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Staenbridge

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Everything posted by Staenbridge

  1. I think Feruchemist is the clear winner here (both for myself and also according to everyone else), though my personal favourite metal hasn't even been brought up once: electrum. Feruchemical electrum allows you to store determination, which IMHO is one of the most valuable resources to be able to call up basically on demand when you need it. Have some uncomfortable tasks to do? Store a bit of determination while going on autopilot during your normal day, then whip out the stores to power through an hour or two of work without stopping. It's a pretty easy one to store too, because determination's rarely a continuous need. Push yourself at the key moment and then you can probably go back to normal once you're over the hump. Zinc (mental speed) is another good one for similar reasons — it's not so bad to store a little bit of for a good half of the day, if not more or longer, and that could be amazing for those moments when you need to make an intelligent split-second decision, or weigh up two difficult choices. I think for Twinborn I'd probably say Allomantic pewter and Feruchemical electrum? Physical dexterity+strength is a massive QoL and self-assurance blessing, and then you have electrum to handle the mental side of things.
  2. Much as I love the other magic systems, Fullborn are completely busted. Just about unstoppable for any other normal magic set, assuming Investiture supplies last. Steel (speed), gold (health), and zinc (mental speed) compounding, like @Quantus mentions, are at the core of their power, but they have plenty of other abilities which could carry certain matchups on their own. Brass (heat) compounding lets them set themselves on fire, oops. Iron compounding makes any physical engagement logistically challenging, because you have to knock over someone who might weigh upwards of a tonne. With Nicrosil compounding, a Fullborn could give themselves Bands-tier Allomancy, which is... a lot. You could almost certainly rip a human apart by variably pulling & pushing off the different trace metals in their body, punch through Shardplate like you're the superhero villain in take-your-pick of shows (viz. JoJo 5, Invincible, The Boys), and other types of silliness. Honestly, I feel for this sort of competition everyone gets much too hung up on considering "Fullborn" to be a valid category, when it's about as likely to arise as a Knight Radiant having all 10 Surges, and on a similar scale for power. They're so absurd in-world that even the prospect of one is another level of divine, even compared to the other magical powers: the Bands are 32 different metalminds, when Allik tells us that getting 4 in a single medallion is all but impossible for mortal hands, and as far as human Fullborn are concerned, Rashek could only become Fullborn through holding the power of a Shard, with no one else managing it 'naturally'.
  3. Bear in mind we still don't know if aluminium Feruchemy "works" like normal feruchemy; that is, whether or not you store Identity in an aluminummind, or are dumping Identity in the metalmind (cf. this wob in which Brandon RAFOs Paleo about this question). This is contentious because aluminium in basically every other magic we've seen it is something of an investiture black hole, sucking in and blocking use of Investiture but not being able to provide anything itself. So it's really out of character to imagine being able to place Investiture into an aluminium metalmind and have it still be there to retrieve at a later date — that's not what happens with Allomancy, nor with Hemalurgy, Surgebinding, SoulForging, Awakening, or Fabrial-ing. So IMO the most parsimonious explanation, Realmatically speaking, seems to be that aluminium would be the sole exception to the store-tap principle of Feruchemy, in which case you wouldn't be able to overrule your Identity with a regular aluminummind. Now, you could probably still pull off that trick like you suggest, but it would be hard to do this in a way that actually works for Nightblood. Like, suppose you try to Connect yourself with Nightblood like how Ishar connects the Radiants to Roshar; well, Connections are made of Investiture so you've just attached a tasty string of food to Nightblood, which I'm sure it'll promptly eat. SoulForging? Same problem, Nightblood eats the stamp, unless you try to stamp yourself to be like Nightblood? But that would be really weird, and I'm not sure how you could get a stamp to take which would convince a person's spiritweb that they're a sentient sword.
