Quote Originally Posted by shadowclasper View Post
correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't it more or less been established that the echo and the blessing of light are more or less the same thing? You can't have one without the other (unless you're an ascian), because to ACTIVATE the echo you have to be exposed to a meteor shower that wakes up your previous cycle of incarnations memory of the ancient world's end of days.
I'll correct you: you're wrong. The Echo is not the Blessing of Light, and was only conflated with it because of that 'hear, feel, think'; it's an innate ability of certain souls. The Blessing Light is an actual connection with Hydaelyn, and is granted via those crystals of light you might remember the surrounding cutscenes of.

While the Echo is not the Blessing of Light, we can also surmise with reasonable confidence that the Blessing of Light does require the Echo; all of those with the Blessing that we know of have the Echo (the WoL, Ysayle, Ardbert and the other Warriors of Darkness, conceivably but unconfirmably Minfilia), but there are those with the Echo that by all appearances don't have the Blessing (the Sahagin Priest, Arenvald, Mikoto, the Resonant (who you mistakenly called the Hypertuned who are a different thing)).

I can immediately tell you off the top of my head that, yes, there was at least one Echo flashback during the 'suppressed' period; Aymeric talking to Thordan. I'm fairly sure there was more, but that one I remember because I had reason to record it, and right now I'm not super inclined to dig into every single Heavensward quest journal entry.

And on your last point: there's actually no guarantee that the Sahagin Priest even was tempered. Through the Sahagin beast tribe we learned that there actually isn't much difference between the Sahagin factions' beliefs; unlike the actual spiritual beliefs that split beast tribes like the Amal'jaa and Ananta, the Sahagin summoners are essentially just 'the sect crazy enough to escalate'.