Being a peak Kherubim, Marc has stats beyond any normal human. Let me give you a rundown, starting with........
As you told me when you were setting up this match, you will rely on speed as your argument. So let me show you what you will have to deal with in the speed department.
First of all, Backlash is a casual bullet timer. As seen below, where he casually dodges multiple machine guns in a small space. But it's not just that, while he was dodging the bullets, he closes the distance between him and the gunmen.
Here is another example of him casually bullet timing. This time he dodges shots from Savage Dragon until SD ran out of ammo.
But Marc isn't just a casual bullet timer. One of his most impressive feats shows him dodging batons and laser fire from all around, casually. In the same scans, he is called the fastest and most agile member of Stormwatch (a group filled with peak and metahumans).
In terms of strength, Marc does not have too many feats as his main form of offense are his psi whips. However, using the feats he does have, I can safley say that he can punch out of his tier. Which is bad news for you since he is already a tier above both of your characters.
This claim is supported by the fact that Backlash was able to draw blood from Savage Dragon with a kick.
Same Savage Dragon that tanked thsese
Backlash can also charge his hits (sort of like Iron Fist). Which he does to one shot 3 inches of bulletproof glass.
Even without misting, Backlash is a man you will have a hard time putting and/or keeping down.
Look at this for example. Here a wall of fire burns him, yet he is barely bothered, it only manages to knock him off balanced.
He also took a full blast from Helspont to the face and didn't die.
And that was after Backlash had just recovered from a previous blast from Helspont. So he took two blasts from Helspont in one issue.
Helspont, btw casually blasted away Youngblood (which is a superhero team. Remember Badrock? He is a member there).
But what about physical durability? You might be wondering. Well, remember our old friend Savage Dragon? Because he is back again. Here Backlash survives a hit from him.
Again, same Savage Dragon who one-shots dragons with a flipping brick.
And's that's not his only feat of taking attacks from mid tiers. Here Backlash survived getting rag-dolled by Helspont after already tanking two blasts from him (as I showed) and almost drowning. Talk about tough.
Backlash is a bad @ss, that is already pretty clear. But before you think he can't get any cooler, he does. Take his skill for example.
Now I won't spend too much time on skill since I don't know how important it will before the debate just yet. But you should know that Backlash is amazingly skilled, like better than Batman level.
For example, here Backlash is, easily getting the better of Zealot.
That feat is made even more impressive when you consider 3 things, 1. Marc did not want to fight her. 2. He was rusty at this point. 3. Zealot is one of the best fighters in Wildstorm, seriously, she fought frigging Midnighter in CQC.
If you want to know how good Midnighter (shameless plugin) check this out.
Plus Zealot's dang strong too. She has enough strength to knock over Mr. Majestic (AKA Supes but stronger) hard enough to dent a wall.
But enough about her, let's go back to Backlash. Here is another feat of him stomping a hero, this time it is Battlion (who is kinda like Cable, here is a wiki link), and this time Backlash was serious.
Moving on we have Backlash's Psi Whips, which are, as I have said, Backlash's main offense.
These things are dang strong, for starters they are able to easily slice through military APC.
It also has feats of causing such an intense amount of pain that it can force Daemonites out. A Daemonite is what Helspont is, for reference.
And speaking of Helspont, he is, not only, impressed and briefly restrained by the whips.
But he is also, later dragged down by them against his will.
You probably already get the gist of this ability just by its name. But here are some feats to reaffirm what it does (turn him into mist) and show you him using it to get the drop on people.
He can use the ability on only some parts of his body if he wishes to, doing this negates basically any attack, like this stab.
He can also attack while fully in mist form.
At a glance, I would say that Backlash is significantly stronger and more durable than either or even both of your team members combined, is fast enough to outpace Arsenal and keep pace with Damian, is skilled enough to toy with both members of your team, and to top it all off, he has the ability to turn into mist to phase through your attacks and the ability to summon his psi-whips which should be able to easily restrain or even take out either member of your team.
This isn't as impressive as you make it out to be as I will prove below.
First things first, when you say you will prove something, it means that you will provide evidence and an explanation as to why your claim is true. However, that is not what you've done. You did attempt to provide counters but no proof.
Except Bardock also drew blood from Savage Dragon, so this doesn't hold much weight when trying to hype up Savage Dragon's durability.
Except Badrock is quite literally 5-10x stronger than the Young Justice's strongest member, Superboy. So him drawing blood from Savage Dragon should not somehow lower Backlash's feat.
