Djarskublar

Well, I don't think it would be powerful in the 'I own you forever' department. I think that it would only be possible for anywhere from a second or two, up to a couple minutes depending on the shadow attempting a possession, and the force of will and Investiture of the person being possessed. I bet a powerful shadow could possess a drab for a long, long while, but nobody could touch a Returned or an inquisitor. But even a second is enough to do serious damage. And imagine a savant capable of summoning several possessive shadows at once. A second is enough time to stab yourself or your buddy. It is enough time for a politician to flip off a crowd. Several seconds is enough to ask why someone is hitting themselves. As Forging proves, something doesn't have to be terribly powerful investiture wise to pull off fantastically powerful effects. Regardless of the exact mechanics of gold shadows, there will be some obscenely powerful application in the right hands. There is no way Brandon would write a totally useless power, and we Sharders can always come up with some combo or hack to make it ridiculous.

AFAIK there is nothing really said about the Oathpact other than that the Heralds are kinda its keepers. If there is some WoB about it that I simply don't know about, sorry. There isn't really much to go on here, so this is mostly baseless speculation, but I had such an interesting piece of inspiration, I couldn't help but share. Don't hurt me Spool ;). I was thinking about what the Oathpact could even be supposed to do, and why it would do it, and I had a flash of inspiration. I guessed that the Oathpact has something major to do with why Odium and Honor are fighting. That is an excellent guess. I see no reason that the Oathpact wouldn't be related to the fight with Odium. So then the idea was to think what purpose it could hold considering that it appears to bind Odium and Honor in some manner (I won't say anything about whether Cultivation is involved, there is no real evidence either way). I was thinking about binding Odium, and it hit me: the Oathpact is Honor's version of Ruin's prison. Because there are 'human' agents involved in maintaining it, and since it is less binding than Ruin's prison, Honor didn't have to do as much for it, and he also made it easier to make by making it so there are some victory conditions. So now I think I need to delineate what all these do. The human agents are obviously the Heralds. There is something seriously funky with them. They get resurrected every time they die in a desolation, and that seems really odd. That I know of, there are very few people in the Cosmere that get revived like that. Returned, one person from a certain metals planet, and the Heralds. That's it. Even more strange, it has happened more than once. They also appear to get revived in the same state they were in mentally/spiritually as before they died. My guess is that the Heralds are the equivalent to the Well. If you do the right thing with the Well's power, Ruin is released. If the Heralds do something, Odium is released from his bond. What that something is, is abandoning the Oathpact. The Heralds were never intended to be able to hold forever, but I guess that Honor decided that humans might be able to do some stuff in the meantime to finally be able to beat Odium. The next thing is that the prison is less binding than Ruin's. Odium can still do lots of stuff, this prison more just restricts his movements to the Greater Roshar system. He can still influence other places, but he can't go there to make it a more powerful influence. It effectively forced Odium to Invest, which is a great boon to the Cosmere (I think the bane to go with it is obvious here), since not Investing appears to be part of why Odium has done so well so far. I think there is also one more thing making it so that Honor didn't have to give up as much to be able to build this prison. There is another escape route besides just breaking all the Heralds from the will to keep up the Oathpact. If Odium manages to totally desolate the planet, he wins. The Oathpact is then destroyed and he is free to go. Because the prison is so loose compared to what Ruin's prison was, it didn't require as much from Honor to build, so he can still act effectively. I have seen a lot of speculation and sorta headcanon on what the Oathpact is, but this explains it pretty well for my taste. Anyone have any concrete proof this isn't the case? I would love to see what you all think. I have to go to work soon, so I can't really provide relevant quotes for what Odiums exact restrictions appear to be.

I just really want something to go down in the romance department with Eshonai. I think that Adolin is the best candidate for that to happen, so i have no real objection to Kaladin/Shallan. On the other hand, Eshonai/(Rock or Lopen) would also be really weird yet interesting to read.

Hmmm. Looking at what you said again, I think I see what you are saying, and yes, the amount you can store does work that way. If you are old, you can't store as much age, if you are well trained in strength, you can store more. If you are ill, you can't store health much at all. So both things apply. Taps are additive, but how much you can store is based on your state of being. I recommend searching the forum for a thread that deals with this more specifically to get some other perspectives on it, so that you see different wordings.

I can't find the relevant WoB right now, but Manifestation of Investiture is the canon term for a magic system that is caused by a Shard or Shards Investing in a planet. Of the system is natural to a planet itself, it doesn't count. I don't recall whether magic Mr A deliberately designed qualifies, but I don't believe so. It only applies to Shardic magic. I don't know if there is a canon term for natural magic. (btw, the wierd thing is calling magic natural XD)

At this point, I'm not sure what you mean by multiplicative. I feel like I've covered the normal definition for it fairly well, so I think you must think it is something really funky. Are you saying you make yourself 1000 times slower and it fills really fast, then you can tap and make yourself 500 times faster for half the time? That is definitely not how it works. Brandon directly refutes that in the one WoB. With almost that exact example. You would perceive it as 1000 times slower, but you are really doing a 99.9% store, so if you did that for an hour, you might get one half second of 500 times speed. At best. Probably less since you would actually experience 250 seconds there. Maybe more like 100th of a second of real time. What Peter is talking about may be more about how the power loss experienced in a compressed tap gets multiplicatively larger the more you compress things. The amount of time you actually get vs your prediction from pure math is something similar to a 1/x graph, but more complex.

