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Compounders


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Honestly, if you start to go through the Compounders, they're often not that useful. 

 

A Crasher like Wax is better than most of the combinations. 

 

The big ones (Atium and Gold) have been done.  

 

If you look at the 8 common types, they're pretty mixed.  

 

Steel is hideously effective, but hard to include in a story.  It's a massive "I win" button.  Zinc has a lot of the same problems.

 

Tin is... well, it's Tin.  You've got superhuman senses that are more superhuman.  

 

Pewter is iffy, because Feruchemical pewter has some pretty unpleasant drawbacks to agility.  A Pewter Compounder would most likely just use it on a fairly low level to supplement Allomantic pewter.  The advantage there is the constant supply for low level use.

 

The Mistborn RPG names an Iron Compounder as a "Deader", which fairly accurately sums it up - You've really got to be careful with that power.  Unlimited weight is potentially useful, but the moment you try to use Allomantic iron, you're pulling something straight through your body.

 

Compounding Copper?  No clue how that works.  Maybe lets you access the memories without having to take them out entirely, allowing you to avoid degradation?  

 

Bronze Compounding just means going without sleep.  Useful, but not really as big an impact as some of the others.

 

Brass doesn't do much for you (Unless you're into deep sea/outer space exploration, I suppose)

 

Then you've got the other metals which are just... weird, for the most part.  They swing from weird, niche cases that push the boundaries of Investiture to "I win" buttons that warp stories. 

 

Twinborn like Wax and Wayne are far, far better characters than most of the Compounders, IMO.  

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I just felt that with all the discussion we're having on compounders, there ought to have been at least one more. If you look at it, gold was an "I win" button too right? I guess it's just how the story needs it, but it'd be more interesting to have a few more.

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Eh, gold is more of a turtle power. It lets you survive anything, but it's not very proactive. Think about it; if Wax had a second net, he'd've won.

 

Whereas with steel, with infinite speed (and we all just saw how over-the-top cheating that would be. It's basically a bendalloy bubble that moves with you) as well as flight and ranged attacks... sure, it's not literally omnipotent, someone could catch you while you're asleep or distracted, but most fights will be over before the other person realizes there's a fight. If Bleeder hadn't wanted Wax alive, by the time he realized she'd run to the mansion she could have simply run behind him and left a knife in his brain.

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Bleeder wasn't a steel compounder though, right? She just had that one spike she was storing speed in for however long she had it, which is why she ran out at the end. Steel compounders just have that kind of speed for a long time, they're not faster than normal steel ferrings. 

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Bleeder wasn't a steel compounder though, right? She just had that one spike she was storing speed in for however long she had it, which is why she ran out at the end. Steel compounders just have that kind of speed for a long time, they're not faster than normal steel ferrings. 

 

She might have been. (Beware: thread goes off-topic pretty quick.)

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Honestly, if you start to go through the Compounders, they're often not that useful. 

 

...

 

Steel is hideously effective, but hard to include in a story.  It's a massive "I win" button.  Zinc has a lot of the same problems.

 

 

 

Whereas with steel, with infinite speed (and we all just saw how over-the-top cheating that would be. It's basically a bendalloy bubble that moves with you) as well as flight and ranged attacks... sure, it's not literally omnipotent, someone could catch you while you're asleep or distracted, but most fights will be over before the other person realizes there's a fight. If Bleeder hadn't wanted Wax alive, by the time he realized she'd run to the mansion she could have simply run behind him and left a knife in his brain.

 

I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed that it was Paalm the whole time; kandra are resilient in ways that humans just aren't, which didn't give us much information as to the limitations of steel compounding.

 

Sure, you can move fast.  But you're still subject to the limitations of your own body's ability to absorb sudden changes in speed.  Change directions too fast, and your innards get squished around in unpleasant ways.  Stop too fast, and it's like a car smashing into a brick wall.  Hit someone while moving too fast, and you could break your own arm in the process.  There's a lot of potential for broken bones and dislocated joints in that picture.  And if you've got long hair, best keep those braids pinned tightly to your head, lest someone get lucky and manage to grab hold of one...

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Sure, you can move fast.  But you're still subject to the limitations of your own body's ability to absorb sudden changes in speed.  Change directions too fast, and your innards get squished around in unpleasant ways.  Stop too fast, and it's like a car smashing into a brick wall.  Hit someone while moving too fast, and you could break your own arm in the process.  There's a lot of potential for broken bones and dislocated joints in that picture.  And if you've got long hair, best keep those braids pinned tightly to your head, lest someone get lucky and manage to grab hold of one...

 

Feruchemy tends to remove such limitations, eg. tapping weight doesn't crush your own body. You're still subject to air resistance and such, but Paalm wasn't moving fast enough to fry herself or anything.

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Minor, interesting point: Air resistance isn't what fries you.

