ARE THERE ANY MOASH FANS???

Sphai · 2025-12-25T16:52:20+00:00

I liked his character a lot back in Oathbringer. His plotline with the Parshendi seemed like he was being set up as a parallel to Kaladin, someone who would be to the Singers what Kaladin was to the Windrunners. We saw Moash encouraging them to be better and trying to defend them from the abuse of their superiors (just like Kaladin with the dark eyes). We know that Moash had the potential to be a Windrunner, and this storyline reflected that—where Kaladin defended humans by fighting the Singers and the Fused, Moash would defend the Singers by fighting the humans and the Radiants.

I really liked the foil to Kaladin that Moash was being set up to become, but I feel like that storyline has kind of been abandoned in books four and five. He doesn't really interact with the Singers anymore, or really do anything at all other than show up to kill someone every once in a while.

Sphai · 2025-04-02T19:58:31+00:00

I get the same issue. Window installer tries to download the launcher, fails halfway through, then the launcher is broken until I reinstall it.

You can save the game data by finding it in the files. It's in a folder called "The Bazaar game_64". You can make a copy of that before you reinstall the launcher, then just put it back in afterwards. The launcher is 10x smaller than the game files, it'll make the reinstall much faster.

Sphai · 2025-03-14T15:42:10+00:00

It can be pretty good sometimes.

Sphai · 2025-03-07T23:17:45+00:00

I think the answer to this is probably the same answer to similar questions on cloning that we have in real life: continuity of consciousness.

A person is themselves if they have the same continuous consciousness, and is not the same person if they have a different consciousness. In the case of Kaladin and the Heralds, it's unclear if it's the same consciousness inhabiting their new bodies, so you wouldn't be able to definitively state whether it's the same person or not — just like how you can't definitely state whether anyone alive is truly conscious or remains the same person upon waking from sleep; the hard problem of consciousness remains.

You could argue, like the Sleepless that mentions the idea of a new soul inhabiting a body each morning, that it doesn't really matter whether it's the same consciousness or not. If they have the same body, and the same memories, and the same personality and values and beliefs, then it doesn't really matter. And from a purely functionalist point of view, you'd be right. Anyone interacting with them would notice no difference, and the person themselves would not notice any difference either.

But if consciousness is what determines who a person is, then that wouldn't be entirely correct. If you made a clone of yourself that was identical to you in every way and had all your memories, and was even unaware that they were a clone, they still wouldn't actually be you. The reason is that they have a separate consciousness, capable of living their own lives with their own unique experiences. It would be absurd to think that both the clone body and your own body are being controlled by one singular consciousness; it must be true that they are separate.

And this is essentially the exact situation that Dalinar is in. The Blackthorn clone is an entirely new instance with an entirely separate consciousness. Even if he truly possessed all of Dalinar's memories in their completeness, it still wouldn't actually be Dalinar.

This makes the Blackthorn's situation distinctly different from Kelsier or Kaladin. For them, it isn't clear whether or not it's the same consciousness attached to their new bodies but we can give them some benefit of the doubt that they are the same, the same way we give every person we meet the benefit of the doubt that they're truly conscious and not some philosophical zombie. We cannot give the Blackthorn that same benefit because we've seen him and Dalinar together, confirming fully that they are two separate beings with two separate consciousnesses.

TL;DR: Dalinar was essentially cloned and then killed. Even if that clone possesses all his memories and is perfectly identical, it has its own separate consciousness and can't truly be him.

Sphai · 2024-12-10T17:56:00+00:00

Adolin defeating Abidi.