Except... Leras still held Preservation. At this point it is just quibbling over what ascension is. Is it just being on the same investiture playing field as Shards? Or is it becoming the actual Vessel of a Shard? I say the latter, and you are free to disagree. Ascention was merely a convenient word for Brandon then. It's easier than saying, 'when he grabbed the power of the Well and... etc.'

Ugh this is what I meant by hashing this out. I have to waste a few posts explaining that I do understand. I believe there is a WoB that Hemalurgy is deadly because the shock of losing part of your spiritweb kills you, even if just the stab wound isn't fatal. Hemalurgy always kills, unless you do something to prevent it from doing so, such as tapping a LOT of gold as you get spiked. It is like saying using Allomancy always requires using metals. It does... unless you are hacking it and using the mists, or Stormlight etc. It isn't going to suddenly accept certain flavors of cheese as a focus (even though that would be awesome). I feel like you are putting words in my mouth a bit here. Spiking damages spiritwebs, both yours and the person you spiked, and the piece you ripped off. Hence I said it damages spiritwebs. There are other indirect mental side effects of spiritweb damage that stem from this. The damage to your web can also make it so you are no longer a true human, you are a Hemalurgic construct. Also, just swinging the hammer to do this, even if you don't end up spiked, still seriously increases your Connection to ruin. Do I need to continue to demonstrate my knowledge? I should really just start saying usually kills the first time, then I wouldn't get nitpicked at so badly.... *sighs in regret* oh well.

Ehhh... You haven't technically ascended here. You have the expanded conscious, and lotsa power, but the power isn't flowing back to you, and you don't keep the power you have. You are just grabbing a significant portion of the Shard's power, not the Shard itself. Because of the sheer power you are holding, you get the side effects to your conscious.

Yeah multipliers like 1/5. We are talking ratios and percents, not multipliers like you are talking about. You must be misreading the wax quote. The TLR thing is kinda misleading. He was saying he needs multiplicatively (pretend for a minute he said exponents) more stored age to keep himself young. This means TLR has to compound more and more age to keep himself young as time goes on. The fact that the feruchemy is additive, while TLR's needs are multiplicative means there is a hard upper bound to how long he can live. Eventually he would spend literally all day compounding just to stay alive. Then that wouldn't be enough and he would die. That's what that quote is talking about. I refer you to the first quote in your previous post. It says 50% strength for one hour is 150% str for one hour. There you have it. I know what I'm talking about. I had the same understanding struggle you are, and eventually worked through it in my brain. You just must be misreading things, so it's perceived contradiction is adding to your confusion.

Yeah it matters. Theories come from this, so it is a technicality that matters in some rare cases. Not in this one, but correcting misinformation on the forum is always good. Yeah Hemalurgy doesn't have to kill, but we have never seen it not kill. Of course Ruin influences it. That is why there is power loss in the spike compared to the person you spiked. I didn't say it didn't. I feel like I hash this out every time I mention this... Oh well I guess I should stop saying kill...

You may not fully understand how much investiture a shard represents. Think about Nalthis. Every person there has a Breath, and some (Returned) have really big Breaths worth around 2000 normal ones a piece. All that investiture is a drop in the bucket to what Endowment has. Getting the investiture of 16 systems would be roughly equivalent to getting 16-20 Breaths. You would be incredibly powerful, but not terribly highly invested. Susebron has tens of thousands of breaths and still has nothing on Endowment.

Those aren't contradictory. The first one is correct. The second one makes sense once you understand the person's question is flawed. You don't get 5 times slower, you get 80% slower. And while you perceive it as 5 (20/100 or 1/5 left) times slower, if you jack it up to 100 times slower, you are really only storing 99% (1/100 left), so only 19% difference in power storage. That is what the second one is explaining. That help? Edit: oh and you must have that Wax quote off. 50% off for an hour is +50% for an hour. And also, just seeing your edit now. It didn't load that for the previous post, so yeah. By the way, it is truly end neutral up to where you hit around a 200% tap. You don't get 20% stronger for 6 hours with a 100% one hour store. It's 20% for 5 hours like the math predicts. The power loss from compressing your tap isn't end negative. The tap is spending some energy to tap that high. It strains you a lot, so some energy is spent countering the strain. It's like bending a metal bar, sorta. If you bend it a little, it's just how far do you move the bar. If you try moving it a lot, you are also expending effort counteracting how springy the bar is. You are still using the same amount of energy, it just doesn't all go into moving the bar.

