Prototype Downgrades

[ByAsura]

They're the same thing just worded a different way. I'm not sure what point you're really trying to make here, and it doesn't exactly matter to the discussion at hand.

Because you said you disagreed with my logic, so I tried using the "more accurate alternative."

I don't believe there's much cutting around when the fireball expands and hits Alex, which as I've said multiple times can be used as a more accurate alternative. I can recalc the feat is necessary.

Also, the low-end is a statement, while the high-end is the blast yield to destroy Manhattan in-game, so City Block level is more likely than Building level+ if you're using this method.

 

[Ricsi-viragosi]

It's not more likely, it's possible at most.

Not really seeing why one should scale to something because they "only" became semi-liquid when hit by it tough. Even the strongest 9-Bs wouldn't do that to most people (not to such an extent).

If there are other 8-C feats, maybe, but I can't see that alone doing much for tier. How much it's worth against 8-C I'm not sure, but I'll also say that using megaton nukes is really unlikely nowadays, especially for where Mercer was.

 

[ByAsura]

It is more likely because feats are regarded as being more accurate than statements.

Also, "possible at most"?

 

[Ricsi-viragosi]

With the full sentence, that at most means that the more likely has to be changed to possibly.

And this isn't much a feat.

 

[ByAsura]

Why though?

 

[Zamasu_Chan]

From what I'm seeing the nuke is being used to disregard anything 8-C, but why? Like Asura said, the writers wouldn't think that the bomb would be that weak from that far. Secondly it ignores the narrative and one of the reasons why Alex consumed the Supreme Hunter. Third this is the only anti feat for 8-C IIRC and Alex is a Regenerationn character. Regen characters are turned to mush almost all the time. Look at Majin Buu for example, he gets blown apart by characters weaker than him and even bullets can pierce his skin despite being solar system level. It's just inconsistency and it you're kinda pushing the downgrade Dragoo.

 

[Sir_sun_man]

im with zamasu on this one

 

[Ricsi-viragosi]

Why though?

To which part?

It's a possibly at most because if you want to take author intent in, then the idea that they would use a megaton momb is seriously unlikely, since those things stopped being used.

For the second, because something turned to paste is a really, really bad downgrade from any attack you took. The amount of power gap needed to do that is immense, so much that that probably wouldn't be 8-C.


But I don't really like using it as an anti-feat for tiers either.

 

[ByAsura]

I was asking why it's possible and not more likely. This is Blackwatch. They have members more powerful than the president and are completely prepared to do some law-breaking in order to defeat the infected. Here's a list off the top of my head.

• Attempting to blow up all of Manhattan, twice.
• Civilian biological testing.
• Creating viruses that could "literally erase human civilization", twice.
• Kidnapping/Torturing children for their genetic experiments.

However, the game doesn't portray it that way, feats do, and it's more likely they didn't truly care what yield it was.

In this game, the characters are kind of glass canons already compared to their weaponry. Also, that's sort of an assumption, though one I'd usually agree with.

Edit: Apparently, this is what would happen if an 800 kiloton bomb were dropped on Manhattan. So it's probably lower than 800 kilotons, but higher than 75 if we go by the destruction scene.

 

[Ricsi-viragosi]

Four of those three were absolute non-factors, as they have nothing to do with AP or megaton nukes. Specifically, the fact that such nukes are not used due to the wasted energy in radiation, while modern kilobomb nukes can destroy large cities, killing everything in them, without causing any notable unwanted radiation and such.

And again, the attacks reduced him to paste, which makes it a lot less impressive. It hardly is backing up any tier he isn't at already from what I'm seeing.

 

[ByAsura]

This isn't real life, for one, and they're not non-factors. Blackwatch wants a 100% deathtoll, and the DX-1118 C is explicitly able to adapt. Most nukes in the tens of kilotons range don't destroy large cities, it takes bombs in the hundreds of kiloton range.

That's an actual non-factor: the argument isn't that it backs up his tier, it's specifically that not surviving the nuke isn't an ant-feat for 8-C.

