Do you think henchmen/mooks who recognize the WoL but attack anyway are silly?

[Canadane]

I mean, you aren't immortal. There are a few NPCs that can give you a run for your money.
You aren't some unstoppable force, for the vast majority of tasks you've undertaken you've had 3 to 7 of your friends join you for help. The game has been rather specific about pointing that out.

[LystAP]

I mean, you aren't immortal. There are a few NPCs that can give you a run for your money.
You aren't some unstoppable force, for the vast majority of tasks you've undertaken you've had 3 to 7 of your friends join you for help. The game has been rather specific about pointing that out.

True, but a reputation like the Eikonslayer should make individuals hesitant to engage. Or perhaps it is a limitation of the game. I feel bad at times for having to massacre waves of mooks, when they could have given up. But it doesn't feel like that option usually exists. There are a few NPCs, but most of those are named. Just as there are adventurers with their own stories in the background, it would be good to not simply be a killing machine that the game sometimes makes me feel. Maybe this is what Zenos meant back in Stormblood.

[Vyrerus]

I mean, you aren't immortal. There are a few NPCs that can give you a run for your money.
You aren't some unstoppable force, for the vast majority of tasks you've undertaken you've had 3 to 7 of your friends join you for help. The game has been rather specific about pointing that out.

Ehh, a lot of the time yes, but also a lot of the time no. It's a bit wishy washy depending on what they feel like doing within the narrative. Like how the final fight with Zenos involves 3 and then 7 people, but they aren't there with you in the cutscenes where he lauds you as his greatest frenemy.

Omega raid is more or less the same. I would have preferred if they'd stuck to the, "Get your trusty friends WoL." every time, but they don't, so it's there when they feel like addressing the gameplay aspect of the game, and then it's not when they don't.

But even then, even with the context of needing 3~7 other people, you still do things that take dozens to hundreds of others to do.

And a lot of the same NPCs that can give you a run for your money only do so at the story's behest, before you've gained your true power for the expansion. And sometimes they don't. One of the things I appreciated about the Zenos fights is that you can hurt and hit him, but at 10% of your normal damage, making you feel weak from a gameplay perspective.

Compared to the Ran-jit fight where you can hurt him and he can hurt you, but he merely tells you that you're weak, and it's not actually shown in the gameplay, particularly if you are a tank. His ultimate attack that knocks you back won't even reduce you to 2/3rds of your HP on tank if you're playing seriously.

As for the actual subject at hand, appearances can be deceiving, and even if you subscribe to the canon WoL appearance of being in whatever expac's AF armor he's rocking and being an average build midlander isn't exactly impressive. Your power level so to speak is not apparent to the uninitiated, and so while your reputation may be fierce, most of the mooks that aren't ignorant of it attribute it to you having a special power that allows you specifically slay eikons, and that's the extent of your specialty. It's only after you kill or incapacitate them that they realize they were on a fool's errand.

And man, whether the WoL kills or incapacitates is also left up in the air. Sometimes when you fight, you just knock people out, and sometimes it's assisted by the gameplay of them not going to 0% and giving up. Other times it's not. In this we can assume that the WoL's body count is high, because unless we see that they live later on, it's safe to assume they are dead, which is usually the case. Example: We got to fight Shiva to the death like any other primal, and yes she did not die. We go to fight Yotsuyu to the death, and she was dying after the fight, but the game goes a step further by having Asahi shoot her so we don't have to let it weigh on our conscience that we killed her.

It's kind of comparable to the whole, "Batman never kills" thing, despite him being shown to hit so hard and knock guys into metal furniture and fixtures that there's no way he's never incidentally killed a guy. I can't exactly feel bad for the mooks, cause I'm never 100% sure or not whether or not I actually killed them. The game doesn't give me that information, so we get Schroedinger's Mooks. That could also be another reason they attack, "I might live, and could pass it off as I died and leave the empire's service."

[Ceridwenae]

...so we get Schroedinger's Mooks.

