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Guilty Gear: Fixing the Tiers (Probably Part 1?)

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DarkGrath

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Guilty Gear has recently been my Dorky Fixation That Will Inevitably Fade Away In Two Weeks™️, so I've been looking through the Guilty Gear profiles on the wiki the past couple of days.

The first thing that's caught my eye is the tiering, and the fact that it's messy. I'd like to clean this up.

Almost every character, even some of the weakest of the verse, scale to a top-tier's feat which was calculated at High 5-A on its lowest end, but all the profiles (including the character who actually performed the feat) are listed as 5-A instead. This is not readily explained on the profiles: the best I can tell is that it is probably a product of Justice's multipliers from the Outrage Equipment, as the profile suggests this feat was done with Justice having her power amped by 40, implying the scaling is based off of her at 1/40th of her power. But this has its own inconsistencies. In the linked scene, there isn't any clear multiplier. All they say in the official English translation is "Prepare the gamma ray - maximum output + 40", and as far as I can tell, there aren't any linked fan translations. To check for translation wonkiness, I have spoken with a native Japanese speaker off-site about this scene, and they've confirmed that the original Japanese dialogue is 100% unambiguously saying "+ 40", not "x 40". They're just saying 40 "something" has been added to the gamma ray, not that it was multiplied by 40 or done with 41 maximum outputs. To provide just one alternate interpretation: if the output of Justice was on a continuous dial from "0" at minimum output to "100" at maximum output, you could say "maximum output + 40" just means adding 40% to it.

Furthermore, most scaling comes from Sol, who is stated to have beaten Justice at full power, and there is no key for Justice's use of the Outrage Equipment, so it's largely unclear what the intention with the scaling between Sol and Justice is supposed to be. There's also a feat from Xrd -Sign- that was calced years ago as being 4-C that was seemingly forgotten about. Some profiles also outright don't list any keys despite having multiple tiers divided on them, and some use seemingly non-canon arcade mode endings for scaling.

There is a lot to unpack. But for now, I would like to make this thread to discuss and clean up the tiers listed on the profiles, as well as their formatting. In the future, I may make a Part 2 to discuss the scaling to this feat.




First concern: I recently discussed this older 4-C feat off-site with @CloverDragon03, who made a re-calc of the feat here, getting a 5-B result. This is good as a general supporting tier 5 feat, but ultimately, I don't believe it would change the tiering by itself. I still believe it is worth listing on the verse page, however, so that there aren't any future confusions about where this feat would land.

(A side note I thought to add regarding this re-calc: you could argue this feat being calculated at 5-B makes the other High 5-A feat an outlier, because this feat ends up producing damage that the highest tier characters could only produce collectively, not individually. This is a worthwhile concern as well, but considering we don't know exactly how much energy and mass conversion occurred in this feat (owing to the mass being contained in a "pocket dimension" of unclear properties) and we are estimating based on regular black hole visual standards, I don't really have an issue saying the characters could be higher tier than what we estimate from this feat.)

Second concern: the multipliers. The dialogue is ambiguous about what has actually been "added" to the maximum output of the gamma ray burst, and we usually do not assign multipliers outside of fairly heavy and straightforward evidence. If we did assume it was "40 extra maximum outputs", that also would place Justice's usual power as 1/41st of this feat, not 1/40th, and I'm not content with this assumption in the first place. All we know for sure is that this feat was done with some kind of boost to Justice's usual maximum output. Rather than using multipliers to downscale this feat, I think it would be most appropriate to just list Justice's usual maximum output as "At most High 5-A" for downscaling from the gamma ray burst, and to attach an extra "High 5-A" key for Justice empowered by the Outrage Equipment. For now, I'm fine with using this line of reasoning to scale all of the other characters, including changing all "5-A"'s to "At most High 5-A"'s, and all "Likely/Possibly 5-A's" to "Likely/Possibly High 5-A"'s. But as mentioned before, I may make a Part 2 to discuss some of the more odd scaling.

