Duralumin and nicrosil flaring

[+Lewis Nethur He/Him]

We've seen that metals can, with practice, be burned at a wide range of rates. Wax and Zane make great use of this phenomenon with steel, Breeze and Allriane show off their subtle prowess with soothing/rioting, and Wayne speeds up time by anywhere from a factor of 10 (see: first scene with Steris), to around a factor of 10,000 (see: scene where Wax's butler tries to kill him with dynamite and wiki the propagation speed of explosions...)

So my question is: has it been confirmed that duralumin and nicrosil can also be burned gently as well as flared?

Could a nicroburst, for example, put their metal on a "slow" burn and increase their target's burn rate by, say, a factor of 2-3 rather than burning their target's metals ridiculously fast? Or conversely, could they flare nicrosil for an even more intense effect? I'm imagining a talented nicroburst turning a crasher like Wax into a ungodly artillery weapon, or sneaking up on coinshots and causing them to accidentally blast themselves to supersonic speeds.

[Shqueeves]

Maybe, but it would require them to be savants

[Snipexe he/him]

It would take A LOT of Nicrosil/Duralumin, and require the burner to be a savant, but I don't see why not.

[+Lewis Nethur He/Him]

I'm not sure I agree with the savant assumption. Wayne is almost certainly not a bendalloy savant considering how expensive it is and how fast it burns, and Vin is able to do things like hover close to the ground, which requires extreme burn-rate control, but she lacks the "perks" of other possible steel savants, such as pushing on points of an object other than their center of mass (Kelsier) and seeing multiple steel-lines for different parts of a object (Wax). Also, I do we have a confirmation on how fast nicrosil or duralumin burn relative to other metals?

[Calderis he/him]

@hwiles I agree. The changes Brandon is making to Savants because of Wax imply that if someone is skilled in control of the metal it's not necessarily because of Savanthood. 

Savants are supposed to be like Spook and Oathbringer Spoiler 

Spoiler

The Soulcaster interlude

Where there are obvious drawbacks to their overuse of power. 

Wax, Wayne, Kel, and Vin all have/had superb levels of control without any overt drawbacks. 

Savanthood could easily lend itself to this and make it much much easier... But I don't think it would be a requirement. 

20 minutes ago, hwiles said:

 Also, I do we have a confirmation on how fast nicrosil or duralumin burn relative to other metals?

We've seen Duralumin burned and know that it's exceptionally fast, but I don't think we've seen a nicroburst so we don't have any real baseline for it. I don't think it's going to burn as quickly, as Duralumin. We've seen Chromium Allomancy in BoM, but again I don't think we're told the speed at which a leecher burns away their metal. 

Spoilered for length, and it's old so I don't know how relevant it still is, but this makes it sound like nicrosil and Chromium don't have equal burn rates to aluminum and duralumin. 

Spoiler

http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=727#4

KIRRIN (15 OCTOBER 2008)

Also, you should tell us what the last two metals are.

BRANDON SANDERSON (15 OCTOBER 2008)

The last two metals are Chromium and Nicrosil. We'll reveal what they do on the Allomancy poster. Suffice it to say that in the next trilogy, the main protagonist would be a Nicrosil Misting. And, to make a Robert Jordan-type comment, what those two metals do should become obvious to the serious student of Allomancy... (It has to do with the nature of the metal groupings.)

HAPPYMAN

If I read the poster correctly, and have the correlations down, these metals are the external enhancement metals.

The simplest idea is that they do to another person what Aluminum and Duralumin do to the Allomancer burning them. If this is true, then Chromium would destroy another Allomancer's metals (useful skill, that, especially in a group of Mistings fighting a Mistborn) while Nicrosil would cause the target's metals that are currently burning to be burned in a brief, intense flash. This could be used either to enhance a group of Mistings or to seriously mess up an enemy Allomancer.

PETER AHLSTROM

The other metals do not have exact one-to-one power correlations like that, so it seems more likely to me that they would work differently. It could be like an area effect weakening or enhancing spell. You would want an enhancer in your party, and you wouldn't want to go up against a weakener.

Nicrosil is a rather more complicated alloy than the others. It's an interesting one to pick, rather than something simpler like nichrome (though I guess that's actually a brand name).

BRANDON SANDERSON

Nicely done.

Ookla is right, the others don't have 1/1 correlations. But I liked this concept far too much not to use it.

In a future book series, Mistborn will also have become things of legend. The bloodlines will have become diluted to the point that there are no Mistborn, only Mistings—however, the latter are far more common. In this environment, a Nicrosil Misting could be invaluable both as an enhancer to your own team or a weapon to use against unsuspecting other Mistings.

DOUGLAS (17 OCTOBER)

I take it either Spook did not have children or Sazed made him a reduced-strength Mistborn rather than giving him the full potency of the 9 originals and Elend?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Spook is a reduced power Mistborn.

CHAOS (16 OCTOBER)

Very interesting about the Nicrosil.

So, if there is no more atium, then that would mean in any future trilogy, there would only be 14 metals, right? Somehow, that doesn't seem right, but maybe that is because it irks me that one quartet to be left incomplete with the absence of atium.

Would it be possible for Sazed to create a replacement metal, by chance, or will the temporal quartet remain inherently empty? It doesn't seem like it's too far of a stretch for Sazed to make more metals: after all, the metal Elend ate was a fragment of Preservation, and now Sazed holds Preservation.

BRANDON SANDERSON

That's a RAFO, I'm afraid. Suffice it to say that what the characters think they understand about the metals, they don't QUITE get right. If you study the interaction between the temporal metals, you might notice an inconsistency in the way they work...

PETER AHLSTROM

Uh-huh. That was already noticed by theorizers in the forums here. Gold works like Malatium and Electrum works like Atium. Yet they're on opposite corners of the metal square.

BRANDON SANDERSON

Ah. I wondered if that had been noticed.

FOOTNOTE

This future book series is the second Mistborn Trilogy, not Alloy of Law. It seems that at the time of Alloy of Law, the people don't have a knowledge of nicrosil and chromium.

 

[The One Who Connects he/him]

On 8/11/2017 at 4:12 PM, Calderis said:

We've seen Duralumin burned and know that it's exceptionally fast, but I don't think we've seen a nicroburst so we don't have any real baseline for it. I don't think it's going to burn as quickly, as Duralumin. We've seen Chromium Allomancy in BoM, but again I don't think we're told the speed at which a leecher burns away their metal.

Have these two statements and draw your conclusions.

Quote

KAYMYTH

OK, so in the signing line, I asked the question about chromium vs a Compounder with both invested and uninvested metals in both their stomach and piercings.

BRANDON SANDERSON

1) Yes, the piercings will get burned off.

2) The noninvested metals go before the invested ones. He said that because invested metals are harder to effect, it takes a little extra time and effort to get them to burn off. So a Leecher trying to clean out a Compounder would have to get a good grip and hang on for a few seconds.

3) Chromium burns about as quickly as duralumin, so if you're trying to burn off a lot of metals, it is possible to run out of chromium before your target is clean.

Quote

The very first scene with Duralumin, when she's burning it alone, it burns along for a while without boosting anything and doesn't burn itself out. Later, when she uses it for the first time with tin and pewter, she does use up both of those stores, and it's expressly stated that the duralumin didn't burn itself out. Every time she has to replenish, it's every metal but duralumin.