Dovahkiin said:
I mean, most Destiny players probably don't read the lore at all, so yeah, likely so.
I'm pretty confident that the text in question was not written with the intent of it just being Mara making sh*t up for no particular reason, even if the singularity forming didn't line up with the description anyway. Chalk it up to cosmic enlightenment from her soul being "energized" if you want, but there's not much of a serious reason to question it on that basis. And as you said, it's infinite paracausal energy. It neither needs to have the exact same effects infinite conventional energy would in its place nor particularly differs from the Warp in that regard.
And if someone's arguing for the Traveler being exhausted from this act, I'm not among them. I'm not aware of any particular reason to assume that.
If infinite paracausal energy doesn't act anything like infinite, well, "real" or "normal" energy and just does whatever it wants then I don't think we should treat it as if it has some sort of parity with an infinite amount of real energy, because it is just a magic beam disconnected from physics. In which case, similar to if someone fired a Warp energy beam, we should probably use the best thing we can actually look at from a remotely real world physics perspective. Like to use a 40k comparison, if the Planet Killer or a Blackstone fortress fired a beam of Warp energy described as having the infinite powers of the Warp within it or whatever, but it only destroys a planet over several hours, that is something to work with.
In this case, the clash of the Traveler and the Witness created a miniscule singularity as the primary effects of their blast, singularities which all cosmologically connect to their own universes. I would assume and not disagree with the people suggesting so because the Travelers does not just sit around endlessly firing out potentially infinite energy beams which seem to be established as its greatest outright attack, rather it fires one, then loses.
Apart from discovering Prismatic (itself stated to make the Guardian "stronger than we've ever been"), the Traveler itself explicitly empowers the Guardian several times throughout the campaign, with characters repeatedly remarking on how much stronger it makes the Guardian in general.
View: https://youtu.be/rMSyQzjYtHs?t=8881The 'Light fissures' through which it does so appear throughout the Pale Heart and are accessible to anyone. So between that, the simple fact that the Witness doesn't slice Guardians up with casual hand gestures like in Lightfall, and the high probability that the Witness wasn't beaten in its big raid form by Guardians significantly weaker than the ones who fought its campaign form, there's ample reason to assume the raid fireteam was similarly empowered.
I disagree. The fact you have to on occasion go stand in the Light fissures to take on any sort of temporary empowerment from the Traveler goes to show it is not constantly empowering you. For example in the video you link is when you get your new Super, but the empowerment of the Traveler lets you constantly have your super up to spam and test it out. This is very clearly not something that happens everywhere and certainly doesn't happen in the raid, suggesting alongside Ergo Sum that it does not have the energy to give.
On top of the Guardians who actually kill the Witness, once again, very explicitly channeling the Traveler itself.
View: https://youtu.be/Xm70McRidZA?t=25Which still doesn't turn Guardians into Super Saiyans, true. I'm not making any argument based on such an assumption.
Again though, they only do so after they have already beaten the Witness in the monolith while the Traveler is helpless, then freed it to allow it to help strike the blow. They don't fly through the monolith and Pale Heart firing out Light Kamehamehas at everything after all. It is very strange to me that people are arguing the Guardians have little part to play when, like, the Traveler is completely losing to the Witness, but then the Guardians beat his ass so hard while the Traveler is sinking in despair that the Traveler is able to one-shot it with just the Light it can push through some Ghost(s)? It seems like the Guardians on their own seem to be doing a lot of heavy lifting in dealing with the Witness.
No need to refer to Unveiling (which has been hammered home as broadly true like, 5 or 6 times at this point, incidentally), that's literally what happens throughout TFS. The Final Shape is the Witness hijacking the Traveler's Light, specifically, to realize its desires on the physical world in which the Light predominates. The Traveler itself doesn't use its power that way because it has no interest in doing so, and is pacifist to a fault even against things it opposes.
I am going to continue to disagree on Unveiling but it is of limited relevance here at this juncture anyways. The Witness needs the Light combined with its own Darkness together to achieve its goals. I sure don't think "the Traveler is pacifist so does almost nothing" really makes any sense alongside "the second the Witness shows up both times it shoots infinite energy death beams at it and the Black Fleet, woe betide anything caught in the middle." And again, Ergo Sum makes it pretty clear it has some extreme limits.
Yes, but they need to corrupt it over time to reach that point. They can't just do that by default, as the Traveler evidently can.
Going to need evidence the Traveler can do so. The time we see the Chaos Gods work together and imbue their power into a host, he manages to, in one frozen moment of time, wrap the entire universe and all its time into a giant knot with which he can manipulate. On their own, competing against one another? Sure, of course not as the power needed to breach the material universe(s) is power they could expend fighting each other.
Sure, and I'm quite receptive to arguments that Horus wins on these axes.
It places hard caps on his ability to engage in vaguely conventional combat against beings he can't just handwave away, true. It says little to nothing about his higher level 'hax' powers that Guardians have tailor-made counters to and which most of his feats are based on anyway. If you want to argue that Horus's own hax exceeds or at least puts him in the ballpark of that, go off. My main point is that shooting him up with a gun in the game doesn't invalidate that hax by itself. You're explicitly protected by and offensively channeling the power of a God as you do so, regardless of how it actually looks in-game.
I am less attempting to say he has no sort of "hax" and more that some of the claims of his power here or how crucial the Guardians are is being rather inflated or disregarded, and that even they with their comparatively miniscule power compared to the Traveler can resist and overcome his hax amongst the greatest of Guardians. I do generally have a less cosmic scale view of much of Destiny, but I do not deny that the Light and Darkness allow all sorts of weird sh*t to happen. I am fine with engaging on the front of the Witness being something of a peer in power if that moves us on to more interesting discussion however.
Starsight said:
Him surviving killing blows for a thousand years... doesn't mean that the power that went to the creation of the Lupercal Court is the kind of power that he can turn into kamehameha beams or reshape all of reality. He can draw on it to regenerate, perhaps, but I've yet to see anything suggesting that he can warp reality at a whim.
I mean, at this point the entire universe and all of its time has been compressed into one singular infinite moment where time and space has been forged together under the whim of Horus, and allows travel across time, space and other variations of them. It sounds like reality is pretty warped to me. Or how Horus brings dead Primarchs (Ferrus Manus) to life just to flex on Sanguinius.
