Mistborn V.S. 3rd Ideal Lightweaver

[Wits instant noodles he/him]

Who would win a Mistborn or a 3rd Ideal Lightweaver.

[Monk of Dakhor]

as long as the lightweaver is trained well enough to make solid illusions

[StanLemon]

The only way I see a Lightweaver winning this fight is if they are at or almost at Jasnah levels of Soulcasting and they can make solid illusions. Or if they are a future Lightweaver that has learned how to use FREAKIN LASERS

[alder24]

Mistborn has bronze, he can sense when Lightweaver is soulcasting, which would make illusions pointless. If Lightweaver wouldn't soulcast, then all Mistborn needs to do it to shot coins in all directions around, then he knows which illusions are real, and where Lightweaver is. Moreover leaching might get rid of alll illusions. And there is zinc and brass - emotional allomancy might reveal where Lightweaver is, making all illusions useless. Not to mention electrum - also revealing what is an illusion and what is not. Probably time bubbles might collapse illusions if they would be on partially in. Mistborn has multiple possible ways of negating illusions. Soulcasting would be more of an weapon, but not enough to easily defeat Mistborn. Mistborn can fly, Lightweaver not. 

So I give 80% for Mistborn. It depends how good in soulcasting Lightweaver is - if he's on Shallan level, than 100% Mistborn  

Good job for making this a poll.

[Quantus he/him]

If the Radiant can Soulcast Aluminum from the air they can counter a whole lot of the Mistborn's powers.  And unlike Radiants, a Mistborn cant heal and still needs to breath, so they could soulcast all the surrounding air into Cyanide or pure N2 or something equally poisonous and drop the mistborn before they can burn.  

A Soulcasting Radiant (either Order) only looses by Surprise or when Stormlight supply becomes limited.  

Edited December 15, 2022 by Ookla the Wandering

[Frustration]

The lightweaver can just soulcast the mistborn. Even if somehow the Mistborn is for some reason immune to this, creating a large bolder around their head works just as well.

It isn't even a real contest.

Edited December 15, 2022 by Ookla the Frustrated.

[Quantus he/him]

5 minutes ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

The lightweaver can just soulcast the mistborn. Even if somehow the Mistborn is for some reason immune to this, creating a large bolder around their head works just as well.

It isn't even a real contest.

Agreed, theoretically the mistborn might be able to Flair enough to Invest themselves past the reach of Soulcasting, but it would be hard to keep up that burn for long and Duralumin would shorten the burn duration too much to be an effective. And then they just Soulcast their clothing or the air or whatever. 

Mistborn are strong and versatile,  but all the powers that really turn Fullborn into an "I Win" Button come from the Compounding side (and mostly are just the combo of Gold, Zinc and Steel compounding).

[Frustration]

3 minutes ago, Ookla the Wandering said:

Agreed, theoretically the mistborn might be able to Flair enough to Invest themselves past the reach of Soulcasting, but it would be hard to keep up that burn for long and Duralumin would shorten the burn duration too much to be an effective. And then they just Soulcast their clothing or the air or whatever.

Honestly soulcasting is just one of the most underrated powers.

Like what stops a lightweaver from turning the ground into mustard gas, or truthberry smoke or other things that would be toxic to anyone but them?

[alder24]

19 minutes ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

The lightweaver can just soulcast the mistborn.

 You always focus too much on soulcasting invested people, so I did some digging

Quote

Blightsong

Would it be harder for Jasnah to Soulcast a Knight Radiant?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Questioner

Would it be harder for her to Soulcast a Mistborn?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, Investiture resists Investiture. It's harder for her to even Soulcast a person than a rock, right?

Questioner

Is a Mistborn Invested?

Brandon Sanderson

The Mistborn, while they're burning the metal. They are not specifically Invested when they are not burning. When the Investiture becomes active, then yes. Before, no.

Blightsong

So Kelsier, he stayed around longer, not because he was Invested, but because he had the potential to use Investiture?

Brandon Sanderson

Over time using the magic will Invest you, on Scadrial. Most of the power is not coming from, on Roshar the power isn't coming from the person either [he cut himself off, so I assume this is how it works on Scadrial even though he didn't finish his thought] so I'm going to have to back up on that one and say, yes, the Mistborn are as Invested as a Knight Radiant, because in both cases the majority, bulk, of the power is coming from somewhere else, but there is the Spiritweb. Investing the wrong term, but you have all these connections in the Spiritual Realm, so yanking you away from them, or rewriting them is harder.

