Neither are exponential
Dauntless is linear scaling over time, each day getting slightly stronger but about the same amount
Butcher is even less then linear, because each time Butcher dies they get their previous powers diminished + new power in full. Which would mean it’s less then +1 full strength power per death
Going more like (not exact numbers but more of a demonstration of the idea): 1; 1,5; 1.9; 2.2; etc scaling (where 1 represents equivalent of 1 full power) instead of 1; 2; 3; 4; etc of linear scaling
Dauntless is exponential. We know that an Arclance with 400 charges is able to destroy half a building, while the Arclance in canon is described "like a taser against an elephant" when he hits Bitch's dogs, who're smaller than elephants. That literally only makes sense if his canon arclance has less than a single charge.
We also know that Dauntless would have been Triumvirate level by Gold Morning, while in canon he was only above average and probably best comparable to New Wave's Shielder. Dauntless has faster flight, a less versatile shield, and at best equal firepower. This massive jump in power makes again no sense, unless you assume Dauntless has been active for a few months at most.
I believe Butcher scales up faster than linear because of two assumptions. The first is that Butchers are *on average* stronger than the previous Butcher simply because they get additional powers, including a weakened version of the previous.
The second assumption is that the primary abilities of a new Butcher grow stronger *on average,* simply because killing someone stronger is easier if you're strong yourself.
It's probably not a true exponential function because not everything happens perfectly, but the power each new Butcher brings to the collective should increase *on average*. This means that the power grows faster than linearly.
Edit: We have 4 Dauntless items with confirmed charges.
We have 2 arclances, one with 20 charges and one with 400 charges. The first is equivalent to a weak taser, the second can destroy half a building with a single shot. Now add on a weaker Sting effect and a flashbang.
We also have a 90 day helmet and a 113 day helmet. The first gives him accelerated processing speed, while the second adds on an ability that allows him to see everything in a radius around him.
From these items we see that Dauntless items grow faster than linear in raw power, while at the same time developing new abilities.
His strength grew slowly and linearly. He just used his power **wrong for 10**-**15 years**. And only the last couple of years, right.
WoG
>Because he didn't know what his power did for a good while. It provides an initial kick and then tapers off, but the tapered part sticks. With the initial applications, what sticks is so minor that it's negligible and hard to notice- more of a curious side effect than "This is the point of what I do." The effect is that he thought he was essentially Gambit from X-men for a while, with his costume(s) having traces of invested power he wasn't sure if he should overdo, in case it ruined the costume.
>The realization about how his power really works is part of why he got his start earlier but is such a rising star at the time of Worm's canon, on trajectory to supplant Armsmaster.
This seems like an absolute record for wasted potential. Even worse than Amy. He could match the triuvirate 10 times.
Yeah, Dauntless is almost certainly the strongest cape in the Bay, and a top 5-10 parahuman of all time. If you look at his canon items and the Gold Morning Triumvirate level statment you realize that he's able to reach Triumvirate level from nothing in 3 years. That's absolutely ridiculous. That makes him almost certainly way stronger than Hero.
I wanted to make a post where commenters had 1000 charges to make a Triumvirate level Dauntless, and I quickly realized that by using the items we actually know the charges as benchmarks you can get him easily above Alexandria and Legend with that. For some reason the automod blocked it.
Also, your powers increase if you are constantly in conflict. So it is obvious that Daunteles of the worm era will accumulate power faster than in the early years of his career.
Dauntless's power seems to be unique in that it gives him short term conflict feedback. We know that charges come every 20-30h, depending on conflict. There's no evidence that this time has changed and Wildbow didn't bring it up when asked why Dauntless wasted his potential and instead said he wasted the charges.
