Quote Originally Posted by Absimiliard View Post
We have yet to experience even the barest thread of the same despair the Ancients bore during their experience with the Final Days. It's unsatisfying to say the least.
So did you just take a nap during the Thavnair revisit? If so, I commend you for the unconscious coordination required to beat a dungeon in that state. I tried to sleep my way through Kefka once, and it ended poorly.

Death is not the only way to ramp up stakes and tension, and it's disappointing that a lot of people default to that--including FFXIV's writers, in fact, a big problem with Stormblood and Shadowbringers is that they didn't want to kill major characters, but didn't know how to up the stakes otherwise, leading to a litany of death scares.

But if you needed a bodycount to believe the stakes, we got a fairly sizeable one. I think Thavnair did an absolutely amazing job of illustrating just how terrifying and dangerous what we were dealing with is (and the healer role quest is a great complement, where you see a long-standing character grapple with turning). I never thought that the stakes needed to be raised after Thavnair, we're already in Screaming Terror Mode at that stage.

...and as an incidental thing, I do like that one thing that helps Thavnair through is faith, another thing that the Ancients didn't have. To the point where I was actually briefly predicting 'wait a minute is this a problem solved by primals'. Which I wasn't wrong about, necessarily.