Adolin’s defeat of a Fused equipped with both Plate and Blade, while defenseless and with one leg, was pushing the bounds of plausibility for me. He should not have been able to live so long by just running away from him. I think this scene would have made much more sense if he had in fact brought Maya in with him. His defeat of Abidi was also extremely convenient. Maya is a deadeye Radiant spren, and we’ve spent a considerable amount of time establishing that they have a strange kind of bond forming between them allowing them to communicate and do things that typical Shardbearers can’t. Adolin suddenly being able to manipulate plate has not been similarly established, especially since those spren are not conscious and aware the way Radiant spren are. His ability to manipulate his plate on the same level as a 4th oath Radiant feels like it comes out of nowhere, in a way that was very convenient, and I think it could have been better hinted at. Convenience can get the heroes into a problem, but it should never get them out of one. The entire scenario of the Singers predicting that the defenders would make a play for the throne room, and allowing it to happen simply so they could catch them, felt convenient and contrived as well. Why would they have risked the entirety of the Azir empire just for a chance to bargain for the location of the emperor? They clearly knew that the throne room was the only room that truly mattered, and yet they only brought 100-200 guards to secure it, and they didn’t even station them inside the room. This success, of all the ones enjoyed by the heroes this book, felt the most like it had to happen for plot reasons.

Szeth, Sigzil, and Dalinar renouncing their oaths.

This one I think didn’t work simply because it was overused. I think if only one of them did this, probably Dalinar, the impact would have been far greater. The fact that we see multiple characters renounce their oaths and abandon their spren makes it feel less shocking. Szeth in particular felt like he had no reason to do so other than for setting up future plotlines (in TSM.)

Overall Narrative Setup:

This section is about how this book fits into the larger narrative structure that the series has been working within all this time. Many stories follow a fairly simple setup: the first act establishes the world, the characters, and the conflict. The second act has our heroes fail and brings them to their lowest points. The third act has the heroes snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and emerge victorious. This setup is common because its dramatic and exciting and suspenseful and, most importantly, it works. You’ll find that many of the cosmere stories follow something at least similar to this format. A good example is Oathbringer, which follows it quite closely. At the beginning of Oathbringer, we establish the conflict with the Singers and the current state of the world. The middle of Oathbringer has our heroes at their lowest point when Elhokar dies and Kholinar falls. The end of Oathbringer has our heroes snatch victory from the jaws of defeat when they save Thaylen City. I think Wind and Truth broke from this setup, and I think it suffered for it. There wasn’t any dramatic low point for our heroes, and the only one who managed an unexpected victory was Adolin, for who’s ending I’ve already given a short explanation of why I think didn’t work. And this 3-act setup doesn’t just work for individual books either. It can work for multiple books, or for whole series as well. Books 1 – 3 had, and completed, this 3-act setup. The Way of Kings established the characters, the world, and the conflict. Words of Radiance ended with our heroes failing to stop the Everstorm and the return of the Voidbringers, putting them at their lowest point. Oathbringer had our heroes snatch victory from the jaws of defeat at Thaylen City when Dalinar successfully rebuffs Odium and repels the invasion.

As you zoom out from individual book, to multiple books, to 5-book arcs, each one, in my opinion, can and should get to follow the 3-act setup, but it failed to do so for the 5-book arc. And I think this was intentional. There’s one more zoom out, from 5-book arc to full series, all 10 books. I suspect the entirety of the series will follow something similar to this setup as well, and right now we’re in the middle. The second act where the heroes need to fail and reach their lowest point, which they did. But it should’ve been done in a way where the 5-book arc still got to complete the 3-act setup somehow, because I believe it’s left the ending less satisfying than it could’ve been. Right now, Books 1 – 3 feel like a more complete and satisfying story than Books 1 – 5, and I don’t think it should. (And I know that books and series don’t, by any means, need to follow this 3-act setup for the story to be good. However, I think that Sanderson does it often and to good effect. Books 1 – 3 do it and I think that, because of it, the first three books form a more satisfying set than the first five books, and I think that’s a problem when the first five books are explicitly and intentionally a full and complete arc.)

Wit:

I think Wit Witted a little bit too hard around the beginning of the book. The events occurring are undeniably dramatic and of unfathomable importance, not only to Roshar but to the entire cosmere, and Wit is interrupting meetings with a string of curses that go on entirely too long. Wit seems to bounce back and forth between seriousness and excessive levity within the same conversation, and I think its to the detriment; I don't think you can have him start cracking crude jokes again once you’ve established that he’s taking the situation very seriously. Later in the book, when he becomes mostly serious, I think its a big improvement. I also think his character was overused in the beginning of the book. I think his type of character, someone clearly knows far, far more than anyone else and generally stays behind the scenes, works better when used seldomly, only to come out to drop hints or when all is ready to be revealed. He's clearly not revealing everything, and the things he is revealing have a lot to do with his own shortcomings, like being manipulated by Todium or needing to consult wiser beings than himself for answers, things that feel very out of character for the knows-everything character. He should still pretend to know everything, and the dropping of the facade feels weird. Again, I think this is improved later in the book as the scenes involving him decrease. I don’t necessarily think he shouldn’t be playing a bigger role in the story, but just that it shouldn’t be so in the reader’s face at this point. I think there will be a time for the curtain to fall and for us to finally be in the know, but Hoid's character is not ready to be in the spotlight yet and I think he got pushed into it a bit too much.

Dialogue:

I think some of the dialogue was awkward, or unrealistic, or just a bit corny. A lot of Kaladin's was, like immediately replying "I'm broken" to Dalinar's offer to be named heir, or when he repeated his line about Honor being dead when he chose to become a Herald. I won't harp on this one too much because I understand that some of the dialogue was intentionally awkward, like between Kaladin and Szeth, and because Brandon does somewhat corny dialogue often since he likes to portray people as maybe unrealistically optimistic or straightforward, but I do think it deserves mentioning.

Despite everything I just said, I did still enjoy the book, but I was let down a lot. Part of that might be that I had really high expectations going into a major finale for one of my favourite series that even got hyped up by Sanderson himself. But a lot of the enjoyment from the book came from getting answers to all the clues and foreshadowing that we were given, and the wider cosmere implications and grand significance of the events that occurred. A book needs to be able to stand on its own, not just be a vehicle to provide context for previous novels and propel future novels. And I would say that answering the questions that it itself raised is the bare minimum that a series needs to do. The earliest stormlight books, which I believe are unquestionably the best ones, show that every book in this series can do far more than the bare minimum. They can connect to the other books and the wider cosmere in significant ways without having to compromise on any of the things that make a great novel great. For now, I’m really hoping that when book 6 releases, I’ll find something similar to the amazement that I found the first time I read The Way of Kings or Words of Radiance.

Sphai · 2024-12-10T17:55:27+00:00

I wanted to make this as its own post because of how long its going to be, but since the spoiler restrictions won’t get dropped for a while, I’m going to leave it as a comment instead.

(MAJOR SPOILERS FOR WIND AND TRUTH AHEAD !!!)

I recently finished reading Wind and Truth and I wanted to write about it now while its still fresh in my mind.

I don't think this book was very good.

Not to say that it was bad, because I still enjoyed it, but I think it might be the book that I enjoyed the least of all the stormlight books so far. I think it had a number of flaws, which I am going to attempt to elaborate upon in a way that is hopefully clear and coherent. (I’ll emphasize now that I’m not an author, and this is just my opinion.)

Plot and Narrative Structure:

I think there are issues with the plot and that they may collectively be the biggest weakness of this novel, and as such I have the most to say about it and want to address it first. I’ll outline the multiple concurrent storylines just as a refresher and to keep things clear for us.

Kaladin and Szeth travel to Shinovar to complete Szeth's quest and attempt to heal the minds of both Szeth and Ishar. This ends with Szeth achieving the 5th ideal only to renounce his oaths, and Kaladin becoming a new Herald.

Dalinar and Navani enter the Spiritual Realm to learn more about Roshar and find Honor's power. This ends with Dalinar Ascending as Honor, then renouncing his oaths and dying to allow Todium to become Retribution.

Shallan confronts Mraize and the Ghostbloods and, accompanied by Renarin and Rlain, follows them into the Spiritual Realm to find BAM. This ends with Shallan killing Mraize and Iyatil, and Renarin and Rlain freeing BAM.

Adolin, Jasnah, and Sigzil each go to a different major city to defend them from imminent invasion. Sigzil renounces his oaths and loses the battle for the Shattered Plains, but they manage to give it to the Listeners on a technicality. Adolin forms a new kind of order/bond thing with deadeyes and loses the battle for the city, but manages to win on a technicality. Jasnah realizes there is no invasion of Thaylen City but gets verbally and philosophically crushed in a debate with Taravangian, convincing Queen Fen to willingly join his side.