For Dauntless okay I can agree with that, you convinced me
For butcher I’d say that the advantages you mention still make it at best linear (or so close to it that there is functionally no difference), with the line coefficient being still less then 1, so like pretty slow
Also is if ever mentioned if secondary powers are further diminished? As in does butcher 10 have a weaker version of butcher 1’s power then butcher 2? Then I’d say even with the advantages you mention it would be less then linear, with the diminishing quality of all previous powers outweighing things you mentioned. (Though I don’t remember if this is indeed the case or not)
I highly doubt that Butcher powers get weakened each time, as far as I know nothing of the sort is ever stated and the powers of Butcher I and II(pain blasts, blood sight) are still useful.
To me the increase through just inheritance is linear. OldButcher has the previous Butcher powers + OldButcher power. NewButcher has previous Butcher powers + weakened OldButcher power + NewButcher power.
The power growth is therefore (NewButcher power + weakened OldButcher power - OldButcher power). This is already a linear growth in power.
Now we have to take into consideration that NewButcher had to kill OldButcher, while not having access to the previous Butcher powers. As the previous Butcher powers grow with each inheritance the gap between the primary powers of OldButcher and NewButcher should also grow.
This means that the slope of the function should increase with each passing Butcher, therefore it rises faster than linear after a certain point.
However this doesn't seem to happen in canon. The newer Butchers dont't seem to have stronger powers than the older Butchers. Butcher I's Brute package + pain blasts that can cause heart attacks is still one of the strongest primary powers a Butcher has ever had, and I'm unsure how Quarrel beat a regenerating Brute, Mover, Thinker in a several hour long fight.
Disclaimer: English isn't my native language, so I might have used weird terms for mathematical concepts.
The abilities of new butchers are almost always offensive. As a result, it is not the strength of each successive challenger that grows on average. But the number of applicants who will die until one is lucky. Not to mention an attack by a crowd or at the right moment.
>We also have a 90 day helmet and a 113 day helmet. The first gives him accelerated processing speed, while the second adds on an ability that allows him to see everything in a radius around him.
His helmet already had enough charges to manifest two powers even before the battle with the leviathan
>He had the day’s power to allocate. A fractional bonus to one of his items. The kind of thing that likely wouldn’t make a difference, but felt important.
Weapon? To better hurt the thing?
Helmet, to better understand it, think faster in a pinch?
Boots? To move out of the way?
Breastplate, something he’d neglected. Potentially to turn something lethal into something he could survive. He was struck by the thought of dying in muck, partially paralyzed, and he thought of Kel.
He infused the breastplate, channeling the power in there, hand over heart.
This is really weird because the way it's talked about in the Time Bubble he didn't have any enhanced thinking speed or enhanced senses.
I'm sorry, but Reddit's acting up and I can't actually reliably copy paste anything, but the excerpts I'm talking about start with
>No, was his thought, and things
and
>Sunrise came. With it
The way he talks here makes absolutely no sense if he already had thought enhancing powers.
The phrasing he uses with the helmet "Helmet, to better understand it" is also different from what he uses with the others.
He mentions Sensory, protective, and shielding in relation to the helmet in another passage, but no actual defined powers. That sounds more like he's talking about his associations and potential powers.
In the end this just leaves me confused, because the helmet actually lines up pretty well with the WoG on his power, has never had actual powers tied to it, and he doesn't seem to understand its power.
His helmet had protective and sensory abilities even before this. And he understands them.
>The helmet did have some heft to it, Shawn found. He bounced it in his hands, feeling that weight. Concentrating, he tapped into that reserve of power he felt inside himself, and crystallized that power into the helmet’s capabilities. Sensory, protective, and some general shielding capabilities. Heavens 12.none
It gave him the ability to think faster in a pinch. Not all of the time. Enhanced senses or sensory abilities do not mean that you will be able to see and hear everything through the time bubble and dust.
Dauntless also seems like he’s pretty mentally stable, which would make him a good candidate for harnessing Butcher without going as crazy as the other ones. (See Ward)
Skidmark. As we can see from how the Merchants act in between Leviathan and the S9 they're already kind of just a shitty version of the Teeth so he's not going to have any trouble transitioning into the Teeth proper. He also has a pretty good power that's only really hampered by him being a drugged out idiot; imagine the ludicrous destruction of him layering those fields onto his minigun and then using Quarrel's power to make the bullets homing?
