How to be Overpowered (Reflections on my strategy guides)

I recently completed a 32-blog series going over all my favorite series and trying to find tiers to the characters of the verse without exceeding them in terms of stats (attack potency, durability, and speed). As such I've come to understand some things better in terms of how to be an op series. As I said at the start of the series, I was mostly inspired by TierZoo's analysis of the ecosystem as a mmo game and Shadiversity's "Fantasy Re-Armed" series detailing the best weapons available to Europe in the Middle Ages to suit or to fight various fantasy species. As such I would like to give an analysis now on how to quickly shape a verse to be broken. This might seem like an obvious question, just give them lots of broken feats and abilities but I am assuming for this question that you can't grant them that many feats, perhaps because of time constraints of your series, perhaps because you want to seem relatively balanced to the eyes of your viewers, perhaps because in this hypothetical versus debating is a game where purchasing feats requires cost and you have a limited fund.

1: Unusual Stats

This is perhaps only of note in a scenario like the strategy guides, IE you are strictly allowed to challenge characters with characters of equal or weaker stats. That said the most difficult times I had in trying to devise counters with one exception was when the verse had an unusual stat combination. Princess Tutu for instance has a tier of characters that are subsonic and town level+. This is a fairly unusual stat combination and while I was able to find counters it was tricky.

2: Reuse Feats

Giving 10 characters a teleportation feat each takes 10 feats to establish normally. Alternatively you could have one teleport and one establish they can all do that, and that's given them all teleportation with one feat and a statement.

A key recurring element I've seen with really hax verses is each time they have hax-scaling, characters that have the abilities of other characters, either because they are aspects of them or they absorbed them or they granted them all their powers etc. If you wanna be op, maximize your feat usage by having it be established that this characters abilities scale to this other character so their feats can get reused. The reason Sailor Cosmos and Sailor Chaos are so hax isn't because neccesarily they did a lot of things but because they scale to the abilities of so many other abilities, Sailor Cosmos to the abilities of all the Star Seeds and Sailor Chaos to all the Chaos Stars.

3: Have counters to secondary stats

We talk in this hobby about a character's power and speed or the three big stats, attack potency, durability and speed because if there is a massive discrepancy between these nothing except being massively more hax will stop the stronger character from simply stomping the weaker.

That said when the stats are more similar, it can resemble the fights between real world humans. In a fight between real world humans without supernatural abilities, a number of other stats are and were near or as important the stat trinity. Likewise in the animal kingdom, between animals of somewhat similar sizes, these secondary stats are often just as important as how fast they can run for instance. These stats are important enough that if large enough a difference between two fighters they act almost as a pseudo-hax. The vs community at the moment seem to acknowledge 3 of them, whereas I would also add two more that currently seem to be only thought of as mundane skills that might be helpful. These 5 in total are:

Stamina: This isn't a problem for most verses. I only include it first because a lot of magical girl series lack good stamina feats. Stamina is the easiest to counter just by having a fairly decent stamina and not having a very limited time limit. If the character does have one, they obviously need to be very offensive in a fight against a similarly powered character as fighting defensive will only drain their time limit.

Range: The most important stat for most of recorded warfare bar none. Being able to hit your opponent from well outside their range gives you essentially a form of intangibility in that they can not affect you, except it's a form of intangibility that makes you unaffected by anything that can't reach you. In real life range was mostly countered by armoring and shields or with your own range though the former isn't usually a practical solution unless you can simply have too high a durability for your opponent to hurt. Outside of good range, good counters to range are spatial manipulations, even if as limited as teleportation or inter-dimensional travel.

Intelligence: Being smarter in practice is an optimization of possibilities, a narrowing of the range of possibilities towards a more beneficial set due to the intellect sorting out the worst strategies. At higher levels intelligence can act as mindhax and pre-cog.

Skill: Similar in many respects to intelligence, refers to a character's skill in combat. The two are both countered by high amounts of the same stats or by being unpredictable and unlike anything the enemy has faced.

Stealth: Highly important in the animal world, stealth at it's highest level is basically just invisibility and can be very important in a fight between two comparable fighters. Stealth and Range can synergize very strongly and was a way I picked counters for a large amount of verses just because it was so effective a combo. Enhanced senses or high enough intelligence counters this.