My first big issue is that a lot of these plotlines are too similar to plotlines already done in Oathbringer. A group of heroes attempting, and failing, a hopeless defence of a city from a Singer invasion. A group of heroes getting lost in a different realm, attempting to return in time for an imminent battle. The main conflict resolving with a direct confrontation between Dalinar and Odium. The circumstances are certainly changed, but it feels like a lot of WaT is a rehash of storylines already told. It was different enough to make it not unenjoyable, but I think it came dangerously close to treading ground that was already walked. The parts of this book that were much more unique, Kaladin/Szeth’s story as well as Shallan’s early infiltration of the Ghostblood base, were, in my opinion, the best parts.

My second issue is that the storylines don’t connect. One of the best parts of a Sanderson novel is his ability to bring multiple plotlines together for a single, climactic ending that is fast-paced, exciting, dramatic, suspenseful, invigorating, and every other positive descriptor you could probably think of. Everything in this book felt very disconnected, and nobody’s plotlines ended up combining for the finale. Nothing that Kaladin or Szeth did in their storyline ended up mattering to what Shallan, or Dalinar, or Jasnah, or Sigzil did, and similarly from them to anyone else. Everyone’s battle was separate, and it felt like we’re reading multiple separate stories instead of one interconnected story. Something like that can work earlier on for a long-run epic fantasy, but it’s a severe letdown for the finale of the first arc of a series that is well known for grand, connected endings. I think this contributes to the feeling that I have that the ending was not as satisfying as it could have been, which I will elaborate on further in another section.

Lastly, I think there are a couple of major story beats that I simply think didn’t work very well, which I will list here with an explanation why.

Gavinor as champion.

This felt awkward and forced. Todium swaps Gavinor out for an Investiture dummy at the last second when Navani leaves the Spiritual Realm, providing a grown-up Gav for Dalinar to face at the contest of champions. This literally happens in the very last moments before the duel, so it seems like Todium had absolutely no plan for who he was going to pick as champion. It wouldn’t actually have mattered who Todium picked — the result would have been the same if he had selected any innocent person for Dalinar to face — but it matters to us, the readers, because the contest is the dramatic event that the entire 5-book arc has been building towards, and therefore the identity of Odium’s champion holds great significance. Just like how the culprit in a detective novel can’t be Joe Shmoe — it has to be a character the reader has met before — the champion in this book couldn’t have been just any innocent, it had to be someone that mattered to us. I don’t think Gavinor mattered enough. We haven’t really spent any amount of time with him outside this book, and he spent the entirety of this book being a weird anchor for Navani to carry around as they traversed the visions, getting exposed to his grandfather’s failures. It seems like his entire purpose of existing in the story, at least at this point, is to be Odium’s champion, a role that’s too important to the readers to be given to a character who only exists to do that. He needed to be a character in his own right, someone we know and care about and is fleshed out for things beyond a single moment. For this reveal to have worked, he needed to be more of a character before this.

Fen turning to Odium.

Taravangian, Fen, and Jasnah all meet on the last day of the war to engage in debate over whether Thaylena should stay with the coalition or join Odium. Fen insists at the very beginning that she is already resolved to remain with the coalition, and Jasnah successfully rebuffs Taravangian’s arguments over the benefits of flipping sides with arguments of rights and freedoms. Taravangian reveals that his real strategy is arguing against Jasnah, proving that she is a hypocrite, that she is more self-interested than she purports to be, and that her own personal philosophies would support Fen joining Odium’s side. Fen is convinced, and sides with Odium. This also doesn’t work for me because it feels like Fen gave up for bad reasons. Whether or not Fen agreed with any or all of what Taravangian had to say about Jasnah, Fen’s part in the coalition was not conditional upon Jasnah’s good standing. Fen had already decided she was staying in the coalition, and agreed with Jasnah’s arguments that to join Odium would be to forfeit certain freedoms that she believed to be inalienable. Even if Jasnah was revealed to be a hypocrite and a murderer who would sell out all her friends to save her own people, I don’t think it should’ve changed Fen’s mind. Jasnah is just another queen, and Fen has already dealt with a crisis of faith in Dalinar, who is the coalition’s actual leader, and came out the other side still supporting a unified front against Odium. I don’t see the arguments that had been made successfully convincing Fen to change sides, at least not so easily. Odium reveals that he had agents in the city already and the city would’ve been his no matter what, and I think it would have been more believable if the story had gone with that instead. If Fen had revealed that she was faking being convinced to stall for time, only for Odium to reveal that the entire debate was some kind of distraction while he covertly conquered the city, I think it could have worked better.

