Piercing damage vs blunt damage (and why they're not comparable in AP)

[ProfessorLord]

"A character with a certain degree of attack potency does not necessarily need to cause destructive feats on that level, but can cause damage to characters that can withstand such forces."

This isn't about destructive capacity. It's about Levi pitting his own force against the strength of a titan's skin and bone and having that correlate to the titans durability, despite durability being a larger collection of factors than just the two.

Like I said before, you generally cannot be 8-C via a melee weapon unless said weapon can boost your strength or has some magical property and aspect to it. You generate the force for the melee weapon, not the other way around.

I'll try to find another character, good idea @GreyFang82.

 

[Lightbuster30]

"A character with a certain degree of attack potency does not necessarily need to cause destructive feats on that level, but can cause damage to characters that can withstand such forces."

>>Thread.

 

[WeeklyBattles]

@Professor Youre not hearing what we're saying. You don't have to be the same tier as another character to be able to harm them with a bladed weapon (within reason). Levi is Wall level physically and his blades can cut High 8-C characters to pieces. This does not give Levi High 8-C general AP or durability as he doesn't need to put High 8-C energy behind his swings due to the fact that he's using a bladed weapon to attack them.

 

[WeeklyBattles]

@Professor Are you seriously trying to apply real world limits to fiction? Levi is Wall level physically, that automatically invalidates your argument

 

[ProfessorLord]

@Professor

That actually makes more sense, but saying that he has High 8-C while using blades is still misleading and incorrect. Attack potency is directly correlated to energy, and if his sword just allows him to use significantly less energy to harm someone much stronger than that's not High 8-C amounts of energy.

I understand that, but it still doesn't mean Levi can scale 1-1 with the titans. Cutting through skin and bone is not testing an opponents durability. That's just two factors of durability.

 

[Warren_Valion]

'Furthermore' there is generally no such thing in physics as Levi being 9-B meanwhile his swords are High 8-C. He's the one generating the force of the strike, not the sword. He has 9-B durability. If he really did have High 8-C via swords then whenever he generated the force behind the sword strike he'd obliterate his arms.

You can't be serious.

You know this is fiction, right? Conventional physics are rarely ever used in a fictional setting.

Look at the 3DMG from the same series. Do you really think that would be physically possible to use?

There are characters that crash on rooftops while retaining their top speed from their 3DMG and are completely fine afterward. The maneuvers people like Levi make when using the equipment are also likely to cause damage to the human body. Not to mention that there are people who fall off the walls and then catch themselves using their gear. Those cords aren't elastic, that much force in that small amount of time would snap their spines, but they are completely fine.

There are just a few examples from the series alone, there are countless more in the entirety of fiction.

So saying that a character can't have this strength because "muh, physics" is a ridiculous notion. This isn't reality, this is fiction.

 

[WeeklyBattles]

@Professor Levi can cut characters who can tank certain levels of energy with his swords, that's why it's an ap feat.

 

[ProfessorLord]

Possibly the biggest strawman I've ever seen.

I've never said that characters aren't able to do what they've demonstrated. I know a lot of things in fiction tends to be impossible and unrealistic. I'm not saying Levi can't be that strong either, because if the author wants to he can.

I'm saying that melee weapons cannot be a significantly higher tier than you are. You generate the force behind the melee weapon, it cannot generate the force on your behalf. If you are 8-B normally but High 7-C with a baseball bat, then you're really just High 7-C without it as well. If you weren't then whenever you generated the High 7-C force you would obliterate yourself.

We use conventional physics as a basis for this website dude. You cannot have a higher attack potency then your durability without suffering damage whenever you attack someone. Exceptions are magic and other in-verse mechanics.

 

[ProfessorLord]

@Professor Levi can cut characters who can tank certain levels of energy with his swords, that's why it's an ap feat.

Cutting someone doesn't mean your attack potency correlates to their durability.

Like I said, me gouging the eyes of a polar bear and ripping their ears off doesn't make me 9-B, despite the fact that they're able to regularly withstand large firearms.

 

[WeeklyBattles]

Youre really correlating cutting off a polar bears ear with cutting the limbs of titan shifters to pieces?

