Shakespeare-verse Strategy Guide

 

How to be OP in the works of William Shakespeare.

Local Scale Threat:

So the lower tier is for the most part the tier of "mundane" happenings which stick mostly to real world battlefield tactics and weapons within the Renaissance period. The weapons used in the real world are mostly accounted for including the likes of flame and poison on weapons, full plate armor, and armies of men with knights, archers, and siege weapons.

Statwise the tier gets up to wall level. This comes from the attack potency of powerful weapons, goblins and lesser spirits able to take the form of animals, the bear from The Winter's Tale, the monsterous man Caliban, and the scottish Warlord Macbeth being strong enough to cleave men in two. Speed goes up to superhuman scaling from the speed of the animals. 

Macbeth is one of the biggest physical threats in the tier, being skilled enough to beat entire armies of armed men by himself, an A tier skill feat. There are a few other characters that are one men armies; such as Roman general Coriolnaus or the demigod Achilles however neither have the physical feats that Macbeth do. It should be noted that Macduff was able to defeat Macbeth. Some people believe this is because Macbeth was cowered by the witches prophecies coming true, but his words to Macduff strongly suggest he was going to try his greatest regardless suggesting vengeance-motivated Macduff just outright scales to Macbeth.

Macbeth is stated to be unkillable to a man of woman born which may or may not apply in a vs context whether or not you think it only applies to people in-universe but either way it's easy enough to get around. Macduff got around it via being born from C-section but one could use female counters to get around this, which provides the additional benefit that in both strength and intellect the tier is likely to underestimate a character that seems to "just" be a woman, something that actually happens in the plays at a few times. More troublesome is Achilles who is usually stated to be invulnerable, save for his heel, although that doesn't actually appear in Troilus and Cressida, so it possibly doesn't apply here. Hector was able to fight Achilles and was enough of a threat to him that Achilles used stealth to attack him in the play.

Manipulators are very common in the verse with some of the best being Iago who was able to manipulate the moral paragon to Othello into murdering his wife in a jealous rage, Marc Anthony who used a speech that in the real world is considered one of the greatest speeches in the world able to manipulate Rome into an angry mob against people they were cheering for earlier for minutes earlier without every insulting them directly and Richard III who in Shakespeare is essentially a patently evil Bond villain using charisma and genius intellect to devise maniacal plans. There's also really good battlefield strategy, particularly from Henry V who was able to get a downright miraculous victory against the French Forces despite disadvantage in training, numbers, and armament. 

Finally there's various forms of fortune telling and seeing the future, to the point that even normal humans will often dream of events that act as preludes to future events meaning the types of powers that an invader would use would probably be known ahead of time.

So what's a good strategy? The best strategy at first seems to be manipulation. Manipulation is super OP in Shakespeare and manipulators are the real puppetmasters of most plays who cause most of the events. This isn't a flawless strategy as there are a number of really strong manipulaters and intellects in the verse already; but many of the strongest characters in the series are the hot-blooded types most prone to manipulation so having strong manipulation ability plus high end stats for the tier put one in a good position.

The best strategy however is stealth. Even more op then manipulators are invisible characters whenever they show up. Even the weakest urchin suddenly becomes unstoppable in the verse if you can't see them, and even mild stealth seems to go a long way with basic masks able to easily hide one's identity. 

That brings me to my first counter which is

Violet Parr from The Incredibles.

Violet is a superheroine that is a young girl that would easily be overlooked in a combat scenario in verse. Her forcefield projection can destroy velocipods which would give her the attack potency to one-shot any person or group of people in the tier. Her forcefields are strong enough to tank anything in the tier, and given she can react even to her brother Dash who has scaling to lightning-timing, she would easily be able to react to anything in the verse.

She also can go invisible which would give her an unparalled stealth and ability to mess around with basically no counter options. The only real downside is her lack of stamina and childish inexperience. For a character with better stealth and experience you could use

Wasp from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Wasp's punches technically carry same energy but via size alteration her mass and density are kept the same so each blow has a force of a far higher category able to one-shot the Chitauri and anyone in the verse. She has fast enough flight that paired with her reaction time she can avoid bullets (and her reactions are likely far higher) meaning she can easily react to and avoid any attack from any of the fighters of the verse like a human fighting an actual wasp...if that wasp could punch with enough force to one-shot any person.

Wasp also has massively higher versatility then anyone in this tier as she can command armies of ants, a power of strong mages in Shakespeare, alter the size of things to grow or shrink unlike anything in the verse, and blaster weapons far more advanced then anything that would be known in the verse.

