Shardblades:Shardplate

[Commander Azure]

To manifest a Shardblade, you need to reach the third Ideal. To manifest Shardplate, you must reach the fourth Ideal. It follows logically that a good amount of Radiants had reached the third Ideal but not the fourth. Then, wouldn't there be significantly less Shardplate in the world than Shardblades?

[Koloss17 She/They]

Good point. I don’t know if we know if there are more or less shardplates than shardblades. The shattered plains are a bad data sample because all the good shards are there.  

[Commander Azure]

Any cosmere experts want to help?

[+Invocation]

The modern Radiants are having issues hitting the Fourth that I don't think the ancient Knights would have had. Pre-Recreance, there was an entire support system. You had your whole Order of fellows, people who were journeying along the same path (even with the slight divergences) and you had people at the head that had passed through all five Oaths and mastered themselves through them. 

Modern Radiants don't have any of that. They don't have anyone to rely on, to fall back on, that would help mitigate some of the emotional impact of the later Oaths. The Third is a  major hangup for them because of that. All they have are outsider perspectives on their troubles and that doesn't go well most of the time. It works fine if you're more independant and your Order doesn't seem geared toward risking your life 100% of the time, but for groups like the Windrunners and Stonewards, that constant danger and panic has no release valve.

In the ancient times, you had the people who had already gotten to the Fourth ready and able to help bridge that gap in any way possible, helping the transition immensely, so the Third probably wasn't as much of a stumbling block. Bridging into the Fifth was probably their equivalent, leading to a much more even distribution of Blade to Plate. 

Or it could be that the Shin whoever hid most of the Shards calculated it to make the ratio more even.

Edited September 8, 2020 by Invocation

[ftl]

6 hours ago, Commander Azure said:

Any cosmere experts want to help?

I don't think anyone knows the answer. This has definitely been brought up before, but with no resolution.

Maybe going 3rd-4th wasn't as hard in the old days.

Maybe there were more blades than plates at Recreance time, but over time it's easier for blades to get lost, or more of them were stolen by the Shin in their wars and there's a big cache of them somewhere.