Ehhh. This isn't completely blunt force. I mean you are trying to compare Savage Dragon tanking a punch from Backlash to tanking a building falling on him, and the two aren't really comparable.
They are both blunt force durability feats. They may not be a 1:1 comparison, but disregarding this feat because of that fact is weak.
Impressive, but in a fight with someone as fast as Roy and Damian, is this feat really applicable in CQC considering its long charge time? Hell, has Backlash even used this attack mid combat?
How did you infer that there was a long recharge time? Because in the second panel he hasn't even started charging his fist yet, but in the third, he is already ready to strike. Also yes, he can do it mid-battle, but that is the best quantifiable feat he has of it. Here he is using it in combat, as you can see there is no long charge time at all.
On one hand we have Roy tanking multiple punches from a bloodlusted Aquaman.
Aquaman is strong enough to send Aquaman to the floor with a punch, even causing him to take a few seconds just to recover. And that was Aquaman with his morals back on.
This is impressive because Aqualad can tank being hit hard enough to dent metal and immediately recover. This means that Aquaman's punches with morals on are way more powerful than this, let alone morals off Aquaman, and Roy was able to tank several hits from Aquaman with only a bloody lip.
That is nice and all but I don't see how blunt force is supposed to protect against energy whips that punctured a bulletproof vehicle.
Also, I don't see how that set of scaling is even supposed to be better than slicing an armored vehicle. An APC has to be bulletproof to small as a minimum but can be as durable as a tank
APCs must provide a minimum amount of protection against small arms fire to be considered as such, though some provide as much protection as a main battle tank,
Wikipedia
So at a minimum, APCs already have better piercing durability than Aqualad (who you mainly scale from) unless you can prove that Aqualad is bulletproof.
As for Damian, he can tank a kick from Wonder Woman.
For reference, Wonder Woman's blows can level multiple buildings.
That is bad scaling as Wonder Woman was clearly not exerting herself as much against Damian as she only wanted to kick him away. However, even if that scaling was sound, Backlash can still easily compete. Savage Dragon withstood a building falling on him, yet Backlash still drew blood from him.
While I concede that Backlash may be faster than Roy in reaction speed, it is not by that large a margin as Roy has casually evaded sonic attacks, making his reaction way over the speed of sound as well. As for Damian, he is uncontestedly faster than Backlash. Damian not only has the same feat of evading gunfire casually while closing the distance, but he also has a feat of tagging an enemy way over MHS + speeds with ease. This feat alone shits on anything you have shown far for Backlash, be that combat or reaction speed.
Ah very well, let us dissect Damian then to see if your claim holds up.
You keep saying that Damian tagged MHS+ characters but in your opening post you only show Damian cutting bullets and tagging Flash, so I assume by MHS+ characters, you are just saying he tagged Flash. But first of all, Flash being tagged by Damian was clearly PIS, and inconsistent at best. I mean, the dude sees lightning in slow motion, Damian shouldn't be able to even breath on Barry without his permission. However, I won't rely on that as my argument. Now, there are a bunch of things I want to bring up so I will make each as brief as possible, but I will expand upon them if needed.
Here is Flash running at Damian
But his running speed was already shown to be much faster than that. Just compare his running speed from the clip below to the GIF above.
Heck, Flash can run so fast that he is almost FTE, which he clearly isn't in your Damian scan.
So clearly, Flash was not going at full speed, and do you want to know why?
I don't know if Trigon possessing him made him slower or dumber, or the writing was just dumb. But Flash was portrayed as slower when Trigon got to him, and here is why.
First of all, you have to know that Flash was confirmed to be able to run faster than Superman. As you can see here when they both try to outrun Omega Beams, but when Supes fails, Flash succeeds.
Now you may be thinking that Barry succeeded thanks to having better maneuverability, but that just isn't the case. Here is a still image of both running before Supes takes flight and Flash is visibly the faster one of the two by a pretty good margin
This is important because Trigon possessed Flash fought Supes and while he was able to land a few blows, Supes was able to not only easily catch his hit but he also tags Flash easily and breaks his leg in the process
So clearly, something is up here.
