is nightblood really that relevant in a war? (shashara didn't need to die)

[king of nowhere]

the whole tragedy between denth and vasher started when she made nightblood and wanted to make more. vasher decided the sword is too destructive to use, and killed her.

my question is, is nightblood really a good weapon? because what i know of weapons says, not at all.

of course, it's very effective. but the cost is ludicrous. remember, every breath is one lifless. nightblood costs 1000 breath. additionally, nightblood drains breath from the user, at a pretty fast rate of a breath every few seconds. So, let's say you need 1000 breath to make a copy of nightblood, and another 1000 for someone to use it. with that much breath, you could make 2000 lifeless. what's more useful? my money is the lifeless getting a lucky hit well before the guy with nightblood can kill all of them. 

nightblood is, in the best case, the equivalent of hypersonic missiles: they have some niche use, but they are too rare and expensive to have a major impact on the war. in the worst case, it's the equivalent of the yamato or the p-1000 ratte: ludicrously expensive superweapons that end up actually crippling your war effort before either being scrapped for their sheer impracticality, or dealing way too little damage to justify their cost before being overwhelmed by numbers.

so, vasher overreacted. shashara sharing the construction of nightblood with the armies wouldn't have affected the war much, there was no need to kill her. the one-breath command for the creation of lifless, that one is the real breakthrough. 

the one thing nightblood actually does well is to counter kalad's phantoms: those things each cost as much as 50 regular lifeless, but they pay themselves by being virtually impervious to regular weapons. but to nightblood, it doesn't matter. 2000 breath spent on a nightblood clone may actually beat 2000 breath spent on kalad's phantoms. though killing 40 without getting hit is still not easy.

[Myst He/Him]

29 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

the whole tragedy between denth and vasher started when she made nightblood and wanted to make more. vasher decided the sword is too destructive to use, and killed her.

my question is, is nightblood really a good weapon? because what i know of weapons says, not at all.

of course, it's very effective. but the cost is ludicrous. remember, every breath is one lifless. nightblood costs 1000 breath. additionally, nightblood drains breath from the user, at a pretty fast rate of a breath every few seconds. So, let's say you need 1000 breath to make a copy of nightblood, and another 1000 for someone to use it. with that much breath, you could make 2000 lifeless. what's more useful? my money is the lifeless getting a lucky hit well before the guy with nightblood can kill all of them. 

nightblood is, in the best case, the equivalent of hypersonic missiles: they have some niche use, but they are too rare and expensive to have a major impact on the war. in the worst case, it's the equivalent of the yamato or the p-1000 ratte: ludicrously expensive superweapons that end up actually crippling your war effort before either being scrapped for their sheer impracticality, or dealing way too little damage to justify their cost before being overwhelmed by numbers.

so, vasher overreacted. shashara sharing the construction of nightblood with the armies wouldn't have affected the war much, there was no need to kill her. the one-breath command for the creation of lifless, that one is the real breakthrough. 

the one thing nightblood actually does well is to counter kalad's phantoms: those things each cost as much as 50 regular lifeless, but they pay themselves by being virtually impervious to regular weapons. but to nightblood, it doesn't matter. 2000 breath spent on a nightblood clone may actually beat 2000 breath spent on kalad's phantoms. though killing 40 without getting hit is still not easy.

Nightblood is on a complete different level

RoW spoilers

Spoiler

Nightblood was able to kill the vessel of a shard. Literally no amount of lifeless would ever be able to match that. As an invested weapon, Nightblood is most useful against other invested beings whose investiture would protect them from normal weaponry.

To answer your question though, there are much better uses on invested arts to take out an army than Nightblood. However one could use Nightblood to make the army kill itself.

Finally, there’s a WoB for this, I can find it if you’d like, but Nightblood is much more invested than 1000 breaths 

WaT spoilers 

Spoiler

Here we can see that Nightblood is capable of mimicking the honorblades. He can choose to not feed on its user as well. Nightblood would have easily ended the war(hypersonic missiles launched at an enemy camp would do that to) but there’s a wider range implication of the threat to the entire cosmere that comes with it. Nightblood is much more powerful than you’d think. 