Now the official name for any of these poor people. Thank you!

[Morningstar1337]

It's kind of comparable to the whole, "Batman never kills" thing, despite him being shown to hit so hard and knock guys into metal furniture and fixtures that there's no way he's never incidentally killed a guy. I can't exactly feel bad for the mooks, cause I'm never 100% sure or not whether or not I actually killed them. The game doesn't give me that information, so we get Schroedinger's Mooks. That could also be another reason they attack, "I might live, and could pass it off as I died and leave the empire's service."

Might actually be interesting to have a quest where a bunch of Garlean troops who want to defect asks the WoL to fight them and make it look like to their superiors that they are dead. With the deaths faked, they would then be free to live their own lives (though that might complicate any returns to Garlemald for them)

[Gula]

Might actually be interesting to have a quest where a bunch of Garlean troops who want to defect asks the WoL to fight them and make it look like to their superiors that they are dead. With the deaths faked, they would then be free to live their own lives (though that might complicate any returns to Garlemald for them)

Have Maxima(Maximus?) send word to the spies, have them get that to the people they know are out like the Garlean Triple Triad NPC, aaaand seeing as how commanders don't seem to care if their troops live or die, it should be pretty easy to increase the defector population. Provided they don't just mooch off Eorzea's resources.

[Alleo]

I mean, you aren't immortal. There are a few NPCs that can give you a run for your money.
You aren't some unstoppable force, for the vast majority of tasks you've undertaken you've had 3 to 7 of your friends join you for help. The game has been rather specific about pointing that out.

Thats mostly just in the english version. A lot of cases dont even make sense with a group. (And even if we somehow truly beat everything with others that does not make us weak either.) And lets not forget that a certain someone from Shadowbringer that beat us was defeated later by us solo too.

Yes we are not immortal but I still would want to know the few NPCs that could truly give us a run for the money. I mean there are some that will be near us and sometimes we get beaten because plot demands it but I know of no henchmen that would be near that which is what the OP talks about.

[Jandor]

There's also this gap between the MSQ and the Class/Job quests were certain intelligent bad guys, like the leader of the Bibliothecs, who probably should know who you are, but attack you anyways.

The only time I see when they do run, is during the Doman Adventurer Guild with that family of lalafells. Every other time it seems to be, 'it's the Eikonslayer! Attack!' Does anyone remember any other times that this happens?

For random bandits and stuff I just assume they don't recognize us, it isn't like there are Eorzean TVs that we appear on all the time.

For people who do know who we are, they probably think the stories about us are massively exaggerated. I mean, it is pretty implausible that one person has done all that

Also, some people are probably just overconfident idiots.

-----

I think it's more like they like to lampshade that in many, many cases, the WoL does it alone. Like the Susano quest where you're clearly the only one there to fight him and both Alisaie and Lyse say exactly that, but the DF says "uhhh yeah they were there all along don't think about it", or when you fight Bismark and there's clearly nobody there afterwards, it's like that with the vast majority of bosses.

Basically it's not a good idea to say random mooks challenging WoL makes sense because it's thought that WoL does it as part of a party, because the story pretty much always gives WoL sole credit anyway.

They don't say exactly that though. They literally clear a path out of Susano's chamber and ask you if can fetch any of your adventurer friends that might be nearby, on say a far-east fishing trip, to help you out. Yes, it's handled in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner, but the writers poking a bit of fun at themselves for stretching plausibility from time to time is a far cry from actually being a confirmation that you're solo all the time.

Nobody is the cutscenes afterwards because, I suspect, the engine can't easily do it. Your "adventurer friends" do show up in cutscenes when they're actually physically there in the same instance as you. The Main Scenario Castrums for example, they clearly show 7 other people with you when you run them, but you're solo if you watch them again when you're alone in the Inn room.

-----

Thats mostly just in the english version.

It's interesting that the German version is different, but it's not like it's more canon than the English version.