Nate-Grey

Very belated, but as a massive fan of both series...

1. Skulduggery, 7 times out of 10. Dresden probably has greater raw power, but Skulduggery has more stamina, he's a much better physical combatant (and Dresden is no slouch), and he has masses more experience. Also, the banter is a trait they share, but Skulduggery has more practice using it as a weapon. That said, Dresden has impressive defences that Skulduggery does not, and if he gets one really good shot in, Skulduggery will be in masses of trouble. The only reason that this doesn't tip Dresden's way is Skulduggery's mobility.

2. Lord Vile. This isn't a fight, it's murder.

3. Hmm. Difficult. With prep, Dresden is aware of how dangerous Skulduggery/Vile is. Also, I'm not entirely sure if Skulduggery is human enough to qualify for the 'protected by the Laws of Magic' thing. With that in mind, it's worth noting that Dresden's natural necromantic gifts easily rival those of Vile, and he's read up on Kemmler's works. He also has Bob as his research assistant. Add to that some very serious ringers to call in, the power of Demonreach, and I think that as long as Dresden manages to exact a battlefield advantage, he wins.

As my pen-name shows, I'm a bit biased, but let's face it, Nate. Exodus is monstrously powerful, but even pre-Shaman, Nate beat him even after a bruising fight with Cable and with Exodus draining power from him. Heck, as soon as he sensed that Exodus was enhanced by Apocalypse, he went berserk and fed him more power than he could hold and sealed him under the Alps.

Post Shaman... well, sure, Exodus is capable of wrecking entire teams of X-Men and Avengers. But so is Nate. He flattened one of the most powerful X-Men teams of modern times in a single panel, with zero effort, while casually puppeting Magneto, preventing Kitty from using her powers, and keeping Apocalypse as a wall decoration. He had pretty much the entire X-Affiliated cast barring X-Force, his father, and Rachel Grey hammering away at his shields and he held them off while having a pleasant chat with his mother. Oh, and he effortlessly bodyjacked Legion. And then there's Age of X-Man, which definitively proved that he was more powerful than his mother (though she's the only person who's even close to him).

Also, he's a lot more ruthless post Shaman, which one should always bear in mind.

@olorun: the Surfer's never been my strongest area, but remember that Cable was dividing his focus between fighting, repairing (even if it was with the Surfer's aid), and holding up Providence. He also intended to martyr himself - whether he'd lose anyway is another matter (probably), but Cable's motives and plans were a bit complicated at the time.

I don't recall Betsy hurting him. She said that he was impenetrable. She did manage to break his control over both Archangel and Storm, though. And Jean emotionally hurt him, yes, but that mostly just upset him, though it did distract him - and he was holding off literally the entire X-Men plus Magneto at the time, and he was increasingly apathetic to whether or not he died. He outright admitted that he was committing suicide immediately after, but the Lifeseed wouldn't let him die.

The Surfer's psychic feats mostly seem to be in admittedly impressive psychic resistance. Pre-Annihilation amp, I'd say that Nate's increased tactical abilities and skill would give him a chance of at least making it fairly even (sure, the Surfer can vaporise him, but to Shaman Nate, that's mostly just a passing annoyance). If Osborn's estimation that he could one on one with Dark Reign era Sentry was correct, then I'd say it would be an even match-up. However, we didn't see that fight, so... mostly, I can see this ending up as a draw. Pre-Annihilation Surfer couldn't destroy Nate, but Nate probably couldn't break through the Surfer's psychic defences unless they faltered for some reason.

@olorun: good question. Depends how you define 'base' Nate.

Pre-Shaman (assuming all powers are working): low High Tier, based on the lengthy composite list by @professorrespect (given the presence of DC characters, I'm a little surprised that the Manhunter isn't on there) - frankly, because Sinister's on there, ditto Exodus and Rachel.

Shaman: solid High Tier. I'd say Herald Class, but especially in the case of the likes of the Silver Surfer, that's been a bit fuzzy at times. However, Saviour Cable gave the Surfer a decent fight while also holding up Providence and repairing everything they destroyed, and lost mainly because he burnt out. Likewise, Rachel as Prestige took out Terrax the Tamer (which isn't saying much, as his real name could probably be Terrax the Jobber). Shaman Nate is implicitly stronger than Saviour Cable (probably because Cable's psychic muscles were... atrophied is the wrong word, but he'd been forced to use them to do some very specific things), especially given his reality jumping habits, and taking a blast from a world-killer like Qabiri without much effort.

Life-Seed: Where, exactly, does creating your own plane of existence fall on this? VsBattles puts him at Universal. The X-Men assert that they're just psionic constructs, but frankly, with Nate the line between 'psionic construct' and 'reality warping' is next to non-existent. He thinks, therefore they are.

(Also, anyone with the Mind Gem who can actually use it is a monster. It's an Infinity Gem, it's what they do).

