Unpopular TM opinions you have

[falseCeilings]

Also, Karna is human, so yes, VS still falls under the category of something humans obtained. However, this just makes it the second weapon we know isn't in GOB. The first is Excalibur, the third is the war god pelt.

My reasoning was:

Gil has access to everything "worthy" (and all NPs fall into this category) that the human species has obtained/created/used.
Gil doesn't have access to VS.
Thus, VS is not part of what the human species obtained.

If I understand it correctly, the reason that VS is not in Gil's treasury is that it was never used in the legends of the Nasuverse. As such, it wasn't recorded in human history in the sense it has to be to materialize in GoB.

The legends mention the existence of VS, but it was never tied to any "heroic" action, and as such, it's not a NP humanity obtained, even if the historical Karna did.

To add to that, Karna is a demi-god with high Divine Spirit aptitude. At his death, he sublimated into Surya. He was an outcast and the juicy parts of Mahabharata only happened because Karna was proud of his Divine descent. It's safe to say that he's not very close to humanity.

Well the notion that VS's energy output/direct destructive power being above Ea and Excalibur's level is what I'm challenging to begin with. Why do you think VS is above them? What feats and lore tidbits are the basis of your opinion?

Formally, considering that the EX rank is reserved for things that are unquantifiable or just so insane that stacking pluses onto A doesn't really do the NP justice, if you have an EX rank slapped onto a thing which has one function (i.e. absolute destruction), it's safe to say that that NP does that one function real damn well.

Other than that, VS is praised for being able to slay Gods. As someone already mentioned, it's not Anti-Divine not because it has some particular affinity against divinity, it's simply strong enough that it can wear that tag on its shoulder. On top of that, it was the ultimate weapon of the King of (Indian) Gods, Indra, who was himself nervous about wielding it. Karna's background in CCC calls it the "greatest spear" at one point.

To be fair, we don't know what the extent of Excalibur's power is when all seals are removed. The fully released Excalibur which should be close in power to the sword that slayed Sefar is probably stronger in its output than anything else on the plane. It is likely above VS as such, but in its regular form, I don't see why VS wouldn't be more powerful.

As far as Ea goes, I understand it's contestable, but I'd give VS the advantage in a beam-clash, since VS is a more abrupt release of insane amounts of energy, while Ea has a more controlled, chanelled output of still insane, but not as insane amounts.

[I Can't Believe It's Not A NoblePhantasm]

My reasoning was:

Gil has access to everything "worthy" (and all NPs fall into this category) that the human species has obtained/created/used.
Gil doesn't have access to VS.
Thus, VS is not part of what the human species obtained.

If I understand it correctly, the reason that VS is not in Gil's treasury is that it was never used in the legends of the Nasuverse. As such, it wasn't recorded in human history in the sense it has to be to materialize in GoB.

The legends mention the existence of VS, but it was never tied to any "heroic" action, and as such, it's not a NP humanity obtained, even if the historical Karna did.

To add to that, Karna is a demi-god with high Divine Spirit aptitude. At his death, he sublimated into Surya. He was an outcast and the juicy parts of Mahabharata only happened because Karna was proud of his Divine descent. It's safe to say that he's not very close to humanity.

The record bit is fair, but Karna's divinity is irrelevant. This would be like saying if Herc has a god-level weapon in one of his classes (let's say Helios's chariot), then the chariot without the horses wouldn't be in GOB because Herc is as divine as Karna, being the son of the chief Greek god within a lineage that is descendant from Zeus (yay incest) and became a god. It has more to do with the weapon's make and circumstance.

My reasoning was:
Formally, considering that the EX rank is reserved for things that are unquantifiable or just so insane that stacking pluses onto A doesn't really do the NP justice, if you have an EX rank slapped onto a thing which has one function (i.e. absolute destruction), it's safe to say that that NP does that one function real damn well.

Yes, and you could argue that, just as Ea is Ex-rank at destroying worlds, but is only equivalent to Excalibur in energy, VS is unparalleled at killing gods, but is in the same energy tier.

Other than that, VS is praised for being able to slay Gods. As someone already mentioned, it's not Anti-Divine not because it has some particular affinity against divinity, it's simply strong enough that it can wear that tag on its shoulder. On top of that, it was the ultimate weapon of the King of (Indian) Gods, Indra, who was himself nervous about wielding it. Karna's background in CCC calls it the "greatest spear" at one point.