 

[WeeklyBattles]

Any normal ass joe schmo normal human on this site automatically becomes 9-C when wielding any kind of sword but it does not change their normal strength or durability

 

[ProfessorLord]

Obviously the energy required to perform the respective feats aren't 1-1 but yes, I did make the comparison.

 

[PaChi2]

Cutting a limb in a single strike is enough to scale. We scale people from much lower than that.

 

[WeeklyBattles]

Hitting someone with a baseball bat and cutting someone with a sword are two very different things. A bat is blunt, so of course it would scale to your ap and dura as you'd need to be that strong in order to hurt someone with it. A sword on the other hand is bladed, it focuses all the ap behind your swing into a fine point, which is what let's people with swords cut things a few tiers above them in ap and durability without being as strong as them.

 

[Warren_Valion]

Snip

Swords and weapons can have their own tiers on the site. Look at Wolverine's page, he's 8-A physically, but 4-B with his claws.

And you're wrong. Magic or other in-verse mechanics aren't the only exceptions. The other most prominent exception is feats. If you have the feats of doing something, and it is consistent enough to not be called an outlier, then you can do that thing, end of story.

Levi can not punch or scratch through a titan's skin with his own hands or nails, but he ca cut through their skin with his equipment. So his equipment can bypass their durability with it's cutting power. He and others have done it constantly in the series, so it's consistent.

These are your words, "I'm not saying Levi can't be that strong either, because if the author wants to he can."

Well, the author did make Levi that strong, but he also made a discrepancy between the strength of any scout when using their own strength, and when using their strength while holding one of their swords.

Does it make any logical sense? No, of course not. But like you said, "'if the author wants to he can." And this is what the author has dictated to work in his fictional setting, despite how illogical it is, and so that's how we classify how strong these characters are.

 

[Skalt711]

This thread makes sense because piercing attacks usually report far more pressure than blunt attacks. Don't forget that elasticity of attacking and attacked being affects physical attacks as well.

Fiction logic can be applied when necessary, but I don't prefer to use it.

Also, I'm here to agree with ProfessorLord's point of view because I agree with it.

Also, I don't understand the logic of 9-C swords. You message some energy to it (sword), it moves with some definite speed. In fact, usually sword should have no attack potency (temperature and its radiation isn't considered here), it depends on the wielder. (Repeated thought?)

 

[Antoniofer]

Non projectile weapons' AP has no sense tho, it strength depends of the wielder's.

I personally think that Levi (or most soldiers) could damage titans with any type of blade, do not remember that the swords made to kill titans has anything special aside from vertatility.

 

[Skalt711]

Don't forget that Levi is already very strong by himself. Landing with the speed of 101 m/s and then fairly damaging someone, who can tank the mentioned landing when landing is something!

I'm not sure about elasticity, so we'll estimate an absolute low-end of what level of energy can Levi project. Let's say, 15 kilojoules. That's 250 times more powerful than 60 joules, an average punching energy that's estimated by me.

Don't forget that Attack Titan hit a very large square when falling.

 

[WeeklyBattles]

Okay now we're turning this into an AoT discussion so let's just leave it at 'fiction doesn't care about physics or what is humanly possible' and get back to the discussion

 

[PaChi2]

But I like AoT.

 

[WeeklyBattles]

Btw i agree that a bladed attack works differently from a blunt attack but you should find a different example to argue your point as Levi's stats are justified

 

[LephyrTheRevanchist]

@Professor

It should be a case-by-case thing. And in AoT it more than justified; although, I always thought that they were capable of going through the titans more so by the speed build up via the 3dgear than the blades themselves.

 

[Skalt711]

@WeeklyBattles As I said, piercing attacks usually report far more pressure than blunt attacks. That's how they're different.

I'm facing you with a replying questions: What do you want to prove? How can you be sure that piercing damage is more powerful than blunt damage? Does piercing damage ignore the durability?

About my point of view: The damage that some being took depends on not only the pressure (and the amount of force). Elasticity of attacked and attacking being also configures the damage as well.

You're cutting a watermelon with a katana. It cuts pretty easily. Easy, right? Try to punch a watermelon with your hand. Now that's complicated because the pressure is definitely lower. Imagine a watermelon that has the compression strength of an original, but has much greater elasticity. It is likely that your katana need to travel a significantly bigger distance in order to cut that watermelon because the time of hitting is greatly extended. You could also apply greater force (katana is the same) via transferring more energy to cut it in the same travel that katana does when cutting a normal watermelon.

