Continuous and Discontiguous Feats Standards Clarification

[Epyriel]

Permission granted by @Antvasima

One of my greatest pet peeves is unwritten rules that are nonetheless binding, so I figured I should make this thread to have 2 topics clarified in writing that I have seen some confusion around in the past.

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1. Continuous Feats: Feats that reflect a continuous release of energy naturally scale higher the longer they go on. So if an attack keeps on going, what is listed as the AP? Currently the seemingly universally applied standard is that any attack lasting longer than 1 second will be capped at that 1 second output to be listed as AP, essentially just using the wattage of the feat instead of the energy (for example: Lawine gradually freezing a lake), and if relevant, listing a specific higher result as 'over time' on top of the normal rating if it takes a particular longer timeframe to achieve a specific notable result (for example: Leviathan’s hydrokinesis over longer fights being able to sink landmasses). This seems fine to me as a standard, it just needs to be written down officially.

Here is my draft (feel free to give input):

Spoiler: DRAFT

For feats that constitute a continuous release of energy lasting longer than a second, the AP value listed shall be taken as their maximum output confined to a single second. Please note that the reverse is not applicable (upscaling characters by using their power instead of their energy when their feats take place in less than a second).

Should a notable feat be accomplished across a timeframe longer than a second (or across an unknown timeframe that could plausibly be over a second) and be deemed relevant enough to be listed on a profile, the AP value for such a feat may be added in addition to their conventional AP as determined by the above standards, but must be clearly marked as “over time”. Such cases may overlap with our standards for Environmental Destruction. Sufficient relevancy for such circumstances shall be determined on a case-by-case basis.
-Attack Potency

Agree: DontTalkDT (only for straight AP), Dalesean027 (only for straight AP), Floxy178 (only for straight AP)
Disagree:
Neutral: DontTalkDT (ED), Floxy178 (ED)

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2. Discontiguous/Volley Feats: Feats that involve multiple components that can be subdivided naturally scale higher the more components are added, so what is listed as the AP? Currently this is listed under a mishmash of different formats, with certain volley attacks like shotgun blasts typically only listing the total, while cannonade barrages like those of Boros’ ship listing both the total and the AP of individual rounds.

There are 3 different ways we can present this on profiles:

Option 1: list only the individual components of an attack for all cases.

This seems to me problematic considering 1) many attacks can be infinitely subdivided if you try hard enough, making the cutoff in some cases feel rather arbitrary, 2) the total yield can be an important piece of information, as whether you can overwhelm something like an energy shield with a particular attack like something that launches a hundred near simultaneous strikes could be the difference between victory and defeat, yet might be misconstrued if only the yield of a single subdivided strike is listed, and 3) the contiguity of an attack makes no difference from a physics perspective for its energy yield, which can have important ramifications on scaling other characters. The more relevant attribute over contiguity for battle-boarding purposes would seem more to be how likely a portion of an attack would be to miss (albeit that doesn’t seem to stop us from listing the total for explosions that are rarely, if ever, going to hit someone for their entire yield).

Option 2: list only the total yield of an attack for all cases.

This may be appropriate for things like shotgun blasts where you can plausibly hit someone with the entire yield with a degree of consistency, although would seem strange for something like the earlier example of Boros’ ship where the vast majority of targets are too small to be hit by more than a single strike at a time. In such cases the yield of a particular subdivision of the attack can be an important piece of information that is being left out.

Option 3: list both the total yield of an attack and the yield of subdivided strikes when relevant (as determined by the metric of if a certain subdivision of discrete component strikes are likely to provide guidance on what portion of an attack shall land).

This seems to me the most sensible option, as it lets us present all possibly relevant information without seeming disingenuous by leaving out an important distinction in either direction.

