Sanderson doesn't really understand that the reason Jordan didn't do so much with the gimmicky channeling stuff because they were supposed to be so powerful.

It was an example of terrible writing or rather editing

So, uh, pretty sure they could have annihilated Caemlyn, bro

Jaric Mondoran turned the second greatest city of the Age of Legends into a lake of glass by himself.

If you know the city is just a giant Trolloc encampment, *you kill it with fire*

Ok, look. The Light has some powerful channelers, 'angreal, and circles

One bro in TSR glassed an entire city. I'm pretty sure the combined force of female channelers plus the Rand loyalist Ashaman could torch Caemlyn and all the guys in it in a few hours. Then you redeploy to the Northern fronts.

 

yep. but it's Camelyn! Who cares if every city in the North is burned to ashes....not the pretty one! we like that one!

*rolls eyes*

100% exactly what they should have done.

 

Is this where the church lady screams "OH WONT SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN".

Lol. We're fighting for existence itself. Guess what? Eff morals. There's no "sadness" anymore at this point. Embrace death indeed

And they spent three or four chapters telling us there are no folks left in Caemlyn!

Only one thing would have been better than the Lava Gateway of Doom:

 

Demandred opening a gateway into space and using the vacuum to suck the armies of the Light into oblivion.

 

I was totally waiting for that one-upsmanship from Dem.

I mean, thing is, they actually did do something like this in TOM for everyone's favorite Dark Side congealing assassin

Another question about battles. Why did the Sharans only use their gateways once and then seemingly forget about them(aside from the fact that they could have decimated the lights regular forces)?

 

I'm going to guess their battle plan was thought up by the mysterious. Male Sharan channelers which don't exist therefore have bad battle strategies.

:O

I love you

Ok, look. The Light has some powerful channelers, 'angreal, and circles

One bro in TSR glassed an entire city. I'm pretty sure the combined force of female channelers plus the Rand loyalist Ashaman could torch Caemlyn and all the guys in it in a few hours. Then you redeploy to the Northern fronts.

For the love of Christ, is everyone aware that Randland is at least as big as the US east of the Mississippi? Or even larger? We're talking hundreds, thousands of miles. If the Light had turned Caemlyn into a charnel house, they could have redeployed a few days later with rested channelers and stop the other two armies in their tracks

Seriously, anyone who thinks the Light plan to deal with Caemlyn was ok is, in large sense, not serious. Caemlyn should have been power nuked or left alone

Monkeyfister, you're my favorite person and are awesome and brilliant and gosh darn it good looking

Egwene actually seems kinda like how Lews Therin was supposed to have been. She's a hero, but she's also an intensely proud, arrogant person, who's a prodigy at everything she sets her mind to.

Did anyone else get the impression that pikes/pikemen are invincible from this book?

Yet another thing to infuriate me. The non trained pikemen would have gotten shattered by the Trollocs. If you read accounts about Early Modern warfare, it's very hard to ignore that it takes an enormous amount of conditioning, experience, and skill to "push a pike" against an opponent that's far better trained.

Then again Mat seems to have figured out that he could get away with this lunacy because Demandred was apparently an OOC moron

I expected something non Jordan but at least *influenced* by the many and excellent examples of battles from great to small that Jordan gave us over the years. Instead, I got waves of faceless Trollocs. In short, I got the novelization of a particularly uninspired video game

You cannot be serious, so I assume you're trolling me. I've been reading this series for 16 years. That's why

Anyone find it weird that Perrin missed out on basically the whole big battle, and his power wrought hammer did little except kill a bunch of darkhounds at the very end? He should have been up on the Heights side by side with Mat, destroying waves of Trollocs like in ToM. Instead, we got some weird thing where he was too fatigued and injured to be healed properly. bah :P

This comment is archetypical of what I'm angry about. I didn't pay forty bucks to read about them destroying wave after wave of Trollocs. This is just lazy writing by Sanderson

All the people complaining are complaining because it didn't go the way they had envisioned it. 

 

 

Yes clearly that's what it is. Didn't have anyting to do with the unpolished prose, blunt plotwork, wooden dialogue, "tell don't show" style or poor characterization. All that without even toching on the mistakes and structural issues. I'm just pissed Demandred came out of Shara.

Seriously, Suttree, what kind of fanboy crap was that? Good on you for smacking down that junk

Osan'gar, do you know what scorched earth means? That's exactly what they were doing. They were falling back, denying the opponent any of the resources of the newly conquered territory. They literally burned their own and their enemies corpses because Trolloc armies don't carry food

You're imagining Randland like a single battlefield. It's not. It's a continent. The Trollocs cannot move anywhere near as fast as the Light armies can Travel since Traveling is instantaneous. This incredible advantage didn't exist in the First War because there were huge DF armies from the get go.

No it doesn't. Bro, Randland is the size of the US or at an absolute minimum the US east of the Mississippi. All the Light forces can be concentrated via traveling. In every battle they were outnumbered by the Shadow because they were all fighting separately. But the Light could have concentrated all of its forces, first at the Gap, then at Caemlyn, then at Kandor. The Shadow cannot, because Trollocs can't go through gateways.

Uh, bros. the Big Guys forces were split in four. This was true at Merillor. The Queen of Kandor wasn't even at the meeting because Kandor was virtually overrun, Caemlyn was taken, and Tarwin's Gap was about to be broken through. And it was Elayne who decided as supreme commander to split the forces

Then again, Sanderson probably knows nothing about strategy or operations, and Jordan was never one to shy from having characters hoist the ole idiot ball

Palarran, it's utterly galling to me that they all ignored *SHADOWSPAWN CANNOT TRAVEL*. They should have been able to defeat every Trolloc army in detail within about a month. You don't need to be a military historian or a staff officer to figure is out. It ruins the narrative because it requires everyone to carry an idiot ball. Then again, their High Commander was Elayne, so maybe they all developed stupidity by osmosis. Back in the First War, like huge numbers of the human population were willing or unwilling Shadow conscripts, but even so, the flexibility of the Light forces was a major reason they could hold off the Shadow for so long

The new weave was an execrable ass pull. Her apotheosis was in TGS. The last two books she has been so out of whack I thought there was some long term latent Halimgar compulsion. But turns out she was just a moron. Thankfully redemption = death.

He can manipulate the Pattern the way people (no, not just dreamwalkers, but anyone in TAR by default) can manipulate the dream. He wanted his pipe lit. And there was high quality junk lit