Returned

I'm not sure I'm sold on Connection as the lowest-level piece of Investiture, but it does seem more foundational than other aspects. Like, being an Allomancer is about your Connection to Preservation, right? Burning Lerasium greatly increases that Connection, but the power you gain by doing so is still filtered through Allomancy and so you can only get the effects Allomancy offers in the way that it offers them (burning specific metals to produce specific effects). But if you could, generically, Connect to other Shards you should be able to access their powers as well. If you could manipulate Connections between other people and/or places you could probably do things that otherwise seem impossible now. I'm thinking of Surgebinders being unable to leave Roshar being related to Connection to that planet in some way, and the migration from Ashyn as an example of "cheating" that limitation by changing the population's connection from the former to the latter. We have a fair number of examples, especially in WoBs, that suggest that a lot can be done with Cosmere magic that depends on the amount of power you can draw, with enough power compensating for less-than-ideal mechanisms for doing things. If F-duralumin could be used to increase Connection to a Shard, maybe more stuff becomes possible. I'd bet that current knowledge of F-duralumin limits what can be done, but that clever applications, coupled with more raw Investiture, will show it to be nearly as powerful and versatile as we imagine F-nicrosil to be. The Feruchemist just has to be sufficiently knowledgable and precise, and I'd imagine there are a lot of connections that would need to be finessed to get a useful, dramatic result.

I think that they're all kind of dumb, because they remind me of when authors try to create slang to make their settings distinctive but end up using 1:1 word substitutions and mimicking slang patterns that happened to exist when they were paying attention. A non-Sanderson example that stuck out for me was a character calling someone she thought was cool "the slam" in a Brent Weeks book: it's so obviously the same as "the bomb" as to not seem creative or original at all, but even "the bomb" was fairly dated by the time that book was published; lazy and pointless, given that all of the characters were already speaking contemporary American English anyways. "Deevy" might be a similar Sanderson example. It's not that the real slang isn't dumb, too, but at least it exists organically-- it became popular because enough people liked something about it. I think that the Misting/Ferring names are intended to sound aesthetically interesting and still be related to the powers they describe, but it's still arbitrary and doesn't fit with the settings and characters' speaking patterns. It's about filling out a list of names which must exist to describe each category that we know exists, but who in the Mistborn setting would even know what a Spinner is, let alone pick the definitive name for them? (I know, it's Khriss, but still). I can't help but get a real "this paper is due tomorrow and I haven't even picked a topic" vibe for some of them. It has to be something, and absent sudden inspiration it's probably going to end up being good enough at best. At least for a few out of thirty two. They all seem overwrought to me, but back in the old days when there were only eight types of Misting to know they didn't feel so... forced. At least "coinshot" described something characters actually did on Scadrial.

She also soulcast her illusory fighters to have some degree of substance in the battle at the end of Oathbringer. At least potentially, if I remember correctly it was guessed at as a possibility but not explicitly confirmed, nor was the feat repeated.

My major piece of evidence in this regard is Sanderson's comment that Sazed isn't managing holding both Shards very well, coupled with the obviously non-harmonious state of Scadrial. A couple of characters specifically mention Harmony's dual nature by one component or the other (TenSoon and Wax at minimum both refer to Wax as Harmony's Ruin, though how knowledgeable they are on the topic isn't clear). I've got a pet theory on the development of Scadrial through future books that relies on Sazed trying to suppress Ruin more than he can manage, with the excess seeping out into the world to various effects. Not that that's evidence of anything! We might still learn new things about Autonomy's actions on Scadrial, but as above I don't entertain the idea that she was invovled with Tan any more. Some pieces fit really well, most notably the similarity to Paalm, but now that we know what Autonomy's plans were I can't think of a way that Tan would have been involved for any reason. And we'd also have to explain why no one bothered to recover Tan's Trellium spike (unless perhaps it was Paalm, immediately after Wax shot him?), or why it wasn't mentioned at all in BoM or LM. I suppose Harmony could have noted the sorts of things Tan was doing and formed his own plan around them, bending Autonomy's efforts to his own purposes. I feel that I can't totally rule out that Autonomy was influencing Tan but it's too thin a reed for me to support. At least, not when there are other explanations that are at least as plausible and don't require so many assumptions.

