I want to talk about tempering

[Lacan]

Well, from how I understand it, when someone is tempered the primal basically imprints themselves on all the aether inside a person. Once that happens, all they can do is worship the primal and that just generates more aether for the primal to feed on. They've basically been turned into literal aether batteries. Just leaving them alive will empower a primal and hasten their return if defeated.

This is why the echo provides complete protection from tempering. Hydaelyn has imprinted herself on you so that no primal could possibly claim you. What I wonder is if tempering could be reversed if someone got blessed with the echo after the fact.

[Biridan]

Does that mean the Warrior of Light is tempered?

[TinyRedLeaf]

Does that mean the Warrior of Light is tempered?

This ranks up there among some of the most common questions on FFXIV lore, like whether the WoL is not in fact already a primal.

The short answer is, no. The WoL is not tempered. The Blessing of Light works differently from tempering. Crucially, the WoL retains his or her free will, unlike tempering, which effectively warps the minds of individuals.

This could lead to more philosophical discussions about free will, and whether any of us are truly thinking "freely" to begin with. But I don't think we want to do that. It would be interesting to note, though, that the tempered are still capable of rational thought. It's their motivations that become warped, and it usually comes across as fanatical, but not necessarily maniacal, behaviour.

[LineageRazor]

The Blessing of Light works differently from tempering. Crucially, the WoL retains his or her free will, unlike tempering, which effectively warps the minds of individuals.

While I personally agree that the blessing is not tempering, I feel obligated to play devil's advocate and point out that our character is pretty darned dedicated to serving Hydaelyn's will. Is it because we freely choose it, recognizing that her will is benevolent? Or is it because we're compelled to, because of the blessing? The railroading in this game means that we're perfectly set up for a Bioshock reveal down the line, where we find out that none of our choices have been freely made at all...

Again, though, given that this is a MMO, and MMO's depend in part on players becoming invested in and identifying with their characters, chances are slim that we're going to discover later on that we were slaves under Hydaelyn's command.

[Biridan]

... I feel obligated to play devil's advocate and point out that our character is pretty darned dedicated to serving Hydaelyn's will. Is it because we freely choose it, recognizing that her will is benevolent? Or is it because we're compelled to, because of the blessing? The railroading in this game means that we're perfectly set up for a Bioshock reveal down the line, where we find out that none of our choices have been freely made at all...

...

The dark knight arc openly explores the servile nature of the WoL. At least the first part I've not seen later parts. Its rather openly implied that the WoL is denying his own wishes. Its as though he cannot act on his own impulses. Likely the dark power is taking his impulses to an extreme it does seem like there is a conflict within himself. Its actually brought up in other places. How the WoL never thinksnfor himself but always dutiful does whatever is asked with a stoic nod.

[Eisenhower]

On the topic of tempering and removal of it, my understanding is as follows:

Aether in the XIV setting possess a lot of different properties, among which there is a sort of matter-energy/aether conversion and alteration as well as aether serving as the soul of living beings. This latter function hinges on the aether having a signature unique to the being it stems from - a signature I assume defines the identity/ego of the being. From the latest patch (but probably even earlier than that, my memory is just poor) we know that Sharlayan scholars consider aether to have a wave component.

From that, I suspect that tempering modulates the base aether signature of the target. This modulation is either a directed function that processes the target aether to a new form, or alternatively, the presence of a primal-sources signature forces the conformation of a weaker signature to it (cf. prion protein conformational changes). Personally, I subscribe more to the latter of these explanations since the Garlean Empire's experiments with creating Resonant individuals appear to work in this manner (with Krile supplying the signature and the sacrifices supplying the "strength level"). Either way the new signature results in altered behaviour in the target. Since the mortal species (so far) show no inherent ability to safeguard or repair their own signatures, tempering is considered permanent.

Depending on how the aetheric signature is defined, it may be impossible to reverse the tempering effect. Although I suspect an inverse waveform (compared to original primal-derived waveform) could be used to return the signature to it's original state, it may be the case that aetheric signatures that comprise a soul aren't static in nature. The passage of time may naturally change a soul-signature in such a way that modulating in an "inverse" way have no effect, limited effect, or even cause further damage. As such, it may be necessary to generate an adapted modulating process that considers the natural changes in soul-signature aether to properly reverse tempering. But such calculations seem to be beyond the technological level of the XIV setting at the moment.

I don't think that the protection the WoL enjoys is tempering from Hydaelyn, though I recall some primals implying it being such. Rather, it may be a layer of interference that scrambles or "demotes" waveforms that originate from primals, rendering them harmless in terms of information but still being able to carry force (as shown by Arenvald was forced down but not the WoL when defending against Lakshmi). This can however be considered to be in contention with the fact that any being can only be tempered once. So it's clear that the tempering effect in itself confers some level of protection against further alteration.

Is it because we freely choose it, recognizing that her will is benevolent? Or is it because we're compelled to, because of the blessing?

Whether or not big crystal mom is lying or not, I don't find it that hard to imagine the WoL willing to defend their own world seeing how they're currently busy living in it. I can't recall it clearly, but I'm of the impression that the Ascians' plans would result it something akin to the heat death of the (XIV) universe. Besides, it really feels like WoL & Co. haven't been doing much world-scale defending as of late - not that I mind. Most of the adventures of late involve post-war cleanup in one sense or another. Sure there's an Ascian being all Silence of the Lambs over at Garlemald, but that feels like a problem for future WoL.

[Biridan]

...

Sure there's an Ascian being all Silence of the Lambs over at Garlemald, but that feels like a problem for future WoL.

Will we be dealing with this problem on Tech Island?

[ObsidianFire]

The only alternative we've seen to "serving Hydaelyn" is siding with the Ascians with Zodiark. Which would be bad. The thing with Hydaelyn is that we've never seen her messing with situations that Zodiark/the Ascians weren't already messing with first. Until we get solid proof to the contrary, I havn't seen anything that leads me to believe supporting her goals is a bad thing. Also... what does "serving Hydaelyn" actually entail? Killing off eikons is something that really does need to be done if life as we know it is to go on. And we know the Ascians don't want that to happen. We've also yet to see a "third option" to the Zodiark/Hydaelyn conflict...

Umm... Darkside is literally the Warrior of Light giving into their alter-ego who really does not like the WoL saying yes to every little thing people ask them to do. The end of the Lvl 50 quest makes it pretty clear who won that fight. The Lvl 60 - 70 quests touch on it some more.

Ultimately, the story kinda need the WoL willing to do what they're asked or it doesn't work to have the WoL be the main character. The dev team likes leaving a lot of things unspecified so it can by your WoL that is doing things and not SE's WoL. One of the things that's often not specified (or the WoL is sometimes given options to pick from) is why the WoL does what they do. The further the WoL gets in HW and SB, the more times they're given options to pick from.

[Lacan]

snip

Well, from what I understand, since Hydaelyn is "all made one" she is actually a sort of collective conscious of all of humanity's aether. So serving her is the same as serving humanity. This also explains why the echo gives you insight into other people's minds and memories, since you were connected with them when Hydaelyn blessed you. That's why you can understand people regardless of their language, since you're listening to what their spirit is saying via the echo. And they can understand you because you're speaking to their spirit as well.


None of that is confirmed though, just my theory. :v Think it makes a lot of sense though.

[Ilenya]

Okay, so I doublechecked, both of them had it when they teleported or whatever the skill was called. There's clearly more somewhere. Will they work with finding tempered or not? And how many do we have access to?