Observer

As somebody who has a really poor grasp of politics in general, can somebody explain to me the appeal of Sanders? (Ignoring how close his name sounds to Sanderson, which is obviously an amazing reason that needs no explanation) For reference, literally all I know about Sanders is that he's fairly liberal, and apparently an open socialist. That's about it. *Should really pay more attention to this stuff*

Also, I'm fairly sure that if you die your breath is actually returned to the planet/Endowment. I doubt it's lost forever.

Alright, this is the last I'm going to say on the subject because I really do not want to get into WWII things. Nazi tests advanced science by a decent amount, because they didn't have any moral qualms about figuring out exactly what amount of force would break certain parts of a body, what it takes to kill a given person, and even a handful of things that had nothing to do with killing test subjects. Pilot stress limits, saving people from freezing to death and lifejacket design were, iirc, influenced by Nazi science. A lot this can be extremely useful, even if most of their "science" was probably just creative sadism. Furthermore they were far from incompetent. While they certainly had their share of really dumb moves, basically every nation can say the same. You don't exactly get in a position to literally take over the world by being stupid. /rant It's totally possible force a Steelrunner to do something. No matter how fast you move, your physical body won't do much against hard materials. You'll just shatter your skeleton trying to go mach speed at bricks. As long as they don't leave your guards where they can be attacked during metalmind hours, there shouldn't be any problems. If they get uncooperative you can just poison their air supply, dozens of toxins to pick from. Sure it'd take some work to test this stuff, but the same holds true for almost any of the metallic arts.

What was the spoiler? We've known metal is Invested since Hero of Ages, and we know metal glows in the Cognitive because Vin saw it as such while holding Preservation. Am I missing something? Also, very interesting idea. But somehow I don't think Steel/Iron would work on, say, gemstones on Roshar or Color on Nalthis. But I do agree, only being able to push on metal is fishy.

They actually did stop the cycle, very effectively. And by that I mean after this next, last iteration, there won't be a world left to continue the cycle on.

I always assumed it was called the Final Desolation because the Heralds aren't going back, meaning this one won't stop when things get dicey. Either Odium is defeated or Roshar is destroyed, no more Honor with his stalling and tricks.

I'm not saying it's a good thing at all. i'm just wondering how long it will take before somebody starts forcing Steelrunners to move at increasingly quick speeds for the purposes of learning where the lethal limit it. It's horrible, but barring Scadrial figuring out Hemalurgy or a trick with the medallions so you can both not die and find where you would, it would probably be the only way. But I really don't want to talk about WWII here so I'll drop any further thoughts I have on the topic.

And if you get it wrong, that's a one in a billion combination dead with no replacement forthcoming. Wonder how long it takes before you get WWII-esque forced tests to determine once and for all the exact limits.

We were discussing over on the thread about why Steel is so hard to store that the perception boost may not be 1:1. You might double your speed but only get 150% of your original thought processing, and the rest of it is enhanced reflexes, also not 1:1. This means that if there is a hard limit on how fast a non-Kandra, non-Bloodmaker can move with Steel, an exponential decrease in processing to speed, all added onto the absolute nightmare that is storing Steel, a normal Steelrunner may be closer to Awesome, Yet Impractical. As for compounders, they'd still be broken as usual (Think heat compounding and health compounding, it's broken in general), but you'd have a hard limit on how fast you could run without dying, a hard time keeping up with yourself provided perception didn't scale 1:1 and I see no reason why it would, and while I'm listing things at that speed you might actually have difficultly performing more than basic tasks. Example: If you move at mach speed, I'm fairly sure punching somebody's face is going to do more damage to your fist than it will to their face, given your hand is using tons of kinetic energy to move forward into something that is physically incapable of getting out of the way fast enough. You can't move it and you can't go through it, so all that energy will probably just shatter your hand. Attempting to fire a gun while moving that quickly will break the gun, forcing you to slow down to fire. Attempting to fire a gun at all probably means you need to stop moving to aim, which means that even if it's for a brief moment in real time, you're still not moving, and you probably also slowed down so you could fire the gun properly, creating a wonderful opening to get shot at. Throw in the fact that you would have difficultly using melee weapons without slowing down (because they don't get durability to go with the swing-speed and your arms sure don't get durability either, Steelrunning could turn out as just being Feruchemy's version of Bendalloy, with its own set of drawbacks and benefits.