Questioner

Would they be harder with more Stormlight or metals burning?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, yes. That would increase the difficulty ratio. For instance, wearing Shardplate is gonna be a great barrier, right, and things like that so yeah. The problem is like, Invested is the wrong term for that, their Spiritweb is connected in different ways.

OdysseyCon 2016 (April 8, 2016)

Simply burning steel/iron enough to see lines would make them to hard to just soulcast. Add to this copper, bronze, pewter and tin, that Mistborns burns all the time, and you won't soulcast them for sure.
Edit: but that's not needed as connections are the thing that stops Soulcasting.
 

19 minutes ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

Even if somehow the Mistborn is for some reason immune to this, creating a large bolder around their head works just as well.

Soulcasting for Lightweavers is slightly different than for Elsecallers. Soulcasting air from a distance would be very difficult for 3rd Ideal Lightweaver. Most Lightweavers in RoW have troubles with Soulcasting and often use some visualisation method to help with it.

Quote

Questioner

Is Jasnah being able to Soulcast at a distance the resonance of her two Surges or is that just a Radiant thing that's not with the fabrials. 

Brandon Sanderson

Jasnah's Order is better at that than others. It is not impossible that you could imagine a Lightweaver being able to do it.

Starsight Release Party (Nov. 26, 2019)

 

3 minutes ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

Like what stops a lightweaver from turning the ground into mustard gas, or truthberry smoke or other things that would be toxic to anyone but them?

Their skill, and familiarity with those substances, those things not being one of ten essences, time needed to convince soul to change. Just for example.

Edited December 15, 2022 by alder24

[Frustration]

1 minute ago, alder24 said:

Soulcasting for Lightweavers is slightly different than for Elsecallers. Soulcasting air from a distance would be very difficult for 3rd Ideal Lightweaver. Most Lightweavers in RoW have troubles with Soulcasting and often use some visualisation method to help with it.

And? Just because our current sample size is bad(mostly their teachers fault). doesn't mean that the order is. If sample size was what determined this fight the lightweaver wins because all the mistborn have been dead for 200 years.

3 minutes ago, alder24 said:

Their skill, and familiarity with those substances, those things not being one of ten essences, time needed to convince soul to change. Just for example.

They are in fact one of the ten essences, smoke and opaque gas.

[StanLemon]

Just clarification on Soulcasting people. It's hard, even for Jasnah. What she does in Oathbringer should not be in any way an example of standard Soulcasting combat. Even during the climax of Oathbringer her narration says Soulcasting regular people is very difficult and the only reason she can do it so easily is because of the Perpendicularity. If she thinks Soulcasting regular people is hard, then Soulcasting a Mistborn burning metals would be realistically impossible in a fight. 

While I have no direct proof, I do expect Copperclouds will eventually be revealed to interfere with Soulcasting as I suspect Brandon will want a reason to keep Soulcasting from being an 'I win' button.

Edited December 15, 2022 by StanLemon

[Frustration]

11 minutes ago, StanLemon said:

Just clarification on Soulcasting people. It's hard, even for Jasnah. What she does in Oathbringer should not be in any way an example of standard Soulcasting combat. Even during the climax of Oathbringer her narration says Soulcasting regular people is very difficult and the only reason she can do it so easily is because of the Perpendicularity. If she thinks Soulcasting regular people is hard, then Soulcasting a Mistborn burning metals would be realistically impossible in a fight. 

While most of this is true, Jasnah mentions that there are techniques that make soulcasting people easier.

12 minutes ago, StanLemon said:

While I have no direct proof, I do expect Copperclouds will eventually be revealed to interfere with Soulcasting as I suspect Brandon will want a reason to keep Soulcasting from being an 'I win' button.

Why copperclouds? They are noted as being the least Investiture intensive of all the metals.

[Quantus he/him]

49 minutes ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

Honestly soulcasting is just one of the most underrated powers.

Like what stops a lightweaver from turning the ground into mustard gas, or truthberry smoke or other things that would be toxic to anyone but them?