  4. I don't think you're being nearly imaginative enough with how "the Surge of breaking bonds" could affect a human. The way I understand it, the physical effect of Division will be cleaving bonds en masse within a substance. Doing this with just a small amount of Investiture would probably lead to the mixture of gloopification and surface-level ablation as you describe, as cell membranes, proteins, and all the other stuff in your body falls apart a little. However, if you apply a lot of Investiture, this would surely cause the substance to immediately catch fire at the very least; broken bonds are not going to stay broken, and all of the radicals/ions which have just been created are going to want to immediately react with everything around them, in a process that releases a lot of energy as heat. At high enough Investiture levels, we might perhaps imagine the cool formations that lightning causes when it impacts on sand, except that would happen inside the person's body. Outside the body, depending on the distance with which you're able to apply the Surge within air, Division Radiants might be able to cause sort of Roy Mustang-style explosions by splitting all of the air molecules in an area and letting them reform, but even setting aside that possibility, you could set off fuels at will and cause massive fires or deflagrations easily. Elsecallers probably do this job more effectively, based on what we see with Jasnah, but it's multiple routes to the same goal I suppose.
  5. I'd say the most important one is actually from Miles Hundredlives in Alloy of Law (ch. 19): Miles means it in the sense of Wax being a sword for "the establishment" i.e. the corrupt Elendel elite, but given how Harmony literally tells Wax that he's 'the tool he sends to fix problems by applying bullets' just a few pages earlier in Alloy of Law, it's clearly not just an apt comparison for material stuff. Earlier in AoL Ch. 18: The theorist in me wonders if Wax's discontent and agreement with Miles' assessment is not also because he literally just got told by his God that he lacked free will in coming to kill the Vanishers, but perhaps we're a little too soon in Wax's character progression for that kind of idea to be manifesting in Wax.
  6. Woah, feels like I'm part of 17th Shard history now. Anyway, here are all of the potential duplicate/needs-decision tags which I found when I had a look: I'm not sure if this is a duplicate or mislabelling, but #rafo explanation is sometimes used in the same way as #rafo-plus, as a sort of 'explanation about why it's a RAFO/context'. Other times it's used for 'this is what RAFO means in general' WoBs. Punctuation creates a few differences: #gavilars black sphere and #gavilar's black sphere #mistborn: secret history 2 and #mistborn secret history 2 (interestingly, I can't tag entries with the former — the colon disappears whenever I try) I found a set of <tag name> <number> broken/empty tags, which I've collected in one big search here. There's 14 which were originally spread across 13 entries, so I won't list them all except in the link. Radiant orders: besides Truthwatchers, there are also 'Order of' duplicates for Edgedancers, Lightweavers, and Bondsmiths, with Willshapers having a broken duplicate in the singular. All of the other groups of Radiants only have the bare name as a tag (i.e. #windrunners, #skybreakers, #dustbringers, etc)
  7. It's a callback to Warbreaker, so I won't spoil it in case you haven't read the book and don't want to hear.
  8. Chapter 121, US hardback p. 1194: I don't think they were just going to write the words "the Azish".
  9. Why would Kandra be elven? Did I miss something in the Silmarillion where Tolkien describes elves as being shapeshifters created by an accidental god using death magic?
  10. I'd argue for the Lord Ruler in this category, myself. Sure, he doesn't have the spikes through the eyes, but imagine watching someone walk out of a burning building with half of their face missing, impaled by spears, bones visible, flesh charred, and then have them look at you with an expression of "you're next". Any full feruchemist/allomancer Compounder has that, but IMO TLR has a sort of flair for it that makes him much more intimidating in a book. Inquisitors you kind of expect to be inhuman, what with their spikes, but Rashek cultivates a much more "Übermensch" vibe in everything he does. An Inquisitor always tends to appear more monster than man. Different kind of intimidation, y'know?
  11. Oh yeah I kind of got side tracked theorizing.
  12. Emotional allomancy is such a weirdly vague thing in the books... it's basically only used with the goal of being subtle, and under the supervision of experts. We're never shown many examples of emotional allomancy that isn't very precise and subtle, except as a teaching exercise to say, "you should do it better — like this." The upper limits of how much you can affect someone's emotional state aren't explored nearly as much. Could you in theory Riot someone's self-hatred and Soothe any desire to not die enough that they might try to kill themselves, or do these not count as emotions for the purposes of emotional allomancy? What about the alternative? Could you Soothe someone's aggression so hard that they would be physically incapable of wielding a weapon against someone? If that were possible then all of the subtlety be damned; brass and zinc are the chief combat metals now. Coinshot? Who cares! Before they can attack, you can hit them with a mental brick to the head and they'll hand you the gun to shoot them with.