Here is my draft (feel free to give input):

Spoiler: DRAFT

Feats involving an attack that can be subdivided into multiple constituent simultaneous (or near-simultaneous) strikes are to have both the total and (when relevant) the individual strike yields listed on profiles. Please note that volley attacks lasting longer than a second shall still have their yield capped to the output unleashed during that window in line with the above standard for continuous feats.
-Attack Potency

Option 1: Dalesean027
Option 2:
Option 3: DontTalkDT (for ‘reasonably cumulative’ attacks), Floxy178 (for ‘reasonably cumulative’ attacks)
Neutral:

 

[DontTalkDT]

For 1. not really sure on "over time" as a standard outside of environmental destruction context. "Over time" would only apply for straight up AP, in my eyes, if over a longer period of time the attack could actually harm a character of the listed durability. I.e. that's for abilties that gradually grow more powerful, rather than for continuous energy beams.

For 2. I believe it's a question of whether the energy is reasonably cumulative. With a shotgun, you can press the barrel to something and it will all hit at the same time and it's essentially one attack. For something like Boros' ship those are separate weapons, which powers you can't really put into a single blow.
Generally, I don't think it's needed to list both. In the Boros' ship case, listing a cumulative value is irrelevant. Meanwhile, in cases where the energy can be pooled, it's usually understood that the AP reflects a full power hit. Like, we wouldn't specify that if Goku shoots one Kamehameha from each hand, each can reasonably only have half of his total output.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

When it comes to over time feats or fractions, policies tend to more complicated when addressing High 3-A and above. Where realistically, lots of them should still be High 3-A and above outright. But fiction can be inconsistent about treating gaps from 3-A to High 3-A or Low 2-C or any wider gaps like 9-A to High 1-B. Lots of verses are just weird when it comes to scaling and feats to where even going from urban tiers to infinite sized multiverse with innumerable/infinite upper dimensional layers is treated as a gap that is undeniably massive but still finite.

 

[Epyriel]

For 2. I believe it's a question of whether the energy is reasonably cumulative. With a shotgun, you can press the barrel to something and it will all hit at the same time and it's essentially one attack. For something like Boros' ship those are separate weapons, which powers you can't really put into a single blow.
Generally, I don't think it's needed to list both. In the Boros' ship case, listing a cumulative value is irrelevant. Meanwhile, in cases where the energy can be pooled, it's usually understood that the AP reflects a full power hit. Like, we wouldn't specify that if Goku shoots one Kamehameha from each hand, each can reasonably only have half of his total output.

I’m not really sure how to list that. Since shotgun blasts can’t really be “pooled” either despite generally being recognizable as a single attack since everything all lands at once. While a broadside from a ship can also land all at once when firing against other vehicles of similar size, yet the constituent shots are fired from independent weapons.

Should it be a matter of only listing totals for single weapons/attackers? Since a shotgun and someone like Goku are ultimately both individual weapons/attackers while something like a ship has multiple weapons.

 

[Dalesean027]

1. is fine for straight AP as DT said above, scaling them to the standard energy per second is best there

2. If its something like some kind of danmaku blast or rapid fire that should be treated exactly as it is as just a bunch of individual attacks, even if they are fired at once it doesn't really make a difference since just because I can fire a bunch of say 9-A attacks per second that doesn't mean I'm suddenly like 8-A or something because I can fire hundreds of 9-A beams at once to damage an area. Its effectively cluster bombing and those are judged by the yield of each individual bomb too, bombardments and dankamu of the sort should be scaled as individual attacks per blast or whatever it may be.

Unless there becomes something to specifically note that one attack has the combined yield of all the individual blast in and is like the accumulation of the everything at once then sure there'd be some precedent to say its fine but otherwise most other cases just having good danmaku doesn't mean the AP value listed should be the accumulation of each individual attack otherwise and should just keep the yield of whatever the individual is.

like this isn't suddenly 7-C because its a bunch of emerald splashes launched from the same source

 

[Epyriel]

2. If its something like some kind of danmaku blast or rapid fire that should be treated exactly as it is as just a bunch of individual attacks, even if they are fired at once it doesn't really make a difference since just because I can fire a bunch of say 9-A attacks per second that doesn't mean I'm suddenly like 8-A or something because I can fire hundreds of 9-A beams at once to damage an area. Its effectively cluster bombing and those are judged by the yield of each individual bomb too, bombardments and dankamu of the sort should be scaled as individual attacks per blast or whatever it may be.