 

Edited February 8 by Mistfallen Soldier

[Frustration]

Nightblood on his own isn't necessarily the greatest as a personal weapon. But the fact that he could be created implies that improvements could be made. Eventually you end up with just Shardblades.

I think the ability to mass produce them is a serious threat.

[Myst He/Him]

8 minutes ago, Frustration said:

Nightblood on his own isn't necessarily the greatest as a personal weapon. But the fact that he could be created implies that improvements could be made. Eventually you end up with just Shardblades.

I think the ability to mass produce them is a serious threat.

I’d argue that Nightblood is better than a shardblade, as is.

[Frustration]

Just now, Mistfallen Soldier said:

I’d argue that Nightblood is better than a shardblade, as is.

Yes, but he's also really expensive. If you give him to someone with only a single breath, or worse none, they'll die before they make much of a difference.

Shardblades on the other hand, you can just give them to a lifeless and they can still use it.

[Myst He/Him]

4 minutes ago, Frustration said:

Yes, but he's also really expensive. If you give him to someone with only a single breath, or worse none, they'll die before they make much of a difference.

Shardblades on the other hand, you can just give them to a lifeless and they can still use it.

Very true, the mass production of shard blades would be very dangerous. But also interesting to see. Because on one hand armies would want to have aluminum armor/shields, and on the other you’d want to be able to defend yourself from some guy with a cannon.

Of the two though, I think Nightblood would have a greater impact. Yes, there will be so many people who would be unable to use it for more than a few seconds, there’d be those who cannot pick it up without going ill. But those who could, who consistently have enough investiture to draw it, would change the course of the cosmere. The floor of Nightblood is really low compared to shard blades, but the ceiling is so, so much higher.

RoW spoilers

Spoiler

While I’m not completely sure of Taravangian’s investiture situation before ascending. I don’t believe we know how Cultivation changed him and whether it changed his investiture levels. He still was able to use Nightblood for a few seconds.

It doesn’t matter that you can only hold Nightblood for a few seconds if those are some really important seconds.

(In an attempt to come back from my own Tangents)

Ultimately, the only time we ever see Nightblood used against Lifeless is near the end of the book, and then a single touch of Nightblood completely disintegrated them. I don’t think we’ve seen Nightblood’s true destructive potential yet.

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, Mistfallen Soldier said:

Nightblood is on a complete different level

RoW spoilers

  Hide contents

Nightblood was able to kill the vessel of a shard. Literally no amount of lifeless would ever be able to match that. As an invested weapon, Nightblood is most useful against other invested beings whose investiture would protect them from normal weaponry.

To answer your question though, there are much better uses on invested arts to take out an army than Nightblood. However one could use Nightblood to make the army kill itself.

Finally, there’s a WoB for this, I can find it if you’d like, but Nightblood is much more invested than 1000 breaths 

WaT spoilers 

  Hide contents

Here we can see that Nightblood is capable of mimicking the honorblades. He can choose to not feed on its user as well. Nightblood would have easily ended the war(hypersonic missiles launched at an enemy camp would do that to) but there’s a wider range implication of the threat to the entire cosmere that comes with it. Nightblood is much more powerful than you’d think. 

 

yes, i am well aware of that, but here we're discussing specifically their use for war on nalthis. vasher didn't kill shashara because she wanted to use nightblood to kill highly invested beings. vasher probably didn't even knew what highly invested beings were at the time. no, vasher did kill shashara because she wanted to give the secret of nightblood to the armies. 

besides, all that stuff under WaT spoiler wasn't possible at the time of warbreaker, and vasher had no idea it would be possible - in fact, both the book and annotations show he has a blind spot in that regard, thinking nightblood can't learn. 

so yes, take szeth or kaladin or someone like that, give them nightblood, they could absolutely turn a war on nalthis in the time of the book. but that's completely irrelevant for vasher's reasoning.

1 hour ago, Frustration said:

Nightblood on his own isn't necessarily the greatest as a personal weapon. But the fact that he could be created implies that improvements could be made. Eventually you end up with just Shardblades.