  13. Vin takes this easily just because of the sheer versatility and ridiculous strength of full Mistborn powers, but you don't need to add many constraints before Szeth has a good chance, depending on which Szeth we're talking about. That might sound kind of dumb but hear me out: Emotional allomancy is something that Rosharans basically have no experience with; Vin could just blast Szeth with a sledgehammer of Soothing and he'd stand there like a drooling idiot while she slit his throat. However, WoR Szeth is filled with the most incredibly potent emotions — that is to say, self hatred, disgust, etc. — and we're told these have a tendency to interfere with Soothing. An allomancer with sources of metal and sufficient iron/steel reserves could basically cut down anyone without Plate without getting anywhere near the opponents. Suppose for some reason Vin's out of coins. Now she does actually have to get close, because Rosharans don't use metal for their currency. In close combat, a Surgebinder has an ungodly advantage over an equivalently skilled and resourced allomancer, because they can just keep taking fatal injuries and reheal them, while also being able to maintain good distance with Shardweapons, and having a much more lethal tool. Szeth in particular has trained to proficiency with all 10 Surges, in addition to having Nightblood at one point. This means that you could justify having fight be Szeth with the Surge set of the Windrunners, Dustbringers, Edgedancers, Truthwatchers, Lightweavers, Elsecallers, Willshapers, or Bondsmiths. No metal and then Willshaper Szeth is able to make Vin sink into the floor and then it's an easy win for the Shin. Edgedancer Szeth is much more effectively able to avoid Steelpushed and Ironpulled objects through abrasion, and Progression seems to make their Stormlight healing much more effective. Elsecaller Szeth could just dump Vin in the Cognitive and then who cares; she's a dead woman walking. Either of the Transformation Honorblades would let Szeth turn the air around Vin into stone, at which point she's stuck unless Pewter is significantly more powerful than I was led to believe. You get the picture. Brass, zinc, iron, steel, and atium all can result in Vin flattening Szeth, but removing just a couple of these change the odds drastically. Even just knowledge of each other's powers would make this a more even battle, as a lot of the difficulty in an unprepared fight will be that Vin could just surprise him with Allomancy. Szeth can't sustainably keep healing from coin injuries, because it takes a lot less Investiture to shoot a coin into his forehead than it does for him to revive himself.
  14. The modern Ashyn magic system we know is planned to be disease based, where bacteria and viruses give their hosts access to different Surges so long as they stay infected. As for the old one, I don't think it's certain, but I believe the assumption is that it was Unmade spren which got ushered in when humans arrived on Roshar. To the best of my knowledge, we don't know the mechanism for the old Ashynite Surges though. Maybe they had formal bonds with voidspren, maybe they didn't.
  15. Yes Pyro; that's how swords work. It trying to convince you to stab yourself just makes it as dangerous as Nightblood, but with fewer Breaths. If you're saying that it'll literally wiggle about and try to slice you up, well we haven't seen Awakened swords move about under their own power, so what's it going to do? Passively cut the hand gripping the smooth surface of the grip?
  16. Love that things are really shaping up for an all-Stormlight podium finish.
  17. Regarding the Shin invasion, one of the major theories around that is that it was in order to seize as many of the Eastern Shardblades as possible. After all, there are less than 100 Blades in circulation among the entirety of the non-Shin states, with the majority of those being in, surprise surprise, the most eastern states. It's difficult to say how much mobility of Shardblades there is, but it's certainly a reasonable suspicion that the Alethi might have so many blades just because they were the furthest away from the Shin when the East got invaded. That would help justify why Nergaoul settled in Alethkar — they would make the best source of troops for Odium if they also had the most Blades.
  18. Oh yeah good point haha, depending on the execution it might give off a "Shards are not human and that's why they don't feel romantic inclinations anymore because human ⇒ romance" vibe, which isn't a stellar idea.
  19. @Karger only Brandon can simultaneously answer the spirit of the question in more detail than was requested, while also RAFOing the question.
