Absurdme

I'd say there's absolutely a hard stop at 7. Wonder Woman doesn't need Superman's speed to land ten taps of her sword inside Thanos' guard. Clark can be faster all day but he's sloppy and goes for big slams which leaves him open to Thanos countering a single hit before Clark gets to ten. 6 is hard to gauge because he's got few combat feats and he's very inexperienced.

5 and 6 are going to have a hard time due to inexperience. Both characters should be able to do it with training but have never shown sufficient repetition in CQC with speed.

@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.

@lan_fan: @jashro44: @mr_shazam0920: From the script as I found it:

• FRIDAY: The anti-gravs are rigged to flip. Touch 'em, they'll go full reverse thrust. The city's not coming down slow.
• Tony Stark: The spire's Vibranium. If I get Thor to hit it...
• FRIDAY: It'll crack, but that's not enough, the impact would still be devastating.
• Tony Stark: Maybe if we cap the other end, keep the atomic action doubling back.
• FRIDAY: That could vaporize the city, and everyone on it.

• Tony Stark: I got it! Create a heat seal. I can...I can supercharge the spire from below.
• FRIDAY: Running numbers. [Stark fights off the robots from the Helicarrier's lifeboats] A heat seal could work with enough power.
• Tony Stark: Thor, I got a plan!

• FRIDAY: Boss, power levels are way below opt...
• Tony Stark: Re-route everything. We get one shot at this. [Barton and Natasha are making their way to the lifeboats]

• Tony Stark: Thor, I'm gonna need you back in the church.
• Thor: [referring to the people getting onto the lifeboats] Is this the last of them?
• Steve Rogers: Yeah. Everyone else is on the carrier.
• Tony Stark: You know, if this works, we maybe don't walk away.
• Thor: Maybe not. [just as Natasha tries to calm Hulk down to get him back to being Banner Ultron flies in with a jet and starts shooting at them]

• Wanda Maximoff: I just did. Do you know how it felt? [she uses her power to rip Ultron's core out of his body] It felt like that. [Stark fires a powerful blast to the core underneath the floating city]
• Tony Stark: Thor, on my mark. [Thor brings on a blast of lightning, at the same time Vision flies in, picks up Wanda and flies off with as the city is being destroyed] Now! [Thor uses his hammer to hit the Vibranium core in the church, destroying the core and the floating city]

There isn't much to say either way that Thor's lightning is necessary (beyond the apparent amp to his strike). There is an implication that without the heat seal there is no energy burst to vaporize the city and that the sheer physical force involved creates a nuclear reaction. It's obviously open to someinterpretation though.

@juopamunch11:

"the power gem in MCU generally showed power relative to the size of the blast or explosion. Like when he blew up the asgardian ship was impressive, when the celestial busted a planet was impressive, but otherwise it didnt do anything measurable or notable"

@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...

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.

@eri123: tagging you because I think you may appreciate my conclusion either in this post or above.

The bigger factor here, as I stated in my last post above, is that Hulk is dealing with likely shifting weights and possibly the last, largest, missile blast while trying to keep an area stable so Rhodey and Rocket survive. I suspect the weight isn't straining him so much as the complexity of the task so soon after doing the snap and I think taking a portion of that missile strike. The push-up analogy is slightly flawed as in that scenario most of your weight is on your hands. What Hulk is doing is closer to a squat. An even more appropriate analogy here would be trying to come up from a squat with a large piece of plywood on your back and balancing a bunch of dumbbells on them while puppies are playing around you and can be killed or injured if any of those dumbbells fall off. Hulk should have most of his core strength, but the complexity of balance is enormous and forces minor muscle groups to bear more load than in a normal lift. This is why body builders who only do limited types of lifts can be exceptionally weak in a sport situation where they need to exert force at angles they are not used to.