 

[WeeklyBattles]

With blunt damage the energy is applied over a wide area, whereas with with a cutting attack all the energy is applied over a paper thin surface

 

[Skalt711]

With blunt damage the energy is applied over a wide area, whereas with with a cutting attack all the energy is applied over a paper thin surface

What I wanted to say.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

Don't we already have policy on chip damage not being equal to scaling to the character you're doing chip damage to?

If so, why does that suddently not apply when the character is significantly larger? I don't give a bee 10-B attack potency because it can stick a needle in my thigh. Comparatively speaking cutting into a large sized character's skin shouldn't suddenly mean you're as strong as said character.

 

[Skalt711]

^ What Dargoo Faust said.

 

[Antoniofer]

Yeah, technically. A giant person is still made of the same material, so if someone can cut flesh of a normal sized one it can cut through one 10 times larger.

 

[WeeklyBattles]

@Dargoo Exactly

Though with Levi it's less cutting skin and more of cutting entire limbs to pieces, flesh and bone and all

 

[Skalt711]

Cutting 80cm thick limb requires more energy than 8cm thick limb, assuming that the hitting square of the attacking being is the same all the time.

 

[Antoniofer]

In theory, it requiere the same amount of pressure to do the same, just a larger surface; what is needed is a great amount of force, pressure is more like a ratio.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

I'm just talking about chip damage.

Cutting off someone's limb absolutely qualifies for scaling.

 

[Skalt711]

Well, I need to sleep.

 

[KLOL506]

Lemme ask a question.

This doesn't affect the dura of anyone who casually withstands Wall level bullets, does it?

 

[AguilaR101]

I got a question regarding this topic in particular, is it fair to extrapolate and assume a character would be able to overcome the durability of an higher tiered one as soon as they picked a weapon with a much smaller surface area?

ie

Character A can resist 1 ton of TNT per square meter

Character B can release an energy of 0.1 ton of TNT per square meter.

Under normal circumstances character B wouldn't be able to hurt character A due to the 10x gap in power, but if say, character B picked up a a rod with a surface area of 1 cm2 he could in theory be able to concentrate his 0.1 ton of energy into a surface area 10,000 times smaller than a square meter, which would result in character A being hit with a concentrated force over 1000x times above his normal durability.

 

[Antvasima]

You should probably ask DontTalkDT, Kaltias, Assaltwaffle, and the calc group members to comment here.

Has anybody done this yet?

If we are going to rework our standards, we need some kind of workable and easily understood mathematical basis for it.

 

[Andytrenom]

Attack potency, as described in its page, is a person's capability to harm something of a particular durability. So going by that you can make the argument that a dude who harms a 9-A with a sword but is otherwise 10-A in physical stats should be treated as being 9-A with the sword. This makes sense given the definition right?

Well, there's another thing that the page has to say about the term. "The attack potency depends upon the energy output of the attack, not the area of effect of the attack."

We measure AP by the actual energy that an attack contains, not the result it produces on its target, a sword swung by a 10-A won't have 9-A energy even if it's capable of harming a 9-A character. Does this mean it can't have a 9-A rating?

Well there's still problems with that since just focusing their own energy into a smaller area won't allow most characters to achieve the feats they do with a weapon. It also won't properly reflect the character's capabilities as a fighter if you don't acknowledge the fact that they are capable of harming characters of a certain tier much higher than their own when weilding a weapon.

I don't have any good suggestion atm for what should be done here, but one option I twould like to see explored is making a proper distinction between normal AP and piercing damage, like we do with normal AP and environmental damage.

 

[KLOL506]

There's also another problem.

You need to be 9-C to be able to cleanly decapitate anyone with an ordinary-sized sword, and fiction doesn't follow real-life standards. So how will that side be managed?

 

[Antvasima]

Well, it doesn't seem like anything will happen here, and in addition, this may be too complicated for our system to handle, unless DontTalkDT, Kaltias, Assaltwaffle, and the calc group members would be able to figure out some workable solution.

 

[Hagane_no_Saiyajin]

Perhaps this scene from HxH would help with explaining blunt vs piercing damage for those who went TL;DR:


Gon vs Hanzo Fights Hunter x Hunter 2011