Why's it anti-divine then? Doesn't extra material and apocrypha material explicitly say that it has powerful anti-divine performance? Not saying he couldn't one-shot a god without the performance, just that it exists.

To be fair, we don't know what the extent of Excalibur's power is when all seals are removed. The fully released Excalibur which should be close in power to the sword that slayed Sefar is probably stronger in its output than anything else on the plane. It is likely above VS as such, but in its regular form, I don't see why VS wouldn't be more powerful.

As far as Ea goes, I understand it's contestable, but I'd give VS the advantage in a beam-clash, since VS is a more abrupt release of insane amounts of energy, while Ea has a more controlled, chanelled output of still insane, but not as insane amounts.

Well, then there's really nothing that indicates VS is above Ea, and by extension, Excalibur. And before someone says something akin to "Excalibur is divine magic and VS kills gods", there's no specification for which divine spirits its being compared to. For instance, it might be being compared to the divine spirits before degradation, which could make both being equal. Also, once getting into comparisons of feats and what else their sword are equal to, the case for VS gets worse.

[You]

Guess what

The sword that cuts and divides the World, with output matching or exceeding that of Artoria's Excalibur. Its power will further increase with the support of Noble Phantasms within Gate of Babylon.

First line.
It's not output. It's power in cm3.

[You]

Why's it anti-divine then? Doesn't extra material and apocrypha material explicitly say that it has powerful anti-divine performance? Not saying he couldn't one-shot a god without the performance, just that it exists.

The god killing spear encroaches upon the world trying to destroy it. With its frightful power, the spear melts, boils, tramples upon the world.
But, however...
"No way..."
Caules is speechless. The light from the spear, thought invincible, was completely thwarted by the shield.
The god killing spear [ruby=Vasavi Shakti]O' Sun, Abide by Death" will destroy any "single" existence.
A person, an army, a fortress, anything and everything.
However, killing a god does not mean killing a world. If the god is killed, then all that's left is a world without a god. Even without a god, the vast skies, earth, oceans will continue to limitlessly spread, mankind's triumphant song will continue to resound.
That is the "world" where Achilles' lived.
What countered the god slaying was the world itself. The arm that held the shield aloft breaks. He grits his teeth and uses the other hand to support the one that was broken. Frankly bearing the pain, Rider of Black yells.
"Gooooooo!"

Because it's that gud it can kill a god.
This is what people were talking about before. If it's 1 target it's EX, it can kill anything. If you make it an Anti-Army, its damage is going to spread therefore A++ over a certain range.

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On your second point, Excalibur is an amplifier of Artoria's magical energy. It's also variable in output, with both of them having equivalent energy by themselves (but different intended targets). Also, I can't help but think you're interpreting random wrong. Random can mean arbitrary. For instance, a random-access list in programming.

I think all NPs have a certain level of “can adjust power by increasing or reducing mana”. But Excalibur and EA have separate properties that depending on the situation will demonstrate different effects no matter how much mana is posed into them.

.

[I Can't Believe It's Not A NoblePhantasm]

Guess what

First line.
It's not output. It's power in cm3.

So mistranslation, gotcha.

Because it's that gud it can kill a god.
This is what people were talking about before. If it's 1 target it's EX, it can kill anything. If you make it an Anti-Army, its damage is going to spread therefore A++ over a certain range.




.

If this were true, Vasavi Shakti is vastly inferior to Excalibur, given It's considered an A++ anti-fortress in magnitude(a higher category than anti-army), while concentrating the attack.

To quote FSN's ingame profile.

"It transforms the user's magical energy into 'light' increases its kinetic energy by converging and accelerating it, and allows for the usage of sorcery on the level of divine spirits.

To an observer, it looks like a giant beam of light, but its target point is the tip. It is the "ultimate slash" that cuts through everything in the "area" the light goes through. Its enormous power heats space around the tip, and as a result it is interpreted as a wave of light that mows across the earth. You could also call it a directed energy weapon."

Granted, emilio did point out that Apocrypha came out first, so while I still think it's a retcon, I somehow thought it was Apocrypha that did the retconning when it was the reverse. Oops.

Also, I didn't say Excalibur and Ea didn't have different effects. Excalibur is a simple ranged slash, whereas Ea uses the same energy to target its opponents with its rupture of reality.

