Is Minfilia always useless ?

[Iscah]

The stones were created to ascend certain individuals to the Seats of the Convocation. Azem had the ability to summon friends and allies in times of need (some take this to play into the lore behind duty finder among other things.) Each stone bestows its gifts and authorities to the user. These are the signature spells and skills innate to the original wielder. The stone only helps define what we already knew. We have always been able to use these skills, now we know why.

This is mostly the same statement I'd already argued against in the post you quoted.

Even assuming we did already possess Azem's power to call our friends to our location, that says nothing about us having the ability to go to them.

Doubly so if we don't even know they exist for us to warp to them, or that we need to do so.


I'm also dubious that we are already using Azem's power prior to 5.3. We just conveniently have friends in strange places if you believe the handwaving excuses as to why they are there, and we have never been shown to use the summoning circle to call on them before. They just turn up, or are possibly organised in advance (before it became too ridiculous to excuse) and in Shadowbringers we canonically have the Scions instead.

Also if we already knew we could summon our friends at will, we wouldn't have had to trek all over Norvrandt to find the Scions in the first place.

I am saying that it is still possible without anyone other than ourselves activating it. Because, as I am sure you are aware, that particular G'raha Tia is dead. He's not doing much of anything anymore. Paplyamo showed us that magics dissipate after death. This one is still going strong.

Firstly, it's possible to activate the beacon ourself now after the Exarch created the initial connection. That doesn't mean we could use it without any idea of what it was or where we could go with it. (We also would have had no idea it was there until the Exarch made first contact and told us to search for it.)

Secondly, it's debatable whether the Exarch is "dead" in the way that would cause the connection to dissipate. Remember that Papalymo's spell outlasted his physical form and only failed when the aetherial cocoon was destroyed. By the same logic, the Exarch's crystallised body – and therefore the connection – remains in place indefinitely.

Thirdly, you could alternately suppose that the entity responsible for maintaining the connection is not the Exarch but the Tower, which likewise should be able to keep the connection open indefinitely once it is set.



Also, relocating some comments I had previously spliced into an old post because I hit my limit earlier:

Being mute and never sharing our other experiences is getting people killed for no reason.

We never share information or ideas and it is becoming impossible to not address this issue.

What specific information do you think we're not sharing?

If you're so certain we knew we could travel the rift whenever we felt like it, when and how do you think we learned this?

Edit to add: Also we are clearly not mute within the story – we are shown talking to the other characters even if our actual dialogue goes unrecorded. I don't see a reason to assume that we are not telling the other Scions what we know, and if I went looking there would probably be times when they comment on the information they've gained from us. We certainly told them about meeting the Word of the Mother, which started Urianger on his plan to send her to save the First.

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When we go to the Thirteenth (which is a strange shell of a ruined world and it's not quite clear if the normal rules apply) we go through a portal designed by the Allagans specifically to tunnel into that non-world and nowhere else. Regardless of the mechanics, it's not of our own making.

When we go to the Chrysalis, it's a rift created by Nabriales – again, not of our own making.

And the working Crystal Tower TARDIS is apparently drawing on the combined mechanisms of the voidgate device (rift access creation) and Omega's ability to navigate the rift. From memory, this is covered in the Twinning datalogs – simply creating an entry to the rift is not enough to find your way through safely to the other side.

[Riastrad]

Sorry. I'm starting to see that I cannot succinctly express what I am trying to say here. Repeatedly iterating the point has no obvious effect and I doubt that trying again will help.

Just ignore me.