Quote Originally Posted by Riastrad View Post
This was Alexander telling us that time is a loop. No way to change it and if you try it will only cause problems down the road, as the reason for trying to change the past is contingent on the future event taking place. Even something as simple as a flower or a pair of goggles.
Time is not a loop - at least that's not the intent of the Alexander storyline. Quite the opposite. Loops can be formed within the timeline, but it's more like a knot in a string than a closed loop - nothing (to our awareness) is trapped repeating the same path over and over. There is a single flow of time from past to future, but some people have existed in a particular moment of time more than once in their life.

Also - unless we're up for a real shock in the future of the story - the current state of Shadowbringers seems to indicate that a time traveler can change the past by altering events to the point that their future 'origin point' cannot occur, although this presumably also means they can't return to it and are "stuck" on the new path they've created.

Of course, it also tells us that inventing time travel in the first place required such a specific combination of elements that not even the Ascians conceived of it... which makes it unlikely to be achievable simply by using the Echo.