1) Fair.

2) I know, it was a separate observation.

3) I thought it was about psychics more generally. Howsoever.

4) Very well. He still destroyed Hybrid.

5) True, but Nate didn't do anything particularly exotic when he fought Jean, nor with Xavier after he ripped him off the Astral Plane (which is very exotic). And I'm not so sure. Xavier, shortly after, became/generated Onslaught, a team-busting nightmare and crisis crossover villain twice over. 90s/early 00s Jean wasn't too shabby, either - she had global range, including contacting Nate on the other side of the planet (along with Cable and Angel, simultaneously), broke through psychic barriers set up by Onslaught (who, with Cable, she later shielded the X-Men from), and took down Psylocke. And that's just on the telepathy side (telekinetically, she was flying through hyperspace, shielding from Binary going nova, shielding from a punch from Jahf, one of the ludicrously powerful guardians of the M'Kraan Crystal, and Black Bolt's screams, and ripping open Apocalypse's armour. I know this is a telepathy discussion, but it illustrates the point of how amped she was). Her boosts up in the 21st century until X-Men: Red were a bit ambiguous, given her relationship with the Phoenix.

I mean, yes, Jean says she's got stronger since then, but aside from recently communicating from the Sun to Earth, I'm hard pressed to find a feat that's really outlying from her previous ones. I am, of course, open to correction.

6) Mea culpa, missed that.

8) I always thought that was more illustrative of his inability to let the 616 universe go, as much as he might deny it (ditto the whole 'relationships' thing). However, I don't think we've had confirmation either way. On the other hand, a good counter is that memories did keep slipping through for certain psi-resistant people - that, I'll have to concede.

9) I didn't say he was fully trained. My observation was more that circumstances left him mostly self-taught. (Well. Circumstances and paranoia).

10) Touché. However, Onslaught was ridiculously overpowered (adding to my previous Xavier point, btw), even more so than Nate himself at the time. A lot of the time, especially towards the end of the Onslaught Saga, he wasn't exactly subtle, overwhelming people through raw force. He wasn't exactly out-skilling Nate, more overwhelming him. Even Jean needed Cable's help to shut him out of the X-Men's heads.

11) That smells of shifting the goalposts, but whatever.

12) Maddie's nature was a bit different - she was a psychic construct tied to Nate himself, not simply trying to feed off of him. In many ways, before she managed to separate herself, she was an extension of him (and boy did she not like it...).

13) He didn't exactly lose to Cable - Cable mostly just avoided getting vaporised (I did find the panel of him tapping Nate on the shoulder, then slugging him in the face, hilarious). And yes, it was unfinished, but it still tired him out.

14) She did something better, yes, in X-Men Red, but only when using Cerebro. It was a matter of skill as much as anything else. And no, I wasn't saying he was on the same skill level as either, but that he'd picked up more than was otherwise apparent by that point, while being, as you say, weakened.

15) Not the same. They conjure up psi-weaponry, which doesn't last and tends to look like a psychic construct. This looked (and implicitly felt, going by the reaction) exactly like the toy. No weird psychic colouring at all.

16) Given that he was severely weakened, and it knew about him and his powers? Not so much.

17) No, he knew exactly what his reality was. He was caught off-guard by the construct of Dani Moonstar, but everything else, he knew about.

18) But were they doing while under his control to begin with? That's the critical distinction for me. If it had been a similar feat, then I wouldn't have made such a note of it.

19) All right, fine. Unfortunately, I don't have the comics I'd usually check for context on that (I mostly just remember that scene for Spidey punching Nate in the groin so hard blood came shooting out of his nose).

20) Psi-armour is the kind of psionic construct that Onslaught made his body out of. Telekinesis is involved, but it's not purely telekinetic.

21) Rhetorical flourish of mine. Hence the addition of 'he worked out a lot'.

22) See previous. Also, Shaman era Nate didn't exactly make him more powerful, it just stabilised his powers and gave him the knowledge of how to use them, from a counterpart of himself.

I disagree - not about the extensively debated part, but the deserved spot.

Ah. I should have clarified that I meant below cosmic (with the exception of peak Franklin Richards - i.e. 'Mr Franklin'). My bad.

1) Point, though I was starting from the start, so to speak.

2) Really? I must have misread the authorship of the post. I don't often use these comments/threads, so I'm a bit new to it.

3) He didn't reach his full potential, which makes what he did do even at that level all the more impressive.

4) No, raw telepathic power equals raw telepathic power, and dominating Xavier in a psychic fight demonstrates that.

5) Yeah, because they know who and what Hybrid is by this point. They didn't when they first met him. And he still dominated fights with both Jean and Xavier, pre-Shaman (granted, he didn't fight Jean that hard, but he shut her down while arguing with Maddie).

6) I was referring to general psychic power. It's never indicated that his telekinesis is stronger than his telepathy, or vice versa.

