Gaius and the two Ascian. Dawntrail/8.0 Spoiler

[Cleretic]

I throw this in the "unintended oddity" bin with Lahabrea and Elidibus having what looks suspiciously like a "wow no one's ever killed an Ascian before" talk (that, yes, we have room to claim was just a "wow they killed an Ascian, which has happened many times before" talk) after Nabriales got ganked, hence Emet-Selch's offhanded "I've overseen many changes of the guard actually..." comment.

I think this one could be an easily squared circle if they wanted to just by confirming the emphasis wasn't 'wow, they killed an Ascian', it was 'wow, they killed an Ascian'. The Students of Baldesion had to nuke their entire island base into the Lifestream to kill Emmerololth, and here the Scions are managing to kill Nabriales using a broken stick with only one casualty! And if you take the Convocation titles to be relevant to anything (which I don't think anybody should), Nabriales was supposed to be the guy that's good at this!

But yeah, this really does just cement that basically every ARR Ascian scene is a goddamn trainwreck that shouldn't be studied too closely. Like, if the developers weren't even consistent about the number of chairs they should have, we shouldn't be expecting any other small details to be important either.


And incidentally, the shoulderpads are an inconsistency even after the Ascians 'got good'; the Winterer Ascian has a shoulderpad setup that isn't previously represented by anything, with no spikes but with the armored upper arm. Mitron couldn't even remain consistent about their shoulderpad status between consecutive cutscenes in the same patch! That element we've gotta throw out completely, it's too inconsistent to mean anything.

[Anonymoose]

That element we've gotta throw out completely, it's too inconsistent to mean anything.

So then, when Alphinaud highlighted Lahabrea's "garb" as marking him as (using cross-language terms here) "of the highest-ranking among the Ascians" ... with his garb differing from black-masked mooks only by virtue of the shoulder ornaments and red mask ... in retrospect we should interpret this not as him delivering a helpful tip that players could count on ... but just yappin' like he's right about everything. Typical 2.x Alphie... At least he was still right about the mask...


I remember we also noticed this trend manifesting with the MTG cards - Dark Confidant variants feature the black-masked Ascian with the generic Zodiark glyph, one with pads, one without.


EDIT

the Winterer Ascian has a shoulderpad setup that isn't previously represented by anything

I had just assumed based on the cloth shoulder that it was the usual black-mask get-up with the new material reflections, but that does appear to be the lower half of the "overlord shoulder" divorced from its upper half. Weird.