Power Hierarchies in WoW

Lore Story Forum
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Really nerdy thread inc

People often make claims about power levels – “Arthas was far more powerful than Bolvar,” for instance.

We mostly all know that these claims are kind of silly, but they are fun, and they can be useful for some discussions. I thought for this thread I’d look at some of the challenges to having these arguments and then look for some ways to deal with those challenges.

Let’s start with why these claims are hard:

One defeat does not a law of nature make

At high levels of play, the difference between the best player and the second best player might be that the best player wins 60% of the time. That’s why a lot of competitive leagues have a “best 3 out 5” system for their finals.

So, if Jaina defeats Khadgar once, how do we know that Khadgar didn’t just roll a 39 on a 1d100 with a DC of 40?

Power is asymmetrical, so power inequalities aren’t transitive.

Just because rock beats scissors, it doesn’t follow that rock will beat paper.

For example, suppose Thrall defeats Garrosh. Now suppose that Garrosh defeats Anduin. Does it follow that Thrall can defeat Anduin? Not necessarily. Shaman vs Warrior != Shaman vs Priest != Priest vs Warrior

Power is unstable

One interesting trend with chess masters’ ELOs over a career is that they tend to increase, then peak, then decrease. Chess gets more competitive and old players’ abilities start to decline.

WoW is a universe with a LOT of power inflation. Because of this, we can’t necessarily infer that because Azshara was obscenely powerful in her prime that she’s still at the same level thousands of years later, either in absolute or relative terms.

Context Matters

“Home field advantage” is a statistical reality in a lot of sports.

For example, say we’re talking Jaina vs Khadgar. OK, is this fight on a boat in the ocean or in Karazhan? Does Jaina have the Focusing Iris? Is Jaina currently in a peacecraft or VENGEANCE mindset?

Since the difference between THE BEST and THE SECOND BEST is often so tiny, these can make a big difference.

The devs can do whatever they want

Broxigar can mess with Sargeras if the devs feel like it. Not much to say or do here, but just something you have to acknowledge if you mess with this nonsense.

And now for some suggestions for getting around these:

This post is a lot longer than I’d intended, so I’m just going to throw out som bullet points and maybe expand on these later if it seems worth it.

  • Create tiered hierarchies. Instead of arguing about whether Malfurion > Tyrande, maybe we can say that they’re too close to call – but they belong in a tier above Nathanos and below Sargeras.
  • Speak in terms of probability. Speaking of Nathanos, maybe we could say that Tyrande has a 99% chance of defeating Nathanos based on their relative feats and combat history. This leaves open the possibility that Nathanos could win if he’s obscenely lucky.
  • Use combat history to create those probabilities: For example, I think there’s a roughly 80% chance Arthas would defeat Bolvar. Why? Because if you look at their win/loss record, and then you plug those W/L records into a win probability calculator for sports, then you get about 80% for Arthas winning, about 20% for Bolvar.
  • Assign weights to data based on estimated power level and recency: For example, I could make the above comparison more accurate if I gave more weight to wins vs world-level threats than to wins vs lower level threats. Similarly, more recent wins should count for more than wins in the distant past because of the tendency for power levels to change.
  • Control for relevant variables: If you’re comparing Anduin vs Garrosh on an EK battlefield, for example, then as much as possible give weight to data re Warrior vs Priest while the priest has homefield advantage.

What thoughts have everyone else? What are some ways we could make power level comparisons more useful? Are there problems with power levels I left out?

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Also: The real take-away from all this is that most of the time we have very little data on how an x vs y fight would go, so most fights are probably less predictable than we tend to think.

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sylvanas beats everyone

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i, gamon, will save us

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As someone who dabbles in battleboarding culture, the terminology differs from this post but the general idea is the same: character strength is estimated based on feats, antifeats, and consistency, with outliers, amps, and other advantages usually ignored unless otherwise stated in a prompt. In the case of Nathanos vs Tyrande, Nathanos was amped by an undefined amount by a Valkyr and lost anyway, so his power clearly didn’t go above Tyrande’s and definitely was weaker beforehand, and to my knowledge showed no feats on a similar level before or since.

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After SoO I had real high hopes they would turn this meme character into something…

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When did achieving everything you set out to do become losing?

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When did letting Tyrande live count as achieving everything you set to do?

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This combined with the cavalier attitude toward existing lore essentially trumps and undermines any discussion to be had.

Tyrande and Malfurion should have annihilated Nathanos merely by looking in his general direction. Superman should pulverize Batman with less effort than it takes him to wake up in the morning.

But we have to make allowances for gameplay, we have arguments that he was soundly defeated even when the original scenario and it’s revision portray Nathanos as successfully accomplishing his task in stride, we have supposition on his true power in comparison to the true power of Tyrande and Malfurion combined, we have to consider McGuffins and luck, we have to consider if an obvious outcome is too boring.

We’re children in a sandbox arguing that my dad can beat up your dad with Blizzard casting the deciding vote.

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If fiction being arbitrary deep down really takes the fun out of it for you, then sure, I guess.