Yes, Damian tagging Flash is not even a speed feat. It is a skill feat. While it does take some level of speed to tag Flash, Damian was actually using his tactical ability to do it. How do I know this? Because Flash is consistently able to blitz Damian in their fight. You showed a scan of this yourself
But while you could argue Damian was caught off guard there, he was clearly not ready in this scan where Flash blitzes him again
As you can see, Damian was attacking Flash before he blitzed Damian to the ground. So he was not caught off guard or anything, he is simply not actually fast enough to do anything to defend himself. Which is likely why you didn't use this as a show of durability since it disproves the notion that Damian is somehow fast enough to tag Flash.
TLDR There you go. 3 good reasons, asides from the obvious PIS factor, as to why Damian tagging the Flash isn't nearly as impressive as you make it out to be.
In your summary, you say this
Second of all, dodging bullet doesn't translate to combat speed,
Which is just nailing yourself in the head really. And you want to know why? Because Damian's combat speed is near abysmal. Here is a bunch of evidence proving it
Here is an example of Damian's combat speed, in this scene he is clashing with Nightwing for sparing practice
And as you can see, their combat speed is real-world peak human level. Nothing Backlash won't laugh at.
Here is the full fight for reference
Here is another example of Damian clashing swords with someone
Again, nothing special. In fact, he fights even slower here IMO.
Here is the full fight for reference, time-stamped to Damian getting blasted by a charge up attack, showing that his reaction speed isn't infallible either
Here is another showing, this time he fights Batman in CQC and Batman blocks Damian's attacks, barely even moving. TRhis shows that 1. Damian isn't that fast. and 2. Backlash could also block Damian's attacks using his skill advantage even if he were slower, which he isn't.
Full fight for reference, and while yes, Robin wins this one, it still shows poor combat speed
TLDR As you can see, Damian's combat speed is barely above real-world fighters, if even that. So Damian is not as quick as you want him to be, and sadly for you, your own words have backfired unto you.
Before I display combat speed, I will first display movement speed. Just so you can better gauge Backlash's abilities. So first things first, Backlash can easily maneuver through a wave of blaster fire
And here he is doing it to bullets
I show that so you can see how fast when maneuvering around attacks. So that you can gauge how quickly he would be when he pulls the same acrobatic techniques against opponents.
But enough of this, you guys want feats of combat, not agility. So here it is, two feats proving he is just as quick in combat as he is in acrobatics. In this first scan, he shows that his hits are moving at blur speeds as he blitzes a poor man
And as for the whips, here he uses rthem to entangle a fast flier as he dodges an attempted bullrush
This is because he can control his psi-whips at the speed of thought
TLDR He can dance around bullets, blasters, and enemies. But unlike Damian, his combat speed isn't poor as his hits are shown to be blur speeds and his whips can move as fast as he thinks since they are just psychic constructs.
Cool, but how is his explosive durability? Because getting lit on fire and getting hit by rapid fire missiles are too different things.
Glad you asked. An older and out of touch Backlash, tanked this
Feats from Helspont that make this impressive?
I already showed a feat for Helspont..........but here are more showing of him blasting away teams
I don't have time to go through who those guys are exactly, but just know that they range from street-mid tier levels in power. Helspont is no joke.
You really need piercing durability feats against my team as Damian Wayne's forte is sword combat.
This is entirely dependent on Backlash's reaction speed, and since Damian's combat speed is so fast that he can tag MHS + enemies, I don't see why he wouldn't be able to do the same to Backlash.
Since I already attempted to dismantle your entire speed argument, I say this happens when Damain tries to cut him
I conclude that Damian and Roy get destroyed. Why? Well, you already handed me the skill and strength advantages
I am not even going to bother countering skill because while Backlash may be more skilled
I concede that Backlash is stronger than Roy and Damian
And then tried to rely on your "massive" speed advantage. But really, 1. Tagging Trigon Flash isn't as good as you think it is. 2. Damian's combat speed is nothing. 3. Slayton can move around quicker, hit faster and use his whips at the speed of thought. Damian holds no advantage over him in terms of speed while Slayton does have some advantages over Damian. Besides that, neither Roy nor Damian can convincingly tank a single attack from Backlash thanks to him puncturing an armored military vehicle and drawing blood from Savage Dragon, and even if they could it would leave them open to more and more attacks, meaning they won't last after the first one either way.
TLDR You underestimated the skill advantage, underestimated the strength advantage, overplayed your supposed speed and ignored misting, which negates damage, and would be a huge problem for you to deal with. And in terms for the fight itself, these two will be outclassed by Backlash, plain and simple.