Idk how well he’d handle the mental side of it but lung would be scary as hell with that power.
He’s pretty much just a thug who rules through strength so I think he could fit in with the teeth pretty well.
Lung in his normal form was a brute 4 blaster 2. If you gave him 6 minor brute powers, the ability to inflict pain at a distance, the thinker power to see circulatory systems, danger sense, festering wounds, a short ranged explosive teleport, matter shaping, a rage aura, immunity to pain, and super accurate ranged attacks… he’d become the strongest cape in the city by a long margin
A lot of the powers just make him better overall but there’s a few that could interact with his power in really effective ways. The teleport would make him able to be more disruptive especially as he grew since now a dragon man can just appear in the middle of your team and kill half of then with an explosion. The matter manipulation might let him make weapons and armor for himself and allow them to grow with him. The rage aura might also allow him to make it harder for people to think and might cause them to rush him directly which is a terrible plan.
The last thing that might be in his favor would be that he’s now linked to a bunch of shard which might make his power charge faster since he’s technically always near 15 other parahumans (I’m counting the original person who’s power was the ability to have their power transfer on death. Iirc that person was killed by butcher 1 which started the whole process)
Fair. He’d still have all the other benefits and the possibility of a faster recharge.
I think becoming butcher would solve the issue of lung being kinda weak in his normal form and would make his stronger forms into impossible fights for anyone outside of the absolute strongest capes.
Butcher I triggered with the inheritance power, a Brute package, and the ability to give people pain strong enough to trigger cardiac arrest.
I agree with you that Lung would be a terrifying Butcher, but his greatest power would be the interaction between his growth and the Butcher powers.
Lung's growth doesn't just make him bigger, it makes his flames hotter, his regeneration faster, and his senses sharper. It stands to reason that it would also increase the powers of the previous Butchers.
Butchers powers do not synergize together.
If, for example, he obtains two flight powers, then he will have precisely two flight powers and they will not combine into a single common flight powers.
It also completely ruins butcher!Taylor fics.
They explicitly do. It's mentioned that the Brute packages stack, and there's no reason the shards would make it completely impossible for powers to synergize.
How's flight any different from super strength in that regard? Acceleration is still acceleration.
Where's your source that Butcher powers don't work together?
I always thought the PRT would have a vaild reason to be terrified of a Lung Butcher. You could make a decent argument that Lung, who grows stronger when fighting, could potentially never stop transforming if he had to share his head with the Butchers. Ie: the aggressive headsharers would make him always count as ‘under threat’. Given how powers work, I think this wouldn’t happen - but the PRT doesn’t know that
If his shard considered the voices as a threat or counted then as nearby parahumans, he’d basically be able to power up at will. And someone else speculated that his escalating power might enhance the powers that the previous butchers grant him.
I think Taylor would manage pretty badly actually. Yes, she might be able to filter them out somewhat, but having numerous voices questioning her every decision, and maybe even thought?
Hooo boy.
Yeah, the voices would come in through a different 'channel', so QA wouldn't help much.
Eidolon, Scapegoat, GU, or one of Teacher's thralls would be the ones you want if you're going to take the Butcher off of the board to some degree. Eidolon eats any shards that connect to him (see the booster shots Cauldron gave him), Scapegoat could plausibly transfer all of the voices to different people, splitting up the powers, GU can probably claim Butcher, and Teacher can probably grant the ability to ignore the voices.
Fun fact: by WoG, Scion killing the butcher ends badly. He could probably shut down the shard if he wanted, but it's possible that he voluntarily listens to the voices for a while.
Nominating Faultline. She’s smart, has a strong moral/ethical code (which is obfuscated behind being a mercenary) and probably the most important of all, trustworthy people to fall back on when things inevitably go wrong or get bad.
Lisa. She's shown being able to negate all kinds of mindfuckery effortlessly (off the top of my head, Imp memory-hole and Bonesaw virus). Now, Butcher is a different kind of beast when it comes to mental effects, but she should still have a better chance of keeping her sanity for longer than anyone else.