While it is unlikely Nalan will try to kill any more Radiants now that the Desolation he killed them to delay has come, I suppose he is insane enough to keep it up. The aim of the Skybreakers was to police the KR, so he might try to deliver some good old fashioned justice given the chance. Of course, a lot of that rides on whether or not he finds out about her crimes, whether or not he can find a way to charge her with them, and whether or not he thinks he has any real shot at killing her. Right now he seems busy with, at minimum, setting up Szeth to fight the Shin.

What's more awesome than how broken The Lord Ruler was? A Coinshot setting himself on fire due to air friction. A Coinshot launching himself into spaaaaaace. A Coinshot launching so hard that when he dies his Cognitive Aspect lands in Nalthis. A Coinshot landing on Endowment in the middle of a Returning offer Basically there is nothing about this that isn't awesome and if they put me in charge of Scadrial I would regularly launch people at other planets as my method of first contact.

I'm well aware, I was joking. To continue said joke, Do we by any chance know if (SH Spoilers)

A circle of Nicrobursts being given a constant stream of Nicrosil, boosting each other in a massive circuit. One Coinshot in the middle, to take the end result. They lay their hands on his shoulders. The moment of truth. The process of becoming a savant means slowly but surely wearing troughs into your soul as you use magic over and over, much like a stream wears away stone as it passes. That perfectly and exactly describes what does not happen here. Instead of the slow erosion of a stream, this is a water drill carving trenches into stone. The Coinshot attains something a step beyond savantism and instantly dies in a massive wave of steel, tearing the Nicrobursts apart with their own blood iron and cracking the earth nearby straight down to bedrock. Scardian scientists abandon the project, but unanimously agree that it was "awesome"

Ah, yes. My need to diversify my speech often leads to incorrectly using phrases like that, apologies. I believe (aw man here comes another SH spoiler tag, be usin' this stuff up faster than Atium) If Odium were ever in a position to fight Ruin in this scenario, it would be because Ruin succeeded on Scadrial and had reclaimed so much Investure from the planet that it could only be measured using a horrifying amalgamation of the metric system and human feces. He would probably get the Atium as well if we're assuming a full success. Under those circumstances, Ruin would be back to his full power, or near as he could get. If he was thinking far ahead, and he probably would, he'd also be bringing an army of Inquisitors and Koloss, since he proved that having autonomous agents is one of the best ways to get things done in Shard to Shard combat. In this regard, I think Ruin would win if the goal of the fight was nothing more than destroying the opponent. Ruin has agents to counter any that Odium might have, and to hate something is not quite the same as to destroy it.

It's proven wrong in BOTH contexts as it happens, which just makes it all the more perfect. And spoilery. So....do I win?

The point of this cycle is that a.) Nobody on Roshar is actually capable of beating Odium one on one b.) Odium has proven on four occasions that he is quite capable and willing to kill every Shard in the Cosmere c.) Odium can be locked down to one planet that he can never quite destroy, and all it takes is a long cycle of people dying For as long as the Heralds kept the cycle going, Odium would be trapped on Roshar, unable to destroy it or anything else. Of course, now it's been a measly 4.5K years with the breaking of the Oathpact, and if I had to guess, now that the trick with Taln is over there is no longer any way to keep the cycle going. I assume the deal was for all 10 heralds to go up, and as long as they did the break/return cycle, Odium would stick to it. Last time they only sent Taln. This bought them a ton of time, but now I don't think they could go back to Braize and continue the cycle even if they wanted to, since they broke the terms of the agreement. This is now well and truly the end. Either Odium is defeated here, or he will finally be able to leave the Roshar system and move on to the Cosmere.

