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Why are Mavel and DC heralds locked at 4-B? An open letter to the staff of Versus Battles Wiki

The_Smashor

The_Smashor

15,676
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Dear Versus Battles Wiki Staff,

I am writing this letter to ask a simple question: Why is it that Marvel and DC Heralds are only ever at Solar System level? I understand our Power-scaling Rules for Marvel and DC Comics exist, but they don't seem to be a very good reason for higher feats to be discounted. Let's go over the rule that seemingly keeps everyone locked in tier 4.

1) Feats: The most basic and reliable method for power-scaling would be direct feats. However, the feats should preferably be somewhat consistent, and elseworld and alternative continuity feats are not acceptable for power-scaling.
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Now then, this has some problems.
  1. Feats are not power-scaling. Power-scaling is how you get a character higher than their direct feats by comparing them to other characters. Feats are characters directly getting a level of power from certain actions. A verse having wonky power-scaling is no reason to discredit direct feats.
  2. I don't understand how inconsistency in feats is what keeps Marvel and DC 4-B. We have seven Solar System level feats for Marvel on the verse page if you count each yottaton feat for Thor. In Hulk vs Broly, Death Battle (Which has a research team that's probably much smaller than our list of knowledgeable Marvel members, not to mention they had limited time to work with and were only talking about a single character) found at least universal feats that are at least universal (The third one was only in a comic panel, by the way, and not directly mentioned). From a SINGLE DEATH BATTLE EPISODE, we already have ~43% as many universal feats as we have accepted Solar System level feats in ALL OF MARVEL.
  3. DC, meanwhile, has TWO Solar System level feats that we've accepted. There is no way that TWO feats on a certain level are the most consistent thing in a 26 year comic run, not even including Post-Flashpoint.
So then, riddle me this: How exactly is Solar System level the most consistent level of power in 90 years of comic books when the amount of feats we have for that level are in the single digits? And how is it that higher feats are all considered outliers when a fairly small team analyzing a single character found at least three?

Sincerely,

The Smashor
 
I'm pretty sure that the Power-Scaling Rules For Marvel And DC Comics asking for Feats doesn't literally limit characters to only what they showed to do but means it as in characters taking effort on doing feats or easily doing others and that helping giving an idea of their stats. We obviously do have powerscaling, quite a lot of it. That's also a very simple-made page we have that's meant to give a basic idea, it could use being remade and I have pointed out this recently.

There's a lot of factors going over what power do this characters have, feats on tier 5 and lower may be casual and not setting up any limit to their power, and anti-feats are a whole other matter; They exist, and people on this line of logic just ignore them every time they happen, as in it's not that they add up to a character's consistency even if, for now, they don't matter, they uprightly act as if all anti-feats didn't exist nor matter for anything at all. If you want to try an upgrade for this then go ahead and see what happens, that'll truly answer your question.

Also, don't just take DB's word and assume what they show is correct, they have no standards when it comes anything on Universe level and above; They claimed in the Flash vs A. Sonic ep. that the Flashes almost destroyed the multiverse by overhyping the wording the comic did, poetic and fancy words like it makes them go nuts, and they have no idea how AoE and environmental destruccion is still a thing for cosmic stuff, their likely idea that King Dedede took a dimension collapsing is wrong as the dimension did so around him w/o affecting him and Alien X taking the universe getting erased isn't Universal (We ourselves got that wrong in his profile but that's because nobody important cares, any relevant staff would just look at that and say "Yeah, that's wrong"). You can present the feats here and at least get to know if they're truly at least outliers, and then even if they're outliers we can have them listed somewhere. That would be constructive, this thread isn't, so I'm gonna close it.
 