 

Regardless, we do see Bleeder start/stop at speeds bodies shouldn't be capable of. Without the Blessing of Potency there's no reason to assume her body is any more resilient than anyone else's. From her ability to react in bullet time, I get the impression that 'speed' isn't a matter of how your body moves so much as a personal bendalloy bubble, with all the physics-breaking that entails. As it stands, I'd assume changes in speed are hand-waved away the way we see start-stop is. Still, this might be a minor limitation, and you can certainly go fast enough to be officially 'insanely fast' before you get to the point where a human body would take significant damage from changes in velocity (aka, acceleration).

 

In addition, while you can't bash someone over the head with a club at superspeeds without the shock transferring to your body, you can stab them a few dozen times before the first wound has time to start bleeding, and still be taking all the time in the world to line up a perfect stab. It takes insanely little force to puncture human skin.

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Minor, interesting point: Air resistance isn't what fries you.

 

Regardless, we do see Bleeder start/stop at speeds bodies shouldn't be capable of. Without the Blessing of Potency there's no reason to assume her body is any more resilient than anyone else's. From her ability to react in bullet time, I get the impression that 'speed' isn't a matter of how your body moves so much as a personal bendalloy bubble, with all the physics-breaking that entails. As it stands, I'd assume changes in speed are hand-waved away the way we see start-stop is. Still, this might be a minor limitation, and you can certainly go fast enough to be officially 'insanely fast' before you get to the point where a human body would take significant damage from changes in velocity (aka, acceleration).

 

In addition, while you can't bash someone over the head with a club at superspeeds without the shock transferring to your body, you can stab them a few dozen times before the first wound has time to start bleeding, and still be taking all the time in the world to line up a perfect stab. It takes insanely little force to puncture human skin.

Not if you're moving at 90% the speed of light, no but at the speeds that would be more normally used it's still mostly air resistance. :P

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Feruchemy tends to remove such limitations, eg. tapping weight doesn't crush your own body. You're still subject to air resistance and such, but Paalm wasn't moving fast enough to fry herself or anything.

 

I'll give you that much in regards to the immediate effects of super-speed, but I don't think that Feruchemy is likely to save you if you trip over your shoelaces and faceplant into the concrete.  :unsure:

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Is it just me not noticing something, but have we only had one natural compounder so far? (Miles)

 

Run the numbers.

Becoming an Allomancer is what? 1/1,000 odds?

Feruchemy is the same, maybe less due to limited gene availability? Say 1/1,000 also?

 

So if we combine the 2, that gives a 1/1,000 * 1/1,000 = 1,000,000 odds of someone being a Twinborn.

 

Once you're an Allomancer, you have a 1/16 chance of having a specific ability, and then the same for Feruchemy, so there's a 1/16 chance of someone who is already a Feruchemist getting a matching Allomantic ability, so... 1/16 * 1/1,000,000 = 1/16,000,000

 

What's the population of Scadrial? Less than 16,000,000?

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Run the numbers.

Becoming an Allomancer is what? 1/1,000 odds?

Feruchemy is the same, maybe less due to limited gene availability? Say 1/1,000 also?

 

So if we combine the 2, that gives a 1/1,000 * 1/1,000 = 1,000,000 odds of someone being a Twinborn.

 

Once you're an Allomancer, you have a 1/16 chance of having a specific ability, and then the same for Feruchemy, so there's a 1/16 chance of someone who is already a Feruchemist getting a matching Allomantic ability, so... 1/16 * 1/1,000,000 = 1/16,000,000

 

What's the population of Scadrial? Less than 16,000,000?

 

Actually, I think the numbers in AoL are considerably higher, probably (at least in part) due to the lowering of the Snap threshold.

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Fair enough, even if it dropped to 1/250, that's still a 1/1,000,000 odds

 

The statistic I've seen is closer to 1/50  (correction, 1/25), though that's from the MAG which isn't strictly canon.

Edited by Kaymyth
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That seems... excessive. That means that being a compounder is 1/10,000 and being an extremely dangerous compounder is 3 or 4 out of 160,000? There should be 2-3 more Miles' running around, plus as many Speederacers.

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That seems... excessive. That means that being a compounder is 1/10,000 and being an extremely dangerous compounder is 3 or 4 out of 160,000? There should be 2-3 more Miles' running around, plus as many Speederacers.

 

Look back in the archives; I started a thread about it all in my early days on the forum.  ^_^  Strictly speaking from the math, it came out to be 1/2500 were Twinborn, and 1/16 Twinborn were Compounders.

 

However - that assumes an equal distribution of Metalborn types and an equal mixing of the bloodlines, which isn't the case.  Certain types of Ferrings and Mistings appear to be more common than others, and you only get Twinborn when there's some Terris in their bloodline back somewhere, and a majority of the Terrisfolk have made an effort to keep from intermixing too much.  (I think we get a lot of the reasoning why there in Grandma V's worry about the Metallic Arts mixing.)