She complements this with being a skilled fighter and experienced superheroine training to become the Wasp in honor of her mother. While not as skilled as the most skilled fighters in the Shakespeare-verse, she would likely be relative to most of the really skilled fighters. However it's possible she could get swarmed by numbers especially if the goblins turn into animals to hunt her ants. For an even better counter to this tier you could use

Kaede Sakura from Kampfer.

Sakura is stronger then early Natsuru who could easily knock a living stuffed animal to the horizon requiring energy in the kilojoules beyond even Macbeth and has fast enough reactions by scaling to react to gunfire making her a top tier physical threat, yet appears to be a completely ordinary cute teenage girl. She is also a master fighter able to take out 3 Kampfer at the same time even fodderizing Shizuku who can cut bullets with her blades suggesting she would be similar if not superior to anyone in the tier via skill.

Sakura uses a gun and a blade as her weapons, which would give her range on most in the tier, and the ability to fight in melee. But her strongest weapon is her hypnosis and her powerful manipulation, strong enough to manipulate 4 girls into becoming her harem without any hypnosis. With this if anyone would be threatening to her she could control them and turn them against the rest of the tier.

However she does have one more unique weakness. Sakura, while she doesn't show it, is a misandrist lesbian who wants to seduce pretty girls to join her harem and so it's possible some of the more manipulative and devious women like Lady Macbeth could charm her in turn and poison her or kill her while she sleeps. Even she can be predicated by fortune tellers as well. 

For the ultimate counter to this tier I would suggest

Athena from Tomorrowland.

Athena is physically strong enough to stop a truck and tear the heads of robots. She's also fast enough to catch up to a truck trying to get away from her. Athena is an immortal robot that seems like a little girl that nobody would suspect that searches time and space for optimistic thinkers for Tommorrowland. 

Athena uses gadgets that nobody in the tier would have any idea what it is or counters like time bubbles that freeze time for things inside and technology to travel between dimensions, or pins that create illusory enviornments around oneself so long as one is in contact with.

Athena is a supergenius intellect that knows the languages of Earth and advanced martial arts from a society with such enhanced technology that it can show the future, manipulate dimensions, and subcounciously brainwash people. She could pretty easily compete with at the very least anyone in the tier in terms of raw intelligence and skill and could manipulate even the greatest manipulators in the verse who would think she's a regular little girl while she knows their true nature with things like x-ray vision and supergenuis intellect. Poison would do nothing to her as a robot and fire is not enough hot to melt her given other Audio-Animatonics were not melted by rocket launch. 

But wouldn't they at least know about her from fortune telling? No actually. Not only is she from outside the spacetime of the normal dimension but having enough optimism in Tommorowland allows you to resist precognition with Casey being able to change the probability of 100% absolute imminent destruction of the Monitor, a Type 3 or 4 civilization's greatest invention, a feat incomprehensibly stronger then any precog feat in Shakespeare, and Athena herself during the climax after seeing tachyons showing her Frank being shot, a vision of the future, intercepted the blast herself to save him.

Also just as a side note; her self-destruction upon death created an explosion that was stated to have required before a kiloton level explosive, an explosive that could kill every named character in the tier at once.

Regional to Planetary Scale Threat:

Beyond the material world, there are supernatural forces that laugh at the folly of man. For it is said "There are more things in Heaven and Earth Horatio. Then are dreamt of in your philosophy." The mind of man is not capable of understand the strange forces underlying the phemenona we know.

At the bottom there are many ghosts, spirits, and lesser fae; often intangible and invisible; these still possess the Ecokinesis; control of nature itself that distinguishes the supernatural powers of the Shakespeare-verse. 

Amount these are Puck, that mischeivous fae Robin Goodfellow who is stated to gird the world in 40 minutes; a casual speed feat of about mach 50. This is consistent with the Airy spirit Ariel who can go to and fro across a big island in two heartbeats and who can outrun lightning. Ariel is made of air, can turn into fire, make people fall asleep, ride clouds, and bring forth the dew from a distant place. Puck is a naughty fairy who is cunning and tricky and can get a love potion from a flower that Cupid shot.

Stronger then these include a mermaid who calmed the sea with her song and made shooting stars fall from the sky. There is the Witch Sycorax who easily bound Ariel within a tree, and witches who caused a powerful storm and foretold the future to Macbeth tricking him to bring chaos to the land.

Outscaling this is the strongest man in Shakespeare, oft theorized to be an analogue for the bard himself; the wizard Prospero. Prospero is an insane magical talent who can create a storm so strong it's like sea and the sky are warring and which is stated to scare Neptune himself. Prospero can not only control the elements, he can summon spirits and goblins, turn himself invisible, raise the dead, seal people in a tree for 12 years or unseal them as he did to Ariel. And these are only his physical powers. 

