Revelations from Patch 6.2: Buried Memories

[Iscah]

Time to kick off the new patch day traditional thread!

For reference, the 6.1 discussion thread is here.

Share your thoughts on Patch 6.2, keeping each section (MSQ, Pandæmonium, etc) inside its own spoiler box so people can browse the thread safely and only read the parts of the discussion that they want to see.

Use the code (HB)(/HB) but with square brackets to create a spoiler box.

[Iscah]

MSQ start

I've only had a chance to get up to the dungeon entrance so not much to report yet, but a couple of things so far.

Varshahn's adult design is a bit odd. They've stuck a little too close to the child face and the eyes look too small. Or maybe it's just that he lacks the thick inbuilt eye makeup that all the playable faces have? I wonder how much difference that makes.

Cool to have Y'shtola back as our healer trust for the dungeon. I don't have a tank at 90 to test how the party shuffles around, but I assume Varshahn is a mage to complement Estinien as melee?

Duty Support

No time to actually try it out yet, but:

Sohm Al has Ysayle as tank.

The Aery uses generic Ishgardian support crew plus Estinien.

The Vault has Haurchefant as tank – but also, curiously, as DPS if you go as tank. He still has sword and shield, and a red GLD icon.

Somehow, despite the team we collected for attacking the Vailt, our fourth person there is still just a generic Ishgardian support. I was expecting Hilda.


Also, I got Moggle Mog in trial roulette. It's much less chaotic now.

[RyuDragnier]

Pandaemonium Abyssos

So it turns out the dark side of Lahabrea is locked in his crystal, explaining why he never really touched it...or how he became insane, he fell to the temptations of his dark side. How Athena was a woman obsessed with understanding the universe to the point where nothing would stand in her way. That somehow Eric's soul is required for it. Claudien looks like Eric, meaning likely his reincarnation. And when Lahabrea mentioned the fact that the crystal we had originally got to start the raids was too complex, I went "OH NO, OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ATHENA IS BEHIND THIS, AND CLAUDIEN HAS THE CRYSTAL" and sure enough, there we are, Pandaemonium in present day, with Claudien missing. Looks like Athena will likely be the final boss of Pandaemonium.

[EdwinLi]

Raid story...

I had a feeling Themis is a Ascian we knew but was not expecting to be Elidibus considering his entire story concluded well enough in Endwalker.

[GrizzlyTank]

Raid story 10/char

Called it that the final part would be in the present. Guess Athena had fractured her own soul prior to her "final" encounter with Lahabrea (like Lahabread did himself after the soulbinding) so that she could continue her experimentation uninterrupted.

[sidurgu-12]

the msq

golbez was absolutely amazing. like hands down he automatically became one of my favorite main villains through voice alone. i dont look forward to the savage hair though lol. it was a fun fight but things only get crazier in savage. as for zero i ended up liking her a lot more than i thought i would, especially her interactions with yshtola. also iirc i think we found the goldsmiths voidsent at zeros domain: its a mindflayer. also also them giving us the option to either firmly confirm or deny zenos' friendship and his mirror remarks was a great touch.

abyssos

seems like quite a few of us predicted quite a bit but it turned out a lot better than i hoped. like lahabrea having an evil side thats attempting to ressurect athena. but imo the twist of her being behind everything was really well done. one thing i liked though was in order to protect erich lahabrea partially sundered himself. but despite him growing on me i couldnt bring myself to completely trust him.

edit: sorry, i just woke up so it might not be as coherent as i want it to be.

[Cilia]

MSQ

No major surprises here.

Zenos' contracted (sounds more like enslaved) voidsent serves as an ally here, huh? And she's only half-voidsent, like Vauthry was a sin eater? Hrm. Well, she's entertaining to me because her behavior is reminiscent of Volke's in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance ("50 gold.").

Just lots of putzing around in the Void, looking for Azdaja. Scarmiglione is the dungeon boss and later fought as an instanced boss, Barbariccia serves as the trial, Azdaja is held by Golbez. No surprises whatsoever. Though, Rubicante and Cagnazzo collaborating is a bit worrisome moving forward, and Golbez' exact plans remain unclear. And, if we end up offing both remaining Archfiends in 6.3, who knows what's in store for .4 and .5(5)?

Barbariccia wasn't as hard (on Normal anyway) as was suggested. Her first phase was a little tough due to using minimally marked AoEs, though looking back on it the telegraphs were clear enough; phase 2 was nothing special. Her slowing hair tethers were a bit annoying though.

Pandaemonium: Abyssos

Whoa-ho-ho there! Twists and turns left and right!