For the record, I'm not saying that VS can't one-shot gods with its own power. I'm saying I think it can do that, and it has bonuses against divine beings.

[falseCeilings]

If this were true, Vasavi Shakti is vastly inferior to Excalibur, given It's considered an A++ anti-fortress in magnitude(a higher category than anti-army), while concentrating the attack.

"Anti-X" is just "this NP is fit to be used on X", why'd you draw power comparisons from it? Anti-army means fit to be used on a spread-out area. Anti-fortress means fit to be used on a single fortified structure. Just intuitively, if something has A++ performance over a large area, and EX on a single unit, it would have somewhere in-between performance on the scale of a fortress. Apocrypha does indeed note that

Its power is surely sufficient to kill gods. Therefore, Heroic Spirits are a matter of course; Monstrous Beasts, Phantasmal Beasts, Divine Beasts, Shields, **Fortresses**, Bounded Fields, and every single existence is equally meaningless before its might.

it's fit to destroy fortresses. (I find this on the wiki but I do believe it's a literal c/p from Vol3 or Vol4. It's also in Apocrypha where we see that the best counter against VS is to prop up a whole world as a buffer. I don't feel like making conjectures about the relative strengths of Ea, Excalibur and VS anymore, but let me put it this way: If I had the choice of standing behind Karna or behind Gil/Artoria during a clash between their NPs, I'd stand behind Karna. No NP has been hyped as much for its one-time absolute destruction performance.

[Tobias]

I think you can make an defensible argument for several different cases. That said, I look at it that people were kinda hoping VS might be able to do the thing that Excalibur actually did and work backwards from there. YMMV

[SpoonyViking]

For what it's worth, Extella does strongly imply Karna actually can take down Sefar with Vasavi Shakti (at least Sefar in her base state, instead of the one at the height of her power).

[Deathhappens]

Guys, the Badass VS thread is next door.

[Zurvan]

Let it stay here

[falseCeilings]

Guys, the Badass VS thread is next door.

Nice.

I think you can make an defensible argument for several different cases. That said, I look at it that people were kinda hoping VS might be able to do the thing that Excalibur actually did and work backwards from there. YMMV

Seems like I'm uninitiated. What's the thing?

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

Think of bunny titan.

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Guys, the Badass VS thread is next door.

Also, Fishrin is back? I like.

[Tobias]

Think of bunny titan.

Right, that.

[I Can't Believe It's Not A NoblePhantasm]

"Anti-X" is just "this NP is fit to be used on X", why'd you draw power comparisons from it? Anti-army means fit to be used on a spread-out area. Anti-fortress means fit to be used on a single fortified structure. Just intuitively, if something has A++ performance over a large area, and EX on a single unit, it would have somewhere in-between performance on the scale of a fortress. Apocrypha does indeed note that it's fit to destroy fortresses. (I find this on the wiki but I do believe it's a literal c/p from Vol3 or Vol4. It's also in Apocrypha where we see that the best counter against VS is to prop up a whole world as a buffer. I don't feel like making conjectures about the relative strengths of Ea, Excalibur and VS anymore, but let me put it this way: If I had the choice of standing behind Karna or behind Gil/Artoria during a clash between their NPs, I'd stand behind Karna. No NP has been hyped as much for its one-time absolute destruction performance.

Yes and no. Anti-unit only has enough power for one enemy, but is spammable, anti-army is straight-up more powerful but more costly, and there's a clear hierarchy that anti-fortress as a category is beyond anti-army.

Spoiler:

https://i.imgur.com/OtjDDCu.png
https://i.imgur.com/LFdjOmj.png

Yes, the novel did establish it can do pretty much anything but anti-world. This does not, however, contradict what I was saying. A+ anti-army NPs have statements from at least 2 novel series now (apocrypha and fragments) are considered good enough for anti-country anti-fortress functions as well, so the same would apply to A++ anti-army. This is not to say that it does it as well as the NPs of said categories of the same ranks. For all we know, A+ anti-army NPs are only equivalent to B-rank anti-fortress NPs.

This is why I'm arguing now that the disparity can't be because of just concentration. What I'm seeing as the interpretation on the rank difference can't be by the mechanics everyone's saying, as it would actually force VS into a far weaker tier. I'm the one arguing that VS is simply on par with Excalibur and Ea in energy, but I don't think it's weaker. This is why I still think it's a retcon(but now CCC's retcon).