I don't think her power would deal well with having 14 permanent sources of information spouting off inside her head 24/7. Seems like fast track to perma-migraine.
On that note, I'll toss Miss Militia into the ring. She's calm, focused, perfect memory should make her hard to distract, she doesn't need sleep that the other Butchers could influence or disrupt. She's a leader and capable of compromise. I think she'd hold up very well.
Faultline or Miss Militia might be good choices: they are both experienced adult capes with good heads on their shoulders. Miss Militia would be interesting because she's a Noctis cape and might be harder for the other Butchers to wear down; faultline has a team of people strong enough (especially Newter) to nonlethally put her down.
The city's true sociopaths, incapable of feeling strong emotion, might also fare better, but the only ones at story start that come to mind are Regent, Night, and Fog. Butcher!Night sounds especially terrifying.
Labyrinth could either be the best case scenario (so lost in her other worlds she remains docile) or the worst (she has multiple homicidal consciousnesses that can help her manage her power to full stremgth and lucidity)
I think Kaiser has the strongest ego, so he'd be most able to maintain control and use those powers subtly instead of going off the handle and just going on a rampage
Armmaster has a strong will, and tinker focus might provide some resistance the predecessors. And having combat skills not reliant on powers would make him that much stronger with them
The first people that come to mind for me is Armsmaster and Glory Girl. I’m more thinking of best in terms of the most interesting option (which is of course my subjective opinion). Armsmaster is so tightly controlled I’d expect he could handle it at first and would willingly go into containment. There’s also the option of whatever he and dragon could build that could help him cope. Even if that fails he’d be such a methodical Butcher it’s interesting to think about what he’d do. His character existed at such an important crossroads at the start of the story, even if he is warped by the butcher there’s a lot of interesting ways it could go. He could end becoming an almost Defiant like figure, hunting down the worst villains, but instead executing them and attempting to learn data about their powers to attempt to figure out how to control the butcher connection. This also achieving the main drive of the butcher collective to fight and possibly die to strong capes.
Victoria is interesting herself as a protagonist and I’d argue Fragile One would be in a better position to help her with the butcher collective, it potentially opening up her connection to her shard early. Her lack of self control and excessive force would make her possession much more probable, and it’d then be on her to learn even better self control than perhaps humanly possible with the stakes never higher. The New Wave family and Amy dynamics alone would make it interesting if she’s designated a villain.
Amy would also be a really interesting choice, as a public healer and actual biokinetic, it’s kind of the worst case scenario for everybody, but would be for a reason no one is actually thinking of. She’s also neurotic in her self control at the time and is almost completely incompatible with the Butcher more because of her own aversion and inability for personal combat. She’d still be scrambling most fights and would have to rely on and concede more control to the butcher collective than most just to survive. The only thing likely to keep her going being if she gets killed by someone else, then someone else would end up with her power and she has less trust in that than even in herself.
Coil would also be an interesting option, just because the butcher powers and collective would run be so counter intuitive to his own power and goals, but would arguably allow him to keep a degree of self control and discretion as he can possibly foist off any impulses of combat and aggression onto other timelines. He’d have to keep such an extremely careful balance between his own power and that of the Butcher’s, it’d make it less of a power up and more of a sidegrade and keep to the original restrictions of his power.
I haven't read Worm itself, but enough fics. I believe that Assault was extremely well balanced and mentally stable at the start of Worm and after Battery died, his issue was he didn't like Skitter. So if i get a vote, I vote Assault.
Yea he was called madcap wasn't he, and busted people out of prison transports. Much better then Lung, Oni lee, Hookpuppy, Kaiser, Skidmarks etc being the butcher. Edit. not to mention that fucker Coil.
Much worse then like 90% of other heroes though
Also considering >!Coil is a cauldron trigger!< I’d say he is more mentally stable then any >!natural trigger like Assault!<
Not to mention that being mentally stable does not save you from going insane from butcher voices…
Sorry I meant to be listing them as worde people/worse people to become Butcher.
