Thread: Revelations from Patch 5.2

I have this feeling

That Ryne and Minfilia are souls sundered from Venat.

Because of these pictures:

Originally Posted by AkaeiNox

I have this feeling

That Ryne and Minfilia are souls sundered from Venat.

Because of these pictures:

What's going on here is a bit complicated, but I don't think that's really the case...

Due to some combination of Ryne's weaker ego compared to other incarnate summoners, her close connection to Hydaelyn as the Oracle of Light, and ice's closeness to the absolute Umbral polarity / Light, Eden Shiva essentially has two forms - Ryne as Shiva (which is actually pretty close to how she was when Ysayle summoned her), and Ryne as a bootleg Hydaelyn.

To wit, her Hydaelyn form has the wings and halos as shown on the Ronkan mural. Her super move is called "Shattered World," as Hydaelyn did to defeat Zodiark, and has her stomping the battlefield, using the same pose, as shown on the Ronkan mural as well. To stop her from triggering another Flood of Light you have to stop miniaturized Hydaelyn crystal lookalikes from devouring too many elemental sprites - keeping the meter at 0 grants you the "Blessing of Light" for a minute as well. At the end of the fight you have to stop her from triggering another Flood of Light with aid from Gaia, and throughout the fight Shiva mixes Light powers with her innate ice abilities.

The whole implication is that the Shiva primal is tapping into Ryne's wellspring of Light to augment its powers - which is preternaturally effective due to ice being very close to pure Light on the elemental wheel - and in so doing takes on the appearance of what Ryne believes Hydaelyn to look like, albeit channeled through her like OG Shiva and Tsukuyomi are channeled through Ysayle and Yotsuyu, respectively.

Easily my favorite fight since Tsukuyomi. Easily.

P.S. Savage version has a third form where Shiva "wears" a simulacrum of Hraesvelgr a la Golbez' EX Mode in Dissidia. Appropriate, given their connection and Hraesvelgr's light / ice elemental affinity.

MSQ Musings

While Zenos' mysterious benefactor being Venat does make sense given meta-text, I'm not entirely sold on the idea yet. Hydaelyn's purpose is to shackle Zodiark, not destroy him, so aiding Zenos in doing as much doesn't seem like something Hydaelyn's "heart" would want to do. Furthermore he says he only has "secondhand knowledge" of the Final Days - were this Venat s/he would have firsthand knowledge, being an Ancient and all.

The ambiguity surrounding the Convocation's fourteenth defective member continues to imply they were the Warrior of Light's original self.

As for Elidibus' scheme, assuming he's trying to trigger the Flood of Light again what he's doing makes sense - by empowering and sending out a bunch of would-be "Warriors of Light," the scales will tip back to Light if they do well enough. By sending out so many he's also destabilizing society, at least in the Crystarium; this is immediately apparent when Elidibus' newly minted WoLs all try to desert or resign at the same time, leading to a manpower shortage. Additionally, the vainglorious attitude displayed by some of them... suggests things won't end well to me. (Reminds me of a Magic card's flavor text: "Heroes act without thought of glory or reward. Accolades are a consequence, not a goal.")

YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse

No real development on that front - but the two quests do imply the next leg will be the carnival zone, and likely feature the iconic opera singer boss (Simone).

Sorrow of Werlyt

Surprised there aren't more people seeing similarities between it and NGE! It's an older anime but it's a classic, and even then newer generations have the Rebuild of Evangelion films to retell the story(ish) for them... the similarities between the Sorrow of Werlyt Weapons' functionality and other surrounding bits of the story and NGE are uncanny.

The more the story progresses, the more I see a real parallel between the story of FFXIV and that of Destiny.

In Destiny, we are "Chosen of the Traveler" that is the representative of Light, and we fight the Darkness. It's basically A Realm Reborn, Heavensward and Stormblood.
Towards the end of Destiny 1, and much more in Destiny 2, we are walking on the line between Light and Darkness in order to be more effective against the Darkness itself. It's even noted that we are the First that are truly able to do it without being corrupted. In Shadowbringers we are as much Warrior of Light than Warrior of Darkness.

We are, in Destiny, the only thing that is "gray" while conserving our free will.

What do we discover in 5.2?