Unless there becomes something to specifically note that one attack has the combined yield of all the individual blast in and is like the accumulation of the everything at once then sure there'd be some precedent to say its fine but otherwise most other cases just having good danmaku doesn't mean the AP value listed should be the accumulation of each individual attack otherwise and should just keep the yield of whatever the individual is.

If you do hit someone with thousands of simultaneous 9-A attacks all at once you very much are dealing 8-A damage. There is no other way to cut it.

It is physically identical. Contiguity has nothing to do with it.

And we literally do scale actual cluster bombs like this.

 

[Dalesean027]

If you do hit someone with thousands of simultaneous 9-A attacks all at once you very much are dealing 8-A damage. There is no other way to cut it.

Dawg that is not how that works

This isn't suddenly several tiers above himself because he's throwing the attacks out and they're hitting the target at the same time or quick succession, genuinely surface area and several other factors matter, its legit not the same. That's just a bunch of individual 9-A attacks in that case.

And we literally do scale actual cluster bombs like this.

That's just giving the equivalent of what the full bombardment would yield if you were to combine the total amount of energy released from every single bomb involved in the bombing but it rates each individual bomb as 9-B. The 9-A part of it is effectively just for show since its not actually applicable to anything since cluster bombs literally don't function in a way to where you could scale itself to the full combined yield of what 40 bombs dropped across a 460m × 150m area yields.

 

[Dalesean027]

Another Jojo example, let's take Star Platinum stopping time and then throwing an Ora barrage at his opponent then resuming time, we don't scale him to the accumulated damage done when time is stopped and that would be considered simultaneous from what you're proposing and yet its still treated as a barrage of individual High 8-C+ punches not suddenly like 6-B since dude could pelt you with thousands of blows in a instance of time stop.


This is no different, so like I said danmaku or barrage attacks should just scale to considered the individual attack yield of each blast and just having good danmaku isn't applicable to being a higher tier just because you can make a lot of projectiles, that just creates circular scaling ultimately

 

[Epyriel]

Dawg that is not how that works

This isn't suddenly several tiers above himself because he's throwing the attacks out and they're hitting the target at the same time or quick succession, genuinely surface area and several other factors matter, its legit not the same. That's just a bunch of individual 9-A attacks in that case.

That's just giving the equivalent of what the full bombardment would yield if you were to combine the total amount of energy released from every single bomb involved in the bombing but it rates each individual bomb as 9-B. The 9-A part of it is effectively just for show since its not actually applicable to anything since cluster bombs literally don't function in a way to where you could scale itself to the full combined yield of what 40 bombs dropped across a 460m × 150m area yields.

And if he tied together his fists with string to serve some weird appeal to contiguity would it suddenly make his AP twice as powerful?

Distribution of energy obviously matters to how much damage a person sustains, but that is not what defines AP, and that doesn’t stop us from tiering all sorts of attacks that don’t lay all their energy into a small area to serve as a piercing strike.

Does a laser beam as wide as the earth that can level continents suddenly have Average Human level AP because that is its energy density across the size of a human fist? Do we tier pistol bullets as having Building levels of AP because that is their equivalent ability to damage characters thanks to their more compact energy density?

Of course not.

You are re-writing the very definition of AP, which is established as the energy output of an attack. Not its energy density.

And that distinction matters, especially when considering the fact a wide variety of characters and vehicles employ energy shields that care little about energy distribution and whose reserves are depleted on the basis of energy yield absorbed.

 

[Dalesean027]

And if he tied together his fists with string to serve some weird appeal to contiguity would it suddenly make his AP twice as powerful?

Distribution of energy obviously matters to how much damage a person sustains, but that is not what defines AP, and that doesn’t stop us from tiering all sorts of attacks that don’t lay all their energy into a small area to serve as a piercing strike.