We pretty much went over nearly every alleged universal feat for Superman in existence and truth be told; they tend to come into a result of none of them actually being solid universal to begin with.
  • The Book of Infinite Pages is the most popular example and usually the first one people bring up. It's debunked by two facts: it does not have infinite mass as proven when Ultraman read it from beginning to the end, and the combined might of Superman and Shazam cannot lift it.
  • The Spectre was not even a planetary feat let alone universal; which the combined might of Superman and Wonder Woman and pretty much the entire Justice league failed to lift him.
  • The Phantom Zone was a chain reaction; anyone can shake or destroy the Phantom zone given the stability feats standard. Even Batman could technically shake or destroy it as all he needs to do is hold a kryptonite ring in front of Superman.
  • The Superboy Prime example is a loophole; they fought in a tiny pocket reality and not a universe. And while Superboy does have his own 2-C scaling feats; he can vary greatly and also has a tendency to hold back. Scaling this to Post-Crisis Superman would be the same as making Krillin universal because he fought a held back SSB Goku.
  • Green Lanterns holding back the Big Bang required the combined might of many Green Lanterns; which they do not stack together linearly in large groups. Lantern Rings are an empathy based power that skyrocket astronomically in large groups. And pretty much every single Empathy base power in fiction works that way and not to common for characters to be Tier 2 as a group but barely anything individually.
  • Then there's a giant list of feats that are either non-canon, Post Crisis Superman wasn't the one who did the feat as Bronze Age Supes did, stuff that required outside help or Superman didn't physically lift a universe but some God character did but said he will drop it of Superman stops hoping,
That's all I got for now for the list, but Superman regularly struggles to do feats less than Tier 4 like more than 90% of the time. There even exist most cases of him being portrayed as barely being Urban level. And the Relativistic Mass Punch is lore stated to be the strongest punch any Justice League Member can pull off and Superman literally needed to put himself in a coma just to do it once. Which he also states was the strongest he's ever been during it. Also, Wonder Woman, Shazam, Blue Beetle, Lobo, and a bunch of other characters consistently have Tier 5 or Tier 4 showings as caps on them; which all of them would have to be updated to universal accordingly is Superman gets it. Especially Martain Manhunter and Wally West.

As for Marvels stuff, I Hulk's universal feats appear to be more so range rather than AP when he "Shook the universe"; which AP got calculated at 4-B. But I do not know of many more examples; also Hulk is inconsistent and all over the place. People like Silver Surfer also have him using his strongest attack being a 4-B thing, in which he would also need to be universal if Hulk is. Sentry is also seen as a stomp to nearly every other Avenger, and his most consistent statement is being the strength of over one million supernovas. Not quite an anti-feat, but even various characters who appear to have cap 4-A feats also stomp various Justice League and Avengers respectively.

I agree with Abstractions that there should have been more elaborate input before closing prematurely, but I do think Eficient is correct in some points. Making everyone Tier 2 kind of creates a lot of loopholes with a giant list of far in between characters would also need updated despite numerous lore inconsistencies and showings of peak/caps.
 
I feel the arguments used by the OP in proposal for either franchise to get upgrades can easily get reversed by the fact that there are more instances of characters being way, way way lower than Universal and above in terms of feats than otherwise.

I don't even personally think the current 4-B ratings for marvel and are sufficient based of the consistency through out the years, at least as not as consistent as lower tiers. There is also the fact that certain Tiers can't even work narratively for characters; Tier 8 and MHS Batman invalidates several of his stories in which he can struggle for way less, and that is entering into outlier territory.

I'm not going to debate the power-scaling inconsistency that has been repeated to dead like a broken record, but I'm just saying, this can easily get reversed into actually downgrading the characters by applying the arguments in the OP.
 
There should probably be a discussion rule stating “please do not attempt to upgrade Marvel & DC without bringing new arguments to the table” or something along those lines.
 
DarkDragonMedeus said:
As for Marvels stuff, I Hulk's universal feats appear to be more so range rather than AP when he "Shook the universe"; which AP got calculated at 4-B. But I do not know of many more examples; also Hulk is inconsistent and all over the place. People like Silver Surfer also have him using his strongest attack being a 4-B thing, in which he would also need to be universal if Hulk is. Sentry is also seen as a stomp to nearly every other Avenger, and his most consistent statement is being the strength of over one million supernovas. Not quite an anti-feat, but even various characters who appear to have cap 4-A feats also stomp various Justice League and Avengers respectively.