Yet,' says Sanguinius, 'I suspect you are a distraction designed to delay me, so–'
'I am,' says Ferrus. His silver eyes are hard. His mouth moves out of joint with his words. 'All of this is. A display of power.'
'As I thought–'
'No, Sanguinius. No. Not as you thought. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Warn you, I suppose. You have no idea of his power.'
'Lupercal?'
'Yes, Lupercal. The power of his will alone is letting me be here.'
The shadows shift and rustle again.
'But I'm not a trick,' says Ferrus. 'I'm not an illusion, or some deceit conjured up from the immateria to divert you. You know that, don't you? I can see you do. I'm dead, Sanguinius, but I'm here. I'm real, and I'm me, and I'm dead, and I'm here. That's how powerful he is. He doesn't need to make a ghost of me, or magic up some vision that looks like me. The warp is in him to such a degree, he can simply bring me here from the other side of mortality.'
'To fight me? To stop me?'
'Oh, brother, no. To impress you. To show off.'
- The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra: The End and the Death Volume II
In fact, Ferrus Manus has an excellent look at the power of Horus having been brought back from beyond mortality and states this of Horus and his power.
'That's the thing about the warp,' he says. 'And I don't think our first-found brother has realised it yet. He's too drunk on its power. He can do anything now. Anything his will desires. You can't imagine. He can melt the world into the sky. He can blow time away like the tufts of a dandelion. He can twist up all of the materia in our universe into one knotted ball, and summon inevitable cities. He can drag the dead from their tombs and their times, and make them live as they once lived. But there is no finesse. It's the sport of a child.'
'You're saying he has no control?'
'He has plenty. But the warp is immeasurable. He's split the empyric realm open, and while he plays with one thing, or delights in another, or masters a new technique, it is wildly spilling out around him, following its own impulses. He put me here on a whim to greet you. I don't know what he was thinking. To surprise you? To remind you that death is always near? Maybe he thought the sight of your first-lost brother would chasten you or drive you mad. Who knows? Maybe he thought I would tempt you.'
...
'If you are a trick of the warp,' he says, 'you're a good one.'
'We are all of the warp,' says Ferrus. 'But we are no trick. The warp is all things. Horus doesn't realise quite what he could do if he found his focus. Stop him before he does.'
...
'Go,' says Sanguinius. 'I need no more lessons.'
'No, one more,' says Ferrus. 'He hid in the past.'
'Horus?'
Ferrus Manus nods. 'That's how he tricked you. That's how he tricked our father. He could not risk our father learning the extent of his power, or reading his thoughts, or comprehending the nature of the trap he had set, so, by will and warp, Horus put himself into his own past, into his memories, so deeply and so completely that, for a time, even he did not know where he was or what he was doing.'
'Is that possible?' asks Sanguinius.
'For him, yes. A tactical masterstroke, but then he is the Warmaster. There was no mind for our father to read, no present thoughts that could be betrayed. Horus gave himself to madness and fitful recollection so that he could give nothing of his plan away. And his plan was known only to him, of course.'
'And thus we were deceived, and came here,' murmurs Sanguinius.
'Yes,' says Ferrus sadly. 'And the need for such insane cunning is now passed. You are here. So his mind is restoring, rapidly. He is becoming himself again, quickly, himself and more besides, fully willed and cogent, present and all-powerful in this moment. I tell you this, brother, because it takes huge effort, even for one such as him, to reconstruct a mind so thoroughly dismantled. He is not quite there yet.'
'So he is weak?'
'In body? No. But in thought, perhaps still, a little. Traces of the self-inflicted dementia may persist. At the very least, he may be confused or not self-assured.'
'So, a flaw I can exploit?'
'Perhaps, while it lasts. Which won't be long. And even weak, he is–'
'I understand.'
- The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra: The End and the Death Volume II
Which is part of the theme of his fight with the Emperor. At first he is, relative to the Emperor, a novice in the ways of the Warp, using vast, brute power where the Emperor uses enormous finesse and is on the backfoot for a time in terms of skill at least (he is also holding back as it turned out, and managed to learn a great deal in their fighting but still has the goal of turning the Emperor) but by the end is beating the Emperor in his own game of fate manipulation via the tarot.
Anyways, yes, reality is horribly, terribly warped and fused. Cities, planets, entire alien dimensions have become fused by his will and power as they combine and unfurl. Some of many, many examples mentioned.
For the warp is inevitable. What it has transmuted outside the final fortress, it now transmutes within. The four sturdy dimensions of the world are maimed and mangled, and in their place other dimensions unfurl their properties, mocking sense and deriding logic with their alien breadths and endless measures. There is no limit to the number of these dimensions, for the immaterium has no definition that the human mind can comprehend.
...
Abaddon sees his forces behind and below him, lit by the sparks of their gunfire, encircling the bridge hatch, which is just a blister-like bunker in the wider landscape. The view around it stuns him.
He had begun to accept the idea that a great realm of wilderness had somehow interlaced with the fabric of the flagship's bridge, and that the scale of that wilderness was continental. But from the hill, it seems endless, and its features the contours of a world built for creatures of far greater frame than his. The wind is harsh, the rain vicious. The absence of stars in the tempest-swirled sky seems the worst sign of all, as though he's engulfed by utter emptiness.
The land itself, as far as he can see, is shelved and folded like a crumpled cloth, with rucks of abrupt peaks lifting thousands of metres high. Debris and dead cities clump to the hard angles, sometimes hanging vertically like patches of moss on a wall.
Low, and far away, the same baleful star he saw before swims ominously behind the veil of the storm and the tendrils of warpflux and pseudomatter that stain the sky. The sight of it makes his gorge rise.
He had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that he might see the Lupercal Court, imagining that it, like the flagship's bridge levels, might still exist as some discrete portion of the whole, displaced by the shifted materia. But he cannot. All he can see are the ravaged, overgrown ruins of the limitless city that this landscape once was, a ghost pattern of dead streets, rubble and wreck where fires still burn, all folded and realigned to follow the violently disturbed bedrock.
