Allomantic Electrum doesn't make any Sense (to me, anyway)

[Trusk'our]

In The Hero of Ages, we see Vin use Allomantic electrum, but she comments on how it doesn’t really affect the fight except to counter Atium. 

Quote

“Vin burned electrum. This created a cloud of images around her, shadows of possible things she could do in the future. Electrum, the Allomantic complement of gold. Elend had started calling it ‘poor man’s atium.’ It wouldn’t affect the battle much, other than to make her immune to atium, should the Inquisitor have any.” - Hero of Ages, page 38

Not only did electrum not “affect the battle much”, neither Vin nor Elend uses it outside of combat. Is Allomantic Electrum just not very useful? What’s more, wouldn’t it not truly counter another form of future-sight unless you could actually use it to reliably change your decisions by seeing the future?

[Frustration]

27 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

In The Hero of Ages, we see Vin use Allomantic electrum, but she comments on how it doesn’t really affect the fight except to counter Atium. 

Not only did electrum not “affect the battle much”, neither Vin nor Elend uses it outside of combat. Is Allomantic Electrum just not very useful? What’s more, wouldn’t it not truly counter another form of future-sight unless you could actually use it to reliably change your decisions by seeing the future?

You can use it to change your actions, but it takes a lot of skill.

Imagine you are playing soccer and you burn electrum

Now, you can see what path your foot needs to take to kick the ball.

[StanLemon]

35 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

In The Hero of Ages, we see Vin use Allomantic electrum, but she comments on how it doesn’t really affect the fight except to counter Atium. 

Not only did electrum not “affect the battle much”, neither Vin nor Elend uses it outside of combat. Is Allomantic Electrum just not very useful? What’s more, wouldn’t it not truly counter another form of future-sight unless you could actually use it to reliably change your decisions by seeing the future?

This is something that has bugged me in the past too. I think I personally settled on a mix of bias towards seeing other people and object's futures as being more useful combatively by Vin and Elend and that Electrum would probably take more practice to use effectively combatively compared to atium. For example, seeing a vision of yourself with a slashed through doesn't necessarily help determine how it got slashed. Sure you could make estimated guesses, but it's different than seeing a future shadow of your enemy trying to slash your throat and responding accordingly.

Another possibility I've considered and more recently come to think might be more accurate, Electrum could always show multiple shadows of a user's future of multiple possible decisions they could make by default. Unless you commit to an action, your possible actions are in flux. Let's say you burn Electrum and see yourself fall to the ground, because you've seen the future, you are free to continue that path or go onto another path and then a shadow of that other path shows you get hit by and arrow. Now that first path looks more appealing, but the possibility of a third action could still be made thus making yet another shadow and so on and so forth. 

Edited January 7, 2022 by StanLemon

[Trusk'our]

4 minutes ago, Frustration said:

You can use it to change your actions, but it takes a lot of skill.

Imagine you are playing soccer and you burn electrum

Now, you can see what path your foot needs to take to kick the ball.

That actually sounds really useful though. So why wouldn't electrum be used more by Vin and Elend unless it wasn't that powerful?

[Trusk'our]

1 minute ago, StanLemon said:

Another possibility I've considered and more recently come to think might be more accurate, Electrum could always show multiple shadows of a user's future of multiple possible decisions they could make by default. Unless they commit to an action, your possible actions are in flux. Let's say you burn Electrum and see yourself fall to the ground, because you've seen the future, you are free to continue that path or go onto another path and then a shadow of that other path shows you get hit by and arrow. Now that first path looks more appealing, but the possibility of a third action could still be made thus making yet another shadow and so on and so forth. 

That would get pretty confusing if you didn't know what you were doing. I suppose maybe Vin and Elend simply didn't have the time to practice with it, especially since they already had a lot of other powers to rely on.

I guess another thing to consider would be that Atium also enhances your mind to allow you to process all the information, but I don't think that electrum does that, which would probably make it harder to use in lots of situations.

So maybe if you were to commit to a certain path of action, then check your shadow, maybe you could determine if the short term outcome would be good or not? That might be a useful application of Allomantic electrum. 

[NameIess]

The reason electrum isn't very useful is because futuresight blocks futuresight. With atium, you see other people's shadows, allowing you to perfectly predict what everyone around you will do. Electrum lets you see your own future, and seeing your future changes your future, meaning that electrum will never give you the godlike abilities of atium, the end result always being a ton of future shadows that are basically useless other than countering atium. You can't commit to a certain course of action because seeing that course of action would immediately change the actions you take by at least the tiniest bit. resulting in your shadow repeatedly splitting.

[Frustration]

11 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

That actually sounds really useful though. So why wouldn't electrum be used more by Vin and Elend unless it wasn't that powerful?

Once you get to a certain level of skill in something that extra bit of information doesn't do much.

And for Vin and Elend it wouldn't do anything. If a coin comes flying at you it's much easier to simply push back on it.

[Kingsdaughter613]

On 1/6/2022 at 10:33 PM, Trusk'our said:

In The Hero of Ages, we see Vin use Allomantic electrum, but she comments on how it doesn’t really affect the fight except to counter Atium. 

Not only did electrum not “affect the battle much”, neither Vin nor Elend uses it outside of combat. Is Allomantic Electrum just not very useful? What’s more, wouldn’t it not truly counter another form of future-sight unless you could actually use it to reliably change your decisions by seeing the future?

It probably works similarly to (SotD)

Spoiler

Sak.

But it would probably take a lot of practice to use effectively.