 

[Callsign_Castle]

Edit: Apparently, this is what would happen if an 800 kiloton bomb were dropped on Manhattan. So it's probably lower than 800 kilotons, but higher than 75 if we go by the destruction scene.

I'll likely respond to most of this thread eventually, but I wanted to respond to this. That is a nuclear bomb delivered via airburst, the most effective way to receive the most amount of bang for your buck from a nuclear weapon.

The nuke in the game wasn't even a surface level explosion, it was a sub-surface level explosion from an unknown depth, with a stated distance of 10-15 miles off the coast. And the bomb still had enough range to devastate nearly half the length of Manhattan, as we see on the Prototype 2 map.

The safest thing to do is go what the game gives us, which is several methods of interpretation which have been calculated.

We shouldn't expect too much realism or project onto others what we think should be the case versus what actually is the case. Nobody is raising any questions as to why there is still a healthy NYC population months later when everybody should be dead from either the blast or acute radiation poisoning.

Which brings me to another point, 10 miles off the coast of manhattan. Alex had to fly the bomb that far before it went off, in a UH-60 blackhawk, which has a maximum takeoff weight of 10,659kg, including the chopper itself which weighs 4,819kg, leaving us with 5,840kg of loadable weight, meaning realistically it wouldn't be pushing anywhere near its top speed nor could the bomb be heavier than this limit.

Yet bombs in all the nuclear yield estimates that we have would have real life counterparts weighing anywhere from 2,900 kg to over 40,000 kg. This isn't to forget Alex Mercer who at the end of the game states he's consumed 1000 men. 88.8kg is the average american male weight. Multiply that by 1000 and thats 88,800 kilograms so the helicopter should've been crushed under his weight in the first place.

You're also given in-game 1 minute and 45 seconds to kill the Supreme Hunter before the bomb detonates. Unless you instantly kill it and are already flying at that mark (which would take nearly double the helicopter's maximum speed), it is an impossible task before you factor in the return trip he started to make.

I think people are attempting to make their own conclusions instead of simply using the game which is obviously very flawed.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

Like Asura said, the writers wouldn't think that the bomb would be that weak from that far. Secondly it ignores the narrative and one of the reasons why Alex consumed the Supreme Hunter.

I've already answered a similar point, in that this argument is highly hypocritical. That exact same logic applies to other fan extrapolations, and has no significant meaning when we're comparing two fan extrapolations. It just happens that one of these extrapolations is significantly rooted in the story and is talked about more than most other feats in the entire game, which gives more credence to this anti-feat than 1-2 gameplay feats by any measure.

I'm not really sure how it 'ignores' Alex consuming the Supreme Hunter, though. It's palatable with the anti-feat, it's extrapolations of other feats we're concerned about.

However, the game doesn't portray it that way, feats do, and it's more likely they didn't truly care what yield it was.

Once again, the game devs likely care even less about however many joules are pulled out of a fan-made calculation system for a fan-made calc of any other kind as well. You'd have a point if we were pulling higher than 8-C stats from pure in-game statements, but from what I've read on this thread you seem to be talking about our calcs, not that.

They're the same thing just worded a different way. I'm not sure what point you're really trying to make here, and it doesn't exactly matter to the discussion at hand.

They're different arguments. I'm fine if you meant the same thing and just flubbed your wording, but there is a very big difference between "this doesn't discount anything" and "this doesn't strongly support discounting things". It's important for me to understand what you're arguing, is all.

I think people are attempting to make their own conclusions instead of simply using the game which is obviously very flawed.

We're all using what we see in the game to draw conclusions, I don't think anyone here is pulling claims out of hot air. Unless you're saying that fan-calcs are "attempting to make their own conclusions" as well, in which case what you just did and what practically everyone else here is doing is "very flawed". Either way this point doesn't make much sense.

I do agree that 800 kilotons is a far cry from what the yeild of the bomb is in-game though (the lowest-end interpretations I've done of it are in the multi-megatons), I just disagree with this specific point.

 

[ByAsura]

I'll respond to this when I get on my computer.