...
It is here, brother,' says Erebus. 'It is this place. This realm is his Court, this world, this starless heaven, this reality. We are pilgrims here, guests at his coronation. He is, as we speak, making the first of the sacrifices to honour the gods and thank them for his apotheosis.'
- The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra: The End and the Death Volume II
Here is the view of Malcador and his immensely expanded view from the Golden Throne of all times, all pasts and presents and futures bound up into this horrible spool by Horus.
Ragged universes vicing me and crushing me.
Razor-edged realities shredding me down to subatomic meal.
Grand mal spasms in which entire galaxies rise, and spin, and fall in the blink of a single seizure.
Eternity, compressed by hyper-mass forces into a dense nanosecond, and then stretched out like a string, like a thread, by impossible gravities, until it winds around forever and loops back again, through a curving immensity of space and time to meet itself once more, ouroboros, all dimensions and none at all, in one isochronal convolution that is both revelatory and inevitable.
...
For there is no now. Or rather, there is only now. The isochronal instant. All of the pasts, all of the presents, all of the futures, even the grim darknesses of far futures, are bound up into one simultaneous solid, a spool of time wrapped into one tight ball, with no end and no beginning to unpick, blown like a loose feather on the currents of the warp. That is my anchor. Not a still point in time, but all time stilled.
- The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra: The End and the Death Volume II
And again from Horus' own perspective.
In pulling off this trick, He has revealed His understanding of your domain. Not just your Court, but the wider realm of Chaos that inevitably surrounds it. He has grasped that everything, and everywhere, and everywhen, meets here in your isochronal nexus, conjoined by the warp, and thus that everything, and everywhere, and everywhen, is accessible.
- The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra: The End and the Death Volume III
Nevermind his actual battling against the Emperor, where the final, highest form of it includes controlling and decreeing the shape of fate itself. A summary of how it works from Horus:
You have never set much store by cartomancy, but you are quite familiar with the tarot's symbols and their significances. The cards always seemed to you an imprecise method, the mummery of Sigillites and warlocks, sometimes effective in divination, but always so vague in their elastic meanings, and thus largely unreliable.
Now you have ascended as a psychic initiate, you have a new and ardent appreciation of their empyric function. They are sigils of imagination. Binding intuitive, non-verbal definitions to archetypes of the cosmos, the cards are a high and arcane art, capable of subtle interaction and piercing precognitive effect.
But here in your realm, awash with the warp, their symbology goes beyond mere precognition. Rather than interpreting outcomes, they can set them. They can determine the user's desired effect, and then manifest the cause to produce it. They are spurs to impel destiny to obey your will.
- The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra: The End and the Death Volume III
And Ahriman:
'Well then,' he says. 'We are within the warp, and within the warp, there is no linear sequence. No before and after. Effect can prompt cause. What is being read can determine its reading.'
He draws again.
'Is this true of all… things in the warp?' Mauer asks nervously, unwilling to say the word.
Staring down at another spread of The Daemon, Ahriman nods.
'Crudely, yes,' he says.
- The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra: The End and the Death Volume III
Just because the text says it doesn't mean the turn of phrase is not itself hyperbolic.
Irony thy name is Starsight.
You're blatantly mistaken here. The Witness speaks to the Guardians in an attempt to convince them to become its Disciple, that's true. What's also true is that, whenever the Witness notices your efforts are actually bearing fruit (literally, the text explicitly states "The Witness notices your efforts"), it goes to wipe you. You are then brought back via an unknown mechanism, which is clearly not actually the Witness building specific pedestals for you to put your suddenly-dimension-hopping Ghosts into in order to get a get-out-of-jail-free resurrection. From there, we have to extrapolate from the fact that we are explicitly told that the Traveler is aiding the Guardians (that's a big part of the Final Shape campaign), and we see cracks of Light all around, as well as various artifacts like the Aegises.
Again, the Witness noticing you and partially wiping your team (since of course the team would have canonically not wiped at all) is part of one encounter in a specific place, and the fails there. Cracks of light being part of other areas of the Pale Heart or artifacts being present outside of it are not indicative of the Traveler actively helping them. The Witness already tried and failed to kill handfuls of Guardians and Lightless Guardians before and failed to kill a single one when they flee at the speed of "humans running." The Witness is already afraid of you as Targe taunts it to anger with the knowledge of, the idea it's just not wiping you in all the other encounters while you've already breached it's innermost fortress is absurd. No, the Verity location is special for it, probably being related to being right under the Witness.
Your claim is that the fireteam is something done by the Guardians' own inherent power. Your supporting evidence is that the unfreezing process in Verity isn't done in a giant wash of Light, and that Zavala doesn't explicitly state that the Traveler saved the Guardians raiding the Witness's monolith. This is, to put it bluntly, bullsh*t. We know that the Traveler was actively protecting the Guardian from the efforts of the Witness all throughout the campaign in the Pale Heart with its Light. In Iconoclasm, the Witness was wounded by the killing of the Dissenters inside of the Witness. Then, Salvation's Edge.
My claim is that what we are seeing is what we are getting. That the times the Traveler helps the Guardians it is in big, blatant acts called out by the narrative, like giving you a sword or giving you temporary rapid super regeneration. Your "evidence" the Traveler is secretly solving all of their problems is "if it isn't, the Witness is not as impressive as I want it to be, so it must be." It's circular logic you've constructed here. What do we see when the Traveler is helping? Big, obvious washes of Light, combined with Ghost calling it out to your directly because subtlety doesn't exist in Destiny. What do we not see in the Raid? Any sort of Light, or Ghost calling out assistance to you. Ergo Sum makes it clear the Traveler has little to nothing left to offer by the end of the campaign pre-raid.
I'll reiterate what I said above, but the idea that the Traveler, which is by all means losing hard to the Witness, is secretly actually using it's power to solve all the problems of the Guardians, defeat the Witness and then also kill it, rendering the Guardians entirely moot, just doesn't make sense on any level. It doesn't make sense with what we see of the game. It doesn't make sense with the Witness being afraid of the Guardian. It doesn't make any sort of narrative sense, or with what the explicit words on the digital page tell us.
