I am quite thankful that I am not the only one that was a bit skeptic about the sudden "echo is the reason we see AOEs and other stuff" in ingame lore. I am a firm believer of story =/ ingame mechanic, because it simply does not make sense to me.

The main character having a certain plot armor so that they dont die is part of a lot of games. And it makes sense to me. We, as the players, might get the feeling that everything is easy and that we will never die (or at least not in the middle of the game) because it would be "Game over". Yes you might have some games where this might happen but most of the time you play someone else after that or its a survival game.

It is simply not possible for our character to truly die in FF14. Even at the end of the story we cant die, because this is a MMO and thus its not over if we played through the story. This might mean that its getting boring for some players but people have to understand that there will always be a limit in such games. The only way you can show defeat for our heroes is by having another person die, escaping from certain deaths and anything that is not lethal and does not change the look of the player. All of this was already done in FF14 but they cant do more than this. They cant make us lose all the time because that would become boring too and it also becomes unbelievable if someone survives all of this.

And like others have said: Our character does not have the knowledge we have. They did not know that they will survive the rebellion, nor do they know that a lot of the other important NPCs have plot armor too. (And we kinda dont know if they will have that plot armor forever) The same can be said about the Scions. They know that we are very good fighters, but they also saw us being defeated or pushed back. And those primals are still no jokes. And lets not forget that the WoD were already death. They gave up their bodies to come to our world, so maybe they could stand up again and again because they were no longer truly normal beings. Also our character does not seem to have that great of a control over their echo.

The WoL will stay human as long as SE wants him/her to be seen that way but also how long the player themselves want to see him/her that way. Because the WoL itself is someone with only a bit of character and the rest is something that each one of us reads into him/her. In my version my character lost the person she loved, lost other important people along her side, thus feels like she cant truly protect the people she cares about. She is emotional not that stable anymore and after learning about all the shards and people living on them, she has even more of a burden to bear. She did not really want to take part in a war and if it would go her way she would try to negotiate more (she was with Alphinaud to save Estinien and she did her best to not have to kill that group of Lupins).

What do I want to say with that bit of a description? That its not really easy to say when or even if our character ever gets to be more of a weapon/monster/god. On one side it depends a bit on SE but on the other hand it also depends greatly on the player themselves. How do you see the actions of your own character? How do you play them? Unlike lots of other single players where you get a character that you cant really play your way, you at least have a bit of freedom in FF14.