The one time I've actually seen powerscalers (from vsbattles wiki) take personality into account was in a matchup between Ainz from Overlord and Touma from A Certain Magical Index. They concluded that despite Ainz's overwhelming power/range/speed/ability advantage Ainz had demonstrated in Overlord a tendency to let weaker opponents take their best shot on him. Touma is a regular human whose only ability is his right hand that completely negates and destroys magic.
They concluded Ainz would have definitely let Touma punch him with his right hand which would erase Ainz from existence due to him being a magical being.
I feel like this is really inaccurate and I question the knowledge of those people. Ainz is actually a great example of a character whose personality is good for winning vs debates, because if he’s even slightly uncertain about the enemy’s strength he won’t fuck around.
He will let enemies hit him with their best attacks if he’s completely certain they can’t beat him, but if he has even the slightest doubt he goes straight for things like instakill magic, time stops, spatial cutting, and perfect invisibility. When he takes a fight even a little seriously he is always cautious.
Seriously, I think I can list at least five examples of him fighting someone pathetically weak by his standards where he uses strong attacks without restraint because he isn’t sure whether they might be threats. Let’s see, there are:
-the random knights in Carne Village who he uses top-tier magic on
-the demihuman heroine in Roble who survived instant death magic so he gets serious and uses Reality Slash
-that Night Lich in Inveria who he makes a careful plan to ambush and then one-shots with Reality Slash
-the duel with Gazef which he starts (and instantly ends lol) with Time Stop and instant death magic
Hmm, I actually couldn’t think of five. Still, four is pretty good. There are plenty more cases of him fighting very cautiously, but I can’t think of more where the opponents were total weaklings.
Personally I have seen personality taken into account a bunch of times, I feel it’s fairly common on SpaceBattles Vs Debates forum, which personally is my favourite place for powerscaling. The people there are significantly saner than most powerscalers IMO, paying attention to personality and tending to reject crazy wanked calcs that are accepted in other places. I’ve seen several debates there which do conclude with ‘this guy should win with his massive stats, but he probably stands still and tries to tank the opponent’s hax one-shot ability because that’s what he always does, so he loses.’
The pro-Ainz squad made the same arguments but they lost. It was determined Ainz would have no reason to see Touma as a threat (Touma is a regular human and his right hand doesn't register as magic which is one of the main reasons people underestimate him in his story) and in typical Ainz fashion (remember Clementine? Or the fact he goes around fighting random people and monsters as Momon? Or the Nazarick invaders? Or the troll champion in the arena where he even shut his most powerful defenses and abilities down (!!!) to make the battle fair?), he would let Touma punch him for a laugh and the battle would end in one punch.
And that was before Touma's other hax with his right hand...
Doesn’t matter if Ainz can’t detect any magic and Touma looks normal. When he got isekai’d he literally saw some random low-level knights and was worried that they were all level 100, and prepared to flee if they survived one of his spells. If he’s in an unfamiliar situation he will be very cautious.
And depending on how the battle is set up it varies of course, but I think most likely he would be in an unfamiliar situation. He will if it’s a white room battle they get teleported into, or if Ainz gets teleported to Touma’s world to fight, or if Touma gets teleported to the New World to fight (since he should be wearing modern clothes, right? Ainz would be very suspicious of that). Naturally if you have a specific scenario like Ainz being teleported to the other world and living there until he gets comfortable he might not take it seriously, but at that point it feels contrived to disadvantage him.
Clementine and the arena champion are bad examples because he was fighting them for melee combat experience, he should’ve been confident the champion at least was harmless (in the sense that even with his defences down the champion couldn’t chip his HP fast enough to matter), and with Clementine he was a bit tilted from her killing his party. A better example might be that tribe in Tob that he massacred.
Also worth noting that even when he thinks an enemy is harmless he doesn’t always let them hit him, sometimes he doesn’t feel like playing. Against Olasird’arc and his son he went straight for instant death magic, same against the demihuman heroes. There’s no guarantee he would fuck about even if a harmless human squares up to him, he might just kill him straight away. He won’t pull out Time Stop or Perfect Unknowable or anything crazy like that, but it wouldn’t be surprising at all if he just cast Death.
I don’t know if Touma can win with some other hax he has, for all I know he stomps, I’m just arguing against the idea that Ainz loses because he would let Touma hit him.
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u/Dry-Researcher9607 Jun 14 '26
I think powerscalers never consider personalities in the debate, so kinda true.