The beginning of Salvation's Edge has you entering the Witness's monolith. The Witness is aware that you're there, of course, but it isn't actively attacking you because it's concentrated on bringing about the Final Shape. That's why the timers are called "Final Shape", after all. Fighting your way through the first three encounters is pretty simple stuff. Once you hit Verity, the Witness is nearing the Final Shape, and notices that you're coming close. So it hits you with basically a version of its Final Shape calcification effect.
Except the Witness literally has the arms of its body attacking you from the very first encounter. Would be very strange to suggest that someone in a boxing match isn't trying to fight their opponent and that their arms are somehow not their bodies and they aren't really trying? This is what you are arguing here. Also, the idea you think the first 3 encounters are "pretty simple stuff" suggests to me you didn't actually play the damn thing because of the enormous number of hours it took pretty much every team to clear them. The idea the Witness which is firing magic blasts from its hands in the encounters isn't trying to kill you is why it doesn't is just so silly.
This is when we have to start interpreting things. The first is that, if the Witness can truly affect a total of 24 Guardians over the course of the encounter, including 5 at a time, it would be trivial for the Witness to have simply frozen all of you. Not only that, but it makes no sense that the Witness has specially made pedestals for reviving you. Lastly, when you die in the shadow realm (solo side), your Ghost magically materializes back in the main room even while your body is calcified in the other dimension. This also makes no sense. All of these together make one thing pretty obvious: this is purely game mechanics. It makes sense; Salvation's Edge is primarily a raid designed for the experience of figuring out and executing puzzles, and obviously it would make no sense for the Witness to just calcify all of you in one go. But then, how could we be escaping calcification? It's clearly not that Guardians somehow become immune to it, because we evidently don't. It also can't be that our own Light or Darkness is what is able to free others from it, given that it never comes up again, and it's dubious that the Witness is only freezing a few members of your fireteam for fun when it has shown the capability to freeze all of you.
You're reaching extremely hard here to dismiss what we see in favor of inserting your own headcanon. The Witness is able to freeze, while you're directly below him in the monolith, 5/6 Ghosts, the last at a time being able to use their Light to unfreeze the others. A much smaller scale version of the Traveler unfreezing everyone in the opening cutscene. This is really not hard to grasp, and is substantially less hoops to jump through. And yes, of course there is some sort of gamification of it, but I hardly think the plinths are it. You'll notice the Witness is something of a model collector himself, his ships, his monolith, all filled with beings frozen in place and, you guessed it, placed on various plinths, in dramatic poses, etc. Or are those gameplay mechanics too?
(Also, as an aside, even if it is your Ghosts explaining what they see instead of you spectating from the afterlife, it still doesn't explain how they magically drop out of the shadow realm while your calcified body is still there, or why dunking your Ghost would revive you and also magically teleport your Ghost back to the shadow realm. So I'm certainly not convinced either way that the mechanism that we see in the game is actually what happens in the lore, so much as it is a mechanical challenge primarily designed for the gameplay loop of being Vault 2.0, with the actual in-lore event being substantially different from what happens in the game.)
I'm surprised you find the idea of dimensional travel between dimensions connected to the same space to be so alien for the most powerful Guardian ever and a group of his peers. I feel like you wouldn't be arguing this is so odd in any other context.
Thus, my proposal: we draw on evidence of a scene that we have already seen, where the Witness does calcify a bunch of people... and the Traveler's resistance brings them back. This has prior, non-gameplay evidence of being true, doesn't require the Witness to be stupid beyond rational belief, and aligns with the idea that the Witness is continuing to struggle to grasp the Traveler's Light—after all, if it wasn't, then it could have already enacted the Final Shape. As for the lack of a wash of Light, that's something that can be chalked down to the fact that the one-by-one design doesn't really allow for it to work like that. But all the evidence, from the campaign explicitly stating that the Traveler's Light is protecting you, to the cutscene with the only other instance that we see of calcification used by the Witness, to the fact that the Witness would have to actually be dumber than a literal child to not use abilities that it has canonically demonstrated as combat moves before... which also coincidentally happen to make the raid puzzle mechanically challenging as something interesting for the players (a clear sign that it's a game mechanic over story design)—all of it makes the explanation that the Traveler was protecting you logical.
You've set up a false dichotomy here: the idea that either the Traveler solves every single problem ever, or that the Guardians had absolutely zero aid from the Traveler. This is also bullsh*t. The Traveler can help by protecting against the Witness's esoteric attacks and limiting the Witness's ability to act offensively against them, while simultaneously not just trivializing all encounters. It's more like the Guardians broke into the monolith, fought their way through the Witness's forces, and then were able to damage the Witness's connection to the Traveler... and the Traveler prevented the Witness from just splattering them across the walls, or banishing them to the f*cking Ascendant Plane like it was able to do with entire planets, or even dicing them into sashimi. The idea that the gameplay version of the Witness that summons a few hands with glowy shape-themed attacks is the full-power Witness is such an incredibly bad-faith downplay of what's happening that it beggars belief.
Again, while I do not think it adheres exactly to the gameplay of the thing, I think that using what we literally see on the screen as being descriptive of what is true compared to wholesale making sh*t up to avoid acknowledging the limitations of the Witness is a much more cohesive look at Destiny. What is also handy about this is that it means one side of argumentation, mine, has actual evidence in favor of it, while the other side, yours, is grasping at straws to try and make up some sort of fanfiction to explain what is "actually" happening because surely what we see is not that.
