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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Yeah, like, Boney is definitely breaking from canon by implying that humans are in anyway comparable to elves in magic outside of divine miracles maybe. Human strength is that for every archmage they have 20 battle mages, and 20 battle mages will probably win simply due to action/attention economy.
 
Boney said:
Pretty much. Elves consider their lack of mutability it a superiority, because it makes learning individual Winds without being locked into them and therefore eventual High Magic possible. But it does mean that they can't go all in on a single Wind anywhere near as hard as a human can.
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There is also this
Boney said:
Let me try to come at this from a new angle.

The College syllabus gets an individual human Wizard to a point equal to what an Elf Wizard achieves when learning that Wind. The point where a human starts is where an Elf finishes. Elves can learn eight Winds and High Magic. Humans can only learn one Wind and no High Magic, but they do get Masteries and Arcane Marks and create new spells from gut instinct and whimsy. Yes, it is very difficult to translate the fruits of an individual paradigm to something more widely communicable, but Elves never have that individual paradigm in the first place. They never have trouble translating their fruits because they never get any. Their new insights don't grow organically, they have to be very laboriously built from the ground up.
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This
Boney said:
The College spellbook is the starting point for human magic. When an Elf knows those spells, they consider themselves 'done' with that Wind. Mathilde had superior versions of some of them before she reached Magister.
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and this.

So yeah. Individual wind casting? Mankind fucking rocks.

Elves are still better at magic as species because their highs can just go higher on Qhaysh, and there is a quote somewhere about Loremasters of Hoeth pondering the Aethyric equivalent of one hand clapping for three centuries, figuring out a spell and then restoring landmass by lifting it out of the sea with it that i can´t find, but as far as individual winds are concerned, human wizards are great.

A cooperation of couple of human wizards and a runelord killed a waaagh. And i´m not so sure the cooperation of that Runelord was actually all that necessary for that particular feat.
 
pucflek said:
So yeah, sure, a human will never master high magic cough cough Enchantress, Fozzrick cough cough but you damn well believe that Mathilde knows shit about ulgu none of these posers could even dream of having. This has been established at the very start. Elves have more institutional knowledge and better insight as species, and sure, they can probably punch higher on account of actually being able to do high magic if they invest centuries of study and passion into it, but at their chosen wind, mankind isn´t far behind, if at all.
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Fozzrick could well have been an elf for all we know. His name certainly follows elven naming conventions, like Imrick
 
pucflek said:
And i´m not so sure the cooperation of that Runelord was actually all that necessary for that particular feat.
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We definitely wouldn't have immediately killed the entire horde without the Gazul Ancestor Rune.

Probably a great deal more would have been able to borrow down to escape. And reality might not have been borked enough for Mathilde's 'boiling the soil' idea to work.


Just wanted to point out, I believe Boney has also said that there are mono-wind traditions among the various kingdoms. I imagine they're capable of things that the White Tower might not necessarily be, even if they obviously aren't doing anything chiselfingery.
 
Mopman43 said:
We definitely wouldn't have immediately killed the entire horde without the Gazul Ancestor Rune.

Probably a great deal more would have been able to borrow down to escape. And reality might not have been borked enough for Mathilde's 'boiling the soil' idea to work.
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It really depends on how effective burning shadows are i guess. I don´t think we ever really saw them work without divine backing?
 
pucflek said:
If i have to quote Boney constantly having to type out the response to similar, constant "elf could tear a human mage apart" that circularily happens all the fucking time in thread i will. The entire point of mankind transmuting their soul to their wind means that they are, in many ways, actually superior to elves in their chosen stick. Mathilde has several times demonstrated understanding of ulgu that utterly shattered elven minds. They had to call their best magical theorist to unpick it to something they could understand. So yes, it is up for debate.