Lahabrea sundered himself to prevent Athena's ambitions from taking root in him, who was herself the one responsible for Pandaemonium and who cared nothing for anything but her experiments bent toward transcending mortality?! And he kept quiet about it all to spare Erich the pain of knowing all that?! Man. Cray-zee!

Well Hephaistos was interred and the facility put back in Lahabrea's control, so all's well that ends well... or it would be if Pandaemonium hadn't shown up in the depths of the aetherial sea, Tartaros was explored, and Prof. guy hadn't gone missing tracking down a memory stone. We also still don't know why Erich was so important to Athena's experiments, and I'm sure we're going to have to go up against her at some point... now that that cat's out of the bag...

I gotta say though, bravo on subverting expectations. Athena is one of the better deities in the Greek pantheon, and Hephaistos is more or less neutral but the Lahabrea we knew was a megalomaniacal douche... having him turn out to be the good one while she was the crazy one was a stroke of genius. Still, given the Lahabrea we knew was a megalomaniac I can't help but feel either he didn't fully excise Athena's influence on him or somehow Hephaistos got loose and took his place... or he recompleted his soul at some point later down the line.

And Themis telling us he's actually Elidibus? Lol dude we already knew, didn't take a Ph.D. to figure it out.

Great music, fun fights (even if none of them were particularly rough). Cool armor designs, even if I'll never get a Savage (read: dyeable) set.

[KageTokage]

MSQ

Our little trip into the void was a fair bit more involved then I was expecting, and I was a little surprised that they opted to break tradition by integrating the trial into the MSQ proper. Aside from that, I wasn't terribly surprised by any of the major story beats, though I am curious what Golbez's endgame is given the nature of his original incarnation.

Zero is an interesting character and someone I'd want to see stick around in the long term, and given her whole shtick of repaying debts, I could see that happening if whatever problem arising in 7.x concerns something other then the void...and I'm really hoping it does because having the entire post-MSQ and an expansion dedicated to it would be a bit...much for my tastes.

Abyssos

I'm glad they didn't take the predictable route of making actual Lahabrea the villain here, and the revelation that Athena was the real villain at the heart of everything was an interesting twist. All of the fights had interesting gimmicks, and I'm expecting some seriously nightmarish body horror from whatever the new phase of the Hephaistos fight is going to bring on savage.

I am leaning even more strongly into the notion of Claudien being the heritor of Erichtonios' soul after the stone lead him off on a wild goose chase, followed by the mention of said soul somehow being crucial to Athena's experiment, topped off by him mysteriously disappearing right when Pandemonium somehow manifested in the present.

Given that it's in the aetherial sea, I'm really hoping that Elidibus and maybe even Lahabrea show up post-mortem to help settle the issue of Pandemonium and Athena once and for all.

[sidurgu-12]

MSQ

Our little trip into the void was a fair bit more involved then I was expecting, and I was a little surprised that they opted to break tradition by integrating the trial into the MSQ proper. Aside from that, I wasn't terribly surprised by any of the major story beats, though I am curious what Golbez's endgame is given the nature of his original incarnation.

Zero is an interesting character and someone I'd want to see stick around in the long term, and given her whole shtick of repaying debts, I could see that happening if whatever problem arising in 7.x concerns something other then the void...and I'm really hoping it does because having the entire post-MSQ and an expansion dedicated to it would be a bit...much for my tastes.

Abyssos

I'm glad they didn't take the predictable route of making actual Lahabrea the villain here, and the revelation that Athena was the real villain at the heart of everything was an interesting twist. All of the fights had interesting gimmicks, and I'm expecting some seriously nightmarish body horror from whatever the new phase of the Hephaistos fight is going to bring on savage.

I am leaning even more strongly into the notion of Claudien being the heritor of Erichtonios' soul after the stone lead him off on a wild goose chase, followed by the mention of said soul somehow being crucial to Athena's experiment, topped off by him mysteriously disappearing right when Pandemonium somehow manifested in the present.

Given that it's in the aetherial sea, I'm really hoping that Elidibus and maybe even Lahabrea show up post-mortem to help settle the issue of Pandemonium and Athena once and for all.

ten letters

i don't think that's possible for elidibus since he also depleted his soul and blended with the tower in order to get us to elpis.

[KageTokage]

It would honestly feel like a bit of an insult...

to spend more time developing Elidibus and Lahabrea then not even give them a proper send-off at the end of the raid story, so I'm really expecting them to find some semi-logical excuse for at least the former to show up in spite of him supposedly being deader then dead.