I agree with Abstractions that there should have been more elaborate input before closing prematurely, but I do think Eficient is correct in some points. Making everyone Tier 2 kind of creates a lot of loopholes with a giant list of far in between characters would also need updated despite numerous lore inconsistencies and showings of peak/caps.
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Shaking the Universe is 4-A tho.
 
The fact is, our comic profiles are something of a laughing stock in the versus community. Some people hate our entire website just because of our comic profiles. I really think we should take a serious look at our current standards.

I honestly don't know enough about comics to be an expert on the topic, which is a big reason why this is a Q&A thread and not a content revision thread. But even from the outside looking in, 4-B heralds really feels questionable at best, which is something I can't really say with any other verse off the top of my head.

And when the first thing a staff member does after seeing the thread is give a non-answer and close it, and then when I ask why they closed it without answering they say what boils down to "I refuse to answer the question because you're egocentric and also I've already explained this to other people.", you can see why I might not trust the staff's judgement entirely.
 
Think we should stay neutral when it comes to other sites. If someone from there complain about our tierings they can come here and try to change them themselves.

This is not any news really, the profiles have been controversial within the community for a long while and there is no clear answer to handle them, what the characters are rated are, according to some staff and comics experts, not accurated but the best we have.

That said, yes it was unfair for this thread to be closed with very little discussion, but is likely it will be a trent as some people are proposing a rule against this very repeated arguments.
 
Here's the thing: If people keep asking the same question over and over again, then you aren't explaining the answer all that well. Or at the very least you've made that answer too hard to find.
 
No, it just happens that new people that have very little, if not zero experience about the topic, bring these already discussed reasons and users here must give the same answer to the newcomers.

Sort of like with onepunchman and naruto.
 
Newendigo said:
No, it just happens that new people that have very little, if not zero experience about the topic, bring these already discussed reasons and users here must give the same answer to the newcomers.

Sort of like with onepunchman and naruto.
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One Punch Man just has a single character with an extremely basic No Limits Fallacy. It's mostly newcomers to versus debating that actually consider Saitama to be at cosmic levels. Naruto, as far as I can tell, has most of it's confusion come from the moon feats that can be calculated in a dozen completely different ways giving a dozen completely different results.

It's nothing compared to the, for a lack of a better word, clusterfuck that is over 80 years of comic book history (Albeit for DC people only care about 36 of those years in versus debating). The situation is confusing for even veteran versus debaters.
 
The_Smashor said:
One Punch Man just has a single character with an extremely basic No Limits Fallacy. It's mostly newcomers to versus debating that actually consider Saitama to be at cosmic levels. Naruto, as far as I can tell, has most of it's confusion come from the moon feats that can be calculated in a dozen completely different ways giving a dozen completely different results.

It's nothing compared to the, for a lack of a better word, clusterfuck that is over 80 years of comic book history (Albeit for DC people only care about 36 of those years in versus debating). The situation is confusing for even veteran versus debaters.
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Yeah, several decades of comics, which can triple if not quadriple the issues that both Naruto and OPM have; from hyperboling statements about power, to weird feats that are constantly debated, recalculated, revised, InFamous outliers, wonking scaling that could make certain characters above other people supposed to be stronger within the narrative, et etc.
 
But yeah, we really need a deep analysis of why we have characters at the level we do, considering the most popular versus debating show on the internet just put two (Three if you count Wally West) separate heralds to levels extremely high above our own.

I know Death Battle isn't known for being the most accurate, but a lot of it's inaccuracies are downplay, so when it says characters have stats higher than our profiles, people listen much more closely than they ever did before.

There is no such thing as "Wrong" in versus debating, just explanations people don't believe. And our explanations have become insufficient. So we either need to change the explanation, or change the argument.
 
I remember there being plans to upgrade the Marvel heralds' peak power level to 4-A. What happened to those?
 
I think it depends on the context of the universe. Since DC's Universe way bigger than most, 3C would make more sense
 
Like i say in Superman tier upgrade, i would have no problem with DC/Marvel Heralds becoming 3-A/Low 2-C.

The problem is that many/most of the supposed 3-A/Low 2-C feats are not that legitimate as people may think, either they are take out of context or nothing more than hyperboles, and for sure we aren't going to use those feats for upgrade the characters.

