Thread: Revelations from Patch 6.4: The Dark Throne

Originally Posted by Cleretic

Actually, 'jumping to conclusions' is literally something they do in Anabeisos' wrapups, and with even more tenuous subjects.

Frankly, most of what they say about Ultima the High Seraph, and a bunch of what they suppose in relation to Athena in the epilogue that opens if you've done Ivalice, are extremely tenuous given what little evidence they actually have... but are obviously the stuff being put forward to us as true, or at least true enough to chew on. 'Auracite is crystallized dynamis' would actually be less of a leap than the ones they actually make. So the fact that they don't make that leap for us tells me that they don't want us to make that leap.

Overtime I've learned that a big part of how the game doles out lore can be discerned by emphasis. This is not a game that trades in subtlety; if they want you to notice something, they'll spotlight it center-stage, not far from the things you're meant to associate it with, because they want the game to still be understood perfectly well no matter how little someone's paying attention (it's the same reason the game reminds you of someone you've met before if it's been a while or if they're not easily distinguished from their group). If they don't, then they're not doing anything with that, at least not yet.

So with this... no, as much as your idea makes a lot more sense than the average dynamis theory, I'm disinclined to think that we have all the pieces to reach such a conclusion, and they just didn't say anything. If auracite and dynamis are related but the relationship just wasn't mentioned, then it requires an extra third element of that relationship that's so buck-wild that it'd be more important than the dynamis. (And probably hasn't even been thought of yet by the writers, or again, they'd have hinted.)

Sure, you could say that the devs did not put enough emphasis on it for it to be a thing.
But the same could be said about the existence of dynamis itself, which could have been theorized in Stormblood already, but nobody did, because people just accepted that it was "the power of friendship" or whatever.
Also, if every solution to a mystery has to be in your face to be taken seriously, then there's no point in coming up with theories in the first place.

The transformations associated with Auracite are currently explained through Owen's thesis on aetheric corruption. The Lucavi that we encountered in the Ivalice and Bozja storylines match up with this. There could be more at play, but we can't say that just yet.

It's difficult to figure out how Dynamis currently fits in with any of this because we don't have much of a framework for it. For example, Voidsent are 'aether-starved' due to the effects of aetheric corruption from the Flood of Darkness, but if so, what is their energy source, and how does Void Magic work? Is this an entropic problem (i.e. darkness-aspected aether is so volatile that there is a limited amount of 'usable' energy in any given moment), or is there some sort of dynamis-driven effect here that we haven't considered, given the scarcity of (?usable) aether on the Thirteenth?

Either way, I think Ultima's reference could be a teaser of what is to come, especially if we end up anywhere near Southern Ilsabard.

Well it certainly wouldn't surprise me if we will get a High Seraph Ultima/Jenova expansion down the line with all the auracite that keeps brought up even more, they literally got Sabik out of their backpocket and that thing is a huge wildcard. Seeing how one of the main themes of Endwalker was opening up the world to us, even to outer space you'd think there are some nasty threats out there.

Originally Posted by Cleretic

Snip

Hydaelyn having combat experience and thus giving her a fair chance is a good explanation actually. What I am wondering about the most is how did she perform the sundering? You can be Azem and experienced, but how did she split existence itself into pieces? This is imho the biggest mystery still not answered. There are implications made that she pulled resources from the planet to help her against Zodiark (Auracite?). For all we know this could be brought up in the final alliance raid. Did I miss something, like have we gotten an answer from the devs?

I think Hydaelyn was specifically designed to take down Zodiark, both in terms of aetheric polarity as well as her abilities to enervate him. The crystallization of the lifestream that we see in the Aitiascope is likely a byproduct of her influence as the Will of the Star. When Zodiark was the Will of the Star, the opposite process was likely happening - acceleration of the lifestream rather than stasis. It'll be interesting to see what happens as things return to a state of balance, although I wonder if the planet is 'supposed' to have a guiding entity, similar to how Zodiark required a Heart. Perhaps the original 'Will of the Star' is currently off someplace else, dealing with another problem?

It's also worth noting that even Argos can make use of Sundering effects - the Lv. 84 MSQ 'Helping Hands' describes his split forms as 'reflections', and I suspect that this is what Lahabrea/Hephaistos did to himself during Pandaemonium as well. So the magic concept itself doesn't seem particularly obscure to any of them, even if its application caught the Convocation by surprise.

Either way, we'll see what the Q+A brings of these topics.

Originally Posted by Cleretic

Auracite right now is instead similar to Omega in that storyline, and I was going to write up that comparison, but I think the closer comparison point is the Warriors of Darkness in 3.x; they're a concrete thing, we have facts on them, there's a backstory, there's connections to both tangible stuff we're very familiar with (for the WoDs, Hydaelyn and the Ascians; for auracite, the Ancients and particularly Lahabrea) and more abstract stuff that their very story pins down into being more 'real' (for the WoDs, the shards; for Auracite, Ultima, who's now suddenly more than just a random raid boss). We know what we're looking at, we know there are 'real' connections to discuss, and it's definitely planned for the future.

