Thread: The Road to 5.0

I honestly think the Calamity started when Regula was killed.

Maybe we HAVE to prevent a ton of crucial events to happen, like Regula's death and maybe even prior events that potentially lead to this calamity (Like the murdering of Ilberd and even trying to "dissuade" Zenos rather than kill him).
I think this also could relate a lot to the "new game+" mode.

Maybe it's there for players to TRULY explore the lore. Maybe "New Game+" will not be optional as it will just mean, the whole expansion happens AFTER calamity (wow's cataclysm) will be the "New Game+" and we will just walk our way, maybe a bit faster, through all of ARR/HW/SB but doing considerably different things and picking up different alternatives to reach different ends. Only, this would just affect the "story" progression and not instanced/character/level/item progression. Maybe we will travel to truly distorded versions of our already explored world. And these new regions are all regions we already know, just deeply altered through ages of calamities or the lack of them.

Originally Posted by Cilia

I don't recall anyone, anywhere, speculating in-universe that van Hydrus was sent to Azys Lla to get him killed

Originally Posted by Cilia

I still feel there are too many variables for Elidibus to have banked on that, but... ehh, it's not worth arguing.

To follow up on this a bit, I don't think anyone is suggesting that Hydrus being sent to Azys Lla was part of this machination. (Or, at least, I don't think anyone is suggesting we have good reason to assume so without more evidence; the Ascians have a terrible track record of being able to manipulate events from any more than two or three steps ahead.) There are a number of overlapping windows here.

From 2.4 to 4.0, Varis (to quote one client's phrasing of Solus) "truly believed he was leading this dance." He didn't know that Solus was an Ascian, or that the Empire was their tool for sowing chaos, or that the War of Succession and his ascension to the throne was by design. In the post-MSQ stinger of 4.0, we find that Varis has spent most of that patch getting a crash course in all this from Elidibus and is still chewing on it.

In 3.0, Lahabrea led Thordan to Azys Lla; Varis (somehow) gained intel on Azys Lla and gave chase with the VIth Legion (Regula would be the one man Varis would trust to obtain such powerful intel / tech and not use it for his own ends, especially after a war of succession.) This is likely why the narrative specified dragon-enslavement and primal-enslavement technologies above the others.

One thing I've never been 100% sure of is whether Lahabrea always planned for Thordan to summon a primal into himself,, consume the Triad, and create an empire of tempered subjects as God King that would eventually come up against Garlemald, or whether he just led him there for the dragon-enslavement tech and didn't see ANY of this coming. That it all happened right after Lahabrea tasked Nabriales with finding a way to merge man and god; that Thordan even knew how to summon primals or what and where the Triad were at all; and that Elidibus stated Lahabrea's goal was the Eighth Calamity have always made me assume the former.) ANYROAD...

Nobody predicted that Thordan would turn on Lahabrea and get ganked by the Warrior of Light before consuming the Triad, leaving their containment compromised; this state of affairs virtually guaranteed that the Triad would become as cats on Elidibus's chess board.

From 3.0 to 3.5, Regula was in Azys Lla on Varis's orders to secure the apex of Allag's research for Garlean advancement; to "bring the eikons to heel."

From 3.0 to 3.4, Elidibus was working to woo Urianger to the Ascian's side by introducing him to various other pawns and providing him with information.

From 3.1 to 3.5, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn teamed up with Unukalhai, introduced to them by Urianger, who worked for Elidibus. However, Elidibus just pulled this kid out of stasis and threw him into the mix knowing that he and the Warrior of Light would take a shine to one another and focus more on taking out the triad and saving the world than asking questions.

So in all likelihood, Elidibus just saw that his pawn, the Warrior of Light, and Regula van Hydrus were all in the same place for a few moons and realized how convenient it would be if the former moved the two latter into opposition and thus isolated Varis, knowing that he would soon - with Lahabrea out of the picture - be pulling Solus back into active service and revealing to Varis (in 4.0) that nothing was as it seemed.

Aparently they did a goof in the Steam listing for Shadowbringers and ended up revealing a new area called Kholusia.

https://imgur.com/0Id7vPt

Also they refer to Titania as a King which is... interesting.

Originally Posted by QT_Melon

Yeah there's different gender neutrals for King, I stated in another thread this isn't unusual as the same thing happened to a degree with the Berserk manga with the "Flowerstorm King"

AH! That's why I was thinking it wasn't unusual for a fairy "queen" to be referred to as king. Got a whole lot of nothing poking around Wikipedia.


...But the Dark Horse editions translate it as "Flower Storm Monarch," probably because of the gendered connotations of the word "king" in English. But you're right that both are using the kanji (王 ou) in a gender-neutral sense.