Strength of a Feruchemist

[KhanBoltNo4503]

I was just wondering if the strength of a feruchemist had anything to do with how much investiture they can store, or if it's constant throughout everyone.

[The One Who Connects]

2 hours ago, KhanBoltNo4503 said:

I was just wondering if the strength of a Feruchemist had anything to do with how much investiture they can store, or if it's constant throughout everyone.

Metalminds have a point where they are "full." I would put that as a category of the object size rather than the Feruchemist storing in it.

[Yezrien]

I don't think the "strength of a feruchemist" is a thing. You either are a feruchemist or you aren't. The only personal limit is that you can't store more of an attribute than you have. In other words, a really strong person could fill a pewtermind faster than a weak person, but neither is a more powerful feruchemist. 

I don't think there's ever been a single reference to a 'powerful feruchemist.' The closest thing would be full feruchemists, like Sazed, who can store in every metal. But Sazed's goldminds were no better than Wayne's.

[Yata]

There are only theory for now about "Feruchemical Strenght", some of the candidatura are:

- you could compress more charge in a Metalmind (hardly to believe for Realmatic Reasons)

- at highter multiplier your Feruchemy is more efficient and you lose less charge in the conversion.

- the threeshold of storage change (Almost impossible to notice as the pratical limits of many metal is far before the magical limit).

- a lose of attributes while your are storing for weak feruchemists (you store 10 units of charge but only 8 arrive in the Metalmind and 2 are Lost)

We know the Feruchemy could have tiers but as far as we know this happens only with artificial granted Feruchemy.

All' the natural Feruchemists seems to be top class and only with Hemalurgy and decay you Will get lesser tier Feruchemy

[YungDankBlast]

It seems difficult to classify what a strong or a weak Feruchemist might be, as Feruchemy is supposed to be end-neutral.

When Feruchemists tap their metalminds at higher rates than they were stored at, some of that stored power is used to increase the rate at which the power is tapped.  For example, if I stored 50% of my speed for 2 hours, I would be able to tap to get 2 hours of 150% speed but I could not tap at 200% for a full hour.  I would maybe get 50-55 minutes of 200% speed.

The way that I have always thought about it, which a lot of people don't agree with me on, is that "stronger" Feruchemists would not use as much of their stored power to tap at higher rates.  So, in the above example if I were a"weak" Feruchemist, I may be able to tap for 200% speed for 50 minutes while a "strong" Feruchemist could tap for 200% speed for, say, 55 minutes.  This way, a "strong" Feruchemist gets more out of it than the "weak" Feruchemist, but investiture levels remain the same.

Another good question would be what would make a Feruchemist stronger or weaker than other.  I believe that Feruchemists who gained their abilities through Hemalurgy would be considered weaker (duh), and it may be possible to increase ones strength in Feruchemy through Hemalurgic spikes on top of ones own Feruchemical abilities.

[+Extesian]

I don't believe I've seen mention of, say, feruchemists with more pure bloodlines being more powerful. But if that's the case i think power would mean efficiency at tapping, especially when you're tapping at high rates. We know feruchemy gained through hemalurgy is not as 'powerful' - inquisitors are less efficient at storing

Quote

KURKISTAN

How exactly does hemalurgic decay work for Feruchemy? Is it like a leaky tube or something, or…?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Yeah… yeah. (Here misunderstanding and thinking that the question’s about the power of the Feruchemy itself, not storing/tapping metalminds)

KURKISTAN

So they try to store 10 units of health and only 9 gets through, or…?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Hemalurgic decay meaning someone who has been spiked is less powerful? That Hemalurgic decay] or the Hemalurgic decay when a Hemalurgic spike is left outside of blood?

KURKISTAN

Less powerful. So like the Inquisitors are less powerful Feruchemists so they had to spend longer storing: so _why_ did they have to spend longer storing?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Yeah they lose a little bit, it’s a leaky… You’re there, exactly. It just doesn’t quite… it’s not as efficient: it’s [an] efficiency thing.

But whether that's just a hemalurgy thing, or whether there are differences between born feruchemists, I'm not sure we know. 

[Calderis]

37 minutes ago, Extesian said:

I don't believe I've seen mention of, say, feruchemists with more pure bloodlines being more powerful. But if that's the case i think power would mean efficiency at tapping, especially when you're tapping at high rates. We know feruchemy gained through hemalurgy is not as 'powerful' - inquisitors are less efficient at storing

But whether that's just a hemalurgy thing, or whether there are differences between born feruchemists, I'm not sure we know. 