Third concern: Formatting issues. Several profiles don't format the tiers correctly. To give two examples: Leo Whitefang's profile lists him as concretely 5-A in the tier section, but "Possibly Large Planet Level" in the Attack Potency section. Ramlethal Valentine's contains two tier sections, presumably for her Xrd and Strive appearances, but doesn't list them separately with a key. On a side note, it also lists her as "Possibly 5-A" for fighting evenly with and nearly killing Sol, a 5-A character, so the justification for "Possibly" is unclear. There's no reason not to fix up these issues along the way if anything is going to be revised.

To summarise the changes I would suggest, then:

  1. Change each "5-A" tier, attack potency, and durability section to "At most High 5-A". Change each "Possibly/Likely 5-A" tier, attack potency, and durability section to "Possibly/Likely High 5-A".
  2. Adjust redundant uses of "Possibly/Likely" in profiles in cases of scaling which already has an appropriate justification, such as with Ramlethal's scaling to Sol.
  3. Add a "High 5-A" key to Justice's profile for "Empowered by the Outrage Equipment".
  4. Add a Calculation section to the Guilty Gear verse page, and add these two calculations to the section.
  5. Fix formatting issues on the profiles with the tier, attack potency, and durability sections.

I believe that is all for now.
 
Agreed with this. I’ll also mention it’s hard to say Sol’s feat with the Man makes Justice’s feat an outlier when Justice is one of the more powerful characters regardless, and we don’t actually know how much mass was taken from Sol’s punch given it was instantly taken to a pocket dimension.
 
I'm in agreement with most of everything here.
I've always had problems with that Blackhole feat cause the only context of how it actually is "transferring more energy that can be produced on the planet" I'm still trying to change it.
 
Agree, but also what are the other potential revisions in the future
The only revision I currently intend to make after this one would be to work out the scaling for the verse. But that may be in as little as a few days, or not for a long time. There's a couple of things I'd like to work out first. Most notably, if there are any relevant feats in the verse that could be used as scaling for the low-tiers, since I'm unsatisfied with everyone in the verse - including those who are clearly not anywhere close to Justice's level - downscaling from a single feat by Justice. If there is anything of the sort, that could inform the future thread.
 
From a glance, speed seems on the table. Johnny being Relativistic+ instead of Speed of Light from statements is odd to me, for one
At least Relativistic+, likely higher (Zato-1 stated his attacks are the speed of light)

Lol. Lmao, even. Lmfao, if you'd be so bold.

(I'll probably make a separate brief thread for this in a bit if no one else does. Such a thread is probably simple enough to fall under a short grace period if done by itself.)
 
I don't know Guilty Gear much but this all seems to make sense. I'd be interested in seeing a rescaling thread.
 
Lol. Lmao, even. Lmfao, if you'd be so bold.

(I'll probably make a separate brief thread for this in a bit if no one else does. Such a thread is probably simple enough to fall under a short grace period if done by itself.)
We'd also need to account for characters like Slayer and Sol apparently being faster than Johnny, which would make them FTL

But, that's stuff we can discuss outside this thread
 
The only revision I currently intend to make after this one would be to work out the scaling for the verse. But that may be in as little as a few days, or not for a long time. There's a couple of things I'd like to work out first. Most notably, if there are any relevant feats in the verse that could be used as scaling for the low-tiers, since I'm unsatisfied with everyone in the verse - including those who are clearly not anywhere close to Justice's level - downscaling from a single feat by Justice. If there is anything of the sort, that could inform the future thread.
If we're keeping it to low tiers then, I still wanna get some type of feat out of the giant door scene in strive.
 
The grace period has passed for this thread, there has been sufficient agreement, and there is no active discussion nor any contests against the conclusions of the thread. So I will close this and start implementing the changes.

Thank you all for your input. I will see to making a Part 2 sometime in the near future.
 
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