So yeah, have either a counter to these or a good amount yourself to not give yourself an obvious weakness.

4: Have direct thought-based powers

Things that make for flashy entertainment make for less efficient overpoweredness. Examples:

Projectile based attacks are prone to being dodged, blocked, or reflected. Danmaku helps with the first and to a lesser extent the second but mostly not the third.

Melee based abilities have low range which gives an obvious weaker point.

Requiring vocal invocations gives opponents a warning something is coming, something to prevent, takes time and can be negated by the admittingly rare imposed silence ability.

Requiring hand motions gives opponents a warning something is coming, something to prevent, takes time, and can be negated by anything that denies motion like bindings.

Relying on external equipment gives your opponent something to disarm and either remove or even use themselves.

These things seem flashy but the very things that make them flashy and entertaining to watch, giving visual indicators and giving a predictable sequence of events make them relatively easy to disrupt. When I was doing my counters to Shamanic Princess, which would have been relatively hard, it was actually made a lot easier by the fact that they have to move and speak to cast magic as was sorta the case with my princess tutu strategy guide.

5: Get ONE power REALLY good.

"I do not fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

In versus context this can be changed too "I don't fear the character who can rip out a soul, can brainwash a person, can turn intangible, can protect 20 different elements, can see 100 kilometers away, can control their body and has a low-mid regen, but I fear the character who has passive planetary scale mindhax."

Above even thought based abilities are passive ones and you don't need to even invest in any other abilities for defense or even alternate forms of offensive if you're one form of offense is so good that it's passive and nigh-irrestible for your tier. I used Metaria from Sailor Moon as one of my counters for DC's tier including speedsters. Truthfully speaking one of the Flashes should be able to beat Modern Metaria due to similar power, and vastly higher scope hax and vastly higher speed. The Flash is alot better "built" as a build. The problem is Metaria's hax is passive, planetary scale energy and mind hax, petrification and blindness-inducing.

Having one hax that is so good that it's passive and massive in scale lets you steal lots of fights you hypothetically shouldn't. I think this meme really does cover it well.

6: Put low tier characters with high tier characters

A lot of the most broken low tier characters are characters that exist in the same setting and regularly interact with high tier characters. As a practical example, I think Batman gets his best feats from the Justice League comics not his own comic series.

The reason why is in Batman's own comic setting, Batman is the relative physical powerhouse most of the time and he and his foes are treated as more mundane humans (for the most part). Conversely when he is in the JL comics, to fit the bigger scope of his allies Batman is made a hypergenius that can compete with the likes of Brainiac and Darkseid, with technology that can fight supernatural threats like demons and advanced aliens, etc.

A lot of people think that Homura from Puella Magi Madoka Magicka in her pre-Akuma state is one of the most hax characters on her tier and it's not hard to see why given what she was able to do Kami Madoka the godly cosmic entity.

Basically when lower tier characters are made relevant to higher tier characters they will be given absolutely immense feats for their tiers to compete and be relevant which is where you get some of the most broken characters in fiction.

7: Use higher planes of reality liberally 

Maybe I'm biased here because I really like the concept of higher plane entities but this seemed so broken. Even just basic intangibility is like a canonical nlf where you can't beat it without specific feats for beating something like that. It negates so much of fiction just by being a non-physical entity.

Being an abstract or absolute form of being negs vastly more then even that, to the point that it starts getting hard thinking of verses with that form of manipulation.

On the other hand if you do have that form of manipulation, it's basically a one-shot kill move against any kind of enemy without resistance and unlike something like soul or mind hax, there's no common resistance to it. Conceptual Manipulation, Plothax or similar types of haxes are almost always a guaranteed one-shot. I did a blog about the Angels from Wedding Peach by the first arc villains from Sailor Moon and the spiritual nature of WP was what gave them a massive advantage, the fact that much of the time the SM enemies were simply not equipped to fight the Angels while the Angels powers were basically one-shots.





So yeah, this is how I found to make a verse broken. Note: this is not the same thing as making it GOOD. Pretty much all of these are subjective if they are enjoyed (I personally am fond of anthrmorphic concepts and spiritual entities for instance) or are barely relevant to enjoyment (stat combinations for instance).