I don't think there are bloodline differences for Feruchemy, but as Oversleep pointed out yesterday when I shared this same WoB in a very similar discussion, Nicrosil Feruchemy means having to consider what a stronger Feruchemist can do. 

[YungDankBlast]

18 hours ago, Calderis said:

I don't think there are bloodline differences for Feruchemy, but as Oversleep pointed out yesterday when I shared this same WoB in a very similar discussion, Nicrosil Feruchemy means having to consider what a stronger Feruchemist can do. 

Yes, what happens when someone taps, say, steel feruchemy from a nicrosilmind at more than 100%?

[kenod]

1 hour ago, CayJoBla said:

Yes, what happens when someone taps, say, steel feruchemy from a nicrosilmind at more than 100%?

Maybe the efficiency for overtapping increases? IIRC, if you start tapping a lot of a specific attribute, some of it gets wasted, and efficiency decreases. Maybe high feruchemical power help lower this?

[YungDankBlast]

23 hours ago, kenod said:

Maybe the efficiency for overtapping increases? IIRC, if you start tapping a lot of a specific attribute, some of it gets wasted, and efficiency decreases. Maybe high feruchemical power help lower this?

I think that's probably the most viable outcome.  However, if this is the case, then could a steel ferring obtain a hemalurgic spike granting them steel feruchemy in order to permanently boost their tapping efficiency?

[Yata]

On 17/9/2017 at 11:50 PM, kenod said:

Maybe the efficiency for overtapping increases? IIRC, if you start tapping a lot of a specific attribute, some of it gets wasted, and efficiency decreases. Maybe high feruchemical power help lower this?

I believe that if this was the case, Bleeder would be unable to keep her high Speed too long as her Power is Hemalurgy gifted and therefore noticable weaker than the standard one

[kenod]

9 hours ago, Yata said:

I believe that if this was the case, Bleeder would be unable to keep her high Speed too long as her Power is Hemalurgy gifted and therefore noticable weaker than the standard one

True, but how well would this be noticed? Bleeder was both storing spikes in blood to prevent decay, and she was using a special metal with as of yet unconfirmed effects on Hemalurgy. It could be possible that this caused the decay to be low enough to be fairly hard to notice. I do think you're right however in that it should have been noticeable to some extent, but it is possible that she simply had enough stored that it didn't really matter.

[Yata]

Just now, kenod said:

True, but how well would this be noticed? Bleeder was both storing spikes in blood to prevent decay, and she was using a special metal with as of yet unconfirmed effects on Hemalurgy. It could be possible that this caused the decay to be low enough to be fairly hard to notice. I do think you're right however in that it should have been noticeable to some extent, but it is possible that she simply had enough stored that it didn't really matter.

You have right BUT the Spikes lose a noticable amout of power at his creation alone and then they lose more (slowly) as they are out of body.
You may notice this from the Inquisitors, they recive (mostly) their Spike directly from the Donor's killing... But they still recive a significant weaker abilities than the average ones

[kenod]

1 minute ago, Yata said:

You have right BUT the Spikes lose a noticable amout of power at his creation alone and then they lose more (slowly) as they are out of body.
You may notice this from the Inquisitors, they recive (mostly) their Spike directly from the Donor's killing... But they still recive a significant weaker abilities than the average ones

True, but weren't a lot of the Feruchemy spikes Inquisitors used before Ruin's release hand me downs? In SH we can see that they retrieve spikes from dead Inquisitors. Given how rare Feruchemists were, and that they were hiding as much as they could, it would make sense that a lot of the Feruchemy spikes were at least a few generations old.

[YungDankBlast]

18 hours ago, Yata said:

I believe that if this was the case, Bleeder would be unable to keep her high Speed too long as her Power is Hemalurgy gifted and therefore noticable weaker than the standard one

While Bleeder would have been weaker Feruchemically, that would have simply made it so she had to use up more speed to compensate for the decreased overlap efficiency.  She could have simply stored a lot of speed to do this.  Additionally, I remember seeing a theory that if you were to hemalurgically steal a feruchemical ability from a person then you would be able to use their metalmind stores since you stole the part of their spiritweb that the metalminds were attuned to (I don't know if it was proven or disproven).  If that was the case, Bleeder could have also used the stores of the ferring she stole from.  I don't think that it would be noticeable either way because it would just mean that she has to use up more of her speed stores, and we don't know how much she had anyway.