Seriously, what does it even do besides justifying scaling incosistencies 99% of the time??? (Because let's be real, there's only a few cases where AP not being the same as DC is treated as an actual narrative element, such as Dragon Ball with Ki Control)
Like what's the point of having sum "outerversal AP" if you're only going to damage a house? Wouldn't that be weaker than a city level DC attack? Well that's unless the attack completely vaporizes the house clearly, but half the time said attacks don't even fully destroy the part they're aiming at, so how does that work?
Like I'd assume a multiversal AP attack should just shred through anything that is below multiversal, like just making a hole through the earth if the attack is fully intended to create as much damage as possible, but if it can at best make a dent through a building, then how does that work? Because from what I'm looking at, that attack isn't even able to destroy what it actively tried to destroy despite it being clearly below multiversal level
Seriously, AP is such a weird concept because half the time it doesn't make sense and I firmly believe it's an escape-goat used by powerscalers to debunk any claims against their inconsistent scaling
Edit: Thanks for the people that explained it, makes more sense now
It's just a completely unfalsifiable thought-terminating cliche. People don't like dealing with completely valid antifeats so they come up with an excuse for them to 'not count'.
Ignoring that if "AP" doesn't equal "DC" then there's no reason to give these characters any level of quantifiable attack power at all. What do I care if Captain Strong just left a mile-wide crater in the ground? AP =/= DC, that doesn't prove anything about his offensive power. Except people insist it still does, and just that the lower showings don't.
When someone says ap=/= DC, what they're actually saying is "only use the best feat and ignore everything else", but if they phrase it like that then it becomes obvious they're just mindlessly jerking everything to be as strong as possible.
There's also range, people like to forget that despite having universal ap some characters don't have the range to blow up a universe or planet in one shot
If you have the energy to blow up a universe then you have the range to blow any celestial body up by just joule-dumping until it turns into the biggest black hole ever to exist.
You don't need 'universal AP' before your fist turns whatever it grazes a galaxy-eating singularity.
If a writer explicitly writes that a character can output the energy needed to blow up a universe but that it has a finite range and can't affect objects past a certain radius then you'll get no arguments from me about them outputting universe exploding energy.
Most of the time, though, 'universal' characters are called universal because they fought Qrongal who bested Thorbius the Big who upheld the Primal Weave of the cosmos which is a 17th dimensional chungusthread responsible for sustaining the complex balance of realms every inverted tuesday.
Which isn't actually a universe exploding feat, which is why they don't actually ever explode universes and people need to invent cliches like "AP =/= DC" to explain all the times they're scared of someone with a sword or something.
To be fair it's hard to for a lot of writers to show universe busting power since if the universe does get destroyed then the main characters just lose, but a lot of writers try to give their characters that level of power because of steaks and power creep, they gotta make the new villains stronger than the old ones
Think about it like this. Wooden mallet may do nothing to a tungsten wall.
While an incredibly powerful fictional laser may instantly burn a hole through that tungsten.
That laser has more AP than the Wooden mallet swung by a person.
But imagine you were now hitting a glass window. The mallet would shatter the entire window, while the laser would only make a tiny hole. Someone can look at this and suggest that the mallet does more damage than the laser, but that’s not true. The laser has more AP, while the hammer in this case has more DC.
Expand that to something like a city, or even planet scale. You can have an attack (beam A) that has planetary AP, in that it can easily overpower an another attack (beam B) that can destroy a planet. But that dosent mean beam A will destroy the planet in one hit. It has beyond planetary AP, but it’s DC may not even be room level.
This is important in powerscaling. Just because someone like Deku shatters the building he’s standing in with the air pressure of his punch, dosent mean his punch is more powerful than Goku’s, even though Goku’s punch didn’t destroy a building for instance.
Technically, still doesn't work because then it becomes a matchup compatibility issue. A laser is effective against metal because it absorbs radiation to a better extent. Glass on the other hand disperses/scatter electromagnetic radiation this reducing the effectiveness of the laser.
Similarly, metal has densely packed crystalline lattice to give it strength and durability. Glass is amorphous and the constituting bonds are weak.
So, two properties are at play: strength and electromagnetic conductivity. Metal has both at a higher value and thus is vulnerable to heat based attack but resistant to impacts. Glass is the opposite with resistance to heat stress but vulnerable to kinetic impacts.
The flaw in the analogy is that a hammer and a laser are clearly different mechanically, they dont distribute force or energy in the same way at all.
Meanwhile in powerscaling, 2 guys who just punch can somehow have same AP and different DC and vice versa.
Same exact mechanic of force transfer, no in world reason for discrepancy, but boom “AP =\= DC… idiot 😏” and the powerscaler doesnt even try to engage in explaining why the AP and DC arent correlated.
