Replying to a few quotes:

Quote Originally Posted by Anonymoose View Post
For those of you digging through the four city missions before the paths converge, is anyone getting any feeling about how far back these echoes are going?

Sthalmann falls from grace and becomes Rostnsthal
Sthalmann's "bill" has become Rostnsthal's "debts"
Is there anything supporting they're the same person? I know that Sthalmann does appear in Echo cutscenes quite often and it's well known he's trying to overthrow the then MALE Admiral, but he does appear in some cutscenes that don't appear to be in the past, such as the one where he's looking for Emerick on The Executioner or where he's talking to the head of the Blacksmithing guild. The last cutscene with him and Y'shtola also appears to be in the present, even though you do step back in the past with an Echo vision.

Also, Rostnsthal appears during the same time you're on the ship coming into Limsa, he appears in one of the main story quests, and he's also heavily involved in the Marauder quests. It's my belief that the original main story and the class quests were all designed with the same timeframe in mind, so I just wonder if I'm missing something that's linking these two together. The only thing I've seen that could support this is the last cutscene in the Marauder class quest line where Rostnsthal is trying to give that officer of the Barracudas some dirt on one of the other pirate captains, but it doesn't seem like he was trying to get back in with them; all he wanted was some coin.

Quote Originally Posted by Catapult View Post
You were rattled by the echo, not because you had an echo-in-an-echo, but because you managed to change history, which is something that normally isn't supposed to happen. A paradox mid-echo would likely knock you out as history re-aligns itself.

Any chance people can apply this concept to the Limsa or Ul'dahn stories?
I can't apply this to the main storylines, but in the Alchemist class quests, you end up inside the kid's mind and after all is said and done, you're able to jar him from his comatose state that no medicines or anything else could fix. This is the only instance I remember where you using the Echo directly changed something, even though it's not supposed to.

Quote Originally Posted by Soukyuu View Post
It could have been Midgardsomr after all. Think of it like this: You know Primals exist. You encounter a being that is totally overwhelming and crashes your greatest floating citadel. Mistaking that being for a Primal could easily happen, I mean, we thought he was a Primal too, so chances are, it was just a misunderstanding that wasn't cleared and was then written into the history books by Eorzean historians.
Except Midgardsomr's husk of a body was left behind in the wake of the destruction; something that typically doesn't happen since a Primal's aether gets released and it disappears like van Darnus did.