Thread: 8.0 and Onwards.

Originally Posted by Keichi

- maybe nerv the WoL storywise, by destroying Azems crystall. Its a nice item to explain, where the raid people are coming. But it looks like to give the WoL to much power.

Genuine question, how does it give them 'too much power'?

It gives them the ability to grab seven convenient weirdos for a fight, sure, but... let's all be honest, we've always been able to summon seven weirdos metatextually, and no matter if the Azem crystal is intact, destroyed or eaten, we will continue to have that ability, because we're playing a game where a lot of major fights are trials or raids that require seven weirdos to help us. All the Azem crystal does is mean that the writers are freed up from either having to come up with an overly convenient reason, or opening an inconvenient plothole by not coming up with a reason.

If anything, I don't think the Azem crystal makes us 'more powerful'; I actually think it establishes very staunchly that we're not that powerful. There's a handful of fights where it's not clear if or how we got allies for them, and so people disagree on if we soloed it or not (I think the most egregious one might be Thordan). The Azem crystal makes it brightly and obviously clear that the WoL is not standing alone, that they can only beat these guys with help; there's ambiguity if we soloed Thordan, but there's no question at all that we didn't solo Golbez.

I think that when people ask for this, what they'd be more satisfied with is some sort of stated rules to it; it's evidently a sometimes food, we don't even crack it out when doing smaller team content like dungeons (or larger team content like alliance raids), so there must be logic to why we use it when we do... but what is it?

I guarantee, you'd be much happier with an explanation of that than you would be with 'the Azem crystal is destroyed, but Valigarmanda's still an 8-player trial afterwards and you don't get any explanation for why'.

The Azem crystall give the WoL the ability to summon allways other beeings to him (i think it was never stated, who or what they are, at last, do i not remember that). So, from story telling is he allways outnumbering the enemie. Whe dont even know, what strenght they have. In theorie could he summon them for every encounter. Even, again one of the bugs at the start.

Removing the stone would make that stuff impossible. But, at the same time would it be again a pain in the ... for the writer, to explain, where allies are coming. Or, if he is solo again (like fight again Ifrit: cut scene for and after the fight shows, that WoL is solo, in the fight are other people there, Or Titan: you was senden first and it was stated, that the others are trying to follow as fast as possible, but arive only after the fight, and yet, are other people there in the fight).

Removing the light stones would probably be a better nerf.
Midgardsorm allready sealed it once, to test, if whe are worthy. But removing the stones would at last reduce the power a little.

By other hand:
If the WoL even truly that strong? When he needed allways help from others, to do the big fights.^^

Originally Posted by Keichi

The Azem crystall give the WoL the ability to summon allways other beeings to him (i think it was never stated, who or what they are, at last, do i not remember that). So, from story telling is he allways outnumbering the enemie. Whe dont even know, what strenght they have. In theorie could he summon them for every encounter. Even, again one of the bugs at the start.

Removing the stone would make that stuff impossible. But, at the same time would it be again a pain in the ... for the writer, to explain, where allies are coming. Or, if he is solo again (like fight again Ifrit: cut scene for and after the fight shows, that WoL is solo, in the fight are other people there, Or Titan: you was senden first and it was stated, that the others are trying to follow as fast as possible, but arive only after the fight, and yet, are other people there in the fight).

And again, I don't think you'd ever actually be happy with the crystal being destroyed. Because there will always be eight-player trials; we will always outnumber them, as we always have outnumbered them. The Azem crystal merely provides a clear, quick and constant explanation for why we always have seven people to call on, especially as the story takes us to increasingly more remote areas where it's unlikely that we just have seven nearby friends. (A reason across all languages, at that; before the crystal, the localizations were actually inconsistent about if they wrote in us getting backup or not.)

Similarly, you won't be satisfied by sealing away the Blessing of Light, because that didn't meaningfully weaken us last time, it just made the Ascians get cocky enough to take a few casualties. And there aren't even Ascians anymore! Or primals, in fact!