The Witness flies around a giant fleet of f*cking pyramids and his ultimate enemy is a giant sphere. He is trying to enact the Final Shape. The idea that shape-based powers are going to be relevant being some strange conception to you is very odd, that that is what breaks your suspension of disbelief. Why you bring up banishing planets which are distinctly not imbued with Light to provide the esoteric defenses one needs to deal with him as if it is relevant makes little sense, and is not what I am arguing. A planet is a large mass of rock, but clearly is something he can deal with without any sort of esoteric defense. The Guardian is not a planet, and is imbued with arguably the most Light of any Guardian, and this alongside their unseen compatriots is, I argue and the lore presents, enough to overcome the powers of the Witness. I will reiterate, the Witness did not show up to the Sol system, wave away all threats, kill all the Guardians and then achieve the Final Shape. The Witness fails to kill a small squad of Guardians right in front of him in the campaign. Need I remind you this cutscene exists.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TefMsoR52U&ab_channel=WoWQuests
Where the enraged, wounded Witness manages all of making some angry smoke attacks which break the entranceway to that arena, has his smoke and giant arms evaded by people running at human speeds (and his hand driven off by singular Lightbearer attacks) or even shots from the Ace of Spades which as we see when shooting Crow, manage to chip stone like regular weapons while again not being brought back by the Traveler. But hey, I am sure in your version of events, the Traveler (who again is from its own PoV unable to act) must have been uhhh, what, slowing the smoke down? Reaching over to imbue Cayde's bullets with anti-Witness hand power? Stopping the Witness from killing them all off-screen with no mention? Come on. And before you try coming in with some "well Cayde also has the Traveler juicing him up off-screen I swear" Ghost explicity says Cayde cannot use his as a weapon.
And Ikora says the same.
And since you seem to legitimately believe that the Witness did just stand around throwing out shape lasers, I can't take you seriously. What, next you're going to say that Rhulk—who is canonically able to tear out the Leviathan's ribs with his bare hands and drag a Worm to the surface of a gas giant—actually kicks with the anemic force of barely sending a well-equipped Guardian flying and doing half their health, or that the Witness actually patiently waits for you to place the rally banner and start the encounter before attacking, or that you can actually fly out of the raid and go to orbit at any time and then return and the Witness will just kind of sit there waiting for you. Not even that, you also have to believe that the Witness decided to use the calcification attack in Verity and then just promptly forgot it could do that and conveniently stowed it away in the arena where there wasn't a get-out-of-jail-free pedestal for you to dunk Ghosts into. And it forgot the slashing attack that cut apart the Guardians that attempted to fly after it when it entered the Pale Heart. And also that it forgot all of the moves it used in the campaign, including the swirling attack that one-shots you if you don't have a shield, or when it was harming the Traveler's Light and destroyed all your health and caused you to fall over, or when it expelled you from its Darkness by blasting you down to a sliver of health and then forcing you to walk in a crawl....
So yeah, your interpretation is "Actually the game mechanics that are very clearly designed to give Guardians some fun positioning and puzzle challenges are 100% lore accurate and the Witness has the intellect of a f*cking child, whereupon it forgets about every single power that it has canonically displayed against mooks and other enemies and even you at previous points in the campaign, because... protagonist power, I guess?"
I see you are attempting to make a strawman bad faith argument of things because you don't have any real arguments or evidence to bring up do you? Obviously the game mechanic versions of things like going to orbit mid-fight are not part of it, or your raid team sitting at the bottom of the arena for 30 minutes while someone gets food are not, no one believes they are and that you are pretending that is what I am arguing is just to deflect from the fact you don't have anything to really add to what we see. I am not writing fanfiction to make up how the fights went, I am in favor of using what we actually see rather than not. If we ever had a version of how those fights went written up and it contradicted what the players do, then we would use that, but we do not. Hell even events in raids in their brief descriptions match up with what you do in the raid, like using the corrupted Light against Oryx for example. The Light is all about making weird things happen to defeat enemies, like shooting computer parts to hack them.
You aren't even trying to explain anything, like clearly instead of "the Witness forgets its powers" reads to me as "the Witness is being pressed too hard by the Guardians shooting and hurting him to use powers that need more care and power to achieve."
The Witness lacking range isn't an indicator of its power being finite, because we are explicitly told that its power is infinite. It being more powerful than the Traveler is also shown by it no-selling the Traveler's beam, subjugating the Traveler in a way that is explicitly something it will succeed at eventually (rather than the Traveler being infinitely more powerful and just going "nope"), and the fact that it left the Traveler on death's doorstep the last time they fought. Hell, we also know that trying to channel too much of the Traveler's power will kill you (both Ghaul and your own Ghost prove this principle). And yet the Witness was not only able to withstand all of the Traveler's power, but was going to channel all of that power to reshape the whole universe. So that level of power must be something that the Witness can withstand, or else even attempting to achieve the Final Shape would just cause it to explode in a burst of Light and die.
I'll come back and say how extremely ironic it is you have no problem believing the statements of infinite power sprinkled far and wide in old, tucked away lore in favor of ignoring the thing every player will see and performing mental gymnastics to explain how the not-infinite effects we see manifest are definitely, actually infinite but because magic they don't have to adhere to physics, while then turning around and saying that the dozen mentions of infinite power across three volumes of one book in a series, manifesting power said in several places to be warping all of time and space, not bound by some arbitrary and unexplained range limitation is not infinite because it is on the other team. If you are going to play so fast and loose with your standards of evidence, you really should be consistent with how you apply it at least.
And it was never afraid of one Guardian... up until the point that the Dissenters manifested. And they could only manifest because the Witness brought them into the Pale Heart, where the Witness's thoughts literally became physically manifest.
Targe certainly doesn't say "you're afraid that your inner beings you have kept suppressed or cut out and act supremely confident about not being a threat and not the Guardian"
As for Horus accessing the Dissenters, that doesn't actually help him because he needs a way to directly enter the Darkness to destroy them. The Dissenters can only be accessed by a specific ritual that enters the Darkness in which the Witness is held, and Horus has no framework of reference to know to do that.
You can prove that Horus can access the Darkness plane, of course? Also, the statues are immune to damage except by the Light swords provided by the Traveler, so you'd have to prove that Horus's power is analogous enough to Light and powerful enough to pierce the Darkness like that.
This is the explicit sort of NLF type bullsh*t arguments that fans of franchises try to use all the time and get smacked down for their terrible arguments. The idea that the various sub-realms of Destiny that dozens of individuals we see across the games get into in various shapes and forms from beings with human-equivalent (or somewhat above depending on what exactly is in question) intelligence and study of rites equivalent in complexity to any random Warp ritual would somehow be inaccessible to Horus, the perfect implement of Chaos who simultaneously battles across infinite planes of existence, countless dimensions beyond space and time, warps fate itself with a thought is just beyond silly. The Guardians manage to figure out over the course of, what, a few days how to breach through the Witness shielding? Often even in the heat of battle they figure out new ways to breach various defenses.