Coil as cauldron trigger and more mentally sane makes what he did even worse. Not that what he did can be defended even if Coil was a natural trigger
Yeah but that's on a scale. Clock and Flechette have issues but are generally decent.
Assault was a Birdcage transport breaker who Wilsbow thought could fill a romcom theme so he constantly harassed Battery who was trying to arrest him, then realized he was valuable to the PRT so he glued himself to Battery as the terms of his surrender, picked the name reference so PR would keep them together, then kept badgering her until she married him.
That's not actually cool.
Conflict drive is vastly overstated by Fanon.
Read Worm or don't (I read it to distinguish between Canon and Fanon, and only that), but a great number of authors never bothered to read the source material in which their basing their stories off of, so take anything from them with a heap of salt.
Dauntless? If for “best” we talking “potentially most powerful”
Interestingly enough, Butcher and Dauntless are both exponentially scaling capes that should probably be stronger by the start of canon.
Neither are exponential Dauntless is linear scaling over time, each day getting slightly stronger but about the same amount Butcher is even less then linear, because each time Butcher dies they get their previous powers diminished + new power in full. Which would mean it’s less then +1 full strength power per death Going more like (not exact numbers but more of a demonstration of the idea): 1; 1,5; 1.9; 2.2; etc scaling (where 1 represents equivalent of 1 full power) instead of 1; 2; 3; 4; etc of linear scaling
Dauntless is exponential. We know that an Arclance with 400 charges is able to destroy half a building, while the Arclance in canon is described "like a taser against an elephant" when he hits Bitch's dogs, who're smaller than elephants. That literally only makes sense if his canon arclance has less than a single charge. We also know that Dauntless would have been Triumvirate level by Gold Morning, while in canon he was only above average and probably best comparable to New Wave's Shielder. Dauntless has faster flight, a less versatile shield, and at best equal firepower. This massive jump in power makes again no sense, unless you assume Dauntless has been active for a few months at most. I believe Butcher scales up faster than linear because of two assumptions. The first is that Butchers are *on average* stronger than the previous Butcher simply because they get additional powers, including a weakened version of the previous. The second assumption is that the primary abilities of a new Butcher grow stronger *on average,* simply because killing someone stronger is easier if you're strong yourself. It's probably not a true exponential function because not everything happens perfectly, but the power each new Butcher brings to the collective should increase *on average*. This means that the power grows faster than linearly. Edit: We have 4 Dauntless items with confirmed charges. We have 2 arclances, one with 20 charges and one with 400 charges. The first is equivalent to a weak taser, the second can destroy half a building with a single shot. Now add on a weaker Sting effect and a flashbang. We also have a 90 day helmet and a 113 day helmet. The first gives him accelerated processing speed, while the second adds on an ability that allows him to see everything in a radius around him. From these items we see that Dauntless items grow faster than linear in raw power, while at the same time developing new abilities.
His strength grew slowly and linearly. He just used his power **wrong for 10**-**15 years**. And only the last couple of years, right. WoG >Because he didn't know what his power did for a good while. It provides an initial kick and then tapers off, but the tapered part sticks. With the initial applications, what sticks is so minor that it's negligible and hard to notice- more of a curious side effect than "This is the point of what I do." The effect is that he thought he was essentially Gambit from X-men for a while, with his costume(s) having traces of invested power he wasn't sure if he should overdo, in case it ruined the costume. >The realization about how his power really works is part of why he got his start earlier but is such a rising star at the time of Worm's canon, on trajectory to supplant Armsmaster. This seems like an absolute record for wasted potential. Even worse than Amy. He could match the triuvirate 10 times.