Mentally he can take command of people, telekinetically strip them of their weapons, send them to sleep and more. He can see the future and make whole illusory banquets to befuddle others. He also can freeze people with a charm and perhaps most impressively that insane storm mentioned earlier he had such fine control of that he kept it from hurting a single hair on the heads of several of the people in it. 

But beyond the ranks of men are forces beyond. While Prospero can compare with most fairies, the fairies are ruled by the fae king Oberon and his queen Titania. Oberon and Titania are fast enough to easily go from India to Greece in the same day and likely similar in speed to Puck, and their power is so great that even their arguing can create a hurricane and was shifting the seasons around across the Earth and affecting the moon, planetoid level power. They also can transmute people into animals and Oberon has shown the ability to see the invisible gods themselves that even Puck couldn't. 

Speaking of them however, stronger then even the fairy lords are the gods themselves; Hecate showing up in Macbeth being stated to grant power to all witches and to be the source of all harms. Jupiter, king of the gods, shows up in Cymbeline entering Posthumus' dream, showing dream manipulation and stated to give favor and fortune, suggesting some level of probability manipulation or control of the world. Neptune is mentioned as lord of the seas in the Tempest and Cupid appears in A Midsummer Night's Dream with his famous love-granting arrows.

And all of this sounds well and dandy doesn't it? But there's one more character that makes this go from a fun challenge to a real struggle. In a Winter's Tale, Time itself shows up, the abstract concept. Time is stated to exist outside the physical realm and causes the decay of all, speeding up time for the audience so that the play can progress a few years acting as a living speaking timeskip. This is very plausibly metafictional time manipulation. Fighting a conceptual is obviously very difficult at this tier.

So how to fight this tier? Shakespeare was most vaunted for his ability to perfectly capture the human condition and the human psyche, and even his supernatural forces show this level of humanity. They are bound to their human emotions. Oberon and Titania are proud and jealous, the gods have their mythological follies as canonical to them, Prospero is torn throughout the Tempest until the end (where he relinquishes his magic) between his desire to get vengeance and the need to forgive to move on. Emotional manipulation is very strong. Prospero also has the weakness that if his spellbooks are destroyed he loses his magic, as do all magic-users. 

Other weaknesses of the verse. Anti-magic powers are brokenly strong against most of the tier; and sealing absolutely messes up most spirits and fae. The tier relies a lot on ecokinesis, control of the natural world and people with powers from higher planes or unnatural sources can likely get around most of the tier's manipulations. Finally pretty much everyone on this tier is used to just lording their power over the lesser races; with people like Oberon and Titania clearly not used to fighting against someone of their own power in their confrontations. Combat skill is lacking in this tier. 

Well the first counter I would suggest is

Pinhead from Hellraiser.

Pinhead's power is enough to grow to planet-scale size and can fight Satan who can destroy small planets, which would give him a power and speed advantage over the tier. Pinhead is an entities from a godlike entity outside the dimension, whose powers are unnatural.

Pinhead is a Cenobite, a race of hyper-logical supergenius hedonists who can perfectly empathize with hedonists like the fae yet also have the intellect to easily manipulate them and trick or trap them. He has far more versatile reality-warping and can create illusions that would put Prospero's to shame.

Pinhead has the ability to sense the sins of others and with that would know exactly to use the vices of the tier against them or otherwise out manuever them. And if they would ever launch an attack that would threaten him he can just teleport away or remove their memories he was even there from well outside their range. It would be hard to hurt him anyway as he is made of pure energy and can't be hurt conventionally basically requiring hax to hit. Except Pinhead is completely immune to magic which is all the attacks in the verse save for the gods.

But what about Time? While Pinhead doesn't have direct conceptual attacks, Time in Shakespeare is a humanlike entity that is directly time's flow and Pinhead would be able to sense via sin-reading and mentally torture via repeated time freezing. Time could try to counter attack but time can only age things and Pinhead is an unaging immortal demon-like entity unaffected by time.

Still you might think the inability to directly hit time means this shouldn't be used as a counter. For a character that definitely could you could use

Pictonians from Hetalia: Axis Powers

Pictonians have reactions relative to the countries which are anthromorphic concepts capable of reacting to the Pictonians lightspeed attack, meaning they should easily be able to react to the tier.

Pictonians shoot a lightspeed beam from their foreheads that remove the color from objects and turn them into white blank and inanimate landscapes, able to cover entire nations and even affect concepts like the nations turning them into Pictonians. 