7) He had Norman Osborn under his control, he was literally inside his head. If it wasn't for PIS, and an unnecessarily convoluted plan, he'd have just fried Norman's mind and moved on (or used him as a meat-suit. Either or).

8) He maintained the reality. The stability of the specific... Matrix, almost, was another matter.

9) He didn't exactly choose to be self-taught - he learned a bit from AOA Forge, because there was literally no other teacher available, and Forge was murdered by AOA Sinister, who'd duped Nate into trusting him. He was understandably rather paranoid by the time he ended up in 616, and ended up encountering Xavier in the worst possible way (by surprise) at the worst possible time (not all that long before Xavier became Onslaught). Also, he had zero life-experience. Not surprising that he wasn't really all that trusting.

Also, too be blunt, he's so powerful even pre-Shaman that skill doesn't really matter. He lacks Jean or Xavier's skill, but he solos Hybrid anyway. He solos both of them when fighting them. He overpowers Exodus and sure, Exodus is weakened, but he's draining power from Nate, who consciously overloads him - and that after a taxing fight with Cable and Blaquesmith. For another comparative feat, Exodus' fight with Holocaust left him in that severely weakened state. Nate, meanwhile, frequently soloed Holocaust with only half his powers available to him.

As for skill, he casually projected an image of himself across the Atlantic that was so thorough that workers at the Daily Bugle assumed it was him, with only Peter Parker (who he was looking for) knowing otherwise, conjured up a tangible construct of one of the Bailey twins' toys when his powers were all but out, and successfully hid the twins from Prime Sentinels, despite him being practically out of power and the Prime Sentinels looking for them (and him) specifically.

Separately, he subconsciously created Maddie Pryor as a living construct, did the same with AOA Gwen Stacy despite never having met her or her 616 counterpart, who he talked about with Peter (that one didn't last), and subconsciously created a construct of an arm with his power and a doctor's medical knowledge. He also very quickly figured out how to filter out the Purple Man's pheromones, despite being under the Purple Man's influence at the time, and flushed them out of his system. Oh, and he wiped the memory of himself from everyone who knew him (I'd have to doublecheck whether he managed to do it to all of New York before Spidey stopped him - while it wouldn't have worked, because as Spidey pointed out, a lot of people outside New York had heard of him, there'd been papers, etc, he was capable of the precise mind-wipe itself). He even figured out how to create Psi-armour powerful enough to flatten the Hulk and hurt Thanos (or a clone).

Hot-blooded, maybe, self-taught, mostly, but by no means stupid. He worked out a lot.

I'd put him in a High Tier, simply because his raw power allowed him to get away with so much.

Why not? There's no given reason for AOA Apocalypse or the Shadow King to be weaker (especially since the Shadow King has been stated to be the same entity across the multiverse, and the Shadow King's comment is given credence by the fact that pre-Shaman Nate is later stated to be the strongest psychic in any reality).

Additionally, you made up his respect thread - even pre-Shaman, his mere arrival flattened Xavier and Psylocke, and Xavier himself said that he'd never sensed a psychic presence that powerful (which includes the Jean, Rachel, Rachel with the Phoenix, and Dark Phoenix, to whom Nate is later compared for raw power), he effortlessly pinned the Abomination with a thought, he resurrected himself with a mere effort of will, and solo'd Hybrid (an opponent who'd previously required both Rom and the X-Men, or Rom, Xavier, and the New Mutants, to defeat). He also launched the Great Beasts into space, flattened Quito from a hemisphere away (under Queen Jean's control), and hopped worlds (also under her control).

Post-Shaman, the only reason he didn't solo Norman Osborn's entire Dark Reign was because the writers realised in the last issue of 'Dark X-Men' that they had to have him lose. Lifeseed, he created an entire plane of existence, not just an alternate reality, with a thought. Heck, he became it.

I'd say he's easily that strong.

Pre-Shaman Nate's powers weren't totally stable, but for raw telepathic power, he could swat even 90s Jean Grey, and AOA Shadow King reckoned he was the most powerful psychic he'd ever encountered, while AOA Apocalypse thought he was the most powerful mutant full-stop. He was capable of subconsciously resurrecting people, and in the case of Maddie Pryor, bringing her back so strong that she could fight him (while he was weakened) and Jean Grey simultaneously. He picked up on Xavier's astral form scouting him, and nearly killed him. He also killed AOA Sinister, and 616 Sinister was generally pretty careful around him. Even with his powers partly blocked by the Shi'ar, he could communicate mentally with Lilandra through a hologram across a galaxy. He was also a fair match for the guardians of the M'Kraan Crystal.

So, I'd put him at 'High Tier' (dependant on state of powers - though, tbh, whichever of his powers isn't working at the time, the other power is still Omega Class). Shaman Nate is probably the strongest psychic in the entire MU - and Lifeseed Nate definitely is.

Appreciated. :)