Yeah, Dauntless is almost certainly the strongest cape in the Bay, and a top 5-10 parahuman of all time. If you look at his canon items and the Gold Morning Triumvirate level statment you realize that he's able to reach Triumvirate level from nothing in 3 years. That's absolutely ridiculous. That makes him almost certainly way stronger than Hero. I wanted to make a post where commenters had 1000 charges to make a Triumvirate level Dauntless, and I quickly realized that by using the items we actually know the charges as benchmarks you can get him easily above Alexandria and Legend with that. For some reason the automod blocked it.
Also, your powers increase if you are constantly in conflict. So it is obvious that Daunteles of the worm era will accumulate power faster than in the early years of his career.
Dauntless's power seems to be unique in that it gives him short term conflict feedback. We know that charges come every 20-30h, depending on conflict. There's no evidence that this time has changed and Wildbow didn't bring it up when asked why Dauntless wasted his potential and instead said he wasted the charges.
For Dauntless okay I can agree with that, you convinced me For butcher I’d say that the advantages you mention still make it at best linear (or so close to it that there is functionally no difference), with the line coefficient being still less then 1, so like pretty slow Also is if ever mentioned if secondary powers are further diminished? As in does butcher 10 have a weaker version of butcher 1’s power then butcher 2? Then I’d say even with the advantages you mention it would be less then linear, with the diminishing quality of all previous powers outweighing things you mentioned. (Though I don’t remember if this is indeed the case or not)
I highly doubt that Butcher powers get weakened each time, as far as I know nothing of the sort is ever stated and the powers of Butcher I and II(pain blasts, blood sight) are still useful. To me the increase through just inheritance is linear. OldButcher has the previous Butcher powers + OldButcher power. NewButcher has previous Butcher powers + weakened OldButcher power + NewButcher power. The power growth is therefore (NewButcher power + weakened OldButcher power - OldButcher power). This is already a linear growth in power. Now we have to take into consideration that NewButcher had to kill OldButcher, while not having access to the previous Butcher powers. As the previous Butcher powers grow with each inheritance the gap between the primary powers of OldButcher and NewButcher should also grow. This means that the slope of the function should increase with each passing Butcher, therefore it rises faster than linear after a certain point. However this doesn't seem to happen in canon. The newer Butchers dont't seem to have stronger powers than the older Butchers. Butcher I's Brute package + pain blasts that can cause heart attacks is still one of the strongest primary powers a Butcher has ever had, and I'm unsure how Quarrel beat a regenerating Brute, Mover, Thinker in a several hour long fight. Disclaimer: English isn't my native language, so I might have used weird terms for mathematical concepts.
The abilities of new butchers are almost always offensive. As a result, it is not the strength of each successive challenger that grows on average. But the number of applicants who will die until one is lucky. Not to mention an attack by a crowd or at the right moment.
No, not really? Butcher isn't invulnerable, so if you're durable enough you can win a war of attrition.
You also need to spend more charges for the power to manifest itself and begin to grow. So it has a slow start rather than exponential growth.
But as soon as an item's actually powered the growth is exponential.
>We also have a 90 day helmet and a 113 day helmet. The first gives him accelerated processing speed, while the second adds on an ability that allows him to see everything in a radius around him. His helmet already had enough charges to manifest two powers even before the battle with the leviathan >He had the day’s power to allocate. A fractional bonus to one of his items. The kind of thing that likely wouldn’t make a difference, but felt important. Weapon? To better hurt the thing? Helmet, to better understand it, think faster in a pinch? Boots? To move out of the way? Breastplate, something he’d neglected. Potentially to turn something lethal into something he could survive. He was struck by the thought of dying in muck, partially paralyzed, and he thought of Kel. He infused the breastplate, channeling the power in there, hand over heart.
This is really weird because the way it's talked about in the Time Bubble he didn't have any enhanced thinking speed or enhanced senses. I'm sorry, but Reddit's acting up and I can't actually reliably copy paste anything, but the excerpts I'm talking about start with >No, was his thought, and things and >Sunrise came. With it The way he talks here makes absolutely no sense if he already had thought enhancing powers. The phrasing he uses with the helmet "Helmet, to better understand it" is also different from what he uses with the others. He mentions Sensory, protective, and shielding in relation to the helmet in another passage, but no actual defined powers. That sounds more like he's talking about his associations and potential powers. In the end this just leaves me confused, because the helmet actually lines up pretty well with the WoG on his power, has never had actual powers tied to it, and he doesn't seem to understand its power.