Pictonians could fire at the verse from space messing up any attack to counterattack. While this should work, if a god or fairy lord hits them, their country level durability will not only hold up, as they are physically only around the level of a mermaid. They also are trying to find something that brings them joy and it's very likely Puck could entertain and decieve them with song and dance while a high tier hits them while distracted. For a more focused tier you could use

Dante Alighieri from Dante's Inferno.

Dante was able to overpower Lucifer who could shake the world and leave it a desert putting him at similar, if not quite as strong as the fairy lords. He's also fast enough to match the Devil who quickly almost flew out of Hell, across 9 layers of horizons calced at 4-digit mach speed, far beyond anyone in the Shakespeare-verse.

Dante can blitz the verse using the cross to absolve the verse by targeting their sins and sending them to Heaven or using Death's Scythe to damn them. Death's Scythe is able to cut not just space itself but to kill concepts like Death meaning it could even hit Time. 

Dante's powers are not part of nature; they are formed from exreme holiness, unholiness, and his sheer will to redeem himself bolstering his astral nature. His unholy powers might be manipulate-able by Hecate who is the source of all harms but his holy powers are unlikely anything in the verse.

Dante's ultimate power is a form of sealing where the souls he absolved him seal enemies in ice, even the Devil which would work on almost anyone in the tier. While Dante is not as smart as some of the characters in this tier, his drive to be redeemed is a supernatural force that bolsters him and allowed him to resist even the manipulation of the Devil himself. And he's far more skilled, able to defeat fighters that have done nothing but fight in hell for centuries, if not millennia.

The only threat to Dante in the Shakespeare-verse is Prospero using his magic to disarm him of the cross and scythe. However even if he did that, Dante could still possibly beat him via using the souls within him to seal Prospero away. While Prospero also has sealing he has never shown the ability to seal away so many spirits at once, and Dante could physically attack him while he's distracted or send a stray spirit to destroy Prospero's spellbooks.

That said this does mean that if Dante gets swarmed by the tier, they could beat him. For the absolute best counter to this tier in my opinion you should use

Pavo Mayura from Saint Seiya.

Pavo Mayura is considered the strongest character that has is below the seventh sense users in Saint Seiya being far above most Silver Saint level entities. Because of this she is likely signifigantly stronger then the nameless Saint Initiate who turned a nuclear power plant into a planetary threat, a feat putting her in the same range as the high tiers of this tier. In terms of speed, even without burning her cosmo, she is capable of traveling at lightning making her one of the high tiers in terms of speed.

Pavo Mayura is accomplished in cosmo giving her control of atoms, making it impossible for her powers to be controlled by the tier whose ecokinesis never reaches down into the atomic range. Pavo Mayura is known for her incredible psychic powers, able to teleport and telekinetically control people. She could easily use this along with her incredible skill, great enough that she has great recognition among the supernaturally skilled saints to easily get around most attacks of the tier and out-think them.

Mayura is a saint known for her calmness and her great degree of wisdom. It's likely she would instantly recognize her opponents nature and use the sealing technique she used on Shoko where one's sins come to consume one; which for beings like Oberon and Titania who have spent their immoral fae lives decieving and lording over mortals, stealing children to be their slaves, would absolutely destroy them. In fact it's unlikely anyone on this tier would be able to tank this attack. Better then conventional emotional manipulation, this is an attack on a spiritual level attacking one via one's evils. However Mayura could also just manipulate much of the verse appearing as a blind frail woman and using her great wisdom and calm demeanor to get her way. 

But what about Time? Cosmo users are capable of attacking the Dryads of Eris which are the sins of humanity showing that Mayura would be able to hit conceptual entities. 

Really almost every ability that this verse has, Mayura has the perfect counter. Telekinetic disarming? Mayura, like all the Saints, don't use weapons. Illusions? Mayura does not use her sight, relies on the psychic wisdom of the sixth sense as a superior sense to see. Sealing? Mayura can undo seals due to her purity of spirit. Time manipulation? Anyone with cosmo can resist universal scale time freezing. Even if they all rushed her, Mayura can use her Brilliant Wings Heaven Dance to create a cosmo wind to blow away them all at once with psychic energy.

Born to don the Peacock Constellation Cloth, Mayura represents the elegant peacock tail's many eyes, seeing all in her great wisdom and judgement. In this verse of humanoid supernatural forces she would see the vulnerabilities of their hearts and use wisdom of Heaven and Earth to counter each vulnerability appropriately.

And that's how to be OP in the Shakespeare-verse.