There is one possibility though. Unless the category is only a measure of the main function it can perform, and the rank is only a generic measurement of NP quality and isn't centered on how well it does its role. But this can't be the case. That would mean there would be no anti-fortress NP below A+ rank, and there are. It also would mean that there would be no rank change for VS's single-target use.

Guys, the Badass VS thread is next door.

A VS thread is more to do with comparing the abilities of characters as a whole, not a discussion on the mechanics and measurements of weapons themselves. Not that I would be unwilling to debate the characters either.

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"Anti-X" is just "this NP is fit to be used on X", why'd you draw power comparisons from it? Anti-army means fit to be used on a spread-out area. Anti-fortress means fit to be used on a single fortified structure. Just intuitively, if something has A++ performance over a large area, and EX on a single unit, it would have somewhere in-between performance on the scale of a fortress. Apocrypha does indeed note that it's fit to destroy fortresses. (I find this on the wiki but I do believe it's a literal c/p from Vol3 or Vol4. It's also in Apocrypha where we see that the best counter against VS is to prop up a whole world as a buffer. I don't feel like making conjectures about the relative strengths of Ea, Excalibur and VS anymore, but let me put it this way: If I had the choice of standing behind Karna or behind Gil/Artoria during a clash between their NPs, I'd stand behind Karna. No NP has been hyped as much for its one-time absolute destruction performance.

Yes and no. Anti-unit only has enough power for one enemy, but is spammable, anti-army is straight-up more powerful but more costly, and there's a clear hierarchy that anti-fortress as a category is beyond anti-army.

Spoiler:

https://i.imgur.com/OtjDDCu.png
https://i.imgur.com/LFdjOmj.png

Yes, the novel did establish it can do pretty much anything but anti-world. This does not, however, contradict what I was saying. A+ anti-army NPs have statements from at least 2 novel series now (apocrypha and fragments) are considered good enough for anti-country anti-fortress functions as well, so the same would apply to A++ anti-army. This is not to say that it does it as well as the NPs of said categories of the same ranks. For all we know, A+ anti-army NPs are only equivalent to B-rank anti-fortress NPs.

This is why I'm arguing now that the disparity can't be because of just concentration. What I'm seeing as the interpretation on the rank difference can't be by the mechanics everyone's saying, as it would actually force VS into a far weaker tier. I'm the one arguing that VS is simply on par with Excalibur and Ea in energy, but I don't think it's weaker. This is why I still think it's a retcon(but now CCC's retcon).

There is one possibility though. Unless the category is only a measure of the main function it can perform, and the rank is only a generic measurement of NP quality and isn't centered on how well it does its role. But this can't be the case. That would mean there would be no anti-fortress NP below A+ rank, and there are. It also would mean that there would be no rank change for VS's single-target use.

Guys, the Badass VS thread is next door.

A VS thread is more to do with comparing the abilities of characters as a whole, not a discussion on the mechanics and measurements of weapons themselves. Not that I would be unwilling to debate the characters either.

[Lily Emilio]

EX version has always been used for Earth Karna and A++ has always been used for Moon Karna even today, so there' no retcon whatsoever. You can only call it a retcon when they give Moon Karna the EX version/Give Earth Karna the A++ version. This is just another case where you get different effects of the same NP in different environment (like Moon Ea and Earth Ea).

[Menwearpink]

Its power also seems to vary based on how much energy Arturia pours into it. The "Excalislash" she does against Gilgamesh isn't as strong as the full blast she does against the Grail, for instance.

At its base Excalibur's function is amplification of energy. It's a multiplier so it's very much a direct X energy = Y beam. Excalibur as we see it is probably just a matter of its max input/output.

That said I wonder how well other beams can be concentrated. Maybe Sigurd will try copying Karna next instead of punching his sword at people?

[Tobias]

Excalibur as we see it could not be considered to be its best example of max input to output due to the seals limiting its power.

[Gray]

Via how variable it is in terms of forms it can take I half expect Excalibur to be revealed to be the proto-type to God Force.

[OnesFleetingGlory]

Excalibur has other forms?

[Gray]

Not really at default.
Beyond Morgan and Normal at least, plus all the seals being released.
It was mainly a joke about how the other versions of Saber there are tend to have Excalibur morph with them.
Like water guns, fusing with secance into a sniper rifle, MHX and MHXA's sci-fi lightsaber versions.
Again mostly a joke.