My point is that you can't compare Badrock to Backlash. How about we use an analogy to make this easier to understand. Let's say there was a man who was punched in the face by a 100 pound weakling and he drew blood from the man with his punch. Now let's say that a 300 pound beefcake hits the man and he also draws blood from the man with his punch. Are you then going to say that this 100 pound weakling hits as hard as the 300 pound beefcake. HELL NO!
That is assuming we know Backlash's strength limit. But it is unknown to us. So really the example should be
A man who can punch with 50 tons of force walks up to a bank vault and is able to dent it. Another man then does the same. Therefore it is not illogical to compare both men to each other.
However, I can see where you are coming from, and because of that, I shall oblige you with another set of feats. This time it is a feat of Savage Dragon no selling\tanking damage. First up is two scans showing a set of trains being thrown at Savage Dragon, but SG tanks the damage, unfazed.
Here is another duo of scans, this time he falls from a great height but gets back up easily, without losing a drop of blood, and fights again
And here is a 3rd scan, this time he gets whacked hard enough to be sent flying through steel beams yet he gets back up again
So there you go, Backlash was able to make a man who could tank those attacks bleed. Take that as you will. I personally think it is more than enough proof to say that Roy and Damian's skulls crack in one blow each.
Exactly. The fact that they are not 1:1 comparisons allows for it to be disregarded because being punched int he face isn't the same as having a small building fall on you. It is impressive, sure, but you trying to compare the two is kind of dumb.
They are both blunt force durability feats.
The whips that Backlash uses are blunt weapons, they just strike with so much force that it can be interpreted as a piercing attack.
And therefore you would need piercing durability to withstand it.
So yes, blunt force durability can still be applied here. And I would argue that while Aqualad isn't bulletproof, Aquaman would be capable of destroying an armored vehicle as well.
Also, who told you they were blunt forced weapons? It seems like your counters are coming from preconceived notions. Backlash can use his whips as projectiles and shape his whips as such. They almost look like blaster bolts really.
Bad scaling? Seriously? Wonder Woman was bloodlusted. And she was leveling multiple buildings with HER STRIKES.
Yes. We know she didn't go all out on Damian. Because if she were, he would be dead, and we would have seen a mach cone if he were somehow able to tank the attack, like when she fought Superman
If anything your scaling is off as you are trying to compare getting punched to tanking a building fall on top of you while I am comparing Wonder Woman literally hitting down buildings to Wonder Woman kicking Damian.
So either you are claiming that Damian is durable enough to tank attacks from someone who collapsed a skyscraper which is inconsistent at best, either that or Wonder Woman wasn't going all out, which means we don't know how much force was behind her attack.
Now which comparison seems more quantifiable hmmm?
Quantifiability is important, yes. But logical reasoning is more important. And you claiming that Damian has that high level of durability isn't more logical to me.
Even if your scaling was correct, Wonder Woman leveled a skyscraper with her blows. Savage Dragon only tanked a small building falling him.
It took multiple blows for WW's attacks to level the skyscraper. just saying.
Flash didn't move FTE when he dodged lightning so when Flash isn't moving FTE, he is still way over MHS.
It's perspective. Flash was moving towards a moving camera (as you can tell by watching the background), so he wouldn't be FTE. Perception of speed is relative to the viewer after all.
This is bad logic. First of all, it took Superman several seconds to actually process how fast the Flash was moving, so Flash is clearly faster than Supes. And this was morals on Barry. A bloodlusted Flash, who was undoubtedly going faster than he did against Superman, was tagged by Damian.
Except Superman is able to catch Barry's attack after being wailed on.
Also, while I cannot definitely prove this, my interpretation of Superman pausing to think was not him trying to process Flash's speed, but rather it was him trying to think of a way to disable the Flash without severely harming him. I believe it would be more IC for Superman to hesitate to hurt his allies, that and it wouldn't make sense for him to need to process Barry when we just saw him catch Barry's attack.
Tactical ability? That is BS and you know it my dude. This was pure and raw speed. Damian Wayne literally used his combat speed to tag the Flash. No tactics were involved at all. As for the other two blitzes you mentioned, the first one Damian was clearly taken by surprise, so you really only have one case of the Flash blitzing Damian, which isn't enough to justify a complete asspull and attribute Damian tagging Flash to "tactics."