Nothing but the cultural/scientific understanding of the radiant and the Spren:

 

 

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Spoiler

 

Phantine

At the risk of getting too technical, is there anything besides lack of knowledge preventing a soulcaster from turning some rocks into a bunch of plutonium and exploding?

I know you've got some rules attached to time bubbles to avoid those going nuclear so I wouldn't be surprised if there was something or another.

Brandon Sanderson

Well, Soulcasting isn't fission or fusion. It's a spiritual transformation process, not a physical one, and so you don't have to worry about some of these issues. There IS historical precedent of accidentally setting off fission reactions in the cosmere using the magic, but that was a different process. Soulcasting is actually pretty safe. (Well, on a grand scale.)

You could end up irradiating yourself, though, which wouldn't be very fun.

If you know what you were doing, making plutonium or uranium on Roshar wouldn't be difficult. The problem is more a matter of knowledge, and room for scientific exploration. They're unlikely to make atom bombs for the same reason they haven't made gunpowder. Once they figure out that some substances are important, they can learn to make them with Soulcasting (assuming they have Radiants) but some substances just don't occur naturally--so discovering them in the first place is difficult, and would require more modern scientific process.

Phantine

Okay, just to clarify here (since I'm not sure how up you are on early nuke designs)

A big enough chunk of uranium or plutonium will explode regardless of whether it's in a bomb or not. Early bomb designs just slammed two smaller chunks together so they'd be one big chunk.

For plutonium 'big enough' is about 35 pounds in one place - a chunk somewhere between the size of baseball and volleyball.

If I understand properly, people can soulcast from the cognitive realm into the physical, which implies once we get into a more modern stormlight setting soulcasters will make nuclear submarines look like small potatoes.

Brandon Sanderson

Slamming two chunks together so they became one big chunk seems an understatement, from what I remember. I'm under the impression that you had to use a great deal of explosive force to ram them together in order to set off a viable fission reaction. Doesn't it have to be compressed somewhat in order to react with itself?

I'll admit, it's been a long time since I've looked at this, but I remember glancing it over, and deciding that you'd need more than just soulcasting to get it to happen. Though it's not outside of reason that a soulcaster could learn to create super-dense plutonium. The problem is one of understanding, however.

Just like it's totally possible that we, with our current technology, could figure out some huge breakthrough in science allowing FTL or other incredible discoveries. But we don't have the understanding to pull it off yet.

In a modern setting, however, a lot of these complaints go out the window. Let's just say that this isn't the only reason a modern society that can instantly transmute one substance to another is potentially a very interesting place.

Phantine

You're totally right that everyone currently uses an 'implosion' style compression design. It's a lot more bang for your buck, and you need less radioactive material to work with. They're also a lot safer, because just sitting around they're well below critical mass - without the power-boosting tricks they basically can't go off.

The old "nobody uses these anymore" designs were 'Gun-Type'. Very simple - shoot a uranium bullet into the center of a uranium ring (or vice versa). Inefficient as heck (the Hiroshima bomb only fissioned 1.4% of its uranium), but also super simple to put together.

Despite being simple to build, gun-types were also super unsafe relative to modern implosion devices (among other worries, dropping a gun-type device into the ocean could potentially set it off because of how neutrons react with water). Also, getting the timing perfect on the fissile 'bullet' was a problem, so practically speaking it could only be done with uranium.

After WWII, the only use the US ever had for gun-types was in bunker busters and nuclear artillery (because of course that was a good idea).

Darn, that post turned out longer than I expected it to.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to see you make something really cool out of a post-scarcity transmutropolis setting (especially since the liespren would be in charge of nuclear treaties), and also my roommate just pointed out all the laying out of nuclear bomb details is pointless if they could just make antimatter instead. D'oh.

 

 

Brandon Sanderson

This is useful information for me, but my gut says that Rosharans couldn't get this working with their current tech level. That said, the REAL issue (as you mentioned in your original question) is knowledge, not feasibility. They'd have to know how to make the right kind of Uranium or Plutonium--and would need to be able to get this across to a soulcaster in a way that works, then THEY would need to get this across to spren. Cross that hurdle, and I suppose it's not at all implausible to imagine Alethi during Dalinar's era with nukes. I suspect the right kind of fabrial could make a trigger device to match ring and bullet at the right time. Depends on how quickly it needs to be going, though.

