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

[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.