Quote Originally Posted by Iscah View Post
It's a really big deal that the WoL was able to be brought across the rift with their physical body intact - not even the Ascians can do that. They just abandon their host and pick up a new one in the other shard when they arrive.

The Warriors are either possessing corpses like the Ascians do, or more likely are "solid aetherial ghosts" like the Scions in the First. They had to kill their original bodies exactly because they couldn't be transported across, and the souls needed to be freed to travel.
Though all of this is true, I should note that this rule gets a little hazy when it comes to the Void. The portal used in the Crystal Tower raid questline allowed quite a few people to travel to the World of Darkness and back without having to abandon their bodies in the process. Shadowbringers also introduces the idea of "Hollows"—temporary holes torn into space that link directly to the Void. Taynor was sucked into one as a teen, only to reemerge well over a century later having apparently not aged at all. That same technique shows up again in the Void Quests introduced in patch 5.4, with the player's allies sending a Porxie (an enchanted clay doll, more or less) through to the other side. Gaia also demonstrates the power to create such portals during her brief stint as the Voidwalker (Eden 2 Boss), and this reappears as a mechanic against the Idol of Darkness (Eden 7 Boss).

The Ascians, of course, have no actual need to preserve their bodies since they can just seize new ones at their destination. But it does seem like sufficiently powerful casters can provide the means of traveling between worlds without shedding one's physical form, so long as they're willing to take the risks involved—such as portals necessarily working both ways, allowing voidsent the chance to cross over as well. That said, those risks are so high that it'd be unfeasible for most people, not to mention dangerous for folks other than the would-be world travelers.