Stormlight Three Update #4 (Oct. 19, 2016)

 

 

[StanLemon]

24 minutes ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

Why copperclouds? They are noted as being the least Investiture intensive of all the metals.

I don't think it would be a matter of how much Investiture but what the Investiture does. Brandon has said that Copperclouds affect Spren, even though a single Spren is massively more Invested than any Coppercloud would be. It seems like the most logical power to do it. My guess is it would prevent the Soulcaster from communicating with the Cognitive aspects of anything in the Coppercloud.

Edited December 15, 2022 by StanLemon

[alder24]

45 minutes ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

And? Just because our current sample size is bad(mostly their teachers fault). doesn't mean that the order is. If sample size was what determined this fight the lightweaver wins because all the mistborn have been dead for 200 years.

This was just to list the diffrences between soulcasting for Lightweavers and Elsecaller.
Personally I think that those differences are because of how important some forms of art are for many of them. And some will always struggle to perform tasks in certain way, as they need their own way do to it. You don't expect painter to sing an opera. But that my thoughts detached from topic.

52 minutes ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

They are in fact one of the ten essences, smoke and opaque gas.

Oh, true than, but the rest is still valid. Soulcasting air is very difficult, and those are Jasnah words. And how many people on Roshar knows what mustard gas is? Or what is atmospheric composition, that air is not just THE air, and composes of N2, O2 and CO2?

[Frustration]

1 minute ago, alder24 said:

Oh, true than, but the rest is still valid. Soulcasting air is very difficult, and those are Jasnah words. And how many people on Roshar knows what mustard gas is? Or what is atmospheric composition, that air is not just THE air, and composes of N2, O2 and CO2?

They have truthberry smoke, which is a known intoxicant.

And hazewater fumes.

[Tglassy]

This is, at least, a better thought discussion than Windrunners.  There's too much overlap with Windrunners.

Judging by the WoB's above, I'm going to rule out Soulcasting the Mistborn.  That just doesn't seem like it would work for a 3rd Ideal Lightweaver.  Which, btw, I'm not sure exactly what a 3rd Ideal Lightweaver CAN do.  They get a blade at that point, but it's hard to tell where Shallan is during the books cause she's so weird.  I think her 2nd Ideal was "I'm terrified" and her third was "I killed my father."  So that means she was 3rd ideal during Words of Radiance, and fourth during Oathbringer, when she made the illusery army. 

So a 3rd Ideal Soulcaster can lightweave fairly well, though is still limited, and can Soulcast to a limited degree.  So no huge armies or Lightweaving a whole theater production.  But hiding one's self and some others is possible, and changing something as large as a ship into water is possible. 

So lets go over the comparison.  

Bronze.  Bronze can sense Investiture.  There IS an argument that they wouldn't be able to sense the Lightweaving, though, since Lightweaving is 'quieter', and the Secret Spren couldn't sense it.  So that is something.  So I'll make a ruling that Bronze cannot sense Lightweaving, or if they can, it is very feint.  But then, the Lightweaver could make use of this and attach a Lightweaving to an object, using it as a destraction.  

Soulcasting, in my estimation, doesn't work on the Mistborn themselves, but can work on just about everything else.  Soulcast the glass dagger into water, for example.  They'd likely have to touch it, but it's POSSIBLE.  They can also create an Aluminum cap, to protect themselves from Zinc and Brass.  And yeah, Soulcasting noxious fumes or whathaveyou.  The main problem there is Pewter, letting the Allomancer survive the fumes.  

I'll be entirely honest, I don't see the Lightweaver lasting very long.  The main thing they have going for them is Stormlight Healing and their Blade, but Mistborn have Pewter and Steel.  Pewter is such an I Win button in close combat with anyone who doesn't also have Pewter, and Steel lets them attack from afar.  

Lightweavers don't have th esame defense against Coins that Windrunners do.  Once the Mistborn has located them, all they have to do is send a single coin through them...and back...and back again...pushing and pulling over and over and over and over until the Stormlight healing runs out.  Ok, sure, the Lightweaver may be able to Soulcast the coin.  That's a valid argument.  But I don't think that'll work if the coin goes through their head.  

Imma call it for the Mistborn on this one.  

