Weltall

See the responses about how confirming a fan theory in a sticker would be a really stupid way to go about things, especially considering that most of Brandon's fans aren't into things to the degree the Sharders are and are unlikely to be aware that the idea even exists. And it's a huge theory to be casually going about confirming if it were true (which I'm inclined to agree is likely) so even if there was a ton of evidence for the casual fan I couldn't see them spoiling something likely to be from the back half of the series in something so mundane. First, she's literally the only confirmed Dustbringer in existence right now so it's not like there are any other options. Second, you're assuming that either 1) she can't change her mind when she finds out the terms Taravangian just agreed to with Odium or 2) that just because she's currently supporting the side that's supporting Odium that means she's not a legitimate representation of the Dustbringers in general. It's more a mindset than who you're fighting for and we have no reason to assume Malata is not generally what we should expect from members of that Order.

We have no reason to think they do not, but we haven't the faintest clue what the alloys would do. For reference, Khriss mentions in the Ars Arcanum that it's theorized that god metal alloys could grant new powers in feruchemy. We know malatium has some feruchemical use but Sazed wasn't able to figure out what it was in the time he had to experiment. If these alloys work for feruchemy there's no reason to think that hemalurgy wound be any different. Not really. If you split a lerasium bead up and give it to multiple people you'll end up with really weak mistborn. Channelling a smaller bit of Preservation's power into one metal, you're likely to still end up with an extremely strong misting out of less lerasium, meaning you could make several powerful mistings from a single bead.

Investiture resists Investiture and Shardplate is very high up on the list of heavily-Invested objects. Vin could push/pull ordinary metal on Kaladin but she'd need a duralumin boost and an especially strong push to have a hope of affecting Plate or an even more-Invested Blade. On the other hand, we know guns could crack Plate so a couple duralumin-boosted coins would work just fine, and she could functionally 'push' Kaladin in Plate if she had an anchor behind her and was pushing on coins that in turn pushed against Kaladin. But that comes down to the environment. As for Kaladin screwing with Vin's gravity via lashings, that requires him to, y'know, touch her. Pretty tricky to accomplish, since she's not likely to be keen on getting close to somebody armed with a really big sword/spear once she realizes she can't deflect it with A-Steel. Pewter speeds up the body's natural healing but does not have the same properties as F-Gold, so no. As mentioned, we have a list of 'how hard is X to affect with allomancy?' via WoB. A Shardblade is second only to Nightblood on that list. Vin might be able to affect a Blade with duralumin and a really strong push/pull but against a Radiant that would be useful very briefly since they can re-summon their spren instantly.

If there's any enhancement to strength from holding Stormlight beyond the fact that you can push your muscles to their limit without hurting yourself (which will look like a strength increase) it's not very much. We know for instance that it's not enough to explain Rock managing to draw a shardbow 'under normal circumstances'.

Also, are we talking a straight-up fight? Because if not and it's just a flat 'who wins, period?' then we're going to inevitably end up with the same answer Brandon always gives when someone asks him this same question: Vin (or Kelsier) stabs the person in their sleep. Game Over.

Yeah, as mentioned the only evidence we have that highspren are 'distant' is that Szeth's spren rarely reveals itself. Considering that Szeth is carrying around the Investiture-eating Nightblood and could easily kill the spren by accident if he drew the sword and ran out of stormlight, it's not hard to understand why the spren might be a bit skittish. As for why we don't see highspren floating around their bonded Radiants more frequently, bear in mind that we don't see most other spren either except from the point of view of the Radiant themselves. Pattern likes to be unobtrusive and is effectively invisible to everyone else for most of Words of Radiance, Glys completely hides (albeit for obvious reasons), Syl only appears to people she wants to see her (and people like Rock and Vasher) and we never see Malata's spren Spark.