"Controlled or influenced" is pretty broad, and the whole tableau seems unreasonable with only Lessie being controlled. We do have some suspiciously cryptic utterances from Tan: Death is clear enough, with the "nails in his eyes comment", and the Survivor is also pretty clear (even if it's not clear how or why Kelsier would interact with Tan or tell him anything about Harmony's modes of action). But to whom is Tan referring when he says "God"? Plenty of characters refer to Harmony that way, but what interaction with Harmony would lead Tan to his conclusion that "someone else moves us"? Before Lost Metal I'd thought that perhaps Tan was influenced by Trell one way or another, not unlike Paalm. The idea was based on how similar Tan's rantings were to Paalm's singular focus on freeing Scadrial from Harmony's manipulations. I no longer think that that makes sense. We saw too much of what Autonomy was up to and how she worked for Tan's scheme (or even involvement in events) to fit. The similarity of Tan's observation to Paalm's obsession does remain troubling, though. It's so specific and technically accurate (if biased to a specific perspective), and Tan was already on the game board long before Wax and Lessie's assault on his hideout. Perhaps it was Harmony's ruinous side that interacted with Tan in some way short of spike-imposed control? I can't shake that the similarity means something, but the WoB stating that Harmony wasn't controlling Tan rules out so many options. But we know that what happened with Lessie was intended by Harmony by her own testimony, testimony which Harmony did not contradict or deny (and tacitly confirmed, by my reading as I recall it). So random chance doesn't really fit, nor does any other "just so" story that doesn't involve divine intervention or Lessie herself making the movement. Lessie communicated with Wax for the timing of the shot via blinks and intended to be shot. I don't see how Wax would be able to tell the difference between Lessie being yanked by Tan versus her lunging just slightly to the side, especially when he wouldn't imagine that she would intentionally move into the path of the bullet. But at least she could have done it. The only other plausible explanation I can think of relies on Harmony making use of Fortune to see a sequence of events leading to the shot striking Lessie and then choosing to make that sequence happen. We've seen other characters do things like that, most notably Preservation, so I think it's a reasonable (if unsatisfying) explanation that doesn't rely on explicit control of Tan or Lessie maneuvering to be struck by the bullet.

I agree with Treamayne. I picked "Influenced by Harmony" from the poll choices as it's the closest one that fits what we know.

I want it to end cleanly, that's all. Given its scope and the way projects/releases have been approached I fear there is a real danger of the series being overstuffed one way or another, like a TV show that started out great but prefers running for as many seasons as possible rather than telling a tight story. I don't think there is much risk that Sanderson will totally lose the thread or write pure filler but I could see the metaplot getting so complex that either the writing suffers just to explain it. As for a plot conclusion, I have no idea! There is so much yet unwritten that if I tried to choose an ending it would probably end up being invalidated by the next ten books anyways, so I'm trying to not get too attached to any predictions right now.

Interesting! That might be exactly what he's after. Or maybe a variation on the same idea, like a way to exist primarily in the physical realm rather than being fundamentally of the cognitive, which seems to be the Heralds' current situation as cognitive shadows. I'm still unsure, just because we know so little about Ishar, his condition, and his mind. His goals and actions may not even be coherent. I don't have any textual backup for it, but my intuition is that Ishar is looking for something bigger... something beyond the Rosharan conflict. Pulling things from other realms into the physical is a big deal and only happens in limited ways. Being able to do that at his own discretion would be an enormous deal, nearly Shard-level in implications and Cosmere-wide.

I'm late to the thread, but I also think Kelsier's sacrifice in Final Empire has a lot of thematic elements driving it. Even with his adaptability, determination, daring, and power, Kelsier's greatest strength was really his charisma. He could inspire others to do things for grand reasons, but ultimately that was a result of personal connections he managed and it led to others sacrificing themselves for his causes. Being killed, defiantly, by the Lord Ruler inverted that: a final, powerful application of his charisma by way of his own sacrifice which then inspired others he never met to actively participate in their own cause. I don't think that replaces anything other posters have said or anything that is in the text (plots and narratives should happen on the page), but is an angle on the event that I've been thinking about.