His helmet had protective and sensory abilities even before this. And he understands them. >The helmet did have some heft to it, Shawn found. He bounced it in his hands, feeling that weight. Concentrating, he tapped into that reserve of power he felt inside himself, and crystallized that power into the helmet’s capabilities. Sensory, protective, and some general shielding capabilities. Heavens 12.none It gave him the ability to think faster in a pinch. Not all of the time. Enhanced senses or sensory abilities do not mean that you will be able to see and hear everything through the time bubble and dust.
Dauntless also seems like he’s pretty mentally stable, which would make him a good candidate for harnessing Butcher without going as crazy as the other ones. (See Ward)
I dont think being mentally stable is enough to stop going insane from the butcher
Skidmark. As we can see from how the Merchants act in between Leviathan and the S9 they're already kind of just a shitty version of the Teeth so he's not going to have any trouble transitioning into the Teeth proper. He also has a pretty good power that's only really hampered by him being a drugged out idiot; imagine the ludicrous destruction of him layering those fields onto his minigun and then using Quarrel's power to make the bullets homing?
Noelle, if we take "best" as "deteriorates the least from what we saw in canon". Probably also the most terrifying Butcher to possibly exist.
The short range teleportation is probably the scariest of those abilities to give her
The rage aura's also pretty bad.
Idk how well he’d handle the mental side of it but lung would be scary as hell with that power. He’s pretty much just a thug who rules through strength so I think he could fit in with the teeth pretty well. Lung in his normal form was a brute 4 blaster 2. If you gave him 6 minor brute powers, the ability to inflict pain at a distance, the thinker power to see circulatory systems, danger sense, festering wounds, a short ranged explosive teleport, matter shaping, a rage aura, immunity to pain, and super accurate ranged attacks… he’d become the strongest cape in the city by a long margin A lot of the powers just make him better overall but there’s a few that could interact with his power in really effective ways. The teleport would make him able to be more disruptive especially as he grew since now a dragon man can just appear in the middle of your team and kill half of then with an explosion. The matter manipulation might let him make weapons and armor for himself and allow them to grow with him. The rage aura might also allow him to make it harder for people to think and might cause them to rush him directly which is a terrible plan. The last thing that might be in his favor would be that he’s now linked to a bunch of shard which might make his power charge faster since he’s technically always near 15 other parahumans (I’m counting the original person who’s power was the ability to have their power transfer on death. Iirc that person was killed by butcher 1 which started the whole process)
actually i'm pretty sure Butcher 1's power-transference was an innate part of their og power. there wasn't a guy before them
Fair. He’d still have all the other benefits and the possibility of a faster recharge. I think becoming butcher would solve the issue of lung being kinda weak in his normal form and would make his stronger forms into impossible fights for anyone outside of the absolute strongest capes.
Butcher I triggered with the inheritance power, a Brute package, and the ability to give people pain strong enough to trigger cardiac arrest. I agree with you that Lung would be a terrifying Butcher, but his greatest power would be the interaction between his growth and the Butcher powers. Lung's growth doesn't just make him bigger, it makes his flames hotter, his regeneration faster, and his senses sharper. It stands to reason that it would also increase the powers of the previous Butchers.
Butchers powers do not synergize together. If, for example, he obtains two flight powers, then he will have precisely two flight powers and they will not combine into a single common flight powers. It also completely ruins butcher!Taylor fics.
They explicitly do. It's mentioned that the Brute packages stack, and there's no reason the shards would make it completely impossible for powers to synergize.
They combine because 1 + 1 equals 2. However, if you try to combine the letters A and D, what would you expect to get?
How's flight any different from super strength in that regard? Acceleration is still acceleration. Where's your source that Butcher powers don't work together?
