What kind of Compounder would you be?

[Dunkum he/him]

I don't know that I'd want to be one, but depending on exactly how Nicrosil works, both allomantically and Feruchemically, the Soulburst could be very interesting.  though for as powerful as compounders are, most of them seem pretty boring, id rather be one of the more interesting twinborn combinations, like bendalloy/zinc: you'd pretty much never lose in any kind of strategy game, just speed bubble, tap zinc, and outthink your opponent in a fraction of a second

[Claincy he/him]

While I don't appreciate the allomantic power as much, I'm pretty sure I'd pick Zinc. My brain is my main strength after all.

[Creecher he/him]

Duralumin, because when filling the metalmind I can't get noticed.

[Bronzeheart he/him]

I'd have to go for Chrysalis (Double Cadmium). First of all, I just like being different . Second, the ability of Cadmium Ferrings to oxygenate their blood would do wonders for increasing one's stamina. Personally, I just find that awesome. I can also think of a few circumstances where speeding up time would come in handy.

[Guest]

Definitely Chromium. I would always have a large amount of good luck.

[Oudeis he/him]

Eh. We know so little about how "being lucky" would work. Ironically, you would need initial, unaugmented luck to gamble that "feruchemical luck" is an actually useful trait. Recall that feruchemical traits cannot be deliberately channeled. We have WoB, for example, that you cannot use feruchemical pewter to increase the power just of your right arm; it's all or none. So we might end up with the situation where you throw a dart at a board with your eyes closed, tap luck in the hopes that you get a bull's-eye... while you do so the bartender forgets to charge you for half your beers, the cute blonde decides she's over Tony and wants to take you for a spin, and back home your cat accidentally turns off the stove you forgot and left on... and you still miss with the dart. Precedent suggests you don't get to decide where your luck goes.

 

Or, since we know so little, it might end up being something very niche with limited efficacy. Who knows?

[AerionBFII he/him]

Eenie meenie miney mo.......Double Zinc = Mastermind woo - hoo!!

[Curiosity he/him]

I will remember EVERYTHING! Possibly all sensory information will be stored perfectly...? Plus, all y'all Masterminds can't touch me. 

[natc]

Eh. We know so little about how "being lucky" would work. Ironically, you would need initial, unaugmented luck to gamble that "feruchemical luck" is an actually useful trait. Recall that feruchemical traits cannot be deliberately channeled. We have WoB, for example, that you cannot use feruchemical pewter to increase the power just of your right arm; it's all or none. So we might end up with the situation where you throw a dart at a board with your eyes closed, tap luck in the hopes that you get a bull's-eye... while you do so the bartender forgets to charge you for half your beers, the cute blonde decides she's over Tony and wants to take you for a spin, and back home your cat accidentally turns off the stove you forgot and left on... and you still miss with the dart. Precedent suggests you don't get to decide where your luck goes.

Or, since we know so little, it might end up being something very niche with limited efficacy. Who knows?

Well when you have bottomless luck statistically you'd get what you need eventually

Though I guess as Hoid says, what matters is timeliness.

Speaking of, since bloodmakers can regenerate from deoxygenation damage and torn muscles, a gold compounder can essentially replicate pewter drag by brute-forcing your hesling while being invincible right? Being able to heal muscle damage would also let you go past the normal human limit for exertion to an extent. You'll still feel exhausted/near dead, sure, but Miles doesn't feel pain so maybe you eventually desensitize to it.

[Kaymyth she/her]

Well when you have bottomless luck statistically you'd get what you need eventually

Though I guess as Hoid says, what matters is timeliness.

Speaking of, since bloodmakers can regenerate from deoxygenation damage and torn muscles, a gold compounder can essentially replicate pewter drag by brute-forcing your hesling while being invincible right? Being able to heal muscle damage would also let you go past the normal human limit for exertion to an extent. You'll still feel exhausted/near dead, sure, but Miles doesn't feel pain so maybe you eventually desensitize to it.