 

[Zamasu_Chan]

@Dragoo Regenerationn characters tend to always get pierced cut or even blown apart by attacks that are weaker than them. Can't bullets pierce through Alex? I guess he's street level.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

@Dragoo Regenerationn characters tend to always get pierced cut or even blown apart by attacks that are weaker than them. Can't bullets pierce through Alex? I guess he's street level.

This has a lot of issues, I'll go over them bit by bit:

• Piercing attacks will penetrate characters with high durability all the time in fiction, mostly because piercing attacks put 9-C levels of kinetic energy on a stupidly small surface area. We've had a large number of shots at calculating what kind of blunt durability would be needed to be bullet-proof, and it's consistently been between high end 9-A and low end Tier 8. So the 'bullets piercing Alex' doesn't really mean anything in the context of Tier 8 vs. Tier 9-A.

• It really depends on the character you're talking about. Regenerationn in of itself doesn't mean that characters can be inconsistent without any consequences, and that we can handwave clear caps on what we can interpret on them. From what I understand, we have already dismissed bullets and small munitions hurting Alex as an element of gameplay, not due to some weird inconsistency by his Regenerationn, so there's nothing invalidating a clear-cut story moment where Alex is turned into mush.

So I'm not saying Alex is street level, although anything above the higher-end of 9-A is very questionable.

It still irks me that we're talking hypotheticals here, though. I have not been provided with any Tier 8 calculations to consider here, and not nearly the breadth needed to handwave the nuke ending, so there's a massive amount of context that hasn't been brought up yet.

 

[Zamasu_Chan]

Also why was the end of the nuke only 8-C when a large portion of Manhattan was hakai'd because of the nuke.

 

[ByAsura]

It depends on surface area. Alex is one man, but the end of Manhattan has hundreds of buildings.

 

[Zamasu_Chan]

Also also, shouldn't Mercer's P2 key needs to be based off a recalc'd tendrils stretching across the city or at least his last key does.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

Explosions are generally pretty bad at harming people at a large distance due to how little of an available surface area there is to hit a person. Most of the damage typically comes from internal bleeding or high-speed shrapnel.

Also also, shouldn't Mercer's P2 key needs to be based off a recalc'd tendrils stretching across the city or at least his last key does.

From what I understand there's large issues with that calc that needs to be fixed and that's not considering the issue of it being a massive outlier to anything Alex and Mercer have shown prior.

 

[ByAsura]

I wouldn't say it's an outlier, more like a new technique. He absorbed Mercer, who has many strange viral powers, and released a tendril barrage devastator, which Heller didn't have before the absorption.

I think it should be recalced though, as they appear larger from a distance, but are smaller than a Walker's chest up close and in-detail.

 

[Zamasu_Chan]

Also also, shouldn't Mercer's P2 key needs to be based off a recalc'd tendrils stretching across the city or at least his last key does.

From what I understand there's large issues with that calc that needs to be fixed and that's not considering the issue of it being a massive outlier to anything Alex and Mercer have shown prior.

You're kinda shooting this down unreasonably. It's not an outlier because A, this is Mercer 2 years after P1 and at the beginning of P2 he's likely far stronger than he was before. B, Heller Absorbed some evolved but still got his ass collectively handed to him by Alex with ease and would've died if it wasn't for his hax resistance. And C, final form Alex is far stronger than even that plus Heller being able to contend with him is pure PIS.
I also said it needs to be recalc'd so please don't make it appear as if I'm trying to wank the character.

 

[ByAsura]

@Dargoo I was going to make a debunk of the nuke feat, but it's pretty much irrelevant. There aren't really any 8-C feats.

I'll begin the next thread soon.

 

[Dargoo_Faust]

I wouldn't say it's an outlier, more like a new technique. He absorbed Mercer, who has many strange viral powers, and released a tendril barrage devastator, which Heller didn't have before the absorption.

I think it should be recalced though, as they appear larger from a distance, but are smaller than a Walker's chest up close and in-detail.

