Moiraine and Lan vs Trevor and Sypha

[Sophicles]

The Aes Sedai Moiraine and her warder Lan take on the Castlevania couple of Trevor Belmont and seeker Sypha. Tevor has his regular whip and short sword.

Which magical/martial coupled pairing wins?

[big_adventure]

QuickDraw but Moraine probably solos. She's quick enough on the draw and knows freaking balefire. She can also wrap Trevor in flows of air to stop the jumping about.

Lan is probably more skilled than Trevor, but much less physically gifted. Lan is a one man army but Trevor can bounce around like spider man.

[The Drunkard Kid]

QuickDraw but Moraine probably solos. She's quick enough on the draw and knows freaking balefire. She can also wrap Trevor in flows of air to stop the jumping about.

Lan is probably more skilled than Trevor, but much less physically gifted. Lan is a one man army but Trevor can bounce around like spider man.

Not to mention that ISTR Moiraine putting down AOE sleep weaves in the first book, possibly over an entire village, so I don't really like Trevor's chances of dodging if he doesn't have the ability to blitz her with a ranged weapon before she tosses up a shield weave. Did end of series Moiraine have any angreals or sa'angreals on her person?

[big_adventure]

Not to mention that ISTR Moiraine putting down AOE sleep weaves in the first book, possibly over an entire village, so I don't really like Trevor's chances of dodging if he doesn't have the ability to blitz her with a ranged weapon before she tosses up a shield weave. Did end of series Moiraine have any angreals or sa'angreals on her person?

I would imagine that she was toting about an angreal - that was pretty much par for the course for her throughout the books. Certainly around the Last Battle, they were handing out angreals like pot brownies at a Phish concert.

[Jackalope89]

I would imagine that she was toting about an angreal - that was pretty much par for the course for her throughout the books. Certainly around the Last Battle, they were handing out angreals like pot brownies at a Phish concert.

Thanks to Elayne mass producing them at least. So angreal did retain their value due to the boost it would give the user.

[big_adventure]

Thanks to Elayne mass producing them at least. So angreal did retain their value due to the boost it would give the user.

Of course - that's why there were so many. Elayne's talent was pretty clutch.

[Nik Hasta]

I don't remember that much from my reading of the first book of WoT but I don't recall Moiraine having particularly noteworthy speed feats off the top of my head - she was caster than battlemage.

Whereas Sypha is quite an exceptional fighter and has a great range game and a great AoE game into the bargain. Barring speed feats for Moiraine, I'd bet on Sypha shooting off something first as she has a buttload of feats of reacting to stuff really quickly.

[Postmania]

The advantage of WoT magic lets the user act pretty quickly. Moiraine would basically be able to look at a target and just think “lightning” and lightning strikes unless I’m mistaken. The target would need to do some aim dodging or withstand something like that first. And even in book one she could summon multiple bolts fall pretty quickly.

[The Drunkard Kid]

I don't remember that much from my reading of the first book of WoT but I don't recall Moiraine having particularly noteworthy speed feats off the top of my head - she was caster than battlemage.

Whereas Sypha is quite an exceptional fighter and has a great range game and a great AoE game into the bargain. Barring speed feats for Moiraine, I'd bet on Sypha shooting off something first as she has a buttload of feats of reacting to stuff really quickly.

The thing is, I don't know that Sylva's projections can cross a hundred feet before Moraine can toss up a forcefield, at which point she can stay utilizing her nearly twenty years of experience backing up Lan while searching the world for the Dragon (to say nothing of her newfound knowledge of balefire), and while she nowhere near as powerful as the high end channelers of the Age of Legends and the new generation, she's still at the top of the normal Aes Sedai tiers even without her angrael.

[Nik Hasta]

The advantage of WoT magic lets the user act pretty quickly. Moiraine would basically be able to look at a target and just think “lightning” and lightning strikes unless I’m mistaken. The target would need to do some aim dodging or withstand something like that first. And even in book one she could summon multiple bolts fall pretty quickly.

Sypha has a certain level of resistances I think, I recall her taking lightning hits in Season 3 I think as part of how she learned that she could manipulate and generate the element. She can also manipulate elements that she didn't create (blocking beams, flames, converting explosions into fire tornadoes and so on).

Obviously there's questions of scale with what's being thrown at her.

Sypha's magic is quick and she's inherently very quick (as in like "I can jump into a crowd of metahuman and extremely hostile vampires alone and completely kick the heck out of them all,") but like 95% of her stuff involves her, at minimum, having to point before firing so if Moiraine is completely "speed of thought and magic is happening" level then I would imagine she might win the quickdraw there.

A fun example of Sypha doing the whole battlemage thing here:

[Nik Hasta]

The thing is, I don't know that Sylva's projections can cross a hundred feet before Moraine can toss up a forcefield, at which point she can stay utilizing her nearly twenty years of experience backing up Lan while searching the world for the Dragon (to say nothing of her newfound knowledge of balefire), and while she nowhere near as powerful as the high end channelers of the Age of Legends and the new generation, she's still at the top of the normal Aes Sedai tiers even without her angrael.

