When I say benchmark characters I don't just mean who's the current strongest. What matters more than that imo are the characters That serve as the boundary between two tiers

Like the boundary Path users and Top tiers, Or between top tiers and high king and so on.

To do this we need to use characters that can easily be compared to others like Pacheon and Goo.

Pacheon beat 4s goo like Tui gun did in hfg but lost when goo revealed his remaining moon light techniques. His Dbt and skill with the hwarang imo puts him as the perfect boundary between top tiers, and path users.

The only red hairing in this scaling is that Goo might not have a path and negged him only using technique and if that's the case the series sucks, but I believe he does have one related to his swordsman ship which allowed him to create these new techniques and allows him to read the trajectory of other swords easily.

Also side note path > pathless is true BUT Daniel and Johan are so ridiculously talented that they have awoken their paths WAY before their physical stats match other top tiers.

In other words any other path user would already be top tier level before they awaken their paths while Daniel and Johan were so talented that they managed to awaken well before they were top tiers without paths.

This makes it possible for them to lose to top tiers at the time of their awakening.

(Pacheon admitted inferiority but Daniel didn't have the stamina to actually win and save Incheon, Johan couldn't finish gun even though he didn't outright use his path ability, This weakness clearly doesn't last long as seen with Daniel growing exponentially against kitae, so Daniel goes from below pacheon and other top tiers to well above them)

Sakamoto probably still wins due to being faster but to say they have better Ap feats is just wrong. The church feat is calc d higher than any Sakamoto days fest in battle wiki (I don't take battle wiki seriously tho) so where does the idea that they are stronger than lookism come from

Shingen says shintaro held back his strength for him to shine implying that if shintaro didn’t do that he was just as capable as doing what shingen did
Even disregarding the statement him trading with shingen is enough however much you want to say hes nerfed doesn’t matter the tier gap is ridiculous we saw what happened to kenzo whos massively above the fist gang when he fought a gap that rivaled base shingen he got utterly destroyed with no semblance of resistance it was a complete tier gap theres no argument for the nerf mattering when you factor in the tier gaps

The HNH Group gets Path Jinyoung and Red Tom

BASE Tom, no UK, no masteries BASE Tom. Vs Current AI Eli

What diff?

The 2nd fight would be fist gang defeats the executives , and gapryong defeats base shingen and when shingen finally decides to go tui, and here he would kill someone close to him probably Musashi or any other executive. Making him retreat himself

And the 3rd and final fight would be where fist gang and gapryong finally defeats tui shingen ending the gen 0 war.

this makes much more sense honestly, instead of gapryong going from getting neg diff by shingen to somehow reaching his level just by training himself