 

I've kind of figured for a while that the reason stopping a long compounding string can be dangerous is because of pewter-drag-esque effects.  It would likely vary depending on what metal you're compounding, but gold would be right up there with pewter in terms of how hard it can be on the body.

 

If this is true, then recovering from a compounding drag may well be similar to how you do it with pewter; tap the metal at a moderate-to-light degree until your body recovers enough to maintain itself.

Edited January 18, 2015 by Kaymyth

[natc]

Yeah, when you think about it, lacking pain would mean Miles would not know when he is overexerting himself, and may have gotten used to moving in such a manner. Stopping pewter drag all at once would kill you instantly because it doesn't actually heal you, but gold compounder "dragging" long enough might make his body and mind start to think it is tougher than it actually is. If he stops and is a lot weaker than he thought he was he might accidentally kill himself, and if you can actually attain savanthood by compounding it would be even worse. His immortality would be his only lifeline without spending significant effort recovering.

[Dunkum he/him]

I also wonder if constant gold compounding would weaken your immune system.   for example on Nalthis, if you give up your breath, and become a drab, you are more likely to contract diseases because your immune system, used to being boosted by the investiture of your breath, is suddenly running all on its own, and isnt quite up to the task (this is mentioned in the annotations, I think).   So if you were usually compounding gold, and then stopped, would it have a similar effect?

[Kaymyth she/her]

I think it's quite possible, even probable.  As long as Miles had been keeping the compounding going, his body had very likely become dependent on it.  There's going to be a profound difference between the effects of going on a compounding drag and keeping the compounding going permanently.  If you run it for a few hours, you're just going to need a recovery phase.  But if you run it for days, weeks, months at a time, that's setting yourself up for some profound changes in your physiology.  Compound gold for too long, and your immune system forgets how to work on its own.  Compound bendalloy for too long, maybe your digestive system stops working.

[natc]

Well it happens to savants. Probably happens to Compounders. Feruchemy cannot otherwise be continuously fueled so it's probably not an often observed phenomenon prior to the birth of Twinborn.

Wonder what happens if you get your body used to continuous storing. Wax doesn't seem to show any irregularities, but then again he almost never moves at full weight. I wonder.

With that said, I'll just go with steel. Mobility is fun, and I have little reason to sustain it continuously unlike gold. Also cheaper. I'll just compound myself a buffer then remain normal until I need it. Keep myself stable. Moving too fast all the time causes all kinds of trouble, so I'll just tap once in a while and compound whenever I feel like I'm running low.

[IAmTheBeard]

Try pulling from as far away as possible and hope you can get out of the way or that the momentum of the structure runs out before it crushes you. If that fails try keeping some kind of shelter handy that wont get destroyed by little things like having a 50 story building thrown against it. Your best solution would be to spike some poor coinshot for his steel pushing but if your a villain things like ethics shouldn't matter.

1) Throw a bar of metal to one side.

2) Compound iron and pull whatever you want to destroy toward you.

3) Then fill iron as quickly as you can and pull yourself toward your bar of metal, out of the way of the crashing object.

 

You could use this to jump around a battlefield, pulling huge piles of debris around. You'd literally leave destruction in your wake.

[kinxer he/him]

It was close for me between Soulburst and Deader (see previous post for some reasoning behind the latter), but I chose Soulburst, mostly because strategically causing enemy Mistings to use up all their metals in an ultra-burst could be incredibly helpful. Even if it's not possible to do it at range, you can cause a Coinshot to use up all their Steel before they can actually push anything (after all, they have to burn steel to see the lines). The effects become even more Fun (in the Dwarf Fortress sense and otherwise) when you use it on other Compounders. Imagine managing to affect a Swift with this while they're tapping- you now have an opponent WAY over there who can no longer move quickly at a whim and also might have run into something while they couldn't control their speed. Also, (I think) once a Soulburst gets going with an Investituremind, they don't really need any more Nicrosil if they're careful with it, so it's incredibly low cost. So, yeah. Soulburst.