IIRC Cosmere Theories is usually the "anything goes" section. In the case of SH and BoM though, I think we're still supposed to use spoiler tags for now. I can't be sure though. I don't know where this section's spoiler policy is kept. Edit: Make of this what you will

Alright. So what we know is that (WOK Spoiler) and that (Elantris/WoK Spoiler) and that on top of all that (Chicago signing speculation spoiler) which is really impressive all things considered. But given that Ruin is, you know, the embodiment of making things die and wither away in the most efficient way possible, it seems like he'd have a really good chance to winning against Odium if it came down to nothing but a pushing match. The issue of whether or not (Secret History Spoilers) Of course, we really shouldn't forget that (Hero of Ages Spoilers) From this I'd assume even a living embodiment of hatred would still lose if it came to a raw Investure vs Investure battle, just thanks to the absurd power of intent. But this is Rayse we're talking about and it's not like (Common Cosmere Knowledge Spoiler) without being clever. Furthermore, since we know from secret history that This implies that Rayse had a plan and a method for killing other Shards and he probably wasn't just making it up as he went along. Given how everybody treats Ruin destroying Scadrial as a foregone conclusion, it's safe to say Odium had a plan for dealing with him in the event that he got loose. Knowing how absurdly unlikely it seemed that Preservation would win, there's no way Rayse took the thousands of years he had to plan and just totally overlooked Ruin. This implies either waiting for Ruin to Invest himself someplace to destroy it before attacking, waiting for Ruin to weaken himself killing everything, waiting for Ruin to do his job for him in destroying everything and then killing him, or maybe he just has some really awesome trick that lets him kill Shards without too much personal danger. It's also possible that (Bands of Mourning Spoiler) One way or another, this may not even be relevant at all, because Odium isn't even in position to mess with the rest of the Cosmere anyway so far as we know. This leaves Ruin's most likely enemies as being one of the other five-odd shards we haven't seen yet, the aforementioned BoM spoiler, or one or all of the many worldhopping organizations we've seen around. We have no idea what circumstances allowed (Secret History Spoilers) All in all though, the buildup to Ruin's escape was so long, taking up thousands of years, that it's unlikely the various factions of the cosmere had failed to prepare for it. Even if the moment of truth kept coming every thousand years and then getting pushed off, they had to know Scadrial was falling apart at the seams. So if I had to throw in a guess, I'd says that Ruin would have been met with lots of things to destroy, lots of success in destroying them, followed by getting himself destroyed because (Fate series/Cosmere Similarity Spoiler) and they don't really like it when that happens. (Okay I'm going to stop now)

It does make me wonder Rayse was planning to do about Ruin if he succeeded. Because it feels like Ruin would win in a knock down drag out fight with Odium, just from comparing their intents.

I'm with Voidus on that one, at the very least. It's already completely possible

Somehow I don't think turning the parts of your spiritual aspect responsible for magic into a mass of scar tissue will do happy things to you. Best case scenario it's like cutting your liver in half and waiting for it to heal, repeatedly. And that's been demonstrated to be a very interesting bit of biology there.

When Wax wants to be lighter he has to store weight. It's not possible afaik to tap "lightweightedness". And it isn't possible to "Tap slowness". We know that it isn't just a matter of perception because you can actually fill up a metalmind with an attribute. Unless we're saying that all storing is, in fact, just tapping the opposite, which makes no sense because that would mean all metal was just naturally filled with a given attribute. That, and you could do that, people would just store away weakness in metalminds to become stupidly strong without ever bothering to do it the normal way. It cheats the main drawback of Feruchemy. I have no idea if that's what you were talking about :/

Somebody needs to ask Brandon if you have to move to store speed. It would answer a lot of questions about how it works. (Putting money on the table he's going to take time in TLM to demonstrate why Steelrunners aren't ruling the world. It wouldn't be that hard to make it Awesome Yet Impractical.)

It's quite possible that after 4.5K years all the original surgebinders in Nalan's Skybreaker team have died, and their powers went with them. Keep in mind, no surgebinders we know of have been born for thousands of years up to this point. The spren pulled out and refused to risk themselves again. Could be that Nalan has been making do with what he has, unable to actually utilize any surgebinders up until now.