The Fourteenth wasn't in any side of the internal war of the Ancients. He didn't agree with the Convocation nor with the Venat. The question in why? It doesn't make sense to not take a side at this point ... unless he had another solution.
It's only a theory, but what if his solution was to fight the origin of the Apocalypse itself.

People will think that we are the "inheritor" of the Venat soul (even if it's pretty clear with Ryne/Shiva fight that, if there is an inheritor of the Venat soul, it's Minfillia/Ryne), but I still think we are the inheritor of the Fourteenth.

The Warrior of Light, our character, is often described as the nemesis of every Primals, he could also be the nemesis of both Zodiark and Hydaelyn, never having wanted them to be called upon, the last of his people trying to find another way, neither in Light nor Darkness.

About MSQ and the WoLs

Honestly I dont see the solution being us fighting against them. Even if we somehow stop them Elidibus has time on his side. Once we are gone he can just start up the next round of WoLs.

I also dont think that its bad that we have a few with the echo because Elidibus does have a point: We will be gone somewhere in the future and there needs to be more adventurers that will protect the normal people.

I guess we just have to stop and put an end to the Ascians. Because it seems that WoL are born in conflict. And its not that easy to become one because even on the source there had only been a couple of them active at a time, at recent times we had three and there should be many more echo users than that. Maybe those two soldiers wont even become WoLs.

So if we stop the Ascians then there should be no conflict that needs specifically WoLs thus no loss of balance. If we just stop the WoLs then its just a short time win.


About Venat: The Amaurotine was female. Yet when Hythlo talkes about Hades old friend (which is us) he changes it to he or she depending on our own gender. I think that might be a good clue that Venat is not us.

Originally Posted by Alleo

Honestly I dont see the solution being us fighting against them. Even if we somehow stop them Elidibus has time on his side. Once we are gone he can just start up the next round of WoLs.

I also dont think that its bad that we have a few with the echo because Elidibus does have a point: We will be gone somewhere in the future and there needs to be more adventurers that will protect the normal people.

More speculation...

Ultimately dealing with Elidibus is the key and best outcome, but it also depends on how quickly his actions have the effect of tipping the balance back towards light. We might be forced to first try to unravel the immediate scheme before we can deal with the underlying root cause. I also assume it's not like Elidibus is going to go out of his way to fight us at this point given how many other Ascians have fallen at our hand. So if Elidibus keeps himself out of reach for the time-being, our options might be limited.

I guess this all comes back to what Elidibus said of his plans at the end of 5.0:

"I will keep these 'heroes' mired in the First, and victory will be ours at the last. Warriors of Darkness now, are they? Then their fate is decided. They shall meet the same end as those who came before--death at the hands of Warriors of Light!"

At the time I guessed he meant he was going to bring WoL from other shards (like the void) to face the "threat" of the WoD somehow. But given what we see him doing now, it seems like his end-game here after awakening all these new "Warriors of Light" is to turn them on us instead. (This way also he doesn't have to face us in a direct confrontation and so risk himself -- he just manipulates things to the outcome he wants.)

A lot of this patch focused on us meeting up with various people who we helped along the way who pledged they'd never forget what we did for them and for the world. But it also focused on how, after the flood of light happened, all the good deeds of the past Warriors of Light were quickly forgotten to assign them all the blame (and that an accurate version of history got basically blotted out by bias). Taking all these points in composite, the question seems to be: what sort of calamity could cause the new army of heroes of the First to turn against us?

I guess if they really want to spin the story on its head, it'd be a flood of darkness. The Crystal Tower as we know was used in the past to open a gateway to the Void. What if somehow that gate is opened again and a flood of voidsend pours out of the Crystal Tower -- enough forces of darkness to blot out the day sky, say... The blame for this would fall on the Crystal Exarch and his friends/allies -- the Warriors of Darkness. Some people would say (wrongly, but likely encouraged by a certain "Warrior of Light"...) that we brought back the night so that we could unleash a new breed of terror (and we all can't be trusted because of things we've hidden from everyone). Elidibus's hope, then, would be that the First's new Warriors of Light (perhaps under the misguided influence (tempering?) of "Hydaelyn") would step in and beat all the "forces of darkness" -- taking us out of the picture and ushering in the new/"final" flood of light that triggers the rejoining. Basically, this way he solves all the problems at once without having to put himself at risk of being killed by the "Ascian-slayer."