Your correction here is correct, but you have one thing backwards that doesn't affect your correction. The focus of a planet is what matters. Every Shardworld has one, and that determines the base of every magic system that Manifests there. The Shard's intent is what then adds flavor, as you call it. On Scadrial, the focus is metal, so every magic there has to do with metal. Then the intent of the relevant shards adds flavor. For Allomancy, it preserves your strength by tapping Preservation. Hemalurgy kills and damages spiritwebs with metal. Feruchemy is the balance mixture of the two, and stores things end-neutrally in metal. So yeah you are right, but you have the order in which those effects are applied backwards.

I got you guys. Here's the deal, say you have a feruchemical ability that you can store 100% of. You store it for an hour. Now you tap it over an hour and have 200% for that hour. Here's where ratios come in. Say you want 300%, well you might think that since you are adding 200%, you would get a half hour of tap time. This isn't quite the case. You would get that time, but in reality, once you start pushing a tap past 200ish, you lose power. You are spending some of the power just to be able to push that high. So instead you get 25 minutes of 300%. There is some power loss. Now say you want 500%. You are adding 400% to your standard ability, so that would be 1/4 of the stored time, or 15 minutes. Now you are compressing it even further, though, so in reality you get maybe 8-10 minutes. Capiche? Now does my bit about losing time make sense? You lose some of the stored time if you compress it into a big burst of speed. Hence you actually age slower. It gets more complex once you consider only storing at, say, 60%. It's easier to get if you convert that to 100% hours equivalent, then do some more math. And that is the totality of feruchemy.

Probably just fluids. It would make a good waste storage tank, so to speak.

I wonder if they could possess/control lifeless? As we saw in BoM, if your iron/steel sight gets good enough, you can see the investiture in all things. I've thought emotional allomancy is underrated anyway. The applications of you could posses someone are varied and powerful. Posses a politician to make them look stupid. Momentarily posses an enemy so they are easier to shoot. Posses your friends and have them hit themselves. Then say 'why are you hitting yourself?' over and over.

Just sign up where linked in the OP

If you're a Radiant my understanding is that you can see spren even if they don't want to be seen. This way, it will be easier for Radiants to discover proto-Radiants. Dunno for certain on all that though.

What about Adolin/Jasnah just to get really creepy. Incest! Ewww! But seriously, I want Kaladin/Shallan and Adolin/Eshonai to be things. Or Rock/Eshonai. Or Lopen/Eshonai. So much hilarious potential with Eshonai's love interests.

Herald of luck is obvious. Someone has to teach the soldiers 'proper' gambling practices! They aren't real soldiers until they know how to gamble. On a more serious note, yeah I'm stumped on him too, maybe he just kinda helps where needed? The odd job guy of the bunch?

Wow... The moons, the Highstorms, and maybe a magnetic core that may also be liquid. This place has so many powerful factors going into its weather. If they have wonky things going on with their axis, I would never want to be an astronomer there. Star charting would be a nightmare. (teehee) If those factors aligned partially in a drawn out way, I could easily see a four month winter. Again, any idea if the core is liquid and doing wierd stuff?

Ehhh... He doesn't use it enough. It would age him a couple minutes when everyone else ages a few seconds. That is per use, but he doesn't use it that frequently, or in tiny bursts that make no difference. He may over the course of his life so far have aged a day or two extra at the outside. Bendalloy is expensive after all! He didn't have access to it easily a lot of the time either.

If anything, without compounding you would age slower. You store a bunch of time, and likely tap it in a burst that would 'destroy' some of that time.

Edit: ugghh spoiler tags. Most of the post ended up in that bottom spoiler. I swear I know how this works guys... I'm not even sure where I want to begin with responding to this... Let's start out talking about spiritwebs. Based off this and your posts over in the Gold Savant thread, I get the feeling you don't fully understand this bit. sDNA isn't really 'sDNA', it's just a good metaphor for it. What it really is, is the sum total of yourself and your experiences. You get small changes to your web with every choice you make, slowly but surely changing who you are. You are born with a set of sDNA based on your heritage, and what you do with it is your choice. Your choices change your Connections to other people, places, and intents. If you go around destroying things, you will gain a Connection to Ruin in your spiritweb, for example. This is why we call it a spiritweb, it is a web of Connections between you and everything else. Location is irrelevant to the spiritual realm. Savantism is where you damage your Connections via magic enough that you let in more Investiture through the cracks in your Investiture. There is no need for you to be in a specific location to rewrite your spiritweb. Your premise that he has to go back to Sel is ludicrous, so ludicrous, in fact, that I forgot you even said it. It simply doesn't factor in, so I didn't even think about it. He is using Preservation's power to rewrite himself anyway. If he was attempting it with the Dor, he would need to be on Sel if he didn't have a hack. I have a mini theory about that, and I think it is relevant, so here it is: the reason Sel's magic is location based isn't because of Dominion or Devotion (though they may influence it), but because the Dor is trapped in the CR where location does matter. The location being based off of Dominion in particular didn't make sense because it is more about Hierarchy than control of land, as shown by the Fjordell Empire having a strict caste system. I understand that symbology is the focus for Sel, so it must be a Shardic reason for things being so location oriented, and this explains it pretty nicely. I will probably post about this shortly since it makes sense, and there is some evidence for it.