Eris Morn after only years of study has become an ascendant master of hive magic. Any radical Inquisitor worth their salt could do the same, and Horus makes them look like drooling idiots. Beings many rungs down the ladder from Horus in 40k are able to have memetic Sherlock Holmes levels of intuition, insight and skill at reading the mysteries of complex magics, of organizing labyrinthine plots on the spot or unpicking them, who have spent such time learning of deep ritualistic mysteries they make all but the oldest Guardians look like children. Lets not forget The Guardian has been alive for, what, a handful of years now, and yet despite being depicted as a drone who follows all the orders pretty much anyone gives to them as they run through shooting everything with no notable intelligence, they manage to undo every complex system in the way with the sheer magical energy of the Light.
Now compare the Guardian, or any Guardian, or all of them to Horus Ascendant, powered by an infinity of magic at the minimum as strange, disconnected from time and connected to ritual as the Light and Dark and having become a master at wielding them, backed up and being filled with the whispers of four acausal divinities composed of this same energy, and the idea that he cannot shortly breach any of these canonically breached barriers shortly after is laughable.
Lets not forget even places like the Ascendant Plane have things like notable Fallen without any Light making their way into them and carving out their own space after a short period of time. How about this, is there something you think has an actual argument behind it you can support as to how he would not be able to access such spaces with all his power, skill and experience?
No, we explicitly know the order. The Yang Liwei encounters the Witness and the Black Fleet first, because it's literally leaving the system. As it encounters the Darkness, Rasputin only then begins to request to conscript their ship into the war effort—something we know Rasputin initiated at the start of Twilight Exigent. Then they try to communicate with the Witness, and then the beam is fired, and then the Distributary forms. This is all before any of the Collapse even begins, or marks the beginning of the Collapse. We also are explicitly told that there is a beam struggle between Light and Dark—THAT'S THE ENTIRE PREMISE OF THE DISTRIBUTARY. Literally, we see a f*cking beam of Light come from the Traveler, and the Darkness clashes with it around the Yang Liwei.
I will now await your citations and an explanation as to why you are so confident on this and breaking down the timeline. It sure is odd we somehow "see" a beam of Light despite this being an arcane, purely textual recollection of Mara after all.
Savathun's Worm states that she projected some sort of grand illusion to the Witness, so that's not true. Furthermore, since we have literally no knowledge beyond "Savathun did... something", how can you even remotely state that Horus can replicate what Savathun did? It's an unprovable claim because we have no knowledge of the conditions or manner in which Savathun achieved it, beyond the literal abstract of "she tricked it." Savathun also... does pull schemes like that, all the time. Her whole scheming to force the Vex to create Quria, so that Oryx would Take it and gift it to Savathun, so she could then understand singularities; her scheme with Dul Incaru, to sacrifice her daughter to the Guardians as part of her plot to loop the Dreaming City to gain endless tribute, through her manipulation of the Guardians in killing Riven; using the very nature of Truth to Power to amass tribute from the Vanguard; killing of Nezarec and the hiding of the Veil on Neptune during the Collapse; the creation of her viral language that corrupted Calus's Loyalists (and was also seeded even in the culture of the Last City); masterminding the Spawn of Crota civil war; the corruption of Umun'arath's mind to summon Xivu Arath in Torobatl when Caiatl inevitably killed Umun'arath; the possession of Osiris and the Endless Night scheme; and so on.
If you cannot cite what form this "grand illusion" took then there is no reason for me to assume it is something beyond the abilities of a psyker to achieve. We don't just assume everything lacking explanation is impossibly capable, cunning and so grand that an opponent could never counter it. If the best we have is "Savathun did something" then the standard of evidence to show it can be defeated is so very low it is essentially useless to bring up. I don't know why you think citing examples of Savathun smugly convincing everyone to do things in the lest trustworthy voice possible as she laughs at them and listing off a bunch of Hive names is somehow evidence she has grand scale illusions, but I expect that when you respond you either come in with some real evidence of what she can do, or else no one has to accept at all that what she does is more than the words she normally uses, and is therefore unlikely that someone like Horus cannot see through them or even recreate them, but better as part of his arsenal.
She's pulled off massive deceptions, and if the quotes provided in this thread are to be believed, Horus is too impulsive and lacking in self-control to attempt such illusionary trickery anyway.
While I am not convinced you have even read most of the quotes here, Horus is hardly lacking in impulse control and self-control. Again, he holds back on destroying the Emperor for more than a thousand years just to try and convince him to join him.
Still you circle, filling the Court with the ring of steel and the breathless gasps of His effort. This contest has become pure ceremony, pure spectacle, a rite of sacrifice to tear out His will and offer it to the gods. It has lasted a thousand years already. It will last another thousand, another ten thousand, another million, if needs be. You have all the time you need.
- The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra: The End and the Death Volume III
As for the sort of rapid-fire deceptions Horus uses directly in his battle with the Emperor, they both do things like travel across time and space pulling one another to places of great emotional and historical significance to one another in order to interfere with their defenses for even moments to allow blows to land. Things like taking Horus back to where he would first be found by the Emperor, taking the Emperor back to where he stole power from the Gods of Chaos, there and many other locations. You can imagine something like this can easily unman the Witness, who has a habit of throwing a tantrum when anyone brings up anything he dislikes, like Calus asking if he was so all-powerful why didn't he go get the Veil? (Great question Calus, probably be cause he is not as all-powerful as he pretends and is afraid of the Guardians busting him up). Or Targe calling him scared, or the Guardians breaking three of his inner statues. Horus drags him back to the place he was born, disturbs him and opens a crack in his emotions to exploit.
Or he fires a Bloodlight beam that strikes right to the core of his being and starts breaking apart the beings that compose his composite soul.
Molech seems to shake Him like a solid body blow. As His guard slips, you block His sword and spear Him to the core with a beam of bloodlight that lances from the unblinking eye on your chestplate. He writhes on that skewer of red rage. It has punctured His soul and amputated nine hundred years of His life. You keep Him pinned with the beam, still bleeding years in an arterial torrent, and you open your Talon, raking Him with incandescent lightning. The lightning, drawn from the deepest storms of the empyrean, fries His flesh and roasts Him alive. His agony is profound. He tries to tear free, but neither the bloodlight nor the lightning will let Him go. You increase the fury of both.