That seems fine on paper, until you're introduced to scaling to literally any of their other techniques. If we were rating this feat as Environmental Destruction I'd be inclined to agree, but if this is supposed to be some kind of tier-setter for end-game Mercer, the lack of anything from him or Alex within multiple orders of magnitude make it fairly simple that it's an outlier.

I agree with your second line of thought, however. The feat has numerous problems in that calc outside of application.

A, this is Mercer 2 years after P1 and at the beginning of P2 he's likely far stronger than he was before.

And we see plenty of Mercer in P2, even more of Heller, and nothing remotely close to this feat. Simply because a character has gotten stronger does not mean outliers cannot exist.

B, Heller Absorbed some evolved but still got his ass collectively handed to him by Alex with ease and would've died if it wasn't for his hax resistance.

Alex being stronger than Heller tells me nothing about how this feat is consistent with what we see of him in P2. I don't really see the point of this argument.

And C, final form Alex is far stronger than even that plus Heller being able to contend with him is pure PIS.

Like I said before, an increase of strength does not invalidate the existence of outliers. That said, I'm not taking the cross-out text seriously and I hope you aren't presenting it seriously.

There aren't really any 8-C feats.

Which is the core of the issue here. Until we're presented with solid feats in the Tier 8 range this entire debate is kind of a waste of time, no offense.

I'll begin the next thread soon.

Sounds good. I'm currently running a fever and will be extremely busy starting classes next week, but I'll make sure to set aside some time to kick off discussion on the next thread. Thank you for being such a large help with these threads.

 

[ByAsura]

Probably environmental destruction, given how devastators are treated in-verse (excluding gameplay). It's pretty clear that Heller's devastator is the most powerful attack in Prototype, which is why he's convulsing and seemingly overwhelmed after absorbing Mercer.

It's fine, that's pretty much why I dropped the argument.

No problem.

 

[XSOULOFCINDERX]

So...

Can I make a match with any of these guys yet or should I just wait?

 

[ByAsura]

Maybe wait 'till the next thread.

 

[Callsign_Castle]

@XSOUL He can shapeshift on the molecular level. UMR just took the word "rebuild" out of context (from what I remember) and said controling whitelight on the molecular level should give Mercer high regen because other profiles have the same logic.
There's also some other stuff that's out of context. For example, that "on-the-fly" transformation stuff refers to his ability to manipulate his body any time he wants, not creating new powers.

Also about this. There's direct evidence of a single virio being fully functional/sentient and capable of taking over an entire organism on its own. This is the smallest level consuming event shown anywhere in both games, and Mercer is the virus.

Prototype 2 then supports this visual by saying Mercer can control every drop of whitelight in existence down to the molecular level, and also saying even a small sample introduced into a larger specimen will facilitate the conversion.

"The basic structure of a virus is made up of a genetic information molecule and a protein layer that protects that information molecule. The arrangement of the protein layer and the genetic information comes in a variety of presentations. The core of the virus is made up of nucleic acids, which then make up the genetic information in the form of RNA or DNA. The protein layer that surrounds and protects the nucleic acids is called the capsid. When a single virus is in its complete form and has reached full infectivity outside of the cell, it is known as a virion. A virus structure can be one of the following: icosahedral, enveloped, complex or helical."

 

[ByAsura]

That doesn't mean he has high Regenerationn. Also, that was the virus Mercer released, not a full organism like Mercer himself.

Basically, you'd need to prove Mercer, despite being Blacklight, can exist on the same level as a virion.

 

[Callsign_Castle]

An organism by definition is classified as a single-cell life form to a multicellular life form. And the virus Mercer released was a vial of a lab-produced strain of the virus that took over Mercer's body. It had never been a (or in) multi-cellular organism until that point.

"Basically, you'd need to prove Mercer, despite being Blacklight, can exist on the same level as a virion."

I would have to prove the virus can exist on a level it started from and we're shown multiple times it can exist at?

 

[ByAsura]

I know, I should've explained that better. Unlike a virion, Mercer isn't a single-celled organism, he's a replication that was created by a test tube of Blacklight.