But if I did feel that way, then I wouldn’t enjoy speculating about lore and wouldn’t be on the SF much

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They considered it but there were folks on twitter who were against it and I guess they caved to that.

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Gee, how did I know that the endless Nathanos Debate would basically swallow what was otherwise a reasonable thread premise.

It’s almost like politics. People have to push their message in literally every available thread rather than accept that an issue has been fought a hundred times elsewhere.

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He never won the 1v1 fight with Tyrande iirc, Nathanos simply retreated when the other Valk died and he’d already accomplished his goal

That’s my bad, I was just trying to use an example of people misunderstanding powerscaling, and that was mentioned in the OP so I grasped it. Bad move on my part.

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There are degrees.

In this particular instance, I feel those in charge of the story direction have made it rather obvious that hoping for consistency is more foolish than typical in geekdom. We have continued and will continue to discuss such things regardless so long as someone is wrong on the internet.

Indeed.

Be the change you wish to see.

Edit:

By which I mean you have the ability to post something else and not engage with that premise rather, letting it fade away as more interesting topics prevail.

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I actually spent a fair amount of my younger years on a comicbook debating website so I am pretty well versed in battleboard culture and lingo. As was said earlier a lot of these concepts you put forward is common practice among “Who Would Win?” debaters.

On the website I spent time on it was encouraged to give your answer in the form of “who would win the majority out of ten fights?” with the understanding that luck and other factors have to be considered at least to some extent as combat is chaotic and messy.

As an example Tyrande should pretty easily destroy Nathanos 9/10 times, with the one win Nathanos gets being due to a lucky shot on his part or Tyrande slipping on a banana peel.

This is called “power scaling” or “ABC” logic and is generally considered a weak argument. Certainly if warrior A can defeat warrior B then warrior C can be argued to also beat warrior B if they defeat warrior A.

But as you point out different skill sets have different advantages and disadvantages. Power sets are important to look at too. A paladin has a huge advantage over undead due to the nature of the Light, so if a paladin were to crush Nathanos they might not necessarily also crush someone of equal skill to Nathanos who happened to be human.

A lot of people poke fun at Malfurion for losing to Xavius, as an example, but that is an incredibly unfair thing to hold against him because Xavius’ powers are designed to hard counter what Malfurion can do. He was also lured into a trap which dramatically tilts things in Xavius’ favor.

This is why in battle forum culture it is important to state what version of a character you’re discussing. Xavius is a pretty good example. Xavius as a night elf, Xavius as Sargeras’ minion, and Xavius the Nightmare Lord are all very different with varying powers and abilities.

That it definitely does. Not just context of the fight, which is usually established at the start of a thread for this reason, but context of the feats you’re using to represent a character’s strengths. You need to take under consideration if a character was amped or if they did what they did under special circumstances before using it as evidence.

This is called PIS. Plot Induced Stupidity. It more or less refers to instances where the characters do something that all evidence says they shouldn’t have been able to do.

Sylvanas beating Malfurion in Ashenvale was a very good example of PIS because she’d never been depicted as that powerful prior. Shoot, the last time we saw her fight she tied with Greymane who, at the end of the day, is a suped up warrior where as Malfurion is a demigod who throws down with world-threatening super demons.

We learned later she was amped which explained away the contradiction, but for the time before that it was just PIS.

Another variant is CIS. Character Induced Stupidity. This is when a character forgets they have an instrumental power that could easily win them the fight or otherwise behaves stupidly so they lose even though all evidence says they should win. This can either be a case of the character being dumb or it can just be an IC (in-character) excuse for PIS as defined above.

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You’ve all set me down a dark and dangerous Google journey, and I’m not sure I can forgive you.

Edit: actually this search has been surprisingly fruitless. Most of what I find are specialty game board cases and abandoned wikis with no explanations for what this actually is. What is battleboarding?

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It’s a term mostly flung around for the hobby of pitting fictional characters and universes against one another over the internet. I personally got my start on subreddits WhoWouldWin and sister sub CharacterRant, but there are other websites with such cultures. That is all I will say to avoid getting too much off topic.

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Killing Tyrande wasn’t what Nathanos set out to do. His goal was to raise more Dark Rangers which he did plus he claimed Sira and Delaryn. Nathanos got everything he was after and then slowly flew away on an easily shot down bat.

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One thing I enjoy about the Warcraft lore is the fluctuating power levels. I love the idea that a guy with an axe can kill a Demigod in one instance, and in another a villain can snap his fingers to instakill the most powerful force the world has ever known. Its inconsistent, but it lets you create your own kind of hierarchy. I don’t think it all needs to be strictly ranked.

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He directly tells her he’s going to turn her.

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What have you DONE!

Do you know what this MEANS?!

Now I have to make a statistical model measuring power levels of Warcraft characters!

Uuuuuhg… my head is already hurting. I’ll have to research as many combat encounters as I can. Create a criteria for the conditions of victory. Catalogue those into categories of Time and Place. Assign power values. Weight those values based on racial and class abilities and how they stack up to the racial and class abilities of others…

Gods, this is going to take forever…

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