What's The In-Universe Explanation For Why Strength Gains Were Relatively Puny Before DBS?

[theherodjl]

Here are a few hypotheses off the top of my head.

1. As fighters become stronger, strength gains rise in proportion for ever-increasing base strength.
2. Fighters in proximity to more & more powerful opponents, good or bad, rise due to a synthetic effect that is physical/psychological/both.
3. Improving skills through constant training allows fighters to find shortcuts towards quicker strength gains.
4. The training style used up until DBS was an inferior, more strenuous method that yielded less-than-ideal results.
5. Potential is unlocked in completely random amounts.
6. Potential is unlocked under certain conditions that have the opposite effect if said conditions aren't met exactly or closely.
7. Akira Toriyama/Toei just decided it should be that way.

Any thoughts/contributions/objections?

[KBABZ]

Well firstly it is made up; I remember a while back I tried to figure out if there was any rhyme or reason regarding the various power boosts, and there really isn't, it's done according to the writers and how they feel the character should stand up to the current opponent. I saw anything from 120% to 40% at random instances.

Generally though, from an in-universe perspective I'd say that it's all exponential. Goku got trounced by Tao Pai-Pai when he first met him, but got enough of a strength boost to withstand blows that would previously have left him on death's door. But if you compare that to the boost earned just by training with King Kai, it's minuscule! To put it another way, 20 x 2 = 40, but 20,000 x 2 is 40,000. Sorta like that. If the series keeps going, we'll likely get to a point where the power-ups we're seeing now will be peas and biscuits compared to the latest stuff.

[Polyphase Avatron]

I blame it on god ki.

[theherodjl]

I blame it on god ki.

That could actually make some sense. Freeza had past interactions with Beerus which may have left some sort of osmotic, lasting imprint upon him that didn't fully surface until he decided to start training. Vegeta also had a past encounter with Beerus which is why his power was the highest among the generally known Saiyans at the time of Planet Vegeta's destruction, and why it never failed to rise during every saga. It also explains why Vegeta briefly became Rageta once Beerus showed up on Earth as well as how Vegeta achieved strength similar to Post-ritual Goku after training on Beerus' planet for a few months.

[Kataphrut]

I mean, were there any gains in Super as big as what Goku, Piccolo and Vegeta got during the Namek saga? Those were some huge boosts in a really short timeframe, we even have numbers attached to them. I can't think of anything that absurd in DBS, where even the initial ridiculous boosts of SSG and SSB got dialled back in later arcs.

[Nokra]

Here are a few hypotheses off the top of my head.

1. As fighters become stronger, strength gains rise in proportion for ever-increasing base strength.
2. Fighters in proximity to more & more powerful opponents, good or bad, rise due to a synthetic effect that is physical/psychological/both.
3. Improving skills through constant training allows fighters to find shortcuts towards quicker strength gains.
4. The training style used up until DBS was an inferior, more strenuous method that yielded less-than-ideal results.
5. Potential is unlocked in completely random amounts.
6. Potential is unlocked under certain conditions that have the opposite effect if said conditions aren't met exactly or closely.
7. Akira Toriyama/Toei just decided it should be that way.

Any thoughts/contributions/objections?

Lol strength gains were puny before DBS? Did you watch the namek arc?!

[Doctor.]

I blame it on god ki.

That could actually make some sense. Freeza had past interactions with Beerus which may have left some sort of osmotic, lasting imprint upon him that didn't fully surface until he decided to start training. Vegeta also had a past encounter with Beerus which is why his power was the highest among the generally known Saiyans at the time of Planet Vegeta's destruction, and why it never failed to rise during every saga. It also explains why Vegeta briefly became Rageta once Beerus showed up on Earth as well as how Vegeta achieved strength similar to Post-ritual Goku after training on Beerus' planet for a few months.

It doesn't explain Trunks suddenly going toe-to-toe with post-God SS2 Goku.

[Tectorman]

I blame it on god ki.

That could actually make some sense. Freeza had past interactions with Beerus which may have left some sort of osmotic, lasting imprint upon him that didn't fully surface until he decided to start training. Vegeta also had a past encounter with Beerus which is why his power was the highest among the generally known Saiyans at the time of Planet Vegeta's destruction, and why it never failed to rise during every saga. It also explains why Vegeta briefly became Rageta once Beerus showed up on Earth as well as how Vegeta achieved strength similar to Post-ritual Goku after training on Beerus' planet for a few months.