I'm not saying he's not the virus, but where's your evidence he can exist as single cells. The game doesn't seem to portray it that way.

 

[Callsign_Castle]

Virions aren't organisms at all because viruses are acellular. Even in a large amount, virions are individual particles.

"Unlike a virion, Mercer isn't a single-celled organism, he's a replication that was created by a test tube of Blacklight."

This reads weird to me because Mercer's body was restructured by the virus (DX-1118) that was contained in the vial. DX-1118 assumed the identity of Mercer when it was just a large amount of virions beforehand.

"I'm not saying he's not the virus, but where's your evidence he can exist as single cells. The game doesn't seem to portray it that way."

In the video shown. It would only take a single blacklight virion for en entire multicellular organism to become completely blacklight, that is what is shown.

 

[ByAsura]

Mercer is made of Blacklight, but he's not the virus outright. He's just made of it and it makes little to no sense in game for him to survive as a single-celled organism.

We don't know that was a single virion. We see one, but the dialogue doesn't seem to imply that.

 

[ByAsura]

I've made the next thread.

 

[Callsign_Castle]

You're not understanding. The virus literally states that it became Mercer. The virions inside the vial took over his body, infected a few cells which in turn facilitated a rapid chain consumption of all the cells in his body.

"We don't know that was a single virion. We see one, but the dialogue doesn't seem to imply that."

We do know that because that is what is shown. The burden of proof would be on you to prove that there's more than the one virion we do see. For reference, Mercer changed Heller's entire biology in seconds with his hand.

 

[ByAsura]

You misunderstood what I meant. Mercer is made of the blacklight virus, but he isn't the same thing as the virions in that vial.

Still, that's not really evidence for Mercer surviving as a single-celled organism, and the game doesn't really imply that he can. He's been absorbed by Heller, and each part of him doesn't scatter somewhere else when its removed, they just die. Mercer was pumping virus into Heller, and he can usually remove it at a whim.

Regardless of what you say, there's no feats to back up Mercer surviving as one cell, so I'm going to drop this.

 

[Callsign_Castle]

"Mercer is made of the blacklight virus, but he isn't the same thing as the virions in that vial."

But that's exactly what he is. The cells didn't infect themselves.

"Still, that's not really evidence for Mercer surviving as a single-celled organism, and the game doesn't really imply that he can. He's been absorbed by Heller, and each part of him doesn't scatter somewhere else when its removed, they just die. Mercer was pumping virus into Heller, and he can usually remove it at a whim."

I've said it at least once already, virions/viruses are acellular.

a┬Àcel┬Àlu┬Àlar

/─ü╦êselyələr/

adjective

BIOLOGY

1. not consisting of, divided into, or containing cells.

A cell would only be necessary for the virus to replicate, otherwise the virus can survive well on its own. I'm not really interested in hearing about Heller consuming Mercer when he was regenerating from several drops just fine in the first game.

"Regardless of what you say, there's no feats to back up Mercer surviving as one cell, so I'm going to drop this."

Your refusal to accept what is shown doesn't mean there aren't feats.

 

[Sir_sun_man]

I wouldn't say it's an outlier, more like a new technique. He absorbed Mercer, who has many strange viral powers, and released a tendril barrage devastator, which Heller didn't have before the absorption.
I think it should be recalced though, as they appear larger from a distance, but are smaller than a Walker's chest up close and in-detail.

heller did have that ability before he got it in the yellow zone

 

[DeathNoodles]

Also, that's not even what I meant.

I mean, you stating that Mercer isn't the Blacklight Virus outright and that he is merely just made up of it (and is not the same virus inside that vial) is contradicted by multiple statements of the Alex Mercer we play as being the Blacklight Virus itself, which heavily suggests that he is the entire virus rather than just the thing that the virus has created from the infection but alright then.

 

[ByAsura]

Heller doesn't have the Tendril Barrage devastator from Prototype 1, he gained another type.

@DeathNoodles You're misinterpreting what I'm saying, but it's irrelevant, regardless.