Edited January 29, 2015 by kinxer

[Dunkum he/him]

It was close for me between Soulburst and Deader (see previous post for some reasoning behind the latter), but I chose Soulburst, mostly because strategically causing enemy Mistings to use up all their metals in an ultra-burst could be incredibly helpful. Even if it's not possible to do it at range, you can cause a Coinshot to use up all their Steel before they can actually push anything (after all, they have to burn steel to see the lines). The effects become even more Fun (in the Dwarf Fortress sense and otherwise) when you use it on other Compounders. Imagine managing to affect a Swift with this while they're tapping- you now have an opponent WAY over there who can no longer move quickly at a whim and also might have run into something while they couldn't control their speed. Also, (I think) once a Soulburst gets going with an Investituremind, they don't really need any more Nicrosil if they're careful with it, so it's incredibly low cost. So, yeah. Soulburst.

Hadn't even considered the effects of a soulburst on another compounder.  What would that do to a glutton, say?  I imagine it would be just awful.

[Kaymyth she/her]

It was close for me between Soulburst and Deader (see previous post for some reasoning behind the latter), but I chose Soulburst, mostly because strategically causing enemy Mistings to use up all their metals in an ultra-burst could be incredibly helpful. Even if it's not possible to do it at range, you can cause a Coinshot to use up all their Steel before they can actually push anything (after all, they have to burn steel to see the lines). The effects become even more Fun (in the Dwarf Fortress sense and otherwise) when you use it on other Compounders. Imagine managing to affect a Swift with this while they're tapping- you now have an opponent WAY over there who can no longer move quickly at a whim and also might have run into something while they couldn't control their speed. Also, (I think) once a Soulburst gets going with an Investituremind, they don't really need any more Nicrosil if they're careful with it, so it's incredibly low cost. So, yeah. Soulburst.

 

This brings up a question I've been harboring in my thoughts for a while, but I think it deserves its own thread.  Probably will be posting it up in a little while.

[kinxer he/him]

Hadn't even considered the effects of a soulburst on another compounder.  What would that do to a glutton, say?  I imagine it would be just awful.

Well, likely a Glutton (assuming you mean a Bendalloy twinborn) would only compound in order to store immediately back into a metalmind, and they'd likely have a main metalmind (i.e. a bracer) which would never be ingested and secondary metalminds (i.e. rings) which would be filled with some of the nutrition from the bracer and ingested to compound back into the main metalmind. Now, a DUMB Glutton may have issues...

[Oudeis he/him]

I would be surprised if nicrosil worked on feruchemy that way, if it let you force them to immediately use every charge stored within their metalminds. And if you use it on a compounder currently compounding, he'd prolly just store the excess in his metalminds like he was prolly gonna do anyway. I guess there's a niche for if you can wait until a compounder is about to compound some stores, then rip away their metalminds just as you nicroburst them, but ... I'd be surprised if that came up very often.

[kinxer he/him]

That's fair, I suppose. I had assumed that it didn't force metal use, but I hadn't realized that they'd probably already be storing. In extreme cases, it may be possible to use on Compounders, but it would probably be most useful against normal Allomancy.

EDIT: It does depend, though, on whether there's some practical limit on the speed at which one can fill a metalmind. If there is a limit, using Allomantic nicrosil on a Compounder could, at the very least, cause them to waste a bunch of whatever they are storing.

Edited January 30, 2015 by kinxer

[Oudeis he/him]

EDIT: It does depend, though, on whether there's some practical limit on the speed at which one can fill a metalmind. If there is a limit, using Allomantic nicrosil on a Compounder could, at the very least, cause them to waste a bunch of whatever they are storing.

 

Valid concern.

 

Please keep in mind that I love Sazed, and always have. He tops my list of "Cosmere folk I wish I could hug." This is not a joke; there's a physical, hand-written list sitting on my desk right now.