So yeah, sure, a human will never master high magic cough cough Enchantress, Fozzrick cough cough but you damn well believe that Mathilde knows shit about ulgu none of these posers could even dream of having. This has been established at the very start. Elves have more institutional knowledge and better insight as species, and sure, they can probably punch higher on account of actually being able to do high magic if they invest centuries of study and passion into it, but at their chosen wind, mankind isn´t far behind, if at all.
EDIT:


So to expand, yes, the greatest of the Asur Archmages will probably trump even Algard in comprehensive magic knowledge, but even they probably won´t handle Ulgu much better than he does. They compensate by mastering all the other winds and weaving entire another school of magic on top of that, but guess what. We are not talking about Archmages here, we are visiting Nagarythe where people do shadowmurdering. And shadowmurdering is something Mathilde is already in the top 1%.
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I did said humans could do things elves can't. But Mastery or not, an elf who has been using Ulgu for 200 years is going to be better at using it than a human LM. And that's the average elf mage, not an Archmage.
 
K von Carstein said:
I did said humans could do things elves can't. But Mastery or not, an elf who has been using Ulgu for 200 years is going to be better at using it than a human LM. And that's the average elf mage, not an Archmage.
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He is very specifically not, as per all the WoG i just posted.

An elven mastery of Ulgu ends where human is beginning to be considered competent.
 
pucflek said:
He is very specifically not, as per all the WoG i just posted.

An elven mastery of Ulgu ends where human is beginning to be considered competent.
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I mean

I think you're stretching that statement a bit farther than intended since for elves that includes reliable casting of battle magic and Lord Magisters, peak of the human craft, don't always even learn those spells to begin with.

Yeah, masteries apply to those too, but so does blowing up during the Sylvania campaign instead of surviving to heal van hal. Functionally not rolling those dice when you cast just changes where and when you can apply it to a table flipping degree.

Just look at rite of way. They needed a genius theorist to codify it for eonir use, but codify it they did - and where only mathilde can use it on a strategic scale because of her staff among humans, every elf who learns it will be able to do the same. Other humans just have to settle for using it in brief tactical maneuvers.

Humans have undeniable advantages within a single wind, but even there they are not a straight upgrade.
 
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Prime 2.0 said:
Yeah, masteries apply to those too, but so does blowing up during the Sylvania campaign instead of surviving to heal van hal. Functionally not rolling those dice when you cast just changes where and when you can apply it to a table flipping degree.
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Thing is, elves still roll those dice. They may have better modifiers but ultimately elven mages can and do miscast and sometimes those miscasts are lethal.
 
Prime 2.0 said:
That's why I said "functionally". There is a multiple orders of magnitude difference here to enable them to not pick up a single arcane mark in centuries of casting.
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The big reason why humans pick up Arcane marks so quickly is that human souls are highly mutable. Elven souls are not. As such elves rarely picking up arcane marks does not in any way,shape or form require them to have a miscast ratio that is orders of magnitude lower then human one.
Compare further with Cython, as an example of a wind dragon, a being who strives to become one with his chosen wind, but due to much less mutable soul only achieves something even close to that goal in literal thousands of years
 
Prime 2.0 said:
That's why I said "functionally". There is a multiple orders of magnitude difference here to enable them to not pick up a single arcane mark in centuries of casting.
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Elven wizards don´t pick up Arcane Marks because they don´t (EDIT: tend to, saying they don´t ever feels touch too absolute claim) pick up arcane marks, not because they never miscast.
 
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Yeah, is it confirmed that elves can cast Battle Magics reliably in-quest, or is that only relative to humans?

Because if you're throwing around huge amounts of magic, it feels like failure is always an option. It might only be mitigated by hundreds of years of training.
 
Parabola said:
Yeah, is it confirmed that elves can cast Battle Magics reliably in-quest, or is that only relative to humans?

Because if you're throwing around huge amounts of magic, it feels like failure is always an option. It might only be mitigated by hundreds of years of training.
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I do not think there is a material distinction between 'safe enough' and 'safe'... most of the time. Mathilde is also just safe enough casting sub-battle magic, if she is tired enough under enough pressure she too can miscast things that are safe. That is what battle magic is like to an Archmage in my opinion.
 