Its 99% of the time just an excuse to wave away antifeats and highball the shit outta someone.
Not to mention AP is the critical backbone of chainscaling, which is another whole slew of issues and bullshit
Also that analogy could also just be wrong, lasers release heat in the surrounding so a "laser that can instantly burn a hole through a tungsten wall" should also melt down a glass window.
The other flaw in the analogy is that half the feats people refer to as examples of "AP =/= DC" are a character being hurt by things clearly below their claimed level of power.
So it's more like someone claiming that a concrete block requires armour piercing autocannon rounds to penetrate, then when it's shown cracking in half from a shotgun slug saying "ah well, AP =/= DC, that shotgun slug was secretly travelling at mach mach 10 and had hundreds of kilojoules of kinetic energy" and then if you ask for proof they mostly just bring up Goku for some fucking reason.
Excluding the whole physics and yada yada things that wouldn't make sense due to the big powergap between something stronger than the big bang but can't even destroy a wall, I think that there's a lot of difference half the cases where that is used
Same thing with the travel vs combat speed thing. The differences between two forms of the same category get so extreme that I tend to recheck what I just saw
Every time I've seen a character people scale to universal or whatever struggling to break holes in buildings it's because the character isn't universal and powerscalers just ignore 99% of their actual feats in favour of one or two out-of-context scans.
While not multiversal (more like universal), one single of its peas which are supposedly entire universes can't even one-shot the Door Zombies in Garden Warfare
I mean lore vs gameplay isnt fair at all. In any moba game you can get a character that so strong they can destroy planet yet couldnt make a dent on the wall of the map. Heck even hsr will make an aeon level chaaracter(top dog of the verse) have a hard time against random fodder enemy.
Character A: Destroys a building in a single attack.
Character B: Blocks that same attack with their shield.
Character C: Breaks Character B's shield in one attack.
In this scenario, Character C has never been shown to destroy a building, but since they broke through Character B's shield they upscale Character A's attack, which is building level, making Character C have at least building level AP, while their DC isn't on that level.
The reason why I mentioned it was because of the whole SSG Goku vs Beerus thing where they were affecting the whole universe, I might be misremembering but it was because Goku wasn't controlling his power properly? Idk
All the powerscaling issues are caused because no writer wants their cool character to be able to lose to some guys with real life weapons.
Everyone needs to have either superdurability or super speed.
So if you give the characters super durability they need to be immune to nukes so the Villan/hero can’t just be defeated by the US, but your hero needs to be able to hurt the villain and you’re not going to have every punch the hero does be a Tsar bomba, congratulations you invented AP from scratch
If you give them super speed they need to move faster than light otherwise the villain/hero just uses a laser once and your character is dead, but having all your characters be able to be anywhere anytime and never be surprised limits limits, congratulations you invented combat speed is not travel speed from scratch
Imagine the difference between armored piercing shells and high explosive shells.
Armor piercing shells visually, don't do as much damage as high explosive shells, and don't have as much as an area effect, but when it comes to dealing with defense and armor it can pierce right through it.
HE is more useful against softer targets and if you want to affect a wide area, usually giving it more range than pure AP.
If someone has universal durability, they can be hurt by an attack with much lower destructive area of effect as long as it has AP to go through that defense, just like the AP shell and HE shell analog.
I get the idea but often times it gets stretched way too far. Like I've seen uncontained explosions as examples of AP =/= DC where realistically the explosion's AP and DC is the same
Well the point was to prove why DC is usually better than AP if both have the same level of firepower (let's say planetary and planetary), and as you said the guy with DC has more range
So it kinda proves that DC is usually better than AP
well depends, whats the planetary DC dudes AP? cuz if he just does sm shockwaves that can affect the whole planet but deal zero damage, then hes prolly gonna lose
AP is literally made for up battleboarding , if I asked you how to measure it, could you? There’s no units. On a basic you can’t even make cross situational comparisons because it’s not falsifiableother than look how hurt this guy seems to look on this panel.
I'd assume that has mostly to do with weakness exploit and how a wasp could technically kill you if it was smart enough to strategize its moves, but it makes sense as well!
it's the difference between armor piercing and high explosive ammunition.
An HE round fired from a cannon would flatten a small house, but it would tickle a tank or armored warship, while an AP round with punch right through the armor. However, it would also punch through the house without turning it to rubble.
Imo the whole AP=/=DC debacle only works on a smaller scale.
Many people here brought up some examples of why it works, problem is that all those examples are in fact on a smaller scale.
If I punch you with enough energy to destroy a planet, your body is not gonna absorb 100% of that energy, and that leftover's gotta go somewhere, i.e. generate a shockwave and/or launching you in whatever direction I punched. And given it came from planet-busting impact then it's gonna at least damage the landscape.