@kluhh:

First of all, I only stated Rocket seemed relatively unharmed prior to the fall. If anything I was showing that the initial blasts seemed to have been absorbed primarily by the facility with minimal effect on the inhabitants. I never made any statement remotely equating Rocket to War Machine or Hulk, nor would I without way more evidence. Don't lol derisively at people while misconstruing their statements if you want to be taken seriously.

Secondly, and my original point, there is no moment at which there is any rubble shown on War Machine. Here he is after the fall....

No rubble, clearly out in an open (relatively speaking) space with nothing shoved off to the side. From the nature of the scene it seems more logical that he took the blast than being crushed. I'm sure some debris hit him of course and he did fall and hit things. But he wasn't pinned under the facility.

So, Hulk is shown directly under the shaft they fell into from the bottom of the missile crater. We pan down into that shaft as the blast clears to see Hulk holding whatever portion of the facility he is holding, but he's already in position. It seems way more logical that he was holding whatever portion there was after the initial fall because the facility is already collapsing at that point OR that he braced against this part during the explosion, therefore holding it and the pressure from the explosion, and explosion which one shot War Machine. If that is not the case then he still tanked that explosion and then got up to hold the facility in less than a second. The only question is how much of this feat is durability and how much is strength. Given that the facility is relatively stable when Giant-Man emerges with Hulk, War Machine, and Rocket in his hand(shown in the photo of the facility you used; it seems he was not supporting the facility itself. It seems more like he was trying to keep that pocket (which certainly included a significant tonnage) from collapsing on his comrades. So overall I would say this feat is more about Hulk reacting quickly during a massive bombardment to quickly shifting materials and enduring serious punishment than it is one of raw strength.

Yes I am debunking mountain level lifting. I am supporting that Hulk endured at least a portion of the largest missile strike beyond that of the gauntlet AND more importantly that weight likely shifts a lot in the rubble and he is struggling to make sure Rhodey and Rocket survive, especially once Rhodey is out of the WM armor and is incredibly vulnerable. This is doubly true if he was holding the rubble at the time of the missile strike as that certainly caused a massive shift. Hulk knows he is pretty much invulnerable compared to the other two. We'll never have the full answer on the scene unless we get some commentary or more deleted scenes though. We know they clipped a lot of didn't even film portions as they chose not to show Rhodey get into the new patriot armor, which is shown next to Ant-Man when he first gets up after the blast if you were not already aware.

@kluhh:

After the main missile barrage of 25+ missiles (I tried to count them all) at that point we see Rhodey, Hulk, and Rocket are shaken but undamaged. The floor collapses and they fall down. There is a final, larger missile that strikes right into the corner of the courtyard right near where the first missile hit. We then pan into that missile's crater to find the shaft is pretty much dead center of the bottom and remains open likely due to the missile blast penetrating the existing debris shaft. Rhodey is not covered by debris at all, he appears to have tanked part of the missile blast after the fall. He may have also tanked some of the initial missile blast that hit Ant-Man.

At least that's how I see it. No building crush at all for War Machine. Hulk was in the same room though and likely took the same beating. Rocket even seems to have survived it. Of course, we really don't know how enhanced he is beyond GOTG Nova Corps intake screen info stating a cybernetic skeleton, enhanced hands, and an enhanced brain.

Being Cap is more about leadership and representing a set of values. Bucky may be physically superior, but he's less like Cap in personality and leadership.

It will also be a better journey for Bucky's character to become Cap later after rehabilitating himself, both in the eyes of the world and himself.

This is a really good matchup. I see some advantages for the Avengers though.

SW's powers are more utilitarian than Quake's in that her attacks can be off-angle, can grab and manipulate people, and she has defended herself (barely) against someone who was able to match BW and Cap at once. Her best power feat to me isn't EG, but rather in IW where she pushed back Thanos initially with a burst of energy that he needed to use the space stone to shield himself against while destroying the mind stone. Thanos was eventually able to push back to his starting position, but not until it was too late. This was not just use of power, but balacing two uses of tremendous power at once. Too bad Thanos had that time stone. It seems like Strange missed a reality where they win. She's also a full-time flyer as of EG. She completely wrecks anyone else.