 

That said, sometimes I hate that guy. He was our best possible hope to know a ton of things about feruchemy and we don't know them because he never bothered to experiment at all, not even for the two whole books with no reason to disguise his power. There's no earthly reason he shouldn't have at least tried tapping and storing electrum, duralumin, even aluminum, and oh my harmony malatium. Imagine if we knew what malatium stored. It was just sitting there. A whole bar of the Eleventh Metal, known to be allomantically active, that Vin never used but a few flakes of to take down Rashek. I'm sure that in the intervening months of Elend's reign they melted it down to get the atium back out of it (that's a thing metallugy can do, yes? You can refine an alloy back into base metals?), but surely there were a few days during which Sazed could have learned what GOD-LIKE POWER it granted...

[Kaymyth she/her]

That's fair, I suppose. I had assumed that it didn't force metal use, but I hadn't realized that they'd probably already be storing. In extreme cases, it may be possible to use on Compounders, but it would probably be most useful against normal Allomancy.

EDIT: It does depend, though, on whether there's some practical limit on the speed at which one can fill a metalmind. If there is a limit, using Allomantic nicrosil on a Compounder could, at the very least, cause them to waste a bunch of whatever they are storing.

 

Metalminds also have a maximum capacity.  If a Compounder is playing it safe, they'll likely not let their standard metalminds get too empty before making a refill burn.

[Oudeis he/him]

I've got the sorta vague impression that "maximum capacity" works out to be not terribly important. Sazed, for example, refers to the pewter back of an earring, not even the earring itself, expressly described in the book as "tiny", as holding a "moderate" charge of strength. Much as a vial of metal, enough to let you burn for hours (depending on the metal) is a tiny vial with a few flakes inside that can be swallowed in a single gulp, I sorta get the impression that mass is rarely a limiting factor in the metallic arts. So while something like a bangle that takes up a quarter of your forearm does, in fact, have a "maximum capacity" I wouldn't be surprised if a compounder could have as many metalminds as he could ever reasonably need (especially when it's of just one metal) without having to go overboard on sheer mass of metal. What I'm saying is, if I'm a compounder and I swallow a ring so I can burn it to get more stores and put them into my metalminds, I don't think I'm ever likely to burn enough at once, even if I'm surprised nicrobursted, than I could fit within the metalminds I've got on me, even if they're all already half-full.

 

Kinxer was right, however, about how much you can store at once.

 

Copper is the easiest. We see Sazed drag out huge tomes full of knowledge, and dump them back into storage, with an impression of ease and speed. It's sorta a precedent that you really can (or at least Sazed can, and while he's the only feruchemist we see, by his own admission and via the context clues we get in the book, he's not actually that good at it, though prolly better at copper than anything else) store as much of a trait as you currently have, not limited at speed by your "feruchemical power".

 

We do know that Compounders burn traits at something like a factor of 10. Is it ever flat-out stated that they can store it that efficiently? We only ever see two compounders, The Lord Ruler and Miles Hundredlives. We do see Rashek compounding, once. He looks old, but not as old as he does when he loses his metalminds. Presumably, then, he's burning youth, using the majority of it, and storing the rest. Is this by choice? Does he wish to sit around merely old instead of antedeluvian? Can he only store so much age at once so that's the oldest he can look at the time? Miles is a poor example; of all the traits, there's perhaps the least downside to having too much health. Leading to the question, is he "filled" with this health for a while, yet? Can he burn his gold, store a fraction of his health, but sit there, flush with health, able to "store" even more than he could on a normal day while napping with a runny nose? Or is the health simply applied? The problem is that unlike things like body heat or metabolic energy, your "health" isn't really a single value represented by a percentage or ratio. Even speed is easier to quantify than health is, so the question is tricky.

 

This should be asked of Mr. Sanderson.

[blad3mast3r he/him]

Ringer =

 

"oh you missed me"

 

Every. Single. Time.