You'll always be a torturer of Heralds to me, @Argenti.

We don't know enough about the underlying mechanisms for how Metallic Arts are inherited to assess how successful a matchmaking and breeding scheme might be. It's not impossible that it could work. What little evidence we have suggests that it would not work very well, though. We don't have any evidence suggesting that two Allomancer or Feruchemist parents are (at this point) more likely to produce an Allomancer or Feruchemist child than one parent with a normal Scadrian, which is one of they key concepts behind such a scheme. And a Mistborn doesn't seem to be any more likely to produce another Mistborn than a Misting, while a Misting obviously can produce a Mistborn. We have excellent evidence for general heritability of Feruchemy but the WoBs regarding the dilution of that trait seem to relate to interaction with Allomancy, not necessarily mixing with non-Terris people. If that's true then the change might not be recoverable through matchmaking alone. The nobility, pre-Catacendre, did at least some matchmaking along Allomantic lines but the population still lost Allomantic strength pretty quickly over a thousand years. Skaa apparently didn't (don't?) have the ability to maintain Allomantic lines at all, absolutely requiring a noble ancestor within five generations to yield an Allomancer (The Final Empire, p. 292). The only people for whom we even know that modern Allomancy (what we see after Lerasium was given by Rashek) is consistently heritable are nobles, and we know that Rashek changed them in some way from what they were before. It's possible that the heritability is more due to those changes than the Lerasium, if not the Allomantic strength. At this point in Scadrial's history noble ancestry might be pretty well distributed through the overall population, but how much noble background does someone need, and could that background be reconstituted into a stronger trait? Maybe. But it's not a sure thing. Overall, the evidence we have suggests that Allomantic strength and heritability come from two angles: being descended from those Rashek transformed into nobles, and being descended from people that burned Lerasium to become Mistborn. The latter piece seems to dilute with each generation, and even at its strongest point (the immediate descendants of the original Lerasium-burners) we don't have any reason to believe that all of the next generation were Allomancers, while we do have good evidence that each generation was weaker (Allomantically) than those that preceded them. We don't know how noble lineage affects things other than that it seems to matter a lot, somehow. Allomantic strength seems like it has some relationship to matchmaking, but it also seems like the main effect of that is to slow the degradation, not to reverse it. The changes in expressed Feruchemy over time don't have those same considerations and so a matchmaking scheme might be more effective there, but it's notable that we don't have any evidence that the current Terris efforts have been at all effective in that regard. So, from what we know now, the idea of a matchmaking program to strengthen Metallic Arts powers across generations is a maybe, at best. But medallion technology (never mind raw Hemalurgy) is so much more reliable, effective, fast, and scalable that I think it would be hard to get enough people on board with a matchmaking program to even make the effort. Regardless, there is clearly more to this for both Allomancy and Feruchemy than simple heritability and we don't have enough reliable information to make very confident guesses. Yes, I think so. Mistborns' Allomantic strength weakens over generations just like Mistings' do, and Mistborn don't appear more likely to produce Mistborn than Mistings or vice-versa. And neither is all that likely to produce an Allomancer at all. But Allomantic potential does seem to be preserved, in at least some cases. Kelsier notes this when he is describing Vin's father, though how precise his knowledge is is unclear. But it seems like the difference is in potential strength of an Allomancer child, should one be born, and not necessarily the likelihood of such a child being born. "Seems" being an important word there-- we have very little reliable information from which we can develop guesses.

I de-upvoted one, but it seems that wasn't enough.