The worst part that everytime people try to upgrade the characters they always use the same debunked feats rather than use new ones.

Like Golden Age and Post Crisis fight, which had proven many times over that the clash wasn't destroying, damaging or even threatening any universe/space-time continuum, and yet people still try to use it to upgrade Post Crisis Superman.

Or when people try to scale Post Crisis Superman to characters who are clearly show to be far stronger than him like Superboy-Prime and Monarch.
 
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A verse having wonky power-scaling is no reason to discredit direct feats.
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This is false. Feats, powerscaling, statements, they are all used to judge a character's power and they all together form a consistency. If a verse has wonky power scaling in which a character who destroyed a solar system once, but is usually portrayed as doing much lower feats and scaling to characters who perform much lower feats, it makes the higher feat an outlier. There are also PIS and inconsistencies, but you ignored those words while making this thread.

We have seven Solar System level feats for Marvel on the verse page if you count each yottaton feat for Thor. In Hulk vs Broly, Death Battle (Which has a research team that's probably much smaller than our list of knowledgeable Marvel members, not to mention they had limited time to work with and were only talking about a single character) found at least universal feats that are at least universal (The third one was only in a comic panel, by the way, and not directly mentioned). From a SINGLE DEATH BATTLE EPISODE, we already have ~43% as many universal feats as we have accepted Solar System level feats in ALL OF MARVEL.
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So basically you are here because some research team much smaller and much more questionable made a video on the internet about some of the feats which you don't have any knowledge of whether they are out of context, invalid or just wrong (like many other feats the team has brought up in the past). We do not list every single feat on the page of a character but if you even tried to go through the character yourself, you'll find Hulk has a plethora of planet to star level feats and solar system can be considered a high end in itself. I suggest you do your own research because simply saying "this character has 7 feats of this level and 11 feats of that level because a video told me so" doesn't work.

DC, meanwhile, has TWO Solar System level feats that we've accepted. There is no way that TWO feats on a certain level are the most consistent thing in a 26 year comic run, not even including Post-Flashpoint.
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Again, how much of DC have you read? Or is that just an argument from incredulity? Please research and bring feats. This is not the way to go.

So then, riddle me this: How exactly is Solar System level the most consistent level of power in 90 years of comic books when the amount of feats we have for that level are in the single digits? And how is it that higher feats are all considered outliers when a fairly small team analyzing a single character found at least three?
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I don't suppose those feats are something new that we haven't already talked about here. But if you want an answer, post those feats here so a discussion can happen.
 
AKM sama said:
snip
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All my arguments are from somebody from the outside looking in. As I mentioned before in the thread, our current explanation varies from poor to nonexistent. Maybe people wouldn't discredit our comic profiles, or even our entire website just because of our comic profiles, if we actually bothered to properly explain why our comic heralds are at a level so much lower than generally interpreted.
 
All my arguments are from somebody from the outside looking in.
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If your arguments come from somebody from the outside looking in, then how do you even know that our current ratings are wrong?

Maybe people wouldn't discredit our comic profiles, or even our entire website just because of our comic profiles
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People discredit everything they don't like on the website. No verse is an exception. It simply comes down to which group you hang around with. Some DB fans think the DB profiles are wanked and some think they are lowballed. This has always been a thing and always will be.

if we actually bothered to properly explain why our comic heralds are at a level so much lower than generally interpreted.
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And how do you know what's generally accepted? Because all you brought up was Death Battle who are known for being inaccurate and exaggerating when it comes to comics. I think the page you are talking about sufficiently explains why a franchise that has been written by a plethora of writers for decades have so many inconsistencies that many times it becomes hard to rate them. You'd know if you read all those comics.
 
I mean "Outside looking in" as someone who isn't a comic book reader, not "Outside looking in" as someone who isn't a versus debater.

Looking at other people's stats, ours seem extremely low and there's very little explanation.
 
FanofRPGs asked me to post his comments on the matter:

FanofRPGs said:
Convenience is not an option for long-running comics. It requires analysis of the common themes and trends, alongside reading the comics and contextualizing them within the era and who writes it. Making generalized thematic statements based on convenient convictions doesn't work for any media.