Hawkeye disabled Vision with his electrical or whatever arrows. Deathlock is obviously a Cyborg and makes a juicy target. His explosive arrows are pretty substantive and if he incaps Deathlok off the bat then he tips the scales fast. I think he also benefits heavily from not having to hit Deathlok (who is pretty damn agile), just shoot two arrows to the sides of his path.

Quicksilver's speed is sustained compared to Yo-Yo's and therefore more lethal long term against the AoS team. If he blitzes Quake she's out of the fight early and removes AoS team's biggest gun. I think he's a fair bit faster (right around sonic to slightly above depending on effort or about 343 m/s or more) than Yo-Yo (180 m/s which is based off a season 3 quote from what I can tell). It's not like he runs circles around her though. He isn't enough to hurt Deathlok I don't think, not substantially at least.

Cap's shield is a great defensive measure that slows down pretty much whatever offense is placed against it. If Quake's first blast is deflected or redirected then it saps the AoS team of a much needed quick strike opportunity. It can also easily tank Deathlock's rockets, May's sword, or Deathlock's rockets. Quake presents a possible problem as she knows who he is and may go for the ground beneath him to reduce his mobility. Yo-Yo is obviously faster than him.

So the Avenger's plan should be: QS intercepts Yo-Yo and staggers her or distracts her from her target (probably SW), Hawkeye incaps Deathlok, SW stalemates Daisy until QS can blitz her (not long) and then has a decisive upper hand if she didn't before. Cap intercepts whatever rockets or bullets he can while charging the AoS team. If Hawkeye can't incap Deathlok off the bat then Cap and Deathlok are the fastest non-speedsters and Cap has to intercept to make a second attempt work. This plan leaves May and Bobbi outnumbered and exposed. QS can make quick work of them (though if he fought them alone their tactical reasoning may prove much more than he expected). SW can devastate them or Deathlok at leisure. I don't really mention BW because the rest of the team has more options at this starting range. BW is one hell of a person to have mopping up and can use widow's bite on Deathlok if needed to incap him longer.

Anyway I am by no means an AoS buff so please feel free to inform! I just think the utility of the Avengers gives them the ability to craft a better winning strategy. Their least skilled team member is their fastest and doesn't need to execute anything too drastic other than a shot to the back of the head or stomp a knee, and possess the speed to do so without much issue. If the Avengers make bad decisions though they can lose these advantages quickly so 7/10 at best for them. If they had prep and access to full SHIELD arsenals on both sides this could be very messy and hard to discern.. and would be an awesome fight.

@geekryan:

"Corvus is inconsistent as hell because he was able to contend with a severely injured Vision, and then barely hold the upper hand against Captain America, and then get one-shotted by Okoye in EG lol."

If you really go through those scenes you'll actually see some very consistent things.

Corvus blocks ranged attacks beautifully with his glaive. He also loves to ambush and does so well. He is also very fast like his wife as a leaper.

He gets ambushed himself multiple times by people he knows are present in the battle because he doesn't pay any attention to a downed Wanda twice ,or Vision on the surgery table and post second impaling. Cap also ambushes and disarms him easily. He is overpowered every time by Vision when raw strength is used in Edinburgh. He only out leverages him once while grappling with the glaive, and only manages to put Vision down by reflecting the Mind stone beam back into him. The two times he is impaled are the only times he fights named characters in CQC who are CQC combatants (Shuri is using her blasters in their brief moment). BW slips under his huge overswing, slashes his leg, then ducks another massive overswing to impale him. Okoye similarly executes an excellent slip/fade counterstrike to his high thrust. He has literally no feats of importance in an actual CQC exchange with a named character while using his glaive other than blocking ranged attacks.

He's actually very consistently portrayed in detail.