You are arguing from a fixed point here. And what I mean by that is you are in the line of thinking that Damian did use his speed in order to catch Flash, and I have to prove otherwise. But that is not the case, we both have conflicting scans showing Damian get blitzed and Damian tagging Flash. But whereas my argument provides reasoning as to how Damian tagged Flash without using pure speed, yours does not provide any reasoning as to how Flash blitz Damian, who is supposedly fast enough to tag him.
Your counters to my first set of scans were basically that Damian was holding back or Damian is better with swords. Which are more excuses than counters really. However, I shall oblige with more scans.
In this scan Damian is fighting a villain, and thus has no reason to hold back, but not only that here he fights with a sword. So let us see how he does
As you can clearly see, his attacks still aren't that quick, but not only that, Ubu tags him clean, and he isn't even that fast. This is consistent.
Here is another scan, here Damian fights Ra's, a villain, with a sword
In this fight, Damian actually shows greater combat speed, but not anything faster than Backlash has shown. Damian also gets tagged again, getting kicked down before getting sliced.
Another villain, but this time Damian uses a sai instead of a sword.
Here Damian again does not display anything impressive, but in this scan, he gets easily overwhelmed by Talon, whose strikes are around blur speed (same speed as Backlash). In fact, he only manages to pull a victory after pounding on Talon from behind while Talon was distracted.
Against another villain using his preferred weapon of choice.
Here Damian displays his vulnerability to getting overwhelmed by blur speed attacks yet again, as Deathstroke manages to tag Damian with a throwing knife by rapidly throwing them.
As for moving at blur speeds, that clearly was't blur speeds. That was just the artist conveying the fact that Backlash was punching his victim several times, evident by the several 'whack's next to the image.
Yeah, he punched his victim several times......using blur speed. The artist would have just used speed lines if he wanted to display simple movement, but that wasn't what is being portrayed here, he drew after images, blurred the punch's path and added around 9 "whacks" in one panel.
I mean, how else would you display blur speed? By showing blurry after images like this?
Because Backlash has done that too
And moving at blur speeds isn't anything new for Damian wnyway.
1. That isn't combat speed, that is Damian running down a wall, whereas Backlash was hitting at blur speed. 2. Gravity was aiding Damian, accelerating him.
In regards to moving at the speed of thought, that's not even at the speed of sound so that isn't impressive.
Are you using human biology on an alien who dodges bullets? Because I am pretty sure one of my first statements was that Backlash was half-Kherubim.
Instead of rehashing my arguments, I will instead highlight why I think Backlash will win. Those reasons are 1. He is skilled enough to take on both Roy and Damian at the same time and easily beat either of them 1v1 like he did against Zealot
2. He is strong enough to take out either Damian or Roy in a few blows, if not in one blow outright. Since he can break through bulletproof objects, and neither Roy nor Damian are bulletproof, and draw blood from mid tiers.
3. He is durable enough to tank their attacks as he can tank large explosions and hits from said mid tier and even a high tier.
4. He can Mist through any of their attacks and overwhelm them with attacks in mist form.
5. He has virtually no disadvantages. You have only relied on your "massive" speed gap to try and dismiss the skill gap and Backlash's misting, but you have yet to display any real impressive combat speed showing to warrant that claim. Not to mention Damain's morals.
Roy will put immense pressure on Backlash through his vestarility, firing missiles, lasers, and arrows
Backlash dodged through a barrage of lasers, metal bolts and bullets with ease. I don't see why arrows will pressure him.
that have tagged casual bullet timers.
You have only shown him tagging Chesire with a net arrow and he only tagged Parasite after Ms. Martian knocked him down.
And Backlash won't be able to evade all of this while fighting with the faster Damian Wayne.
He can evade all of that, he already has feats avoiding many more attacks. But he doesn't even have to thanks to misting.
You are trying to argue for Damian and draw attention from Roy
Trying? I would say that I have succeeded. Even at your last post, you won't be able to post any new feats for him so that's that.
and yet you have yet to show me anything that suggest he won't be tagged by Roy's arrows and weaponry while he is fighting Damian. And remember, Roy has pinpoint precision so he would be hard pressed to evade a hit from Roy
Roy hasn't tagged anyone as fast as Backlash, while Backlash has dodged a barraged of bullets and blasts from incredibly close distances
TLDR Backlash wins because he is better in nearly every way. You tried for speed but you haven't shown any combat speed that surpasses Backlash's much less shown that you can blitz him. You're just a duo of rookies waiting to get schooled by the master.
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