It doesn't explain Trunks suddenly going toe-to-toe with post-God SS2 Goku.

Sure it does. Vegeta first met Beerus as a kid which set the foundation for his "lasting imprint" and that event occurred in Trunks's timeline, too. And if turning SSJ is due to S-cells in the middle of your back, then there's every reason that the "lasting imprint" is also something with a biological vector, and therefore something that Trunks could inherit.

The reason, then, that Kid Trunks hasn't made those gains is because he's never had the impetus to push his biological limits, except for Buu, in which case, he put all of his efforts into Fusion, a double-edged sword that gave him the boost they needed then, but also limited him to Goten's advancement.

[PFM18]

They weren't. They were only tiny in the Buu arc where the strength gains were limited to new transformations.

Goku's max output of power from the beginning of one arc, to the end of the next arc literally increased by over 360 thousand times. He went from 416 to 150 million. He trained for a year and went up in power by almost 20x. He trained for a week and gained an almost 12x power increase, and then gained a 33x power increase from his zenkai during the Namek arc. Nothing puny there.

In the tme skip from the Mecha Freeza stuff to the android arc, Piccolo went from being maybe a couple million to being right on the SSJ level. It constituted at a bare minimum a 100x boost. Nothing puny there.

In the Android arc, they show up and they can handle the initial androids, the new couple androids 17/18 kick their ass, and then it turns out 16 and Cell are stronger than 17/18, and then Cell absorbs 17 and now dwarfs 16's power. Vegeta trains for a year and jumps 3 tiers of power:

Semi-Perfect Cell
16/Cell
17/18
SSJ Goku/Vegeta
19/20

To where now he dwarfs Semi-Perfect Cell. He had a HUGE power increase in that year in the ROSAT. Certainly not "puny" by any stretch. Then, Perfect Cell comes in and beats the shit out of this Vegeta, and then Goku gets an even BIGGER power increase to where now he is at a minimum of 2.5x stronger than this super strong Vegeta, because his 50% had surpassed Vegeta. Again, certainly not To where now things look like this:

MSSJ Goku
50% MSSJ Goku
ASSJ Vegeta/Trunks
Semi-Perfect Cell
16/Cell
17/18
SSJ Goku/Vegeta
19/20

And then we find out that Gohan had jumped ALL of these tiers of power in the year of training. He literally went from clearly weaker than 19/20 to being superior to MSSJ Goku. An even larger power increase than what we saw from Goku which already dwarfed Vegeta's already huge increase in power from just a year of training. Not puny by any stretch of the imagination.

Then the Buu arc is the outlier where they make marginal increases over the 7 years and presumably people head canon it as just being diminishing returns causing their power increases to halt.

And then in DBS we see very similar power increases, more likely smaller increases in power over the course of DBS. But there is the outlier at the beginning of the series where Goku/Vegeta gain astronomically large power increases. Goku, because of his fighting process, was able to retain the power that he gained from the SSG ritual in such a way that his SSJ form was now as strong and then stronger than Super Saiyan God. And then Vegeta trained with Whis, and now he had surpassed or equaled the Goku who's SSJ had surpassed SSG. Now, that is outrageously large, and if I were to quantify it, considering his Base was weaker than Namek Freeza before, and after his SSJ had surpassed SSG just as Goku did, and considering the outrageously large power increase SSG had yielded, I calculated it to be a 176,000x power increase over the course of those 6 months with Whis. And yes, that does make previous power increases seem puny in comparison, but it is an outlier for a reason. Vegeta had never received training from anybody, and then he gets training from a literal God with unfathomable power who teaches him to be more powerful by increasing his ki through ki control abilities, rather than continuously punching stuff like he usually does, it makes sense he would get an enormous power boost.

We see Freeza, and 17 get huge power increases but we never saw a precedent for them so this doesn't actually contradict anything that was established before. Neither had really trained before. Gohan had trained for a bit and caught up but Gohan's enormous power increases are standard for him. Of course, Future Trunks's power increases are pretty nonsensical.

[mogi67]

You assume that power levels are a linear scale. I don't think that this is the case in Dragon Ball at all

[PFM18]

You assume that power levels are a linear scale. I don't think that this is the case in Dragon Ball at all

Care to elaborate?