[frank]

Edur magic crushes Letherii magic wich previously had crushed all oposition. Edur magic is countered by the Perish and by the Malazans when they upgrade the quality of their mages.
Then it fries the grey ..... on Leather.
Malazan magic was often countered by the oposition while it fell to the soldiers to make the difference.

Any thoughts on powerlevels etc?

[Aptorian]

frank;123236 said:

Edur magic crushes Letherii magic wich previously had crushed all oposition. Edur magic is countered by the Perish and by the Malazans when they upgrade the quality of their mages.
Then it fries the grey ..... on Leather.
Malazan magic was often countered by the oposition while it fell to the soldiers to make the difference.

Any thoughts on powerlevels etc?

Let me just start of by quoting the resident abyss cat: Wolverine would win.

It's pretty tough to compare the individual levels of power:

I have a big problem with it since my personal opinion is that SE cheats and lets random circumstances play in rather than pure powerstruggles.

Edur magic I would say is still the most powerful thing available, of the non ascendants I would only expect Tay and perhaps QB to be able to stand up against the Krishnan for a short while.

The Malazan mages hadn't really crushed all previous opposition. The place were we hear the most about the old magecadres fights, they seem to often have been hardpressed, mostly being used to negate other mages influence in the fights. The fact that pure squads of mages don't exist any longer tell of how depleted of capable mages the Empire has become. those that still exist of actual power, hide among the ranks of the soldiers like QB did the first years.

When have we seen Edur magic being countered by Perish magic? Besides the portal they open I'm not even sure they have any mages. The Gray Swords didn't have any.

I think any magical battles we see will be inconclusive as I expect it will be battles in the like of those in the Panion War, where a couple of Powerful ascendants justs start to cut their way in to the heart.

[Danforth]

As Apt said above I feel its very difficult to gauge the various power levels of different mages because circumstances could would sway the advantage to one due to many outside influences.

Though as I understand it the Edur and Lether magic is very barbaric so a malazan mage would be able to undo them using the more subtle techniques of magery.

[fan_83]

the main reason why edur magic is so powerful is becasue they are not using KE.. which is their own brand but instead use chaos magic through the cg which truimphed any otehr brand of magic....

chaos is the oldest and the hardest to defend against...

as long as the users body can handle the strain very very few mages can go mano o mano against a high level chaos magic user and survive..

the perish and the malazans have not went up agaisnt he edur in a huge battle... and the only example so far is qb bluffing the edur.. and the simple fact is that if the eres has not helped then qb and co owuld have been obliterated...

tay on the other hand may survive the first assault but not many more...

[frank]

I thought beating the edur fleet the Perish met were pretty big scale. And could the edur not having any restraints in their magic use have anything to say?

[Chaos]

Ceda was whooping some serious Edur booty in a one on one with the Warlock King , even with his backup sack, so I don't know that I agree with that sentiment 100% either. I think that SE doesn't do that many straight on power struggles , it's how the magic is used. Take QB for example, lots of power but most of the time it's the intelligent use of that that saves the day rather than trying to destroy everything.
And of course there are varying levels of power , sorcery wise, within diff people in diff civilisations.

Good point about Chaos though.

[GardenGnome]

Magic isn't paper-rock-scissor, so don't try to apply that system...
It's maybe more like this...

[dessembrae]

the water manouvre looks a little camp. and dont wanna know what you would use " the sponge" for. You would definitely need to watch what crowd you played that game in:D

[Chaos]

haha, yeah sponge looks painful :S

[Aptorian]

GardenGnome;123470 said:

Magic isn't paper-rock-scissor, so don't try to apply that system...
It's maybe more like this...

That I believe I will use for every single discussion I get in from now on...

About the Perish: When did they fight edur Krishnan? I can't remember this. Do you mean when QB, Bottle and Eres trick the Edur fleet? Cause that was the near death of the human fleet.

About the Ceda nearly beating the Warlock king. That was the Ceda. Some of the most powerful Letheri mages were obliterated by the Edur, mostly the big Sea Spirit, but the Edur would also had done the trick.

Unless something strange is going on, and the 14th can tap into the Letheri Holds on Lether, then they are still going to get their asses handed to them in full on battles with the Edur. No matter what tricks QB and Bottle have up their sleeves... They would need very direct involvement from the Eres.

[GardenGnome]

Glad people like the advanced rock-paper-scissor

Apt;123511 said:

Unless something strange is going on, and the 14th can tap into the Letheri Holds on Lether, then they are still going to get their asses handed to them in full on battles with the Edur. No matter what tricks QB and Bottle have up their sleeves... They would need very direct involvement from the Eres.

I doubt that, Apt. The warrens are blocked in the north, where Iron Bars and co. landed, but later on Corlo first enters the warren he describes as septic, and even later he access Mockra and cooks heads and confuses gods. So, either warrens are only blocked in the north, and not in Lether, or (more plausible, I think, as warrens as a whole were unknown on Lether) the blocking of warrens was caused by Gothos' ritual, which is now failing.

[Aptorian]

GardenGnome;123520 said:

Glad people like the advanced rock-paper-scissor
I doubt that, Apt. The warrens are blocked in the north, where Iron Bars and co. landed, but later on Corlo first enters the warren he describes as septic, and even later he access Mockra and cooks heads and confuses gods. So, either warrens are only blocked in the north, and not in Lether, or (more plausible, I think, as warrens as a whole were unknown on Lether) the blocking of warrens was caused by Gothos' ritual, which is now failing.