I think the ability to mass produce them is a serious threat.

if someone had the ability to mass produce weapons that cost 1000 breath to make, they'd be a serious threat simply because of how many breath they'd have. sure, with modern technology and investiture sources you can mass produce that. but on nalthis during the time of the five scholars? no chance. you can't mass produce something that expensive because you can't lower cost.

[Frustration]

1 minute ago, king of nowhere said:

if someone had the ability to mass produce weapons that cost 1000 breath to make, they'd be a serious threat simply because of how many breath they'd have. sure, with modern technology and investiture sources you can mass produce that. but on nalthis during the time of the five scholars? no chance. you can't mass produce something that expensive because you can't lower cost.

Considering that he made an entire army with over fifty breaths a piece like that wasn't too big of a deal.

Additionally remember that originally lifeless requires multiple breath to work, but the ichor alcohol was developed allowing for single breath awakening.

On top of that making something weaker than Nightblood should require far less than the original.

And someone had enough breaths as Lightsong's dreams show an army of lifeless with such weapons.

 

I'd imagine that after refinement only a few hundred breaths would be needed. Do I think a shardblade equals 4-5 Phantoms? Absolutely.

[Myst He/Him]

Okay, so, we know that somehow these scholars got quite a lot of breath, (experimenting is expensive) which has made me think of something very disturbing.

The Priests always used a child for the weekly breaths the Returned needed to survive. The reasoning being that a child’s breath was more vibrant(and potentially having more investiture?). But it raises the question, how young does one need to be to give their breath away? Presumably old enough to say the words, but if surrounded by those words in that particular order, it’s feasible that a child under 3, or maybe 2, could transfer their breath to someone.

Theoretically, someone could mass produce breath, assuming they had enough resources. And Vasher had a Kingdom during the majority of the war.

Breaths are not as rare as we think, assuming you’re fine with some very unethical stuff

[king of nowhere]

10 hours ago, Mistfallen Soldier said:

Okay, so, we know that somehow these scholars got quite a lot of breath, (experimenting is expensive) which has made me think of something very disturbing.

The Priests always used a child for the weekly breaths the Returned needed to survive. The reasoning being that a child’s breath was more vibrant(and potentially having more investiture?). But it raises the question, how young does one need to be to give their breath away? Presumably old enough to say the words, but if surrounded by those words in that particular order, it’s feasible that a child under 3, or maybe 2, could transfer their breath to someone.

 

I think you need intent, saying words at random doesn't normally work for cosmere magic. Not sure if awakening is an exception

[alder24]

16 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

the whole tragedy between denth and vasher started when she made nightblood and wanted to make more. vasher decided the sword is too destructive to use, and killed her.

my question is, is nightblood really a good weapon? because what i know of weapons says, not at all.

of course, it's very effective. but the cost is ludicrous. remember, every breath is one lifless. nightblood costs 1000 breath. additionally, nightblood drains breath from the user, at a pretty fast rate of a breath every few seconds. So, let's say you need 1000 breath to make a copy of nightblood, and another 1000 for someone to use it. with that much breath, you could make 2000 lifeless. what's more useful? my money is the lifeless getting a lucky hit well before the guy with nightblood can kill all of them. 

nightblood is, in the best case, the equivalent of hypersonic missiles: they have some niche use, but they are too rare and expensive to have a major impact on the war. in the worst case, it's the equivalent of the yamato or the p-1000 ratte: ludicrously expensive superweapons that end up actually crippling your war effort before either being scrapped for their sheer impracticality, or dealing way too little damage to justify their cost before being overwhelmed by numbers.

so, vasher overreacted. shashara sharing the construction of nightblood with the armies wouldn't have affected the war much, there was no need to kill her. the one-breath command for the creation of lifless, that one is the real breakthrough. 

the one thing nightblood actually does well is to counter kalad's phantoms: those things each cost as much as 50 regular lifeless, but they pay themselves by being virtually impervious to regular weapons. but to nightblood, it doesn't matter. 2000 breath spent on a nightblood clone may actually beat 2000 breath spent on kalad's phantoms. though killing 40 without getting hit is still not easy.