  20. Just FYI: Bondsmiths don't have access to Cohesion. That's the Willshapers and Stonewards.
  21. GRSM is the one I use (you're going to have to clue me in on where the "A" is in "Gender Minorities"). IMO, anything beyond LGBT or LGBTQ is too convoluted for common use. The point of an abbreviation is to be short and snappy: an 8 letter initialism is venturing into alphabet mafia territory, and gives me this shifting goalpost vibe for representation in the acronym. I've seen stuff like "QUILTBAG" proposed, but that's really trying to save a sinking ship. My bet is Jasnah or one of the long lived characters, i.e. Hoid or a Shard's Vessel. I could imagine that having lived for thousands of years would have a large impact on your attitudes towards romantic and/or sexual couplings, especially if who you are is being constantly moulded to better fit the Intent of your Shard.
  22. That's a good point, but it does also seem to be a much more deeply set mindset issue than a matter of just peaceful isolation. However, I do think it is something which Harmony is trying to fix peacefully — as I recall, after Wayne stumbles into a disgruntled scientist, he then gives her a fat load of cash on behalf of Wax; it isn't so unreasonable to think that Harmony is trying to nudge these sorts of interactions to happen more often. True, lerasium alloys are boring allomantically, but at the end of the day we just don't really know what they're going to do in terms of Feruchemy or Hemalurgy. We don't even know what pure lerasium does as a metalmind, so unlike with the other two Arts we don't even have that as a basis to make guesses from. That does sound like a pretty fun idea too. It has a sort of Altered Carbon vibe with the rich having access to immortality. Perhaps you'd have a dystopian post-scarcity Scadrial, where age in atiumminds has replaced all other forms of currency, because nothing else is truly valuable. We have no indication that people were Snapping for anything other than the 16 "normal" Allomantic metals back when Snapping was a pretty grim process. Since the Catacendre, atium is no longer part of the normal table of Allomantic metals, which suggests that we would never get any atium mistings. Yeah, this is probably the best example of what I was referring to. We have these really important holes in our understanding of lerasium that don't seem to serve any purpose unless we're going to see lerasium again. Personally, I think Brandon is going to try to limit this one heavily. It would be a massive headache as an author to try and min/max your half dozen magic systems and come up with resonances for everything. Because you just know that if this were IRL, as soon as it became possible there would be thousands, if not millions, of researchers just trying to figure out all of the combinations and interactions. With multiple planets worth of Cosmere-aware scientists, there wouldn't be any good reason for an 'obvious' thing to have not be tried, i.e. all of the basic combinations of two separate magic systems. For example, why on earth would Selish scientists not have considered every metal in combination with their magics? Allomancy is shaping up to be an incredibly important magic system on a Cosmere level, and they would naturally have a lot of people who can use Doric (Dorish? Dor?) magics. It does seem that there is significantly more harmonium than there was either atium or lerasium in circulation, so it's possible that this is actually what's happened. Without the Pits producing atium, Harmony can just dump a lot more Investiture into his own god metal.
  23. @robardin have to agree with option #1 myself, but much more importantly: it makes me very happy to see Farside comics in the wild.