Does a laser beam as wide as the earth that can level continents suddenly have Average Human level AP because that is its energy density across the size of a human fist? Do we tier pistol bullets as having Building levels of AP because that is their equivalent ability to damage characters thanks to their more compact energy density?

Of course not.

You are re-writing the very definition of AP, which is established as the energy output of an attack. Not its energy density.

And that distinction matters, especially when considering the fact a wide variety of characters and vehicles employ energy shields that care little about energy distribution and whose reserves are depleted on the basis of energy yield absorbed.

There's many ways to cut it, the fact you claim there's only one shows a major misunderstanding or lack of knowledge on the subject.

Your argument only works if every single 9-A attack couples into the target as one unified, concentrated energy-transfer. Otherwise, there's no 8-A damage. You'd only be proving that there may be 8-A total energy spread across many separate impacts.

It may seem minor, but it's a pretty damn major distinction you keep skipping.

Claymores, grenades, shotgun blasts, debris clouds, sandstorms, water sprays, and airflow can all involve large total energy spread across many fragments or particles. That doesn't mean the target takes the entire summed value as one single attack. A person hit by a hundred lower-energy fragments like having a fistful of dirt thrown at your face isn't going to automatically entail being hit by one higher-tier projectile as if you combined every singular grain's KE into a singular impactive force. They are being hit by a hundred separate impacts, each with its own contact area, direction, penetration, pressure, impulse, and transfer efficiency.

Energy being scalar doesn't just magically erase the mechanics of impact.

Momentum has direction. Pressure depends on area. Stress is local. Impulse depends on force over time. Damage depends on how the target actually absorbs and even just responds to the energy. If attacks land on different parts of the body, the energy is distributed. If they come from different angles, their momentum vectors do not all reinforce. If some hits occur after the target has already moved, deformed, broken, or been launched, or whatever else, they do not all transfer in a way that couples together. If the contact points are separate, the local stress at each point is still from a lower-tier strike or whatnot, not some magically unified pressure or force.

So no, "thousands of simultaneous 9-A attacks" doesn't equal "8-A damage", at least not in the way you're framing it.

At best, and I'm being generous here, it can equal 8-A total energy under ideal math, physics and so forth. But for it to count as an 8-A-equivalent damaging attack, that energy must be delivered into the same target, over the relevant time window, with comparable concentration, coupling, directionality, impulse, contact, and destructive effect. Without that, it is nothing but just a large number of 9-A attacks.

This would be why being hit by like a hundred 9-B claymore pellets doesn't mean you took the full energy of the entire mine as one attack, let alone additive to be like 9-A or 8-C due to the total pellet concentration. This is why sitting in front of a fan doesn't shred your skin off nor mean you're tanking the combined kinetic energy of every air molecule as one concentrated strike. This is why getting dirt thrown at you is but a nuisance, while the same total energy compressed into one solid object could tear a hole through you.

The total energy existing conceptually or in general in the interaction is not the same thing as the target receiving that energy as one concentrated attack.

You're confusing total energy output with effective applied damage. Those are not the same thing, really not much to debate here it simply isn't the case.

If you do hit someone with thousands of simultaneous 9-A attacks all at once you very much are dealing 8-A damage. There is no other way to cut it.

Yeah um, no. That's not how we treat these things or else we'd have 7-C ~ 6-B Star Platinum or some stuff or anyone with time hax would be several tiers higher than where they are because they can do several hits in whats effectively 0 time when we don't work on that logic here

 

[Epyriel]

There's many ways to cut it, the fact you claim there's only one shows a major misunderstanding or lack of knowledge on the subject.

Your argument only works if every single 9-A attack couples into the target as one unified, concentrated energy-transfer. Otherwise, there's no 8-A damage. You'd only be proving that there may be 8-A total energy spread across many separate impacts.

It may seem minor, but it's a pretty damn major distinction you keep skipping.