You do realize that you necro'd a topic that was almost two years dead to share your theory, right? One that's contradicted by a WoB that was already provided by Extesian years ago. 'Turning into a spren' isn't what's happening and moreover it's functionally impossible when you consider what the spren are. A spren is a Splinter, a chunk of Investiture separated from a Shard, with some degree of intelligence and frequently its own intent. Splinters are generally defined as things that have never been human. A Cognitive Shadow is kind of a Splinter that used to be alive but there's an important distinction: You have to die first to become one. Soulcasting Savants are changing due to their use of Investiture but they're not becoming spren and the wiki doesn't need to be changed.

Shallan is a step ahead of Kaladin at the end of Words of Radiance. She's able to summon Pattern as a blade before saying her latest truth, ergo she was at the equivalent of the third Ideal at the time. We don't know about Renarin, Jasnah and Malata to know how many Ideals they've sworn but there are distinct hints that Jasnah is far enough along to be able to manifest Plate and the one order where we know for certain when they get Plate (the Windrunners) get theirs at the Fourth Ideal. Also on Szeth, the fact that we're told that the Third Ideal is what makes you a full Skybreaker makes it reasonably clear that their spren can manifest as blades at that point. Brandon has even explicitly stated that the Third Ideal is when most Radiants get the blade.

The exact line is "(Scadrial) is one of only two places in the cosmere where humankind does not predate the arrival of the Shards.". Not Shattering, arrival.

I played the original PSX version but haven't played the remake yet, though I really should. Funny enough, there was a spoof article ages ago about 'Chrono Trigger 2' that talked about how big the game was going to be and time travel and this and that with Toriyama doing all the designs again... and at the end they revealed they were just messing with the readers and talking about DQ7. But yeah, I had a lot of fun with that one, it's probably the single worst game in the series to start with given the incredibly long 'start to first battle' wait time but it's a really good game as long as you're willing to give it that time to get going. EDIT: Got our Hajimari update early this week, or at least the first leaks and (moderate-quality) scans. Some fairly heavy spoilers for the back half of Cold Steel involved.

Odium doesn't need to have had anything to do with the first humans on Ashyn to be 'their' god. He showed up, he influenced things one way or another without needing to Invest in the planet and eventually the cataclysm that resulted in the mass exodus happened and Odium got his proxy war started. For all we know, he just whispered in the right ears that it would be really cool if they played around with the Dawnshards and waited until someone foolish enough listened and things went boom. Odium can manifest on Roshar even though he's 'on' Braize so he should be able to do the same to Ashyn without having to ever Invest his power there. Thanks to Khriss in Arcanum Unbounded we know that humans predated the arrival of the Shards on all but two places, one of which is explicitly Scadrial (because it didn't exist before) and Oathbringer gave us Roshar as the second place, which means humans would have been on Ashyn when Odium arrived. It's likely that Adonalsium put them there for whatever Grand Design he had for the system, though we can't discount that there were pre-Shattering worldhoppers who chose to go there for some unrelated reason. In any event, he had his hooks sufficiently into the humans who fled to Roshar that they could have been considered 'his' when they arrived, but then something happened that resulted in humans and singers switching gods.

Getting Breath on its own does not, so far as we can tell, do anything that affects physical strength, speed or dexterity. On the other hand, being a Returned does, as we see with both Vasher and Denth and this is a universal thing as confirmed by Brandon. We just don't see it much because none of the other Returned we meet have any training in how to fight and they're unable to put their natural advantage to good use, or likely even realize that it exists in the first place. Meanwhile those two are much savvier about just what it means to be a Returned and on top of that they've got centuries worth of experience.

The game isn't actually telling you to do that, it's telling you what the ultimate solution to your current problem is. You'll see what that means shortly. Also, given the amount of times you've talked about needing to grind, a tip that should help you greatly for the future: The game's EXP scaling makes it very easy to tell when you're at the level you're expected to be. If enemies are still giving you good experience per fight, you're underlevelled. If you're getting very little experience per fight and the next level will take a ton of grinding, you're overleveled. Yeah, it's a very Japanese thing. The intro of CS2 contained a very good example of this which the localization (thankfully) excised: Every so often something will still slip through the localization, if for no other reason than that the scripts are ZOMGHuge! CS1 for example weighs in at about 1.4 million characters and Japanese is a very compact language so once you translate even a single game you're looking at a mass of text that's comfortably bigger than even the thickest doorstopper Brandon has ever released.