One of the primary causes of Manywar was in fact the invention of a single Breath Command for Awakening Lifeless, which allowed Awakening whole armies of Lifeless. It was Shashara who disclosed how to do that and she bears partial responsibility for starting the war. This sudden huge technological progress sparked the war, Nightblood could have easily thrown everything upside down again. Keep in mind that Manywar was the stage for the Awakeners’ arms race, new technologies and Commands were in constant development, things were changing drastically as the war was progressing. 

You say that there weren't many people out there capable of wielding Nightblood, I say it's probably not true. During Manywar many powerful Awakeners were engaged in the conflict, uncountable amounts of Lifeless were created and who knows how many Breaths were lost in total. Just Vasher alone left 50000 Breaths for safekeeping AFTER the war had ended and after he Awakened 1000 Phantoms, each requiring at least 50 Breaths to Awaken - in total Vasher left more than 100000 Breaths in T'Telir and probably even more counting normal Lifeless he left them. That's Vasher alone after the war. Shashara had to have at least 20000 Breaths to Awaken Nightblood, other Scholars probably also had tens of thousands of Breaths available to them and regular Awakeners were probably casually fighting with thousands of Breaths. There were a lot of Breaths everywhere so creating and using multiple Nightbloods wouldn't be a problem. And if Nightbloods were to become widespread, Lifeless would become obsolete overnight. The very invention that started the war, in which kings and Awakeners pour their fortune into, would be just useless, which the Battle of Twilight Falls has proven.

However, that’s not exactly what Vasher feared. Nightblood himself was just an accident, he wasn’t supposed to end up like this, he was meant to be like Honorblades and Shardblades - they don’t eat their own wielder. Shashara knew she Nightblood wasn't what she wanted and she probably was going to make improvements to the design and if the knowledge of that became public, new and different Commands would be used to Awaken Nightblood-like blades, each would have an unpredictably different result. They would soon discover how to make safe blades and Yesteel is the proof of this, as he knew how to do this during the events of Warbreaker and OB spoilers:

Spoiler

his knowledge was most likely used to create Vivenna’s blade, a Shardblade-like construct that doesn’t feed on their user. Those blades could be used by Lifeless, undead monsters fighting other monsters with monstrous blades wrecking havoc everywhere they went, that can't be stopped with steel or stone - that would be a truly horrifying sight to behold.

Sure, if more blades identical to Nightbloods were created, they would be rare and dangerous to use, but they would surely irreversibly change the war. However, Nightblood was just a proof of concept, the beginning of new technology. New Type-4 entities would soon be created, like Awakened shields, armors and new swords. All this sudden influx of sentient metal weapons would escalate Manywar once more, and with both sides having access to them it would be impossible to stop the war like Vasher did. Nightblood alone caused devastation during a single battle he was used in, just imagine how much more destruction all those potential new Awakened steel objects could have done, if the knowledge of their creation were to become public. 

Warbreaker ch 53:

Quote

Vasher didn’t respond. What argument could he offer? That Shashara had needed to die? It had been bad enough when she’d revealed the Commands to make Lifeless from a single breath. What if the way of making Awakened steel, like Nightblood, had entered the Manywar? Undead monsters slaughtering people with Awakened swords thirsting for blood?

 

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson

Lightsong Thinks about How Hallandren Wouldn't Fall

He's wrong here. If he hadn't intervened and taken responsibility, the God King would have died, and another Manywar would have begun. It would have ended with Hallandren in flames, destroyed by the advancing Idrian coalition, who by then would have gained the secret to creating swords like Nightblood from Yesteel, who is hiding in one of the kingdoms across the mountains and who secretly knows what Vasher did to create the sword. He would have brought his kingdom into the conflict. And the world would have burned.

Warbreaker Annotations (March 21, 2011)

 

Spoiler

Questioner

If Vasher and Shashara had Awakened a non-weapon in exactly the same way as Nightblood (say a shield), would the object exhibit the same properties as Nightblood?

Brandon Sanderson

So, if you said "destroy evil" to a shield... no, it wouldn't be exactly the same. The Command is the most important part of all of this, but the shape, how the weapon perceives itself, how you perceive it, is all gonna play into this. They're playing with some real dangerous stuff when they made Nightblood. And it didn't go as intended.

San Diego Comic-Con@Home 2020 (July 23, 2020)

Edited February 9 by alder24