You don't want the crystal to be gone, because all that would do is change the next extremely improbable trial we get into into a question of 'where'd all these guys come from' that the game might not even care to answer. What you want is an explanation for why we only sometimes have seven randos with us; why we aren't constantly throwing a full party at every single problem.

And you're right, the WoL isn't actually that strong. Don't get me wrong, they're a serious enough threat that you could never count out of a 1v1 against someone of around the same size, but for several expansion now they've been fairly consistently written as at the top of their field while not being the only one on a peak; we've frequently been in situations where an individual puts up a serious fight and sometimes even wins, and that's not even taking into account people like Estinien and Zero, who've never fought us but are definitely implied to be in the same range. We're good, but we're not 'soloed Zodiark' good.

I think of the WoL in being the same as anyone from the Bat family. Where if DC like Marvel in the early 90s made trading cards for their characters people like Nightwing would have a strength stat of 8 or something. I'd probably put the WoL at a 7.5. And somewhere on explanation of what the character is capable of the WoL's blurb would say slightly above peak human strength. Think of it in terms of how someone like Spider-Man can lift a heavy pile of rubble and maybe even hold up that pile of rubble for a time they won't be able to lift or hold for long something as heavy that say the Hulk is capable of lifting or holding.

I also don't think the Azem crystal is summoning actual people all the time as we do have an option to answer Erichtonios before P10 that Themis isn't the only one who is capable of summoning illusions right before we go and summon 7 people who might or might not be scantily clad cat girls looking as though they were having a fun day at the beach.

Still it would be a good thing to "nerf" the WoL. Regarding Azem's crystal, my thought on this is it does contain the technique to invoke people, but the amount of aether needed to be done is up to the users. No aether, no invocation. Concerning Hydaelyn's benediction, now she's vanished, I don't think it should remains as it is, it should vanish along time as well. It doesn't mean it gives the WoL his/her strength, but regarding primals, of any sort they are or wherever they come from, it doesn't lessen the fact that anyone can be tempered, even though we have now a mean of healing that affliction. But even with that, we still have Vrtra's scales protecting us from tempering, so even without Hydaelyn's benediction we'd be doing fine. Devs just have to find a new way to make us feel new threats for the WoL and the main cast, that's just my thoughts.

Ahem..
i have nod doubt the discussion about the warrior's insane feets is an important topic to discuss going forward if we are to have compelling threats but may i please get some responses to my query? that would be ever so nice to hear about thank you

One thing I think a lot of people forget is that a lot of the WoL's victories either had significant help from outside sources, or were against far weaker enemies than you think.

Thordan was in the body of a decrepit old man and wasn't even at full power, we beat Nidhogg with help from a Dragon's eye, Tsukuyomi was incredibly weak by Primal standards, Hades took several Lightwardens worth of aether, Elidibus would've defeated us had we not had Azem's crystal to bail us out, Zodiark was a half-formed mindless puppet controlled by a Sundered Convocation member, Hydaelyn was basically running on dregs, and the Endsinger would've outright killed us had the Scions not turned us into the Dynamis equivalent of Primals.

The biggest weakness of the WoL has always been the good-at-combat characters who just beat us up with no shenanigans or Primal powers involved, like Zenos and Ranjit, and I'd expect to see more of those going forward.

I think, as stated elsewhere in the forum, imho the best way to threaten the WoL is the classic superhero problem: can’t be everywhere at once, and you simply can’t save everybody or please 100% of the people 100% of the time.

I think this expac is going to do some of this with the rival teams, but who knows!

Originally Posted by KageTokage

If anything, I'd really like the next major story arc to be revolving around some kind of existential crisis kicked off by the absence of Hydaelyn and Zodiark.

It was implied the shards are naturally inclined towards rejoining with the Source and the former was actively preventing that, so now that she's gone it would really only make sense if there were some meaningful repercussions.

You already know creative business unit 3 can't handle that; look at how rushed and badly paced endwalker was. FFXIV's in "maintenance" mode, meaning from endwalker on out they're improvising and creating on the spot. My guess is they're done with grand adventures and will settle for vacation spots that are disjointed in narrative from expansion to expansion. Kinda like saturday morning cartoons.