[Frustration]

2 hours ago, Tglassy said:

Soulcasting, in my estimation, doesn't work on the Mistborn themselves, but can work on just about everything else.  Soulcast the glass dagger into water, for example.  They'd likely have to touch it, but it's POSSIBLE.  They can also create an Aluminum cap, to protect themselves from Zinc and Brass.  And yeah, Soulcasting noxious fumes or whathaveyou.  The main problem there is Pewter, letting the Allomancer survive the fumes. 

And if you soulcast a massive rock around their head?

[therunner he/him]

11 hours ago, StanLemon said:

I don't think it would be a matter of how much Investiture but what the Investiture does. Brandon has said that Copperclouds affect Spren, even though a single Spren is massively more Invested than any Coppercloud would be. It seems like the most logical power to do it. My guess is it would prevent the Soulcaster from communicating with the Cognitive aspects of anything in the Coppercloud.

While that could be the case (and in interesting idea!), we also know that Copperclouds can be pierced and it is not that Investiture intensive.
Combined with the facts that

1. Scadrial is comparatively low-Investiture world, so Lightweaver has more power available.
2. Soulcasters can change people, which would present more difficulty than Coppercloud barrier.
3. Soulcasters are used to dealing with resistance (https://wob.coppermind.net/events/31/#e9681)

I would say that while Coppercloud could make it a bit more difficult to soulcast things inside, it would not be that strong an effect and it would mainly make the soulcasting more Stormlight intensive.


Personally here I think Mistborn does have an advantage if they keep moving (soulcasting massive rock around head is difficult if the air you want to soulcast keeps changing).
One interaction that could possibly change it is if Lightweaving would allow you to mimic the bronze pulses, because if so, bronze would become useless and Illusions would not be identifiable for Mistborn, granting Lightweaver decent defense option. They can do sound (https://wob.coppermind.net/events/324/#e9287) so other types of 'waves' (Investiture pulses) could be accessible to them as well.

On that topic, could Ligthweaving create fake steelsight lines? (if they knew about them, and how they look)

The reason is that per this (https://wob.coppermind.net/events/398/#e13218) there are both Cognitive and Spiritual components to Lightweaving, so maybe it could work for that as well? (thought that would most likely require extraordinary talent or a lot of practice)

Edited December 16, 2022 by therunner
spelling

[alder24]

5 hours ago, therunner said:

On that topic, could Ligthweaving create fake steelsight lines? (if they knew about them, and how they look)

I do think so, even if that's just in PR, for Mistborn it might look like his lines, if made good enough. But Lightweaver needs to know exactly how it looks, and he can't, as he can't experience that and see them.

[Tglassy]

18 hours ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

And if you soulcast a massive rock around their head?

If that were possible, Jasnah would have done it when her life was in danger fighting the Fused.  

[Frustration]

10 minutes ago, Tglassy said:

If that were possible, Jasnah would have done it when her life was in danger fighting the Fused.  

As matter of fact she did, now it was oil, rather than stone, but it formed around people's heads, even in their mouths.

[Tglassy]

4 minutes ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

As matter of fact she did, now it was oil, rather than stone, but it formed around people's heads, even in their mouths.

So why didn't she do stone? She's made stone before.  Lots of it.  Very quickly.

[Frustration]

5 minutes ago, Tglassy said:

So why didn't she do stone? She's made stone before.  Lots of it.  Very quickly.

Because she didn't want to kill her own forces who were caught in her oil.

[Tglassy]

14 minutes ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

Because she didn't want to kill her own forces who were caught in her oil.

I don't buy that.  She was in a pretty hard fight with a Fused.  If he could have been defeated just by soulcasting the air around him into stone, that should have been her first thought.  She wouldn't even have had to worry about killing the other people in the area.  Just kill the one Fused, and be done with it.  

I don't think "Soulcasting a box of stone around their head" is an actual strategy a Soulcaster can employ.  When she soulcasted the air into oil, she soulcasted ALL the air around her as well.  She didn't have precise control over it.  So she chose a substance that would be relatively benign...unless someone lit it on fire.  

Basically, I think if trapping a person in stone was a viable option, we'd have seen it already.  

Edit: Heck, if they could do that, just have Jasnah go up to the army and turn the whole area into Stone.  She could have used the abundance of Stormlight at the battle at the end of Oathbringer to just soulcast all of Amaram's forces in Stone.  I mean, why not, if that's a possibilty?  She had enough Stormlight there.  

Edited December 16, 2022 by Tglassy