A-Atium Plus A-Electrum

[Trusk'our he/him]

Quick thought that came to me earlier:

When an Allomancer burns Atium, they see the future of all things nearby that isn't themselves. When electrum is burned they see only their own future.

Basically, do you guys think that their would be some synergy between the two powers? For instance, would a Mistborn burning both get some slight advantage in combat compared to a Mistborn only burning Atium (just to clarify, not two Mistborn fighting each other- two Mistborn fighting other people but using metals to see the future)?

[Quantus he/him]

They could work together, or they could cause the same fragmentation interference that Electrum does to an Atium observer and cause a weird feedback loop of observation and reaction.

Atium also give an increased ability to process and understand all the shadows, while Electrum does not (or only slightly if it does)

[alder24]

1 hour ago, Trusk'our said:

Quick thought that came to me earlier:

When an Allomancer burns Atium, they see the future of all things nearby that isn't themselves. When electrum is burned they see only their own future.

Basically, do you guys think that their would be some synergy between the two powers? For instance, would a Mistborn burning both get some slight advantage in combat compared to a Mistborn only burning Atium (just to clarify, not two Mistborn fighting each other- two Mistborn fighting other people but using metals to see the future)?

It really depends if Atium's mental powers could help process electrum shadows or are they only working with Atium shadows. It could give you a little edge in normal fights, but because electrum already nullifies Atium, I don't think using both at once would give you an advantage when fighting a Mistborn burning Atium - your electrum shadows would be splitted like Atium shadows - your opponent sees the future, your electrum shadows react to their future move, they change those moves because they react to their shadows, your shadows splits to many more, etc. Just unreadable mess of shadows.

[cometaryorbit]

1 hour ago, Quantus said:

They could work together, or they could cause the same fragmentation interference that Electrum does to an Atium observer and cause a weird feedback loop of observation and reaction.

Atium also give an increased ability to process and understand all the shadows, while Electrum does not (or only slightly if it does)

I think it's slightly- all Allomancy enhanced the mind to some degree: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/270/#e7551

[Trusk'our he/him]

Just now, cometaryorbit said:

I think it's slightly- all Allomancy enhanced the mind to some degree: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/270/#e7551

That fact has made me wonder if someone found a way to supercharge A-electrum if it would have a similar effect to A-Atium, since the mental enhancement should increase as well.

[cometaryorbit]

I think it would not be enough to make it equal to Atium, since as the mental ability increases so would the amount of information coming in that needs to be processed.

I think increased mental speed from F-Zinc would be much more useful: A-Electrum/F-Zinc would be much more capable at effectively using future sight than a double strength A-Electrum (say natural Electrum Misting + A-Electrum granting Hemalurgic spike).

Electrum future sight is not intuitive to use; even Vin - with exceptional Allomantic intuition - didn't realize it could be used for anything other than countering atium future sight. It is possible per WoB, but I think it would require dedicated focus and lots of training to do much without other relevant powers (like F-Zinc or maybe Blessing of Presence/Hemalurgic Copper - it's unclear how broad its benefits are, or exactly what it would do to a human).

[Underwater_Worldhopper he/him]

A-Electrum arguably isn't very useful outside of some very specific situations, since the more you pay attention to the Shadows, the more they blur and change, since you're creating the Mistborn with Atium vs Mistborn with Atium feedback loop, except with yourself. F-Zinc would probably exacerbate the issue, since the more information you glean from the Shadows, the more they change and blur as you change what you will do because of the knowledge, which then blurs the Shadows even more, ad infinitum until you can't get any information from the Shadows at all, and since the majority of the information gleaning and changing actions happens in the future, there's no net benefit in the present at all. I honestly think Electrum is the most useful when you can train yourself to actually follow the Shadow, so you only have one Shadow and can change what you do only when something happens to the Shadow. At first glance, this would seem impossible since the Shadow would split and change before you could see what causes the change because the Shadow is showing what will actually happen in the future, so you'd never see the Shadow itself get injured, but if it changes it means future you has seen something that causes them to divert the future, which is a warning in and of itself, so even though you'd never actually see the Shadow get injured, it should still change, which warns you. A little counter-intuitive seeming at first, but it makes sense once you think about it. All in all, A-Electrum is largely useless, but the clever could find uses for it. The mental benefit goes out the window though, because Atium, when confronted with Atium, balances out as the Shadows become indecipherable, which is what happens off the bat with Electrum.