 

So, while Mistings and Ferrings are relatively common in Era 2, there aren't as many Twinborn as the raw math would make it out to be.

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I'll give you that much in regards to the immediate effects of super-speed, but I don't think that Feruchemy is likely to save you if you trip over your shoelaces and faceplant into the concrete.  :unsure:

 

Concur; I feel like people make much of the WoB. We know Feruchemy protects you to an extent, but that I've seen we've not had WoB saying that you are granted 100% full and complete immunity not only to your own power but to everything ancillary that your power might be the proximate cause of.

 

That seems... excessive. That means that being a compounder is 1/10,000 and being an extremely dangerous compounder is 3 or 4 out of 160,000? There should be 2-3 more Miles' running around, plus as many Speederacers.

 

 

However - that assumes an equal distribution of Metalborn types and an equal mixing of the bloodlines, which isn't the case.

 

This, basically. Wax mentions in the first book that in 300 years the Terris have mostly kept to themselves; a tiny fraction of the population has mixed Terris/other blood. Even if we do assume the people who intermarried with Terris even had allomantic genes, and assuming their numbers keep the "one in fifty" suggestion which I believe has WoB support along the lines of "that sounds about right," (neither of which, I believe, are safe assumptions,) that gives us a number like 1 in 40K. Since this is probably optimistic, while I'm sure Miles isn't the first Compounder there's ever been, I'm not at all surprised at their rarity.

 

I believe we got a guess that there are about 10 million Scadrians in the known world. If 1/40K is a rough guess (which, again, I think is unlikely) that means we've got even odds of a Compounder existing if 1/250 people are of mixed Terris/other blood. So, I'm not surprised Compounders aren't all over the place.

 

EDIT: Spelling

Edited by Oudeis
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Honestly, if you start to go through the Compounders, they're often not that useful. 

 

A Crasher like Wax is better than most of the combinations. 

 

The big ones (Atium and Gold) have been done.  

 

If you look at the 8 common types, they're pretty mixed.  

 

Steel is hideously effective, but hard to include in a story.  It's a massive "I win" button.  Zinc has a lot of the same problems.

 

Tin is... well, it's Tin.  You've got superhuman senses that are more superhuman.  

 

Pewter is iffy, because Feruchemical pewter has some pretty unpleasant drawbacks to agility.  A Pewter Compounder would most likely just use it on a fairly low level to supplement Allomantic pewter.  The advantage there is the constant supply for low level use.

 

The Mistborn RPG names an Iron Compounder as a "Deader", which fairly accurately sums it up - You've really got to be careful with that power.  Unlimited weight is potentially useful, but the moment you try to use Allomantic iron, you're pulling something straight through your body.

 

Compounding Copper?  No clue how that works.  Maybe lets you access the memories without having to take them out entirely, allowing you to avoid degradation?  

 

Bronze Compounding just means going without sleep.  Useful, but not really as big an impact as some of the others.

 

Brass doesn't do much for you (Unless you're into deep sea/outer space exploration, I suppose)

 

Then you've got the other metals which are just... weird, for the most part.  They swing from weird, niche cases that push the boundaries of Investiture to "I win" buttons that warp stories. 

 

Twinborn like Wax and Wayne are far, far better characters than most of the Compounders, IMO.  

 

 

So basically if you can compound tin, you are Daredevil?

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Nah, Daredevil doesn't fit the model of a compounder... a compounder would have all five senses, and could turn them on and off at will, and selectively. Daredevil lacks sight, and the other four are on constantly, even when he wishes they weren't.

 

I see him as more of a hemalurgic construct. He has four tin spikes that grant him four enhanced senses; like a koloss, this changes his body, robbing him of sight, and perhaps granting him the other physical abilities Daredevil seems to have. As an added bonus, I wonder if two of the spikes are through his forehead, mimicking his costume's horns...

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Nah, Daredevil doesn't fit the model of a compounder... a compounder would have all five senses, and could turn them on and off at will, and selectively. Daredevil lacks sight, and the other four are on constantly, even when he wishes they weren't.

 

Actually, Daredevil does fit the model of a tineye misting who was permanently blind. After all, he can't heal the damage to his eyes with that power. Likewise if he was a tin compounder. He'd just have to empower his remaining senses.

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Actually, Daredevil does fit the model of a tineye misting who was permanently blind. After all, he can't heal the damage to his eyes with that power. Likewise if he was a tin compounder. He'd just have to empower his remaining senses.

Wow, that could be a super cool character. I'm imagining a tineye who got caught doing something he shouldn't have been doing, so they blinded him and sent him stumbling out on to the street. Years later, he's become a full tin savant, he still can't see, but his other senses are so incredible he's ready to go get some revenge.

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