Dceu Durability Level Thread

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KryptonianKing88

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Gonna try and keep this ordered weakest - strongest. Feel free to make corrections as you see fit. Also, Superman gets multiple spots due to his sunlight buff

Batman - Peak Human

Flash - Peak Human/Slightly Superhuman, assuming he can survive crashes at superspeed

Cyborg - Small building level, can probably survive explosives

Black Manta - Small building level, got wrecked by his own blast and a fall down a cliff

Ocean Master/Aquaman - Building level, stunned by a grenade, survived Black Manta's blast though injured. Both should be physically close

Wonder Woman - Large building to Multi City block level, survived a large explosion pre-godmode, took a punch from DD

Steppenwolf - City Block to Multi City Block, armor can survive WW's sword strikes, bodied in a couple hits by Superman

Faora/Nam Ek - City block to Multi city block, tanks punches from Superman

Zod/MOS Superman - Multi City Block, tanked more punches from Superman, should be physically close

BVS Superman - Multi City Block - City Level (His absolute max, any more and he dead), barely survived a nuke

JL Superman - Several City Block - City level - Planetary (wanking motherbox feat), seems stronger than previous incarnations, motherbox feat

Doomsday - Multi City level - Easily tanked and grew stronger from a nuke

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Absurdme

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@kryptonianking88:

The problem in general is that once you get past the mildly enhanced individuals in the movies, the feats become increasingly difficult to quantify. This general thought process of city level etc also becomes perceptively skewed. Comparing cities, islands, continents etc as if they don't have an extraordinary scope beyond small-medium-large is silly. Even city blocks vary tremendously even if they cover the same land area. So I'm going to pick a bit at some of the above as an example specifically because the DCEU characters tend to have few total feats and they tend to rely a lot on scaling. I'm going to try to address a few of the clearer examples of feats to provide as much precision as possible.

The nuke in BvS: Above you have DD as having tanked the nuke easily. He could not have taken the full force of it (as per the scene, future references may indicate he is capable). For DD to take the full force of the Nuke none has to go into space and none would have to hit Clark. This means DD tanked a portion of the blastwave (kinetic energy), radiation, and heat (which is actually just another form of radiation). I refer you to the link below which I know others have referenced....

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Effects/effects1.shtml

And a good tool for the effects of nukes...

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

So DD tanked a small portion (still insane compared to what humans can take) of a spherical portion against his body which is easily three to four times the size of Clark. Clark logically took less of the blast. In both cases they absorbed way less than all of the nuke.

DD is also clearly unable to fully regenerate his skin after...

No Caption Provided

His mutation/adaptation/energy absorbtion power seems to only be able to mitigate most, but not all of the damage. I went through this a bit in another thread about how WW and Supes kinetic attacks enhanced his wounds from the nuke. In that I also noted that Superman knocking him into the fuel tanks showed no difference on his wounds. So there is likely a threshold for damage to hurt him. The total damage he took from the nuke superseded that threshold by some small amount. If Clark had been allowed to get DD out of orbit he could have possibly been killed by a succession of nukes (depending on how much adaptation builds up over time). This does seem somewhat unlikely though as the (presumed) hellfire missiles from the Apaches caused him pain and discomfort, but no visible damage, so it seems there is not just a threshold, but a strong enhancement to capacity to handle even a small portion of a nuke after.

So it is also worth noting that a nuke doesn't impart all its force to a city either. At best we're talking 50% if detonated just above or at the skyline. DD isn't taking anywhere near that. The heaviest nukes in our arsenals wouldn't even destroy the entirety of a moderately sized city like Las Vegas or Kansas City. It would completely devastate their downtowns and obviously make them uninhabitable, but they aren't even a city-level attack if you're talking total obliteration.

On the motherbox feat, Cyborg, and Clark: I hate to use the term "wank" but I do think people sometimes invest in a little willful ignorance to support their preconceptions or misconceptions. The Motherbox separation is a clear case. Destroying the planet can, from a resident's perspective, merely mean rendering it uninhabitable, and that would fit with Darkseid's usual desires. Total obliteration isn't even the goal. Furthermore, separating them is in no way logically tied to their total destructive capacity. The blast hurt Superman but clearly wasn't a nuke level event. It also clearly falls within the realm of not taking the full force of the event as with the nuke. Clark and Cyborg being well enough to joke after indicates even further that this wasn't close to the nuke. The fact that it hurt Clark who was not hurt in the senate hearing explosion and Cyborg surviving also clearly places Cyborg above where you have him and closer to Clark. Cyborg also easily takes Steppenwolf's axe to the shoulder.