Assuming they went that route, obviously the question would be how would we thwart it. I think, despite it all, we will still have some allies who won't turn so easily. But somehow we'd have to stop the flood of darkness without contributing to the world tipping to light. As I said from the start, killing Elidibus would be ideal, but my guess is he's going to play pretty cautious. At the very least you'd have to undo the scheme enough so that you could get to him.

Anyway, obviously all this is going way out on a limb in pure speculation. We'll see what happens...

And now, Eden's Verse

Did I miss it or did they not explain how that darkness inside Gaia could control the sin eaters? You wouldn't expect polar opposites to work that way. Does it mean a powerful light could control voidsent? If they didn't explain it then I assume an explanation will come next time, but I may have just missed it.

On a gameplay level Ifrit/Garuda was complete anti-fun. It's not that it was hard to figure out the mechanics, it's that there was too much aoe going on to do much of anything at all. I don't think I'll ever be going back to it. The other fights were good though. And Shiva! Shiva was amazing. My favorite fight of this patch, and that's counting Ruby Weapon and the dungeon too.

Originally Posted by Khala

The Sorrow of Werlyt:
This is the first time I'm contemplating not finishing a story arc in all the time I've played.

They could have done many things but bringing back a guy who has never once given a single solitary rip about anyone but Garlemald and his own power is .. odd. He has destroyed countless lives (Fordola, Livia, all of Ala Mhigo - to name a few) and seems to be held hostage (from the sounds of it) or he'd be on the opposing side yet again. And fridging yet more characters (and this first one felt especially bad since we never even saw her face ), whom we've never had a chance to even know makes it hard to feel the emotional impact this should have had. All this while making our character the hand that kills them to further Baelsar's "redemption" arc feels really gross. Am I supposed to feel sorry for him after all he's done? Yeah, no. I'll be honest and say I wish he'd stayed dead and we'd gotten a new character for this story.

About this:

I have not done it (low ilvl) but I agree with you. I at least liked it how aggressive our character was towards him. Yes he is now working with us but seemingly only because of a common goal. He was still all "Varis" when the emporer was killed and he did a lot of bad stuff to us..if we had not stopped him he would have used that horrible weapon against Eorzea no matter if Lahabrea was more than he thought.

Please SE dont let him be the one that will take over the government of Garlemald..please let it be someone nice like Maxima who already wanted change and peace without some kind of vengence as a driving point

MSQ

Originally Posted by polyphonica

More speculation...

"I will keep these 'heroes' mired in the First, and victory will be ours at the last. Warriors of Darkness now, are they? Then their fate is decided. They shall meet the same end as those who came before--death at the hands of Warriors of Light!"

At the time I guessed he meant he was going to bring WoL from other shards (like the void) to face the "threat" of the WoD somehow. But given what we see him doing now, it seems like his end-game here after awakening all these new "Warriors of Light" is to turn them on us instead. (This way also he doesn't have to face us in a direct confrontation and so risk himself -- he just manipulates things to the outcome he wants.)

A lot of this patch focused on us meeting up with various people who we helped along the way who pledged they'd never forget what we did for them and for the world. But it also focused on how, after the flood of light happened, all the good deeds of the past Warriors of Light were quickly forgotten to assign them all the blame (and that an accurate version of history got basically blotted out by bias). Taking all these points in composite, the question seems to be: what sort of calamity could cause the new army of heroes of the First to turn against us?

I guess that could also be his plan but at the same time I have a hard time seeing how they would fit so much into the remaining patches because I am not sure if we deal with in the next expansion.

You are right that people did forget the good deeds quite fast but we have to remember that unlike us who saved the whole rest of the shard they were in the end just normal heros for them. They dealt with some bigger issuses just like we did and saved quite a few but it was not on the scale we did. Also the lesson I think that they wanted to teach the NPCs was to not accept everything at face value and to not forget the good parts. If they then suddenly would just turn around as soon as we may have done something "bad" in their eyes it would destroy that lesson quite fast. Also it would be really bad if they simply just listen to only Ardbert but ignore our reasons..we who saved them all.

In the end it took Ardberts full group becoming WoLs to tip the scale too fast and right now none of the people are even WoLs.