Soul Crystals - What Are They, And Are They Necessary?

[Reaper]

Soul Crystals.

 

My understanding is they're effectively the knowledge of past people that you can use their soul crystal to learn their knowledge. An imprint/predisposition towards the knowledge, if you would. It teaches the wielder the basic skills of the individual whose soul crystal it was in life, and allows the wielder to rapidly develop correlated skills.

 

To that end, I want to clarify, one does not need a soul crystal to be a job, correct? Or in other words, if I say my character were to have learned Scholarly pursuits from another Scholar who did have a Soul Crystal (or perhaps my mentor even let me borrow the soul crystal from time to time to observe it that way to enhance my own knowledge) it would be fully possible to be an IC Scholar without actually having a soul crystal in my possession... correct?

http://kilieit.tumblr.com/post/159315531877/just-how-obscure-is-that-job-crystal-in-lore 
I found a great post that helps dictate how hard it is to come by certain soul crystals, but I am more-so curious about the viability of playing as a job (or similar enough to be identified as that job by insiders to the profession) without a soul crystal. I am fully aware it would take more time and effort to learn it without a soul crystal, and thus unless I acquire my own later in RP I'd likely be inferior ICly to other Scholars who actually have an IC crystal.

 

Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Ideas? Happy to hear all of the above!

[Skae]

Main purpose of a soul crystal is to let learn your job far more rapidly than you could have otherwise.  Doing so in months rather than years.  Or years rather than decades.

In some cases (Black Mage) having a Soul Crystal also helps by preventing you from killing yourself when trying to learn how to manipulate the magical energies.

 

There is no reason you couldn't learn how to be a Scholar from another Scholar even without a sould crystal.  You would learn much slower though, and since you can't have been studying for long due to how recently Scholars were reintroduced in Eorzea, you'd be little more than an apprentice though.

 

[Valence]

As Skae said it, it greatly increases the speed at which you learn things. The crystal mentors you and feeds you new knowledge every time it feels you growing, and not only that, makes you literally feel and hear and listen to past experience from other users through various forms.

 

However a lot of jobs require a crystal to work either properly, or not at all:

 

- BLM: partial requirement, you can still cast standard black and thaumaturgic magic, but for the most powerful spells, you'll just cook yourself from the inside and die horribly without one.

 

- MCH: complete requirement, it provides the link between your own aether and the aetheroconverter (your glam lunchbox).

 

- SCH: complete requirement for the fairy iirc.

 

- WhM: hard to tell considering how the crystal is handed to us in the job story.

 

- AST: at least partial requirement not to lose all power.

[Reaper]

5 hours ago, Valence said:

- MCH: complete requirement, it provides the link between your own aether and the aetheroconverter (your glam lunchbox).

 

Thanks again, Valence! I saw you comment on my other post too.

 

I have been on hiatus for well over a year, and I forgot that tidbit of lore. I am going to try to see if I can find videos for the arcanist's & mechanist's quest chains so I can properly read over all the NPC and quest text to verify the integrity of my lore knowledge before I start RPing and make a fool of myself.

[yhvh13]

I really wished Squeenix had built this whole thing without job crystals at all. You'd simply learn how to be a job, like any Summoner of ancient times would, for example. It would open for much more character flexibility without really making the idea of jobs a commonplace. For example, without a WHM crystal, you'd still need to be a chosen individual to be taught by the Padjali or Elements anyway.

[Sounsyy]

Late to the thread, but I figured since Kilieit's post got linked you might find this one helpful as well. Whereas Kilieit's post goes over the difficulty in acquiring the various soul crystals, this post goes over each soul crystal means to their respective job:

 

-Soul Crystal Lore

 

Hope this helps!

[Skae]

16 hours ago, yhvh13 said:

I really wished Squeenix had built this whole thing without job crystals at all. You'd simply learn how to be a job, like any Summoner of ancient times would, for example. It would open for much more character flexibility without really making the idea of jobs a commonplace. For example, without a WHM crystal, you'd still need to be a chosen individual to be taught by the Padjali or Elements anyway.

 

Without a sould crystal you would realistically need many years to master any of the jobs, especially those were there are no real teachers around - like Summoner.

 

[Valence]

Well, there is Y'mithra and her allagan book familiar I guess. And the Immortal Flames dedicated squad although they're still in their infancy/learning. 

 

SMN is far from being the worse in terms of teachers. Neither is WhM even if you can't really justify that the Senna white mages would teach you in the first place. 

 

Red mage is a real issue since there is only one surviving teacher in the world currently. SCH can also be a problem unless you find a lucid tonberry teacher I guess. 

 

More generally for restricted or lost jobs, the teachers are scarce and often a couple of famous NPCs, which isn't always very suitable to RP characters. Self teaching is probably worse, but it's almost always a strong option if you're willing to come with all its shortcomings (you'll be an amateur dabbling in the art, it will be gruesome teaching full of dangers, etc). Some job quests (like RDM) explicitly tell about repositories other than soul crystals for the art, scattered around the world (one of the RDM sources can be found in Ishgard library of all places). It's a lot about spending years chasing after myths and legends really.

Edited November 29, 2018 by Valence