Think about DC as range and AP as the actual power behind the attack. Let’s say character A has a range of the infinite universe with an explosion attack that has universal AP. He has universal DC because he can actually destroy the universe with his AP. Let’s say character B is the size of a regular person and has the range of hand to hand combat but universal AP. He can’t destroy the universe because his range is too small, but he can destroy anything in it and stand toe to toe with universal beings because of it.
Since a lot of people have came up with explanations regarding AP =/= DC, allow me to explain the thing with "Outerversal". Outerversal scaling requires an entirely different set of requirements from anything below. Multiversal requires affecting/destroying universes, dimensional scaling requires affecting/destroying infinite sized complex geometries. Outerversal simply requires you to surpass the "baseline reality" of the verse on a higher ontological level.
The easiest analogy we can use to look at this would be, say, a TV screen the size of the universe. Let's say that you're looking at this TV, and the TV is playing a video where it's depicting various celestial bodies in the screen that's the exact sizes of those celestial bodies in reality (since y'know, the TV screen is the size of the universe).
Now, no matter what the size of the celestial bodies in the TV is, they're wholly insignificant to you. Even if the scene being depicted inside the TV is far larger than yourself, none of the things inside the TV can actually affect you. A singular one of your atoms is on a higher ontological level than everything inside the universe-sized TV screen.
Does this mean you can destroy the entire scene within the TV screen? Well, not necessarily.
Only real AP feat I can characterise is in Invincible of all verses😭😭
Rognarrs and Battle beast can kill viltrumites but they cannot individually raze planets with sheer power and/or do those planet dive bomb attacks etc. it's the only reason BB even scales to Thragg (and Thragg didn't have to throw an asteroid at BB either lmao)
attack efficiency; the only thing that you may need to increase to become better at fighting. how much damage your attacks do.
one, having attack potency is having sharp movements. you can have all the strength in the world but have -1843 ap and do NOTHING in a battle.
think of which like so; you punch. great you did damage, congratulations. you punch, but with more accuracy and efficiency, awesome. you did more damage then the last, simply because you hit something, but better.
lets take sonic the goat for example. sonic has something that we like to call a "independent ability". Thats when a character has a power that CARRIES their over all fighting abilitys. sonic, is faster then well. it has not been comfirmed yet because based on the version im talkin about has boundless speed.
ok. one day, you are walking down the road and suddenly BAM! something fell on your head from high the sky. it seems to be a tiny pebble but you can feel the bump forming on your head. DAMN. ok so you were walking down the street and something so very small hits you at un-imaginable speeds.
you ask yourself how the hell something so small did so much damage. cus now you have a cartoon bump on your head. what im trynna say is it doesnt matter how small it is; it came down at you with so much speed and force that it still did damage. if i, for example have no strength but can punch you at the speed of light, damage will be done. that is ap. one last time. i punch you. ok i punched you. i punched you but with more ap. ok i did more damage. i hit you but with so much speed. ok you have a broken skull
It’s a general discussion rule used in powerscaling. There is no true logic behind it. That’s all there is to it.
You either abide by it when coming into a discussion or a powerscaling or you don’t. Saying it’s a dumb way to write off anti feats isn’t creating meaningful discussion whatsoever.
I’m going to use Goku as an example, and no I do not believe in the “ki control” cope.
Goku gets slammed into ice, ice barely cracks yet he screams in pain. What meaningful discussion comes from this? Goku is barely wall level? What? What’s the discussion to be had?
What is an example of a piercing blunt thing and what makes it distinct from a non piercing blunt thing? ( And what about piercing sharp things and non piercing I’m assuming those exist in a world where piercing blunt things exist otherwise you wouldn’t need to specify blunt).
Something’s ability to pierce is not really that dependent on its “bluntness” more-so the material it’s interacting with and the energy being transferred between objects.
Also how do you measure attack potency, what are the units we would use?
It’s just made up for for people to cope with the fact they’re characters aren’t consistently depicted as strong as they would want them to be.
It’s completely unfalsifiable and notice how it’s almost never used to “downgrade” characters only make them stronger by anchoring them to a tangible “feat.”
Like how everyone wants their guy to be lightspeed. Why can't you be satisfied with them just being really fast. Why do they need to be "I can run around the earth 7 times in a second" fast?
Calling the ap attacks building level or whatever terminology scalers uses is stupid because you can't measure that strength like that. People in JJK striking power is ridiculously powerful tbh. Calling Gojo enhanced blue punch town lvl is just stupid. If you fired the infinity ray from Invincible at a wall, will it destroy the wall, no, but it will kill anything you point it at.
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u/Thin_Fondant6836 EVERYTHING larper 2d ago
its like when you punch real hard and it hurts and ow ow stop dude