I still believe that holds are more powerful than warrens, so my point was that the 14th would need the raw power of holds to be able to fight the force of the Edur warlocks.

I realise that if Tayshcren could withstand Rake, warrens might be able to do the trick... but after Quicks reaction to the power of the holds in BH, I have the impression that warrens don't have the kick that the holds have.

[Chaos]

Apt;123511 said:

About the Ceda nearly beating the Warlock king. That was the Ceda. Some of the most powerful Letheri mages were obliterated by the Edur, mostly the big Sea Spirit, but the Edur would also had done the trick.

yeah but it was the Ceda vs 2 edur and the Warlock King, the former getting blasted easily enough but my point being that the WK is probably one, if not THE, strongest magic user the Edur have. Not including Rhulad ofc. So, in my eyes, it was the Ceda vs the best of the Edur and the Ceda was winning. I'm not arguing that , as a race, the Edur have a stronger magical force, that's true. But just that it's not a simple case of "that race is stronger at magic than that one and will always beat them in a power struggle".

[Abyss]

quoting Apt quoting me, Wolverine ftw!

But just complicating things by noting that Ceda was channeling the entire cedance and spent about chunk of time gathering the power to do that.

The warrens weren't blocked in Leth - it seems more like they didn't exist. Corlo could use Mokra because it's based on people's thoughts, not drawing on a physical source of power like most of the other warrens. Perhaps a healer using Denul or a witch using Tennes to affect animals would also be fine. But a mage trying to access Meanas or Rashan would probably have a problem, possibly even after Gotho's ritual expires. Or maybe not.

Holds seem to have more raw power than Warrens, and of course Holds tinged with Chaos are a whole other thing, albeit at the weilder's expense. Iirc, we never saw a Letherii mage in MT do something as subtle as disguise themselves or cast shadows and illusions, things we've seen Malazan squad mages do a dozen times. Hold magic may just not work on such a 'micro' level.

- Abyss, micro-manager.

[Dolorous Menhir]

We've never seen pure Warren magic versus pure Hold magic. So I don't know how people can just say one is better (or more powerful, or more destructive, or harder to resist) than the other.

[polishgenius]

The Midnighter would eat Wolverine. Yep. >_>


There doesn't seem to be any set magical heirarchy other than the individual power of the user. Obviously some magics are better straight out and other are more subtle, but other than elder > other there's not much to show. The Edur are so powerful because they don't control it, and it has serious payback.
That puzzles me though. The elder warrens were about way before the human first empire, yet that appeared to use holds?
And holds seem rawer than warrens, not necessarily more straight out powerful. I'd set Rake against the Ceda powerwise, for example...

[Sir Thursday]

I think what the person upthread was referring to when he said that the Perish seemed to hold their own against the Edur was the fact that there have been many engagements between the two, and indeed the Edur fared worse than the Perish IIRC. This would indicate that the Perish found a way to triumph over the Edur magic.

Sir Thursday

[fan_83]

apt" tay manage to stand against rake cause rake wasn;t gunning for tays death...

if you reread gotm again... rake used a wave of magic instead of a focused shot to wack his opponent... that means that tays has no chance against a rake who is determined to wack tays..

also: chaos: a race of warrios in which 1/3 of them are magic users will beat nearly any other race... remember the assumption behind magic users.. magic will cancell magic so that steel and fight steel..

with so many more magic users among the edur.. magic from the edur wiull overwhelm the magic of the opposnents.. leaving no need for steel..

thats how the conquest of lethar worked... they wiped the field with superior use of magic htat overwhelms the opposition..

how does a couple of squads of mages fight against thousands of mages???

[Aptorian]

Dolorous Menhir;123567 said:

We've never seen pure Warren magic versus pure Hold magic. So I don't know how people can just say one is better (or more powerful, or more destructive, or harder to resist) than the other.

I wonder if the one occasion we actually have seen isn't Tay against Rake at the Enfilade at Pale?

Tay was hard pressed but he was surviving killing blasts from Rake. His magic was decribed as the darkest most chaotic source.

Problem is that this was GotM, which is, well... GotM. Also we don't really know yet what either of them is capable of at full blast, even though I think we did see Tay as close to defeat as possible at Pale.

EDIT: Sorry hadn't seen your post Fan 83.

Was the waves not as devastating as full blasts? I wonder...

And I agree, the 14th right now, doesn't seem ready to face a skirmish with magic and all on Lether.

But are there really that many magic users among the Edur? At least the royal women seem capable of something, demon summoning and stuff. How many male magic users were there? I don't remember it as a lot.

It's not like the 1100 surviving warrior mages of the Andii in Black Coral

[Dolorous Menhir]

It does say at one point in MT that a significant proportion of the Edur are magic users, but not sure if it was as high as a third. And the rest of the book was not consistent with that, we did not see a third of the Edur armies use magic, far from it.

We saw a handful of K'risnan and the Warlock King on the battlefield deploying the major sorceries, and all the K'risnan died over time. Binadas and the women were much much less powerful (Binadas surviving the Ceda's attack notwithstanding).

I think "one third of race are magic users" is not equivalent to "one third of race are powerful battle-mages". Offensive magic is only one branch of Erikson's magic system.

Rake did say that he was not making a serious effort to kill the mages at Pale, (my interpretation of that is that) he was trying to do indiscriminate damage to the army, making the attack so costly it would be called off before he and Tays really got into it.

It's still not correct to diminish Tays' achievement in that battle though, they really did serious damage to Moon's Spawn, and Tays survived Rake's onslaught.

I still think Tays would lose a one-on-one battle with Rake.