Alas, my wank has grown tenfold since.
One could point out that super-speed 8-Cs wouldn't struggle much with armies of normal people. However Travis does have a similar feat of killing 100 armed people on his own and scales to people who've beaten hundreds, the number is lesser than an entire army but that isn't super important when it comes to group fights because only so many people, a dozen or so tops, are going to be able to threaten you at once due to range concerns. Obviously more is better but only because it requires more consistency, the actual moment to moment threat isn't any different.
It SHOULD be noted that basically everyone scales to the MHS stuff, and that it's actually around Security level 30 that you get the majority of said lightning BS in CoH. Everyone can dodge it, just some people are better at dodging it than others and AVs/Heroes are the best at it. There's no stat stomping here, it's just that CoH gets more BS at the higher tiers than most MMOs.
Oh, and, bear with me. I kind of need to pull powersets and enemy groups from my rear end here, and you'll be getting wiki pages. The main thing to note is that 1 on 1 not a single combination of powersets can take on America's #1 hero
Onto Travis' own skill feats, before I talk about 'em
I have a few quick things to explain.
A very consistent trend of Suda51's writing is that "instinct", "bloodlust" and the ability to sense them are a very universal thing among combatants (and normal people to a minor extent). If you're curious there's
this old blog of mine - In particular I'd point you to the
KiD stuff which makes it very very explicit. The more experienced people are in this type of thing the better they become at sensing danger even in supernatural ways and gain the ability to instinctually react to things. It's like a verse power system except literally just about having that dog in you. If it sounds like bullshit - which I wouldn't blame you for, it's pretty strange - I can pick out some of the best evidence for you, but it is accepted on profiles. Anyways, all of this is to say most human combatants in the verse are similarly driven by this and can be roughly scaled to one another, it's a sort of Instinctive Reaction/ESP UES. From now on I'll make sure to handpick stuff just from fighters much lesser than Travis or ones he has direct scaling to, I just wanted to explain that there is a direct line that can be drawn between skill and instinct in the verse. A
fighter's instincts are honed as they become more powerful and even low tiers are supernaturally aware of danger.
Essentially, one big
Super Reflexes verse, probably a bit better than SR, but nothing Statesman hasn't seen and dealt with before. Anyone I skip is dealt with or at least is similar to something I already mentioned
Seems a bit like what you'd get out of
The Family, or an
Arachnos Widow. Generally, if Statesman fights either, the fight isn't lasting ten seconds. But that's him being an in-verse top tier, in actuality for PCs they're spooky if they hit, the problem is them actually hitting the PC.
- Not only does Travis upscale due to established reasons, but he also does just no-diff KO the guy in Travis Strikes Again. That's a more skilled Travis but y'know.
Fair.
- Bad Girl - Travis fights her to a standstill in NMH1. It's a dead even fight with both landing a lethal blow on the other (Travis manage to weasel his way out of getting killed), they were relative and he's gotten better since. Bad Girl's instinct is powerful enough she can fight solely relying on it, surpassing her father who even before learning to fight was able to stand up after being knocked out, catch an attack and then fight several people while unconscious.
So essentially KO doesn't work here. If Statesman sees this sort of thing happen he's liable to throw Travis, but at that point it's if Statesman gets his grubby paws on Travis that's GG, but it's not like Travis can't dodge Statesman. Like I said, they're probably somewhat relative in skill, but Statesman has never fought someone who can fight unconscious who also wasn't psychic so it didn't really count as a fight.
Onto Travis himself, even before actually getting real training and
learning just off correspondences he
barely ever found a challenge, and he's since received training from combat masters. Even at the beginning of the first game (Travis grows in skill a LOT through the game, going from greatly inferior to his master Ryu to surpassing him by the fourth to last boss) Travis easily stomped the 11th best assassin in America,
Helter Skelter, and only gets better since. He can
fight while having his perception messed with, learn wrestling moves just by watching VHS tapes of matches [note that wrestling is a legit fighting style in the verse]. Has stated
that he makes his mind go blank during a fight, fighting with his instincts, which allows him to
dodge surprise attacks from behind, and can consistently block attacks coming from any direction without needing to turn, even ones that would require extreme precision such as
bursts of automatic gunfire from multiple directions at once.
Most of this, besides the wrestling this is where I call on Super Reflexes again. Bullets are MHS in this verse, or around it, so... uh... half the enemies in this game use bullets of some kind... And SR can tank stealth(Just ******* run to the end of the mission) through armies of the *******... and this is where I mention
Malta is better trained and skilled than actual Special Forces and has shit like homing rockets and whatnot. I'm sure Travis has that sort of thing too, but... yeh.
Ah, the average life of a Martial Arts Super Reflexes... anything, actually. SR is like gambling, you'll rarely take hits but when you do, it's usually an Alpha strike(A one or two-shot).
That was all NMH1, in 2
he's gotten a lot better than
ever before, he's precise enough to
snatch bullets out of the air unharmed and scales to people like Million Gunman who can pull off
Revolver Ocelot-style ricochets.
Can't really scan this, but
Dual Pistols Hail of Bullets is literally curving bullets through the air and ricocheting if there's a roof. Can't recall any time someone caught a bullet but then again, I could just be not remembering it.
More notably he fairly easily beats
Kimmy Howell who
can learn in a single day techniques that would require normal assassins entire years (and if you've been reading anything so far you understand that "normal" is a very relative term here). Note that she prepped specifically to kill him with that monster AD and still failed.
Ehhhh, it's weird cause PC Widows can blitzkrieg from 1 to 50 in like a day, including honing their psychic powers or lethality if you go Fortunata or Night Widow respectively. And Widows often go after Statesman(Or did, he's a corpse in-verse) just to see if they can be among the big dogs.
Oh, and when I mention levels, I mean Security levels. An in-verse thing that dictates the power and skill of the hero or villain in question. Statesman is a 50, so he's cleared for everything under the sun.
Another thing to note is that, as a member of the Surviving Eight, he's had to solo armies of
Rikti. Who are... advanced inter-dimensional Aliens who can one-shot kill most people and can do legit damage to people
comparable to Statesman. And also have the ability to psychic blast people or spam disorients until they die with every single weapon they have. And also hit them with beams of nuclear fusion. Almost every other Hero and Villain who participated died. Statesman did the entire war and doesn't even have scars to show for it unlike his compatriots.