I'm going to have to respectfully ask you to translate that for me, that's a fair bit of jargon in there.

Like what level are these forcefields at, what kind of scale does she work at personally etc.

[Cleric of Hell’s Brigade]

I kind of agree. Sypha regularly tosses quick magic out amidst fighting meta-humans capable of ripping humans in half.

She has also shown the ability to take control of other attacks (she takes Trevor’s fireball from his whip and turns it into a fiery cyclone) and she catches the fire attack from the monster attacking Castle Dracula (stops it cold after it was fired at her).

And Lan is completely useless in this fight. Trevor is blatantly meta-human to the point that he, in his least impressive state, was still pin point accurately whipping fingers off an assailant back in season one. And that’s not taking into account the blows he eats and shrugs off or his blatant meta-ness in fighting vampires.

[Nik Hasta]

I happened to watch the fight between Trevor and the Stone Eye Cyclops in the first season while skimming through the feats this morning and like... given that this is Trevor wildly out of practice, with no gear and a bit drunk, the dude still pulls off some pretty wild ****:



This is the base level of his capabilities and he only goes up and gets better from here.

[big_adventure]

To address a few points:

Yes, WoT magic is most definitely "think and it happens" stuff. Rand, when still half what he becomes later and battling serious mental issues catches a knife out of the air thrown by an ally who's an expert combattant (though likely not super high end WoT - which means soloing dozens of other experts without a scratch) when he's not looking, and not expecting it. He catches a crossbow bolt out of the air before it kill his girlfriend when it's fired from behind them and again, he's not expecting the attack.

Moiraine isn't Rand, but she's got literally 30 years of experience battling armies of superhuman monsters and men who can channel across the world, and she's explicitly one of the strongest of the "current" Aes Sedai (post Age of Legends, pre-Rand and Co.). She has a number of salutatory battle feats. Aes Sedai and other channelers have dozens or perhaps even hundreds of feats in the books of grabbing armed foes and holding them immobile, blind and deaf so quickly that they don't know what happened. They even pull stuff like this off when they are being ambushed, mid combat, etc., and it just requires a thought.

I would probably give Sypha a decent edge if they started off at 10 feet thanks to her speed and battlemagery, but this is Khazan and 100 feet. Moiraine can counter anything Sypha can throw, and the same is most definitely not true in reverse. Moiraine can just snap her neck with flows of air at the bell - attacks in WoT do not have to cross the space between and are most definitely not always visible - two advantages Sypha is missing. She'd basically never do this to a human in-world, she couldn't, thanks to the Oaths, but in Khazan it's a fight to the death where she's immediately under attack, so she's do it in a heartbeat.

Lan and Trevor are both useless to the fight. Lan wouldn't be useless against Trevor. He is more skilled, in all likelihood, and has the pesky advantage of wielding a magic completely unbreakable sword, so he'd be able to defend against Trevor. Trevor dominates scary monsters, but Lan does as well, treating massively superhuman Myrrdraal like chaff and Trollocs (10 foot tall super strong armored beast-men) like, well, less than chaff. He's explicitly the best non-channeler warrior in the series (only Demandred, a channeler, and Lews Therin, Demondred's superior who lives inside Lan, are close to a match with a blade), and not by some small margin. The best of the other fighters are: Gawyn, Elayne's brother, who trains freakishly hard and gets so good that, while still basically a young adult, can easily kill the person responsable for training Warders swordsmanship. So Gawain used a handful of ter'angreal, one of which turns a regular person into a super ninja at the cost of their lives, again, a handful of them to attack Demandred. Demandred treated him as a joke, lauhging at him in their fight. Galad, Gawyn's half brother and pretty much the best non-Lan normal human fighter in the books. Galad is trivially better than Gawyn. Galad has a feat at one point of basically strolling through an attacking force that was stalemating some high-end warriors, killing a couple of dozen of them, all while lecturing Nynaeve. Demandred kills him pretty easily. Lan, on the other hand, kills Demandred.

That's not to say that Lan would win against Trevor - he wouldn't, Trevor is cartoon superhuman by an alarming degree. But Trevor would have to work for it.

Here, it doesn't matter, because Moiraine can kill them both before they can get anything to her and Lan.

[Cleric of Hell’s Brigade]

Ehh, the problem being at 100 ft can Moraine hold a person faster than her in place as Sypha is darting around (a tactic Sypha often uses)?


Because, while admittedly it’s been over a decade since I read a WoT book, I don’t recall Moraine’s Air Flows working like that (and I seem to remember a lot of Aes Sendai getting taken by surprise throughout the series). And if she can’t target hit a moving Sypha, that might be a problem because Sypha has a helluv a lot of power to bare here, and quickly too. Her fire can immolate super durable monsters pretty quickly.