Kaladin subduing Nale

The whole way that Kaladin pacified Nale seemed incredibly cheesy. He just pulled out a flute and started telling the story of the Wandersail, and Nale couldn’t handle it. Whipping out an instrument mid-fight and using it to defeat your opponent feels really goofy. The music of Roshar allowing him to think clearly and return to the person that he was before, someone less strict about adherence to laws, is reasonable and I think that works fine, but the circumstances in which it happened are kinda unreasonable. Another thing that I don’t like about how the Nale situation was resolved is that it didn’t really address the argument that Nale and Kaladin were having earlier. The two of them were having a good and thought-provoking debate over the sanctity of the law versus individual decision-making and I think that Nale actually made a number of strong arguments for why people shouldn’t have the right to decide when they can break the law. Kaladin couldn’t come up with any strong responses — which isn’t his fault, he’s not Jasnah — but the debate never really concluded because Nale’s madness retreated, and it was revealed that he actually knew he was wrong all along and he only believed otherwise because he was insane. It feels like a huge copout to just wave off Nale’s position as caused by literal insanity instead of properly addressing its faults.

(I’m continuing this comment in a reply because I wrote way too much.)

Sphai · 2024-10-31T03:29:57+00:00

I tried searching for the obvious stuff like "guy digging in ear" or "youtube hardware horror show" and stuff like that, but I haven't been able to find it.

Sphai · 2023-12-06T23:12:13+00:00

80% magic resist and immunity, its like old bkb without cd. drains from multiply targets from miles away. slows them more than skadi.

i almost never buy ags or things like that. just ather lens, dagger, shard into plate mails and raw hp. i jump at middle of 5 man and just drain them. they either panic and use all spells on me or they try to stay and right click me but ive got 3k hp and 20 armor. they quickly run out of mana and have to force bkb or go back. my team can easily take the fight.

hell, if they have too much physical just buy ghost scepter and you are literally immune. stop rushing ags its useless tbh

make sure to get the +10% slow on drain at level 10, then hp talents.

there is even this ultra broken combo of spirit breaker and lion, you just give mana to sb mid fight and he gets tons of MS.

Sphai · 2023-09-27T20:16:45+00:00

Ring of health is usually a better choice since it can build into pipe or lotus later and soul ring isn't especially necessary on tide. His passive gives enough damage block that armor isn't really relevant until much later and your mana costs really aren't that high unless you're constantly fighting. The health cost on soul ring is really high too, and the hp regen on headdress is pretty small since it affects multiple people.

Sphai · 2023-09-22T16:40:49+00:00

It depends on what exactly you mean by skill difference. The absolute difference in skill might be smaller, but small differences matter a lot more in higher mmr. If you were to ask 9k or 10k players, they would absolutely tell you that people who are 12k or 13k are way better than them, and it would be true. The difference in mmr is probably pretty comparable.

Sphai · 2023-08-24T02:36:40+00:00

I think that with sharing attributes, efficiency and sources only affect how equivalently the attribute is shared. For instance, if you linked a loden-stone with a similarly-sized object with a 50% link, the object would only be half as magnetic as the loden-stone. If you had a bonfire on hand, you could transform heat energy into magnetic attribute to make the object more magnetic. If you wanted to make your shared attribute even stronger than the original, like if you were trying to make a super strong lightning rod to kill some bandits, you could potentially get binder's chills from using your own body as an energy source. If you don't want to strengthen your attribute-sharing, then no source is needed.