Claymores, grenades, shotgun blasts, debris clouds, sandstorms, water sprays, and airflow can all involve large total energy spread across many fragments or particles. That doesn't mean the target takes the entire summed value as one single attack. A person hit by a hundred lower-energy fragments like having a fistful of dirt thrown at your face isn't going to automatically entail being hit by one higher-tier projectile as if you combined every singular grain's KE into a singular impactive force. They are being hit by a hundred separate impacts, each with its own contact area, direction, penetration, pressure, impulse, and transfer efficiency.

Energy being scalar doesn't just magically erase the mechanics of impact.

Momentum has direction. Pressure depends on area. Stress is local. Impulse depends on force over time. Damage depends on how the target actually absorbs and even just responds to the energy. If attacks land on different parts of the body, the energy is distributed. If they come from different angles, their momentum vectors do not all reinforce. If some hits occur after the target has already moved, deformed, broken, or been launched, or whatever else, they do not all transfer in a way that couples together. If the contact points are separate, the local stress at each point is still from a lower-tier strike or whatnot, not some magically unified pressure or force.

So no, "thousands of simultaneous 9-A attacks" doesn't equal "8-A damage", at least not in the way you're framing it.

At best, and I'm being generous here, it can equal 8-A total energy under ideal math, physics and so forth. But for it to count as an 8-A-equivalent damaging attack, that energy must be delivered into the same target, over the relevant time window, with comparable concentration, coupling, directionality, impulse, contact, and destructive effect. Without that, it is nothing but just a large number of 9-A attacks.

This would be why being hit by like a hundred 9-B claymore pellets doesn't mean you took the full energy of the entire mine as one attack, let alone additive to be like 9-A or 8-C due to the total pellet concentration. This is why sitting in front of a fan doesn't shred your skin off nor mean you're tanking the combined kinetic energy of every air molecule as one concentrated strike. This is why getting dirt thrown at you is but a nuisance, while the same total energy compressed into one solid object could tear a hole through you.

The total energy existing conceptually or in general in the interaction is not the same thing as the target receiving that energy as one concentrated attack.

You're confusing total energy output with effective applied damage. Those are not the same thing, really not much to debate here it simply isn't the case.

Yeah um, no. That's not how we treat these things or else we'd have 7-C ~ 6-B Star Platinum or some stuff or anyone with time hax would be several tiers higher than where they are because they can do several hits in whats effectively 0 time when we don't work on that logic here

Once again you are trying to re-define AP.

AP is defined by energy yield. Not energy density.

Mechanics of impact and distributed material strength can determine how much damage a given character will sustain, but the combinations of different possibilities for those are endless, and ultimately is not the criteria we use to list AP.

And you didn’t answer my earlier challenge.

Do we downscale the AP of attacks larger than a human fist?

Do we upscale the AP of attacks smaller than a human fist?

The surface area of a bullet is what, a hundredth of a fist? That is why it pierces people so well in comparison - more compact energy density. So why don’t we list its AP as 100x higher?

Because that is what you have to do if you want to re-define AP in general as energy density, instead of having conversations about mechanisms of impact in versus threads for particular matchups where they belong.

It is not like how we define AP already isn’t useful either. If you have an energy shield whose energy reserves you need to deplete, what matters is energy yield. If you land twice as many strikes at the same yield each, you are going to deal twice the damage.

 

[Floxy178]

Don't know if my vote counts for this thread but I agree with DT.

Distribution of energy obviously matters to how much damage a person sustains, but that is not what defines AP, and that doesn’t stop us from tiering all sorts of attacks that don’t lay all their energy into a small area to serve as a piercing strike.

Agreed, otherwise we should've used some pressure based AP system instead of current one. So only that shouldn't stop us from indexing total AP IMO.

 

[Dalesean027]

And you didn’t answer my earlier challenge.

Do we downscale the AP of attacks larger than a human fist?

Do we upscale the AP of attacks smaller than a human fist?

I didn't answer because it ultimately has no bearing on what I said and reframes it in way I didn't present it but vice versa you still have yet to answer exactly what I said earlier as well.