On Batman and Flash: These two are clearly superhuman. The term peak human is really an in-universe description for characters that amounts to not much outside it due to inconsistency. Batman makes the most durable of us humans look like chumps. Some of that is his suit, which ablates bullets entirely on it's reinforced areas (point blank back of the head didn't even rock him). When he takes the knife in the shoulder during the warehouse scene in BvS it's not just pain tolerance, that's straight up being able to continue using the arm while there's a svere separation of the pectoralis major and minor. After he pulls the knife out he put a guy up against the wall with that arm. This is an example of superhuman strength as well since part of the muscle is severed.

Anyhow this is getting really long. Generally I support a "crunch" or a regression towards the mean for your list at least in relative comparison to one another (and it's often how I feel about all the cinematic universes). Even Thor's supposed star level feat is not really star level in the sense of taking the full force it would take to put out a star, to me it appears he is taking the force of at least one axial x-ray jet from a weak pulsar. Like all high range feats it is insanely awesome and there is no need to "wank." The ability to ablate physical force also tends to take a bell-shaped curve aspect on in the sense that the further you get from being on-par with an event, the proportionally less likely you are to cause damage or the more likely to totally supersede the capacity to ablate. Every high-end character like Superman is still well above the slightly superhumans and relatively invulnerable, just not as high as is sometimes implied.

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KryptonianKing88

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@absurdme:

Thanks for the detailed write up. So where would you put them, assuming city and cityblock are just based off the American average?

And about Batman, he's peak human in the DCEU universe (pretty much every "peak human" in fiction would be superhuman in ours) same as how 616 cap is peak human in earth 616

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Absurdme

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@kryptonianking88:

Thank you.

I get what you're saying about peak human, that's definitely the common usage. Sometimes I think the usage tends to blur the lines when in discussion though and that's why I point it out. I am a huge guy, considered tough by most people who know me, and Batman is so far beyond me as to make me look like Peter Parker before the spider bite.

I am hesitant to place characters because I think the scale and its general use is the issue. For example, DCEU Clark is regularly tossed through skyscrapers. When this happens his body is not impacting the totality of the skyscraper, nor is the impact the full force of what drops it. His impact force only has to weaken the structure enough to release the potential energy of the standing structure above, once that comes down it of course destroys what is below. The obvious parallel, that has been made before, is the 9/11 WTC attacks. Many conspiracy theorists like to proclaim that the jet fuel can't burn at high enough temps to melt the steel. The same issue with perception applies. Just like Clark's body, the jet fuel fire only had to be enough to weaken the steel supports enough to release the potential energy of the mass above, not melt it fully. Skyscrapers are wonderful examples of engineering, but they are not fortified structures. Clark could probably survive being slammed through the base of every single one on Earth, but the impact is not planetary.

If we consider the nuke feat if it had happened in a city, how much of the destruction would he prevent? Assuming point blank ground zero detonation and optimal positioning , he would have prevented the destruction of several city blocks. The fireball for the largest deployed US ICBM warheads is about 2.33 km according to the nukemap site, that's just under 1.5 miles which we will round up to. Assuming an average Manhattan city block that's .5 miles long and .2 miles wide Clark would save a thin slice of three city blocks from instant annihilation. Now there's another 12.27 km (7.62 miles) of pressure wave he would also absorb in that slice for a total of 18 blocks behind him. Now the slice widens the farther we go and his initial 6 ft tall and 2 ft wide body doesn't shield much initially. By the time we hit this 18 blocks back though I think we can safely say he's got one to two blocks worth of area covered and possibly a bit more. After that point most of the immediate damage to people is third degree burns so structural damage is minimal. This may be less than some DCEU fans like to place him at, but it's still an incredible feat and we're talking about total annihilation vs just breakage. I can break a brick, but it's well beyond me to vaporize one.

Once you take this into account I think your scaling will be better off. Zod and Clark are breaking skyscrapers, not annihilating them. This also creates a more clustered but fair comparison where the Kryptonians are above WW, but not by much, which makes sense because armed and armored she is close to Clark against DD and the Kryptonians are well armored in addition to having that physiology. Aquaman is also easily as durable as Diana in his Atlantean armor against SW. Given that he is barely fazed by a grenade I would say his durability may be greater than hers at present, but overall is pretty even. We're always going to be nagged with consistent depictions that bullets harm her unless they show us a flat out bullet wound to give us something more tangible. I do think you should take a closer look at Cyborg, he's definitely more durable than the Atlantean special forces armor given how he shields himself from Clark's heat vision and how little damage SW does with the axe.

I have only begin looking at the DCEU in depth so that's the best I can give you for right now. Hopefully it's been helpful.