They destroy Him.
He explodes in a cloud of white ash.
- The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra: The End and the Death Volume III
Ah yes, the "human intelligence" Guardians that canonically figured out and cleared each raid on the first try. The ones that are able to make ridiculously convoluted leaps in logic to figure out the right thing to do, without ever having failed once at it. Also, the Guardians don't end up figuring out all of the ruses of the gods, and even many times when they do it's by sheer accident because they end up killing the right person at the right time. And Savathun is still able to deceive them, and the Witness—and the Witness itself was able to deceive the entire civilization of the Krill about the Syzygy.
Now hang on, so now you're agreeing with me the raid mechanics are exactly as complicated as they are in the game? Pick one, either you agree with me and we should use them as close as we can (and which baseline human gamers are able to still figure them out by the way, albeit not first try) or they are somehow abstracted into not being useful for them being intelligent. The Guardian never gives off any sort of hyper-intelligence, you wander about taking orders from people, you threaten a few people and shoot all of your problems away. There are extremely intelligent Guardians like Osiris of course, but there is no indication the one you play as is one of them. Savanthun is not doing any sort of deception beyond talking well. The Witness is not entering the minds of all the Krill and making them unable to see the Syzygy is coming, it is perfectly ordinary deception humans can do.
The Traveler is not the Gardener; certainly not the Gardener that was in Unveiling. This is also explicit:
Hmm, lets compare evidence. On one hand, you have some cryptic apocryphal tale told to you by the Witness, a perfectly infallible source of information, lets see what your Ghost, one of the main characters of the game and connected directly to the Light and Traveler says in The Final Shape even, to Luzaku, a Lucent Hive also serving the Traveler which she calls Gardener and answers in the affirmative to this question.
And I mean, not like this is new information despite people desperately grasping at Unveiling to be true. Shock horror gasp, the propaganda fed to you by the Witness isn't true? How could it be, I truly thought he was here to save everyone in The Final Shape.
From the Witness' Origins cutscene. Which I am sure you also know but pretend isn't true describes the Winnower as the Veil. The Veil which was used to create...the Witness. The Witness who says that it was formed by...the Winnower as its First Knife, which is described as exactly what is happening in that cutscene.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0CKckjryVI&ab_channel=Destiny2
Also... the Traveler is explicitly stated to be infinite in power. What? Like, more than the Witness, this is uncontested at any point. The entire culmination of the Final Shape is rewriting all of reality with the Traveler's power. What the hell are you on? Also, Ergo Sum's lore showing that it spent the last of its power giving you the sword is not true; if it had been fully subjugated by the Witness, then the Final Shape would already have been enacted. We're told explicitly that the Traveler is still fighting at that point.
And yet it is overmatched both times by the Witness. It sure seems to not have an infinity of power when it needs it. And no, Ergo Sum and I did not say it has lost and nothing is left, just that it has nothing left to give aka all of its power is being spent trying to hold back the Witness.
And what? We even get lore cards talking from the Winnower's perspective in Salvation's Edge, further confirming the existence of the Winnower, while the Witness explicitly states that it is the First Knife. There's zero ambiguity there.
See above, but no, there are not lore cards from the PoV of the Winnower as anything other than the Veil. We have cards from the PoV of the Witness itself, but that is not the same.
The Traveler is infinite in power; it simply is restricted in how it can leverage that power due to its nature and morals. But it can save people, very clearly so, as shown by the first cutscene. It can also fire infinite energy in a beam, as shown by Cosmogyre IV and Osiris's discussion of the beam fired on the Witness at the end of Lightfall. And other people can use its infinite power to achieve the shape they desire.
This is like the whole thing earlier in the discussion of "Well Horus didn't want to retcon the universe, but he's still universe level even though he doesn't show universe-scale manipulation" is the Traveler, except the Traveler does have two universal feats to its name.
Where does Osiris add anything useful on its beam? I mean, the beam the Traveler fired looks awfully similar to the beam it uses to transform planets when looking at their impact. And really, this makes sense when the Traveler is a Gardener, not a destroyer, but it sure does not take infinite energy to terraform a planet. At best it might have infinite potential to do things.
Again, 999,999 is literally the damage cap. We all know that Destiny is built on spaghetti code; honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they would have trouble adding more decimal places given how the code is written. And they chose to have damage numbers because it gives the impression to the player of big damage. The fact that you are ignoring is that the beam fired by the Traveler that deals that damage is the only thing capable of dealing damage to the Witness's barrier. All your rockets and Celestial Nighthawk Golden Gun/Still Hunt shots, all of them do zero damage to the Witness's barrier. Saying that the damage numbers are like a rocket ignores the fact that, no, they're infinitely above a rocket by simple virtue of doing damage at all (any damage is an infinite percent greater than zero damage), and also fundamentally misunderstands how Destiny's game engine even calculates damage (there's a reason that damage testers use their weapon multiple times on the same enemy; a bunch of factors go into how damage calculations are outputted in Destiny, varying just as much based on the enemy receiving the damage and the activity as it is based on your own loadout). Also, y'know, we've known for a long time that Guardians' weapons are amplified to deal more damage via Light; being in the Traveler and empowered by it, I can't imagine a situation where it wouldn't be more appropriate to say that they're dealing more damage.
No, it is established that adding Light to a weapon does not make it more powerful, it makes it more versatile. There are special abilities where large amounts of Light are channeled by Guardians, see: Golden Guns, but their regular weapons this is not the case. And yet again, the Witness throws up another round of barriers at the end (one of many you have taken down with Light because Bungie loves damage gates) after you have reduced him to a small fraction of health remaining. If you think a multi-billion dollar company cannot add some commas I have a bridge to sell you. Again, I don't think this is the end all be all of discussion, but it is telling Bungie even had damage numbers pop up at all here. You think if they were trying to represent some sort of infinity they couldn't plug in an infinity sign or the like to pop up? There are no infinite energy beams being fired here, and yet despite being certainly finite, they kill the Witness. More evidence that without weird metaphysical interactions between the forces of nature they are, the Witness can be killed just fine with application of some more mundane weaponry.