The entire point of doing a 2021 batch was to let people who didn't get in on the Kickstarter in its first.... hour or so, could still get everything except a numbered copy. I doubt they're going to get so many orders that they can't deliver them all sometime within 2021, especially since the number of new backers pretty much fell off a cliff within a day. Using some very rough assumptions based on the number of new pledges per day since the first and assuming the trend stays the way it's going, there's probably going to be about 25% more books they need to order at the end compared to the number they need to order right now to meet the demand, tops. I doubt that's enough to warrant a 2022 delivery date for even the latest orders if they expect to be able to release ten thousand copies by the end of this year. Not even that, they went past that number within hours. I'd be annoyed with myself at not getting in during that opening hour if I cared enough to want a numbered edition, but I'm totally fine with a first edition period even if it means waiting a bit longer. xD

Yeah, certain spikes can steal attributes like 'strength' or 'emotional fortitude'. Brandon came up with the idea while working out how to make the kandra and koloss work. These spikes are also noted to twist the recipient due to the way they work, so even one H-Iron spike is presumably going to result in some unpleasant side-effects. Shadows of Self confirms that a single spike can seriously twist a person as long as the right thing is spiked into them.

If you think that CS2 is going to have 'school stuff' I have to question whether you've actually paid sufficient attention to the context in which the game is taking place. But yes, as mentioned it's not a thing. CS3 has it again but it's treated slightly differently than CS1. Oh, and a lot of your 'I saw this coming' things are, wait for it, things we already knew thanks to the Crossbell arc happening side by side, with Ao's ending happening in parallel to CS2. Except one obvious thing that wasn't introduced until CS1:

@Briar King I think what aneonfoxtribute is trying to say, however indirectly, is that we're interested what you thought about the stuff that happens after the final dungeon. It's kinda momentous stuff and all. xD

Popcorn Intensifies!

That's one thing but hardly the biggest thing and there's a lot more in CS2 that's Crossbell-related. Point being, if there's stuff going on that you're really lost on and Crossbell is even vaguely mentioned in context with it, it's probably stuff that happened in the Crossbell duology which Falcom implicitly assumes the player is familiar with. So y'know, don't get frustrated if you're lost, it's just a really big interconnected series like that.

It did, yeah. Then it got a sequel and given all the teasing of who the likely protagonist group in Calvard is gonna be, the ending of the followup pretty much screams 'Jack and Halle will return in: The Calvard Arc'. xD Speaking of which, given the vibe I got from those novels, I really want that arc to have a 'Jazzpunk Noir' atmosphere to it.

Toval's first appearance was actually in the Ring of Judgment manga (released shortly before Zero no Kiseki and serving as a quasi-prequel) and gets referred back to by him on several occasions in the Cold Steel games and the CS2 drama cd. But yeah, like you said every novel series we've seen is either known to be significant or is almost certainly strongly significant and we just haven't gotten the payoff yet. Hello there Gambler Jack, I wonder if we'll be meeting you in Calvard... and while there's sometimes a big delay between novel and payoff, sometimes it happens really quickly like in the case of the CS4 novel. And it's not just the main novels that are potentially important either. @Briar King if you haven't done so already, you really want to go through the Erebonian Folklore texts. You might notice just how many things you've seen in CS1 are mentioned there.

Last I checked, the real world doesn't have a tripartite division of reality into three Realms so the way aging works on the physical level is kind of irrelevant.

Miles quite specifically notes that It Doesn't Work That Way. He ages and eventually he'll just keel over (because of his Spiritual age fhough he doesn't use rhat term) even if he's in otherwise excellent health. All methods of immortality we've seen in the Cosmere involve some sort of cheat that either stops your soul from realizing its age (F-Atium within limits, Fifth Heightening) or floods it with Investiture which is functionally eternal (Elantrians, Cognitive Shadows). Healing magics don't work that way.

If you just want the answer so you can move on:

Are you avoiding looking it up because you want to figure it out on your own, or because you're worried about spoiling something else by accident?