Passive powers are boring, are there even any tricks involved with them?

[kroen]

Off the top of my head:

 

Steel/Iron: You need to master angles, anchors, weights, etc.

Tin: You need to learn to isolate certain sensory inputs in order to concentrate better on others.

Bronze: With enough training you can sense which metals others are burning, and you can even know how much they have left. And if soothers/rioters are involved you can tell which emotions they're targeting.

Zinc/Brass: There's the learning curve of isolating desired emotions, and doing so with finesse so that your targets don't know they're being soothed/rioted.

 

Pewter: Just burn it and enoy its effects.

Copper: Same.

Gold: Same.

Electrum: Same.

Cadmium: Same.

Bendalloy: Same.

Nicrosil: Same.

Atium: Same.

Malatium: Same.

 

Am I missing something? If you can name some tricks with these metals, I'd really like to know.

Edited March 28, 2013 by kroen

[Voidus]

Ham talks about the difficulty of pewter burning, it's more in knowing when to use your metals rather than a specific application. Less practise required than some of the others but there's still something.
Copperclouds with enough practise might be able to shield the emotions of others, so there's room for improvement there.
Gold, using it is fine but interpreting what you see effectively seems to be beyond the abilities of the two we've seen use it.
Electrum and Atium the difficulty would be using that additional sensory input (More for electrum, since that's als part of atiums ability) and the same problem with pewter, knowing when to use it. Vin managed to beat Shan by using that trick, so it is fairly useful.
Bendalloy would be about knowing again when to throw up your bubble, where to move, using the time you gain effectively, etc.
And finally Nicrosil would be perhaps one of the most difficult to use effectively,you could just go around ramping up everyones metals constantly but if they don't know what you're about to do they could get seriously injured, it'd be about predicting when and where it's needed, and timing any offensive uses you might try.

[Observer]

Miles uses gold to notice his own slouch through the eyes of a hateful observer, so it could probably be used to do as he does and get "The best of both".

 

Here's a somewhat OT question.

 

If bendalloy and Cadmium cancel each other out, what happens if only parts of the bubble overlap? Does the whole bubble go down when touching it's opposite? If so, that could be a good way to neutralize a slider. In the other case, could it allow you to exit your speed bubble?

[Phantom Monstrosity]

I believe it's only the area of overlap, yeah. Don't think you could exit a speed bubble, though, since the issue is (in my view) crossing over the interface between them - and you're sitll going to end up going through the edge.

Anyway

Electrum: it's based on what you are going to do. Kindasorta. Using it as a method of detecting traps, trying fifty hypothetical combinations for a safe at once... I could see that working.

Aluminum: Brandon said it purges other influences, and can eventaully be used to purify the body of other things as well

Gold: same as electrum, there's a lot of interesting things you can do in terms of information gathering if you make the potential past self less irritatingly random. Also, maybe if you can overcome the disorientation you could do something sorta like soulstamps.

Atium: Nobody's had the ability to practice with it. I assume that being able to regulate just how much future sight you actually needed at that exact moment, pulsing it on and off, you could probably dramatically lengthen the time you can spend burning it.

Nicrosil: If alumnium can let you purge internal impurities, you might be able to flare up the toxins in other peoples' bodies, instead of their metals.

[Voidus]

I maintain that Nicrosil is one of the most potentially interesting and vaired abilities, you can use it as a support for allied allomancers, defensively just to deplete enemy reserves of metals, or if timed with enough precision offensively, (Nicroburst a Tineye just as someone fires a gun, or a coinshot just as they're pushing off up into the air, lurcher as they're pulling on something to move, Seeker in the middle of a heap of allomancers to disorient them) lots of possibilities for that one if you're skilled enough.

[happyman he/him]

I think that in terms of actually burning the metals, the abilities could be considered somewhat boring.  You don't have to do anything special with the actual burning.  By the same token, the descriptions of how individual chess pieces move are also rather boring.

 

It's the strategies and tactics---when to turn them off and on, what else you do while you are burning---that make them interesting.  The powers are more than the sum of their parts.

[Thought]

I'd love it is Copper had more to it, although the fact that Sanderon didn't give Vin a teacher for it indicates that it's just as binary and boring as we fear. Hopefully, he'll reconsider, and in the future we'll see Smokers who can vary the strength and size of their cloud, exclude particular individuals from protection, and mask other magic use (hey, if Seekers can learn to detect Feruchemy, then Smokers should be able to learn to hide Feruchemy).

[Vortaan he/him]

I'd love it is Copper had more to it, although the fact that Sanderon didn't give Vin a teacher for it indicates that it's just as binary and boring as we fear. Hopefully, he'll reconsider, and in the future we'll see Smokers who can vary the strength and size of their cloud, exclude particular individuals from protection, and mask other magic use (hey, if Seekers can learn to detect Feruchemy, then Smokers should be able to learn to hide Feruchemy).

 

I'd like to see Smokers learn to control the size of their clouds. It just seems like a useful ability for a traitorous Smoker to have just at the right minute.

[SwiftSteel he/him]

Aluminum: Brandon said it purges other influences, and can eventaully be used to purify the body of other things as well
 

 

 

So if aluminum can purge inner influences (it could only be inner, since aluminum is a metal that only affects the user), does that mean an Aluminum/Duralumin Gnat could remove the effects of emotional Allomancy when burning their metal?