How about this one: any small device which requires some electricity but not a whole lot at once is built with as little metal as possible, and/or the functional components are surrounded by an aluminum case (making them Allomantically undetectable and uninfluenceable). There is then a small cartridge which can be slid into the device, and the cartridge contains a reciprocating metal element which can be pushed/pulled within a track (probably against a spring) or which is mounted on a wheel and so it can be spun. Either way, the cartridge's metal element is designed on the same principles as a wireless charging mechanism and the motion of the metal element generates electricity. The interior of the main device is designed such that the cartridge, when inserted, either transfers power to the aluminum-encased components (perhaps via magnets) or directly conducts power through aluminum channels. The Allomancer can, at need, power the device directly or potentially charge a small power storage system in it (like a big capacitor or a more complex rechargeable battery-like structure) by Pushing and/or Pulling on the metal element in the cartridge. What the devices do obviously will matter, but I could imagine a small noise-generating machine (low-frequency pulses, maybe able to distract Seekers?), lights, a radio transmitter, or lots of other small-draw equipment. It's probably easier just to carry standardized batteries in an aluminum case and power things that way, but the idea of converting Allomantic power into electricity on demand seems like something that would have some valuable applications to an infiltrator, spy, or assassin.

Really interesting line of thinking! I'm not sure of all of the details, but my thoughts are: Soulcasting doesn't appear to preserve the details of something's original material, aside from physical shape. As an example, when Jasnah transformed a human into smoke or crystal they weren't living smoke or living crystal (as far as we know, at least). They became what the were cast into, and that happened to be unliving. I'm sure that others can post corrections for me, but Soulcasting seems to actually convert one thing into another and forsake its original properties (again, except for shape in some cases). If that's accurate then a corpse Soulcast into some non-flesh material won't be a corpse any more, so the normal Lifeless elements seem like they wouldn't apply. Or at least wouldn't necessarily. Soulcasting an object which could easily be made to resemble a humanoid body should make it easier to Awaken afterwards, even if transformed into a harder-to-Awaken substance. It's easier to make a wax figure in a human shape and cast it to tungsten than it is to carve or mold tungsten. So in that sense it should be easier than Awakening a non-human-shaped piece of the same material, but I think that the difficulties with Awakening metal would overwhelm that. Think, but don't really know. I could easily be mistaken but I think that Soulcasting something which has been Awakened has a real chance of ending its Awakened status. We don't have any examples I can think of to compare with though. It just seems like too much of a cheat to Awaken something and then supercharge it by transforming it into a material which could never have been Awakened with so few Breaths. And that's assuming that the same visualization and Command would translate to the new material, which won't always be a given.

I, personally, think that the effects of swearing the fifth Oath as a Radiant won't provide a ton of dramatic or flexible new powers. It's a given that such a Radiant will be able to work with more Investiture and direct it more efficiently and effectively, since we see this improve with every Oath already it seems likely to continue. I don't know how much more powerful Radiants can become while still being characters that we can see participate in the plot without breaking the story just by their presence. We haven't seen much in the way of Surges changing through further Radiance, though we also haven't seen many people actually develop. Shallan may be a good counterexample, being able to Soulcast her illusions to some degree, but I don't think that that's something along the lines of "Soulcasting like an Elsecaller". Maybe their resonances become more pronounced and flexible, rather than individual powers? I don't think that manipulating essences will come up, nor making use of spren to cause changes in the physical realm. The former encroaches too much on Elsecallers and Soulcasting in general while the latter is what fabrials do already, and figures old enough to have known the Radiant Orders in the past seem ignorant of and surprised about captive spren fabrial technology. I don't think that Radiants will lose agency or be inherently constrained from making "bad" choices-- human freedom to choose to keep an oath or betray it seems like too much of a theme to be permanently taken off the table, though I do think that the depth of understanding required to reach the 5th Ideal will provide a lot of insight and guide a lot of decision making support. So more Investiture and possibly better/fuller resonance between powers seem to me to be the most likely effects swearing the 5th Ideal produces. There will be more effects but I expect them to be more personal and philosophical in nature than additional superpowers. A 5th Ideal Radiant will have a much fuller and deeply-held understanding of their Oaths and the view of the world they engender (such as Kaladin's perspectives shifting in ways that make him a fuller Windrunner but less capable as a soldier). They'll have the cracks in their spiritwebs (if not minds/souls, necessarily) filled in with... Investiture? The nature of their bonded spren? They'll have confronted the worst of their issues, though I'm not sure it's a guarantee that they'll overcome those issues, necessarily. Their spren will be more fully present in the physical realm, with expanded intelligence, personality, and understanding than they'd had previously. That also suggests expanded abilities with manifesting as different types of objects.