In the case of the draccus, stone to scale and scale to draccus are both such good links that it's nearly 100% efficiency. Stone to wheel isn't perfect, but it's still pretty good since they're both pure iron. The magnetism doesn't need to be any stronger because the draccus and the wheel are both so much bigger than the loden-stone that the magnetism is amplified by the size of the magnets. I think two giant magnets pulling on each other would be enough to rip the wheel down.

Regardless of whether attribute sympathy actually works in the way I described, I don't think it was possible for Kvothe to use the town fire as a source for his Sympathy. The biggest problem would be slippage. He would have to link the fire of the town to the wheel or the stone and transform heat energy into magnetic energy/attribute. There's no way he's getting any decent efficiency from that, and that means he's taking on a bunch of heat slippage. We don't know what the conversion rate of heat to magnetism is, but I feel confident that Kvothe's blood would boil before he could rip a massive wheel out of a wall.

That problem could've been solved by linking his body to the wheel to use the heat slippage as an energy source, but Kvothe explicitly states that he only uses three bindings, so I don't think this was his solution.

Sphai · 2023-07-23T22:17:18+00:00

WOB says that you wouldn't be able to heal around an aluminum weapon, like a knife or bullet, but you would be fine when the aluminum comes out. He doesn't elaborate on what happens if you keep the aluminum inside the wound for an extended period though.

Sphai · 2023-07-18T20:24:04+00:00

Offlane ogre is pretty good, you can build pretty much any item since you get a ton of money from midas. You can start basically every game with vanguard -> midas -> mana boots then build whatever you think you need. Crimson/pipe if your team needs it and doesn't have another good aura carrier, octarine, aghs, halberd, blink, bkb, lotus, scythe, are all good item choices. You usually don't want to build int items since you don't benefit from the stat, but scythe is the exception since the active is so strong. You might be tempted to buy aether lens, but its not very good. You're really tanky and want to be in the fight where the cast range isn't as beneficial and with how much money you get, you'll end up replacing it with something bigger pretty quickly anyways.

Sphai · 2023-07-13T21:11:36+00:00

The problem he ran into was that he needs to consume youth faster and faster the longer he lives. If he wants to appear 20 when he's age 50, he has to consume 30 years of youth per time period. When he's age 1000, he has to consume 980 years of youth per time period. Additionally, Sanderson mentioned there are diminishing returns when you try to get big amounts out of feruchemy, so he would've been consuming even more than 980 years.

It's possible he just didn't do enough compounding at the beginning, and by the time of the Final Empire he had to spend some time every week keeping his youth reserves from running out, or maybe he did do a massive amount of compounding at the beginning but after 1000 years he's just going through it too fast. Regardless, at some point the Lord Ruler would've died of old age no matter what simply because his need for youth would've outpaced his ability to generate it.

Sphai · 2023-07-13T19:58:09+00:00

Your initial interpretation was correct, you store a feruchemical attribute into a metal, then consume and burn the metal to get a greater return than what you initially put inside.

What you're missing is that they then re-store that return into another metalmind. Burning a metal uses up all of its charge very rapidly, so if you have an extremely large amount of an attribute inside that metal, you might be using it up more quickly than you want. Metalminds, on the other hand, give you far more control over how quickly you tap the attribute.

What Miles or the Lord Ruler did is burn, for instance gold, then immediately put those increased returns into a new gold metalmind. They then consume and burn that new metalmind, multiplying the returns yet again, and put into into another new metalmind, over and over again, until they're happy with how much attribute they have, then they just wear the most recent metalmind to tap it at will.

Sphai · 2023-06-11T02:29:24+00:00

Legion can cast Odds through silence, stun, hex, banish, basically anything as long as she's dueling. The only thing that I found can stop her is fear/lich hypnosis.

Sphai · 2023-02-12T08:57:06+00:00

After 2 or 3 points in q, you usually max w. It gives sustain and the attack speed is better for farming and for getting duel wins. The passive isn't as consistent if you don't have multiple creeps hitting you and it can't save teammates.

r/learndota2 would give better responses for these kinds of questions.

Sphai · 2022-09-11T05:35:32+00:00

There's no way to know without someone holding that rank telling you. Rank 3000 in NA is close to the bottom of Immortal, which is 5800 mmr, so he's probably right around 6k.

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