So yeah, I look at auracite now in the same way I looked at the WoDs then. And when I look back at their story in full, I do realize that nothing that went on to be important in their story in Shadowbringers was already independently around in 3.x; everything that was important to them was either newly introduced in Shadowbringers, or already a part of their story back in 3.x. So similarly, I'm very disinclined to believe that the auracite story, whenever we get it and whatever it becomes, is going to suddenly bring in other things that are already independently important right now; I'd scrutinize everything we find after now that looks related, not the stuff before it that they happened to not bring in at the time.

Regardless of how planned it was, it was really satisfying to see how individual plot threads around things like Ardbert's group, Minfilia's departure, and even Unukalhai's story came together several expansions after Heavensward. I know that Ivalice and Bozja are special cases, but there's a lot of floating plot threads around Auracite that could be used to weave together more stories down the line. Even if the current Void story arc gets wrapped up with a nice bow, the ideas are out there, ready to be utilized when the time is right.

Originally Posted by Iscah

Also I have to note with some smugness that we didn't get some "special promise" from Themis, and it is more likely that his "who did I make a promise to?" line in 5.3 is simply relevant to 5.3 and highlighting that he has lost even the memories we glimpsed earlier in the chapter of him making his vows to the Convocation. I liked that symmetry at the time and I've been saying all along that I didn't want it commandeered into referencing something else.

Originally Posted by Cassar

This is very interesting, could you expand on it further? What do you think the promise was?

Coming back to this late, because I was on the verge of replaying 5.3 on an alt and I wanted to get my references straight -- and now that I have, I'm upgrading my previous statement from "more likely" to "undoubtably" that the forgotten promise is simply the vows he made to the Concovation, unless there's a whole lot of misdirection going on, because the phrasing is a key arc of the entire patch storyline.

The first time it gets raised is your glimpse Elidibus's memories when you encounter him at the watchtower (Heroic Dreams cutscene #1) -- while he does not speak himself, we see the speaker of the Convocation welcoming him to the order. "At times you will stand with us. At times you will stand against us. All that you might steer mankind and the very star upon their true course. For yours is the seat of Elidibus, the emissary, and by this name shall your every action be guided."

In the same scene, in the present day, he repeats to you a version of the same words -- that the Convocation charged him to steer mankind and the very star upon their true course, and it is his duty as Elidibus to see it done.

Then in Anyder (Faded Memories cutscene #1) you see more of Elidibus's inner monologue -- in one part committed to his duty, in another, unable to remember why he yearns and struggles for this, as more of his remaining memories fragment and fade into darkness.

Following your fight with him in Amaurot (Faded Memories cutscene #4), Y'shtola reveals that she has worked out Elidibus is a primal, and asks him whether he can still remember everything that was lost in the Final Days, or even the things he cared about, and he responds by repeating his vows like a mantra: "No matter how much I should change, no matter how much I should forget, I shall ever remember my duty. At times I stand with my brethren. At times I stand against them. All that I might steer mankind and the very star upon their true course. For Elidibus is my name. And my mission. Guiding my every deed."

And then finally, atop the Crystal Tower (The Converging Light cutscene #2), when you tell him that everyone who relied on him is gone and he cannot bring them back, he says it doesn't matter because he has his mission: "I am Elidibus! And it is my duty to steer mankind and the very star upon their true course! This I swore to...to someone. We spoke, and I swore...what? What did I...?"

There was never any mystery to it. We see his last and most strongly held memories unravel as we watch on -- in contrast to the beginning where he knows he was entrusted with this duty by the Convocation, now he is left with only the drive to act and has lost the reason why he is doing it.

Originally Posted by Teah_Kaye

I'm hoping we'll see Ryne (...and Gaia? I love that duo and would be infinitely happier to see both of them but they'd have to make Eden mandatory) next patch with the way 6.4 left off.

Me too... looking back, I think it was a huge mistake to not have Eden (+Elidibus as the main pot stirrer) storyline being the patch MSQ, because not only interesting characters in Ryne and Gaia, but also the fact that we have a whole plot point (Eden) that could potentially interact with the 13th storyline we have today.

I didn't read this myself, but from somebody else's post, that they don't intend to do something like making old optional content being mandatory in the future again... And while a developer surely can change his mind (sometimes not even long after), I have little hope that we'll see Gaia in 6.5/55 and Ryne, at best, probably just as a guest appearance for a dungeon taking place there to trigger the plot point device against Zeromus.