Yuji wrote: Tue Feb 25, 2025 9:50 am
Piccolo has been portrayed as weaker than base Saiyans even back in the Boo arc. In modern material, he's also been firmly established as several steps below Super Saiyans.
I think we take offense to it because we assume, logically, that SS is a 50x boost, so this would mean Piccolo is more than 50x weaker than a Saiyan's first transformation. But I think the writers, and even Toriyama, probably started envisioning Super Saiyan as x2-x10. Toriyama himself definitely said so.
I agree that modern material has solidified Piccolo as weaker than Super Saiyans. But I’m not entirely convinced that the Buu arc itself made it so clear that he was outright weaker than Base Saiyans.
Vegeta’s line about possibly taking anyone including Piccolo and #18 without SS is there, but we never actually see him try. Dabra saying the three Saiyans were the strongest in their 7-people group could imply Piccolo was below Base Saiyans, but it could also just mean he was accounting for their hidden strength, since he doesn’t sense ki the same way Goku does. And then there’s Piccolo reacting more to SS Goten & Trunks’ ki than Base Goku in Kami’s Temple, but that could be more about how unpredictable their energy level was.
However, we do have
Battle of Gods where Beerus implies Base Goku < Freeza, and we know that after fusing with Kami, Piccolo was clearly stronger than Freeza and early SS1 level. If we go by those Buu arc implications, then yeah, it does feel like Freeza’s level might have been retconned upward, especially with
Resurrection ‘F’ reinforcing that idea. We even saw
Super push this further with Frost, who never trained like Freeza but was still stronger than Piccolo. So it wouldn’t be the first time the series adjusted power scaling to fit the narrative.
That said, it still feels a bit inconsistent, because before
Battle of Gods, Piccolo should logically be above Freeza but below SS1s. Maybe we just have to accept that power scaling isn’t always rigidly consistent across the original and later material.
Magnificent Ponta wrote: Tue Feb 25, 2025 7:22 pm
I might be off-base in looking at things this way, but looking at the fight so far it almost looks as if "Gomah's power" and the power of the Third Eye don't perfectly match - The Eye seems quasi-independent and still more powerful than the empowered Gomah, somehow?
Looked at this way, one might suggest that The Eye seems to channel its own power through Gomah offensively (of course, it usually does intrinsically empower him at least to
some extent in so doing) and gives him power of recovery against damage taken, but in other ways Gomah's performance against the stronger heroes (e.g. he seems to be very much affected by the attacks of other characters even though he should be significantly more powerful than them) makes him appear more like a host for its power, rather than like someone whose power is fully identified with that of the Eye.
I dunno. It might be quite wrong, but right now it feels like a useful way of looking at the fight, to me.
That’s actually a really interesting way of looking at it, and I think it makes sense given how the fight has played out so far. Almost like the Third Eye is using him as a conduit rather than fully amplifying him directly.
Also, his ability to take damage and keep coming back seems tied to the Third Eye’s influence, but when it comes to his own attacks, he doesn’t seem as overwhelmingly strong as he should be if he were fully in control of that power. That kind of reminds me of how Red Potara characters work in
Sparking Meteor. Even a weak character with one equipped can be nearly invincible, but that doesn’t mean their own power is suddenly on the level of the strongest fighters.
If that’s the case, then maybe the Third Eye’s power isn’t something Gomah can completely wield, just something that acts through him when needed. It definitely makes the fight more interesting, since it raises questions about how much of the battle is his skill versus how much is the Third Eye keeping him in the game.
