Revelations from Fan Festival Around the World 2021

[Lord_Umbra]

Well if they do retire/die I fully expect B-Team to stay B-Team the only one I could see & would hope gets come to main group is Riol he's been just as important as Arenvald even more over the years so I'd like him to finally be voiced, the others just really have little to no presence in the MSQ.

I expect any new Scions group to be WoL, Twins, Graha, Fordola, Arenvald if he lives, Estinien I don't think he'll go back being a lone wanderer & possible Zenos if story goes where I think it is going.
I really want a Babyface turn from Zenos he can be Estinien No.2 start out as foe & become friend.

As for deaths I may be reading into it too much but Y'sthola & Thancred both looking older then all others in the trailer I think her spell from all years ago in Ul'dah is finally killing them both.... but might just be covid cg work why they all looked a bit off.

I think Uri will be our retiree to a spot on Sharlayan Council & usher in a new age of Co-operation between Sharlayan & rest of Eozera.

As for Reaper I'm dreaming but I hope LB3 is just summoning Cloud of Darkness.

[Anonymoose]

Apropos of nothing, I found the "Gillionaire" segment kind of funny. Most of those questions were pretty easy but they had such a hard time with it.

I think there's a reciprocal dynamic when it comes to designing events like these, and finding it funny was the goal. If you create an explicit goal ("answer trivia") and exclusively get people who are good at that goal, you're going to get Jeopardy - a serious tone where you might not know anyone and they might not have a good time, and who wins is considered "the best." That doesn't achieve the actual, implicit goal: create a Fan Festival panel that is entertaining to watch. You achieve the latter goal much easier with familiar people who are used to making content, even if some might not be very good at trivia, lol. Even me; I'm used to writing and researching. Random off-the-cuff instant-recall trivia is not necessarily my strength, but playing off of Ethys and trying to make things fun, that I can do.

tl;dr if the goal was "Make an Exciting PVP Competition" you might not know many of the players if you recruited the best of the best, but the competition would be fierce and meet that goal. If the goal was "show off the PVP system in an entertaining way" you might actually be better off forming 2 PVP teams of casual content streamers and making them fight, lol.

[Kuroka]

Then again, maybe we're being trolled and the Zeal-like floating islands is actually where we'll be doing our Harvest Moon farming life.

Might be, but the buildings definitly look like Amaurot... the spirals and stone patterns... idk..

[Sathona]

That does sound possible. Though I wonder if that revelation will be revealed at the end of the job questline at 80? The shade does merge with us for extra abilities, even if its temporary.

Wouldnt the end of the quest line technically be 90 with EW?

[Cilia]

Wouldnt the end of the quest line technically be 90 with EW?

No we have Role Quests instead of Job Quests moving forward; everyone's expecting a Role Quest for Reaper (and Sage) to help introduce them for 70-80, though.

Personally I'm not sold on the idea of the shade being the PC's soul fragment from the Void; it's certainly possible, but if the only way Reapers' arts work is to use their unjoined soul shard from the Void that's... going to limit the number of people who can use it and stretch the plausibility of anyone being able to teach the art, given almost nobody knows about the sundered shard worlds or the Void's relationship to them.

[JeanneOrnitier]

I only just now noticed that Reaper's voidsent channeling mode changes your outfit.

[EdwinLi]

I only just now noticed that Reaper's voidsent channeling mode changes your outfit.

Yep it is what in certain games call a Avatar Form which usually a short time burst mode that changeds the appearance of the character, turns all attacks into stronger attacks, and give players access to Ultimate skills that can only be used during the Avatar Form.

If it follows this basic set up for Avatar Forms then we should also expect that the strongest skills for Reaper may only be accessed in this Avatar Form.

[KageTokage]

No we have Role Quests instead of Job Quests moving forward; everyone's expecting a Role Quest for Reaper (and Sage) to help introduce them for 70-80, though.

Personally I'm not sold on the idea of the shade being the PC's soul fragment from the Void; it's certainly possible, but if the only way Reapers' arts work is to use their unjoined soul shard from the Void that's... going to limit the number of people who can use it and stretch the plausibility of anyone being able to teach the art, given almost nobody knows about the sundered shard worlds or the Void's relationship to them.

The job doesn't necessarily have to be widely available, considering that we're canonically the only true BLM in existence due to the soul stone being needed to use the job safely.

Nor would prior practitioners of the job have to know that the actual reason they can control/resonate with the voidsent is because they're technically one and the same. They may simply go on a hunt to find a "compatible" familiar without knowing the finer details.

I only just now noticed that Reaper's voidsent channeling mode changes your outfit.

It also strips away racial features like the Au Ra horns and tail...which hopefully is just because they're not done designing the job.

[Theodric]

It's worth noting, though, that the game has a significant number of role-players - many of whom are pretty interested in whatever new jobs and playable races are added to the game. With that in mind, I'm not overly fond of such things being super rare and exclusive. Especially not in an MMO with countless players.

Perhaps Reaper will start out as something rare, but much like how the Warrior and Summoner jobs began to become more widespread I hope to see such treatment given to pretty much every playable job eventually.

[YianKutku]

Might be, but the buildings definitly look like Amaurot... the spirals and stone patterns... idk..

Possibly. I'm also mostly wondering why we'll be going there, that requires it to be a full zone. (Or is it even a zone? Could it be just a dungeon?) If it's Amaurotine in nature, that might suggest we're there to look for something from Amaurot to handle the current crisis.

The floating islands could also be related to basically any other revealed zone: a bastion of lush greenery in the barren landscape of the Moon, or that suspicious floating landmass on the map of Ilsabard, or Thavnairan exotic magic, or Sharlayan went "yeah, we raised a few islands and kept some stuff there". The only one I suspect is not related is Labyrinthos, since I don't think there's enough "underground" on those islands.

Hence my questioning about the number of zones: in other expansions, while there are six zones, generally at least half of them are connected to others in some close manner: the Fringes leads to the Peaks (leads to the Lochs), the Ruby Sea leads to Yanxia, the Coerthas Western Highlands leads to the Dravanian Forelands leads to the Dravanian Hinterlands (with the Churning Mists attached to the Forelands), and so on. Here, we're apparently being sent across two continents, with Thavnair, Old Sharlayan, and Garlemald, and then we're going to the Moon as well, and we know the Moon, Thavnair, and Garlemald have their own zones. Whoever our companions to these places will be must have as much teleport anima as we do to blip back and forth.

Speaking of spirals and teleporting, I did notice that in the art for the harbour of Thavnair (and presumably Radz-at-Han), there was a Sharlayan-style aetheryte. This wasn't seen in the other pictures of Radz-at-Han, which had their own (pointy, rather than spiral) aetheryte style.