How Physically Strong is the Warrior of Light?

[Selvokaz]

https://www.deviantart.com/selvokaz/...eck-1161953011

So...just how physically strong are they, and do the feats you do during side quest count?

[Connor]

With dynamis in play I’m inclined to say ‘as strong as the writers need them to be’. Though, there’s no much fun in that lol.

To me it would depend a lot on which job they are. Like I’d imagine something like Black Mage would have fairly average/low strength compared to other ‘average Eorzeans’, whilst something like Warrior or Monk would be ‘freakishly strong’ compared to the average person lol.

It’s also kinda hard to judge though because there’s things like the Bard harp-bows that would require Hulk-like strength to actually draw properly, yet they handle them like they’re nothing lol. Imagine taking a punch from that guy! There’d definitely need to be strict criteria i.e ‘only feats performed during non-Hildi quests’ or ‘only cutscene feats’ lol, otherwise we’d just end up constantly cycling back to ‘as strong as the writers need them to be’

[Anonymoose]

Agreed with Connor; somewhere in the ballpark of "human-y levels" for the most part, "whatever the story wants" otherwise. Aether is a force multiplier that increases combat potential in most of the skills we see. They're not going to make a new "Warrior of Light interacts with item" animation for every weight of item, so some are exaggerated or at scale.

But when Zenos and the Warrior of Light get into a street fight, they still just traded slugs to the face that, if they had any degree of preternatural muscular power, would have caused instant death.

[Dikatis]

Agreed with Connor; somewhere in the ballpark of "human-y levels" for the most part, "whatever the story wants" otherwise. Aether is a force multiplier that increases combat potential in most of the skills we see. They're not going to make a new "Warrior of Light interacts with item" animation for every weight of item, so some are exaggerated or at scale.

But when Zenos and the Warrior of Light get into a street fight, they still just traded slugs to the face that, if they had any degree of preternatural muscular power, would have caused instant death.

The Warrior of Light has generally shown a great deal of superhuman strength when the time calls for it though. They can trade blows with being like Titan, who can smash the ground so hard it undulates like a rug on top of having attacks like "Mountain Buster", catches and deflects the building-sized sword wielded by Susano, and is repeatedly described as having the strength of a hundred men. In "Mama, She Is In Rubble Deep", they lift a piece of fallen concrete rubble so heavy that a Maelstrom soldier initially believes the feat to be a "tall tale" until he remembers who he's speaking to. And then in the posted screenshot from "The Might Be Giant", they can easily bench press and carry hunks of stone that even the Yok Huy would find burdensome to carry.

The Warrior is also generally described as being rugged and brawny for their race and regularly go toe-to-toe with enormous monsters like behemoths, Gajasura Matanga, and Maulskull. In the Warrior questline, they're considered the greatest warrior alive and are stronger than Dorgono and Curious Gorge, who can sweep aside small armies and bat Roegadyn in heavy armor clear across the Wolves' Den. In the Monk questline, they trounce the Corpse Brigade almost single-handedly after more than ten hours of heavy training and sprinting through the Gyr Abanian wilderness to meet up with Erik. Then there's their rivalry with Zenos, who is so strong that he can bat entire military squads away with a single swing of his sword.

I struggle to call the Warrior of Light's physical fitness anything other than superhuman.

[Anonymoose]

Not to say that the Warrior of Light isn't uncommonly strapping, or dismiss the "when the story calls for it" exceptions, but some of the objects the Warrior of Light lifts in fetch quests and the like are so heavy that - even if their bones and muscles could support it - the ponzes-per-square-ilm exerted by their feet on the ground should cause them to immediately sink into the earth, I think.

Some of the examples that aren't aetherially infused combat feats or the poetic license of anime cinematography, I assumed were, like, "The Joke", so to speak.

There are a lot of examples of the game pointing out that you carried a bunch of corpses across Thanalan in your pocket, or carried that entire wagon of crystal crates back to the merchant it was stolen from, or dragged around that Grebuloff in a sack, or that you're carrying "an entire arsenal in your pack", but that it's "perhaps best left unexplained". I took that as the game is saying, "Don't think too hard about it." when the feats start getting kind of silly.

[Dikatis]

I think we can mostly handwave any complications of super strength in fiction because, well, most writers don't care about physics to that extent unless they're trying to lampoon the superhero genre in some way.

The thing about stuffing big objects in their backpack is clearly a gameplay convenience, but their on-screen feats of strength aren't.

[Cleretic]

It's worth remembering that all the races we can play as have the ability to bolster their techniques with aether, so while it feels both plausible and useful to declare some sort of average/expected 'floor' for the WoL, it honestly isn't; we can, literally, punch as hard as the context calls for. That isn't a protagonist thing or a heroism thing, that's just how most humans in this setting work. (RIP Garleans)

What I do think is a little exceptional there is that the WoL's baseline says that they're clearly quite good at that aetheric manipulation of physical ability; even the weediest dork of a job we've got (which my character's stats say is Black Mage by a good like 30 points at level 100) can hold off Susano's sword, do sick extreme sports stunts in Hildibrand, and as we've stated, carries way more things than we reasonably need.

If I were to REALLY dork out on this I'd actually zero in on quests like Beast of Burden, where we physically carry a thing for a limited amount of time; of all things, those quests are the ones that suggest we have a limit of physical strength and stamina, and we might be able to work out a plausible 'sans-manipulation average' by figuring out how heavy those things tend to be.

[Zakuyia]

I mean we canocilly blocked off susano sword, fell from sky, got shot by what i would assume is a heavy bolt rifle got back up.....were but different.

[Selvokaz]

I mean we canocilly blocked off susano sword, fell from sky, got shot by what i would assume is a heavy bolt rifle got back up.....were but different.

true but chemical warfare killed us in another timeline,

[Exmo]

true but chemical warfare killed us in another timeline,

In Heavensward the WoL got taken out by a cup of tea