The beam fired by the Traveler is directly comparable to the one fired on the Yang Liwei; both are explicitly the Traveler attempting to expel the Darkness. Unless you're going to claim that the Traveler actually wasn't trying and didn't really want to expel the Witness at the end of Lightfall.
Cite it being the same. I sure don't see some singularity causing clash of Light and Dark, I see a terraforming beam with no such effects.
And doing damage in the Darkness is explicitly told and shown to us as doing more harm to it and its control of its power than merely shooting at the glowing spot on its chest. And you can certainly claim that smashing a few statues is something Horus could do, but you have no evidence to suggest that Horus could access that Darkness-space that holds the Witness's selves. I don't disagree that he could eventually figure it out, but I doubt it'll be as simple as "And he sees the Witness and immediately goes, 'Aha, you're a being made of composite minds, which means I can enter the Darkness realm that contains your mind and unmake you,' and then does so."
I mean it could literally be that fast when we look at the abilities of Horus' mind, his ability to control time and the Warp, but even if it was not essentially instant, he has as much time as he wants because even if the Witness was his peer in sheer power, he lacks so much skill, finesse and experience at wielding it against anything that can fight back Horus can just keep him endlessly occupied until he figures it out and then kills it.
Do you have any evidence that their sensors couldn't perceive it as infinite? Or did you make that up?
This is called proving a negative, and is not how claims work. If you are claiming to me that the Vex sensors present at any given location have infinite sensor resolution, you're going to have to prove it.
As for measuring Light and Dark, you are certainly welcome to prove that the English text that we are given does not mean what it means... despite being given to us by machines that explicitly are incapable of exaggeration like that, functioning purely by responding to and analyzing what they can perceive. If they meant immeasurable, they would have said immeasurable. As for it not leveraging infinite power... how does it missing things have anything to do with power? Perception and power are not the same, and the Traveler was dormant the whole time. The "innumerable" moments in which the Witness doesn't leverage infinite power usually come down to the fact that it didn't need to because it succeeded anyway (or it's a matter of perception, which is not synonymous with power), and the Traveler explicitly protecting the Guardians in the Pale Heart. Targe also doesn't actually injure the Witness; he just dispels the projected illusion of the Witness in the Darkness illusion briefly, which tosses Zavala away.
Describing much of Destiny lore as being straightforward English is funny considering how much of it is layers and layers of (often poorly constructed or overly indulgent fart sniffing) metaphor, obscured meaning and unreliable narrators. Like, do we think the Black Garden is truly a literal garden? Of course not. sh*t, the lore tells us that is is a metaphor. I would not hinge my entire argument on such a thing, but I have not done so because there are so many things suggesting the limits of the Traveler.
And I think that arguing that the Witness actually magically forgets all of its powers the moment someone vaguely protagonist-shaped appears (unless the protagonist is standing in the Witness's specially prepared rooms that have exactly the mechanism to negate the Witness's own abilities, which it built because lol of course why not) is far more egregious. I think that ignoring the explicit statements of the Witness's infiniteness by saying "Well maybe the robots that are incapable of doing anything beyond being action-reaction entities actually misspoke" or "Clearly it actually just made up that it was the First Knife, which is why you get a ship called First Knife and a lore tab called First Knife and its own explanation of it being the First Knife that directly references the Winnower, and all of the mentions of the First Knife in lore" or "Yeah that one time that we are told that there's a clash of infinite energy and then the creation of an infinite universe was actually not infinite in any way because I don't like it." And the less we say about your ignoring the fact that the Witness was literally going to use the Traveler to reshape all of existence by saying "Well the Traveler doesn't actually have the scale to do what it was literally going to be used to do in canon", the better.
I have covered this all multiple times so am not going to repeat myself more. Just reread the posting above.
I mean, I think that if we truly put it at its higher end as the First Knife, then it should win against Horus by being able to cut apart the Gardener. But if we take a more reasonable interpretation (still on the higher end, but not the highest), then sure, I can see the merit in this argument. Assuming the raw scope of their power is evenly matched, then I can see Horus being able to eventually figure out the trick to unmaking it and destroying it. Mind you, if they both are truly infinite, I'm not sure that variety of powers or different attack vectors will make that much of a difference, and neither will be wearing the other down. It'll be more centered around social-fu and figuring out the other's weakness.
Assuming both are infinite for the sake of more discussion, and assuming the Traveler is also infinite for comparison, then Horus is going to body the Witness like the Witness bodies the Traveler. He is just far too skilled, experienced, vicious and conniving compared to the Witness, like the Witness is compared to the Traveler on its lonesome.
Starsight said:
I mean that he can't do things like, infinitely rewrite all of reality just because it's connected to the Isochronal Nexus, the way that he can warp reality inside of the Lupercal Court. He can go places, sure, but outside of Terra and the Lupercal Court, he can't freely warp them however he wants. Like he can't delete the entire universe just because he's connected to every point in the universe, because he can travel but he can't rewrite everything outside of his specific centers of power.
Errrm, yes, he can? But why would he, his goal isn't to be a cackling Disney villain who just wants to delete the universe, he wants to usurp his father who he perceives as having wronged him and then rule the galaxy as the new Emperor and as a god. Not much to rule if you destroy it all.
He can do anything now. Anything his will desires. You can't imagine. He can melt the world into the sky. He can blow time away like the tufts of a dandelion. He can twist up all of the materia in our universe into one knotted ball, and summon inevitable cities. He can drag the dead from their tombs and their times, and make them live as they once lived.
- The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra: The End and the Death Volume III
And again, he did this.
Grand mal spasms in which entire galaxies rise, and spin, and fall in the blink of a single seizure.
Eternity, compressed by hyper-mass forces into a dense nanosecond, and then stretched out like a string, like a thread, by impossible gravities, until it winds around forever and loops back again, through a curving immensity of space and time to meet itself once more, ouroboros, all dimensions and none at all, in one isochronal convolution that is both revelatory and inevitable.
- The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra: The End and the Death Volume III