Altom said:
The big reason why humans pick up Arcane marks so quickly is that human souls are highly mutable. Elven souls are not. As such elves rarely picking up arcane marks does not in any way,shape or form require them to have a miscast ratio that is orders of magnitude lower then human one.
Compare further with Cython, as an example of a wind dragon, a being who strives to become one with his chosen wind, but due to much less mutable soul only achieves something even close to that goal in literal thousands of years
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But elvish mages routinely live for centuries while still being pretty active on battlefields, while the average imperial BW has a lifespan of at most a couple decade. It implies that they have a lower miscast rate, or at the very least more effective ways to protect themselves from their miscasts. Maybe a bit of both.
 
K von Carstein said:
But elvish mages routinely live for centuries while still being pretty active on battlefields, while the average imperial BW has a lifespan of at most a couple decade. It implies that they have a lower miscast rate, or at the very least more effective ways to protect themselves from their miscasts. Maybe a bit of both.
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Lower? For sure. Orders of magnitude lower? No flipping way.

Speaking of elves and their resistance to negative effects of magic, actually good example is Druchii sorceressess. They use Dhar, probably the most corruptive form of magic, the kind that drives humans mad just from being around it for too long. Yet they show no physical mutations and only debatable mental influence (arrogance, cruelty, etc could be Dhar poisoning, or they could be the consequence of, well, beimg a druchii).
 
K von Carstein said:
But elvish mages routinely live for centuries while still being pretty active on battlefields, while the average imperial BW has a lifespan of at most a couple decade. It implies that they have a lower miscast rate, or at the very least more effective ways to protect themselves from their miscasts. Maybe a bit of both.
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If he/she goes beyond the Elven battle wizard 101 training, a human battle wizard too can minimize their chance to blow themselves up.

Unfortunately, Elven battle wizard training 201 takes 40 years to complete, 301 takes 80, and 401 takes 120.
 
Altom said:
Lower? For sure. Orders of magnitude lower? No flipping way.
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Given the difference of life expectancy? It's far from implausible.

Altom said:
Yet they show no physical mutations and only debatable mental influence (arrogance, cruelty, etc could be Dhar poisoning, or they could be the consequence of, well, beimg a druchii).
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It could also be due to the mental state required to use Dhar.

IronFist said:
If he/she goes beyond the Elven battle wizard 101 training, a human battle wizard too can minimize their chance to blow themselves up.
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Enough to allow for a survival so long? And it doesn't disprove the fact that elves have some way to not explode as much as humans when casting BM.
 
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Altom said:
Lower? For sure. Orders of magnitude lower? No flipping way.

Speaking of elves and their resistance to negative effects of magic, actually good example is Druchii sorceressess. They use Dhar, probably the most corruptive form of magic, the kind that drives humans mad just from being around it for too long. Yet they show no physical mutations and only debatable mental influence (arrogance, cruelty, etc could be Dhar poisoning, or they could be the consequence of, well, beimg a druchii).
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They're no less active and yet live orders of magnitude longer.

That has a pretty straightforward implication, even when setting aside arcane marks which, fair, not the best point of comparison.

And even then, is the number one cause of death among military elf mages miscasts? Because I'm pretty sure it is for empire battle wizards.

The difference in reliability is strategically significant. Human mages have significant advantages within their wind, but the reliability is a huge one elves have over humans even within that scope. That's my point.
 
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Prime 2.0 said:
Because I'm pretty sure it is for empire battle wizards.
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And I would like to know what lead you to this idea. Because to my mind, enemy action (like, say, cavalry, fear of which flat out created a type of apparation all by itself) is much more likely to be the primary cause. Not to say BW don't die to miscasts, they do,but a primary cause? I find it unlikely.
 
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