  24. Okay, so as most people will hopefully be aware by now, there isn't exactly a lot of atium or lerasium left over from the time of the Final Empire, as of Bands of Mourning. The Pits have not been producing atium due to an unfortunate terrorist attack involving one of the retired miners, and Leras was always a bit of a Scrooge when it came to lerasium. Since then, Harmony hasn't seemed to want to make more, though Brandon's naturally being coy about the why of that. However, I'd like to make the case that atium and lerasium will both return for Era 3 and beyond, if not in The Lost Metal itself, and that if not, it would be better if they did. There are three primary strands to this: one in-world, one from an authorial perspective, and one from a reader perspective. That is to say: it suits Harmony's goals, it's a case of Chekhov's Gun, and it would be really cool. --- From an in-world perspective, there are good reasons to think that Harmony might wish to return to production of atium and lerasium in some capacity. As a Shard, he takes a much more active role in the management of his Shardworld than most other shards, with obvious exceptions being the three musketeers over on Roshar. The old Scadrian god metals offer unparalleled utility in creating strong tools for him to make use of, especially if he wants Marsh to stick around. Marsh will run out of atium eventually, and a chap with dozens of hemalurgic spikes and centuries of knowledge is a very useful tool indeed. It might also be desirable for Harmony to have other full Mistborn running around, as Atium shadows in an era of guns become actually insane in terms of utility, especially when no one knows that atium exists nor how to counter it. Even if they did, Electrum mistings are not typical combat Allomancers. If Harmony wants atium, then he must also have lerasium, because Atium Seers are no longer born. However, this still assumes that he would create atium, but keep it from the wider populace. Harmony may also wish to allow atium and lerasium into the wider Scadrian ecosystem, even if only in very limited quantities. Harmony seems disappointed in how little his people have innovated since the Catacendre; if the converse of this is true, and Harmony wishes for Scadrial to develop, grow, and change, then he may wish to provide them with more "toys", so to speak: atium and lerasium are incredibly potent god metals, and the potential for their use is almost limitless. Remember, they can be alloyed with every other Allomantic metal: for all of the possibilities of 16 metals interacting across 3 Metallic Arts, now you have 48. --- From an authorial perspective, consider this: we still have many questions relating to the god metals which are unanswered and RAFOed. Some of these, Brandon does not want to answer because they relate to wider Cosmere things, which he either doesn't want to spoil, or hasn't pinned down yet. However, many of them do not. These two in particular stand out: If lerasium and atium were never going to feature again on Scadrial, there would be no good reason not to answer these two questions: they both directly imply that the answers will be relevant to some forthcoming book. Therefore, I propose that Brandon does still plan for one or both of them to return to Scadrial, or at least that he has not ruled out doing so. Atium would be the most likely, as it is "less potent", but as mentioned in the previous section, much of the utility of atium relies upon full Mistborn and full Feruchemists, which means probably lerasium. (yes atium spikes are an option, but it's also the most boring option). --- Finally, let your own imagination run wild. It's crazy to ask that on a forum about fan theories, I know, but bear with me here. Atium and lerasium have incredible potential within the world of Mistborn — indeed in other worlds, now that we know that there are worldhopping Mistborn — so it would be such a tragedy if we never get to see them get used to their fullest. Picture a cyberpunk Scadrial where criminals on death row are executed by being spiked with Lerasium or Atium spikes, which allow for incredible fusions of technology and magic in new and diverse Hemalurgic constructs; you thought social media was bad? Just wait for an AI super intelligence which can use emotional Allomancy. Harmony is able to equip his kandra agents with a myriad of different Blessings, especially chosen for the given mission and individual — alloys of atium or of lerasium, each providing esoteric and much more specialised abilities than the traditional four. Picture a Cosmere-aware Scadrial, where promises of just a few lerasium beads can buy the alliance of an entire planet. Deeper understanding of lerasium and allomancy in its purest form has allowed for artificial Seers to return through the use of metalminds like those of the Southern Scadrians. Public speakers, assassins, bomb disposal teams, professional footballers — everyone in a high pressure environment wants to know the future, and now you can, for a price. Picture Harmony, actually having a good retirement plan for his agents. "Look Wax, I know I've been dragging you through the mud for the last... uh... well most of your life to be honest, but once we're done here I'll give you everything you need to live in peace and I'll never bother you again. Shardic pinkie promise." Picture Twinborn, but they aren't just Metalborn Twinborn. They're Returned Oracles, Windrunner Coinshots and Lurchers, Edgedancer Sliders (speedbubbles).... The resonances which make Surgebinding such an interesting magic system are suddenly being considered across the entire Cosmere. Picture a secret society, selectively breeding humans so that they can train full Mistborn from birth in the use of multiple magic systems; the love child of the Envisagers and the Set. Hell, I can't even picture it, but just think about what Lerasium and its alloys, or Atium's alloys, might do as Feruchemical metalminds or Hemalurgic spikes. Would you finally be able to get lossless Hemalurgy? Metalminds for pure investiture in the different magic systems? --- If you made it this far, well you've got more patience than me.
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