Another Jojo example, let's take Star Platinum stopping time and then throwing an Ora barrage at his opponent then resuming time, we don't scale him to the accumulated damage done when time is stopped and that would be considered simultaneous from what you're proposing and yet its still treated as a barrage of individual High 8-C+ punches not suddenly like 6-B since dude could pelt you with thousands of blows in a instance of time stop

So is something like SP suddenly several tiers above itself since if by the logic you're suggesting we use he can hit an opponent thousands of times in stopped time with High 8-C+ strikes so does that suddenly make it like 7-B since those did effectively happen simultaneously in real time.


What you're proposing is actually redefining how we treat AP instead since you're essentially just saying as long as more than 1 attack hits the target at the same time that if the target withstands it decently they scale a multiple of how many attacks they survived. There's lots of barrage attacks in fiction that can home in all at once to like explode on the target and plenty do combine into a larger explosion but in that case you can just calculate the actual explosion but instead you're basically saying that you should simply take the characters AP and multiply it by however many attacks they shot that hit at the exact same time to get tier now. Its essentially just a proposal of calc stacked stats based on surviving simultaneous attacks.

We'd also have to define what we consider simultaneous too like some characters can land millions of blows in the blink of an eye in canon or even a supersonic can effectively hit someone 100 times in a second or what if they had time stop, do we know tier every time stop character with damage accumulation because its effectively damage done in 0 time or what if someone survives it instead of upscaling like normal do we know tier them X however many hits it was they withstood?

 

[Epyriel]

I didn't answer because it ultimately has no bearing on what I said and reframes it in way I didn't present it but vice versa you still have yet to answer exactly what I said earlier as well.

It is very much a consequence of what you said.

If AP values are listed not by their yield, but by how they interact with a test subject’s durability then that is going to have a lot of repercussions beyond volley attacks.

So is something like SP suddenly several tiers above itself since if by the logic you're suggesting we use he can hit an opponent thousands of times in stopped time with High 8-C+ strikes so does that suddenly make it like 7-B since those did effectively happen simultaneously in real time.

7-C, but yes effectively as long as you can avoid running afoul of calc stacking.

If you hit someone with an energy shield a thousand times more at the same time at the same yield per strike you are going to deal a thousand times the damage. That total yield has ramifications that are important to consider, and would be remiss to ignore on profiles.

That doesn’t mean someone without an energy shield tanking those blows necessarily scales in durability thanks to the mechanics of the separate impacts, but that is why it is important to list both AP values.

What you're proposing is actually redefining how we treat AP instead since you're essentially just saying as long as more than 1 attack hits the target at the same time that if the target withstands it decently they scale a multiple of how many attacks they survived. There's lots of barrage attacks in fiction that can home in all at once to like explode on the target and plenty do combine into a larger explosion but in that case you can just calculate the actual explosion but instead you're basically saying that you should simply take the characters AP and multiply it by however many attacks they shot that hit at the exact same time to get tier now. Its essentially just a proposal of calc stacked stats based on surviving simultaneous attacks.

do we know tier every time stop character with damage accumulation because its effectively damage done in 0 time or what if someone survives it instead of upscaling like normal do we know tier them X however many hits it was they withstood?

Nope. I’m not proposing any changes to how we treat durability, only AP. It is the very fact that the same attacks can have different impacts depending on what characters they are hitting and the nature of their durability that makes listing both AP values so important.

We'd also have to define what we consider simultaneous too like some characters can land millions of blows in the blink of an eye in canon or even a supersonic can effectively hit someone 100 times in a second or what if they had time stop,

That one is pretty easy, we just list simultaneous attacks as whatever appears simultaneous from the character’s perspective because that is how it is going to look against speed equalized opponents for crossverse and comparable components inverse.

Like if you put an FTL character against a regular human their blows are obviously going to appear from the human’s perspective to all land at once, but to the perspective of another FTL character it would be clear they are executing attacks one after the other (and could be interrupted in-between).

So the only way to actually be simultaneous is to either a) be able to launch multiple attacks at once (which yeah timestop would effectively count for that) or b) be able to launch attacks dramatically faster than the attacks themselves travel so that they still hit an opponent all at roughly the same time.