I could be wrong, but from what I have seen, I honestly wouldn't mind herald level Marvel getting upgrades as opposed to DC, from what I have seen. Marvel tends to be more blatant in its approach to showcasing universal feats. Ergo a physical universe, a parallel reality in its full scope, is physically being destroyed. DC tends to appreciate the abstract and esoteric more, which I feel goes over many debater's heads without the needed context, and "universal" feats thus tend to be either some thematic metaphor, an illusion based on the well of the target's soul, mind, or consciousness, or just unscalable to the objective reality of characters.

These "feats" thus are found to be inaccurate on the grounds that a character is within the Godsphere as a thoughtform doing the feat which doubtless they cannot replicate in realspace, the feat is a figment of the user's dreams or subconscious reality and not a physical reality, or any such thing. This would be like the Infinite Book, Dominus, Where is Thy Sting/Man of Tomorrow #15, and Queen of Fables.

The disparate remainder of cosmic feats, at last, are incorrect scaling chains based on vague misnomers or misinterpretations of a character's nature. This would be like the Red King or Cythonna or any such thing.

Marvel is different, from what I have read. They tend to dive headfirst into showing a physical feat without any disqualifying context or esoteric underpinning. This is just me conjecturing. I am far more knowledgeable on DC than Marvel but that's the feeling I get. Moreso I am getting at is when people push for upgrades, when it comes to Marvel it's an unambiguous "haha universe go boom from clap" while DC it's "Superman fought X who scales to Y who has Z nature which could mean A"

I recommend anyone opposing Superman upgrades to do the following.

Stop calling feats that are invalid or faulty "outliers" because that's not what they mean. Calling them an outlier is a reactionary defense when an offensive analysis and rebuke of the actual feat is desired more.

We shouldn't start a discussion on the basis that the feat is already evaluated and it's a foregone conclusion. I got into DC because I got sick of not knowing who to trust when it came to interpreting feats, and I held the belief that the only person who I could truly trust was me. I can only hope my judgment is the most logical, implicit, and capable of adequately unifying the conflicting elements of the characters and stories, yet it's still my analysis and my beliefs and you should be just as willing to not trust my word or judgment as I was to other "debunks" for Superman feats. I would recommend reading the comics, seeing for yourself what you learn or interpret from the feats. That's why I strive to always give the issue numbers. At the very, least copy and paste the argument on there and don't just start on the premise that it was a previously "debunked feat."

Superman doesn't have 30+ definitive universal feats. He has 30+ interactions that are wonky and vague enough to be assumed as universal without proper context through tenuous scaling chains to something whose origin point is also usually a dubious feat or statement in itself. The absolute few remaining feats that aren't debunked, which is like... 5... Aren't confirmed either. They were just too vague and wholly contextless to debunk or confirm and are then never even a case of Superman or the JLA or any herald destroying a universe. They stand in limbo, weird interactions Superman found himself in which the author never elaborates furthermore their consequences so we're left guessing the potentiality that it could be universal.

And I posit this question. You guys always beg the question of whether or not Superman was going all out, or if he was limiting himself in a fight. What if, by chance, it was the other way around? What if these characters, who so consistently are shown as universal, are given the PIS pill and are going easy because the main character is fighting them? Have you not noticed one-off villains like Dominus utterly stomp Superman to the point where Superman requires clever trickery to win, while longstanding characters on a cosmic scale-like Mordru suddenly underperform? It makes me ask the question if it's actually the villains going easy on Superman. This is actually the case for most one-off villains BTW. Mxy told Superman that Emperor Joker was intentionally going out of his way not to kill Superman and just toy with him. So did Soulfire Darkseid. This is implied with Dominus who obviously didn't want to kill Superman instantly because Dominus wanted Supes to unknowingly lead him to Kismet. What if Mordru or Kyle Rayner are not going all out and are 'lowering their power level so to speak because they either don't want to kill right away or don't feel the need to use as much power as they normally do for their cosmic feats?"
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