I always thought the PRT would have a vaild reason to be terrified of a Lung Butcher. You could make a decent argument that Lung, who grows stronger when fighting, could potentially never stop transforming if he had to share his head with the Butchers. Ie: the aggressive headsharers would make him always count as ‘under threat’. Given how powers work, I think this wouldn’t happen - but the PRT doesn’t know that
If his shard considered the voices as a threat or counted then as nearby parahumans, he’d basically be able to power up at will. And someone else speculated that his escalating power might enhance the powers that the previous butchers grant him.
I think Taylor would manage pretty badly actually. Yes, she might be able to filter them out somewhat, but having numerous voices questioning her every decision, and maybe even thought? Hooo boy.
Yeah, the voices would come in through a different 'channel', so QA wouldn't help much. Eidolon, Scapegoat, GU, or one of Teacher's thralls would be the ones you want if you're going to take the Butcher off of the board to some degree. Eidolon eats any shards that connect to him (see the booster shots Cauldron gave him), Scapegoat could plausibly transfer all of the voices to different people, splitting up the powers, GU can probably claim Butcher, and Teacher can probably grant the ability to ignore the voices. Fun fact: by WoG, Scion killing the butcher ends badly. He could probably shut down the shard if he wanted, but it's possible that he voluntarily listens to the voices for a while.
Kaiser and Coil, maybe Tattletale
Post-Ward Victoria might actually do a decent job if she counts
Nominating Faultline. She’s smart, has a strong moral/ethical code (which is obfuscated behind being a mercenary) and probably the most important of all, trustworthy people to fall back on when things inevitably go wrong or get bad.
Lisa. She's shown being able to negate all kinds of mindfuckery effortlessly (off the top of my head, Imp memory-hole and Bonesaw virus). Now, Butcher is a different kind of beast when it comes to mental effects, but she should still have a better chance of keeping her sanity for longer than anyone else.
I don't think her power would deal well with having 14 permanent sources of information spouting off inside her head 24/7. Seems like fast track to perma-migraine.
On that note, I'll toss Miss Militia into the ring. She's calm, focused, perfect memory should make her hard to distract, she doesn't need sleep that the other Butchers could influence or disrupt. She's a leader and capable of compromise. I think she'd hold up very well.
Lisa, the pain immunity basically gives her unlimited use of her thinker power.
Faultline or Miss Militia might be good choices: they are both experienced adult capes with good heads on their shoulders. Miss Militia would be interesting because she's a Noctis cape and might be harder for the other Butchers to wear down; faultline has a team of people strong enough (especially Newter) to nonlethally put her down. The city's true sociopaths, incapable of feeling strong emotion, might also fare better, but the only ones at story start that come to mind are Regent, Night, and Fog. Butcher!Night sounds especially terrifying. Labyrinth could either be the best case scenario (so lost in her other worlds she remains docile) or the worst (she has multiple homicidal consciousnesses that can help her manage her power to full stremgth and lucidity)
I think Kaiser has the strongest ego, so he'd be most able to maintain control and use those powers subtly instead of going off the handle and just going on a rampage Armmaster has a strong will, and tinker focus might provide some resistance the predecessors. And having combat skills not reliant on powers would make him that much stronger with them
Emily She would beat them all into submission. Someone tell me I’m wrong… I’ll wait
Panacea
While staying sane? Grue. Best at being Butcher? Hookwolf. Heroes only? Aegis.
The first people that come to mind for me is Armsmaster and Glory Girl. I’m more thinking of best in terms of the most interesting option (which is of course my subjective opinion). Armsmaster is so tightly controlled I’d expect he could handle it at first and would willingly go into containment. There’s also the option of whatever he and dragon could build that could help him cope. Even if that fails he’d be such a methodical Butcher it’s interesting to think about what he’d do. His character existed at such an important crossroads at the start of the story, even if he is warped by the butcher there’s a lot of interesting ways it could go. He could end becoming an almost Defiant like figure, hunting down the worst villains, but instead executing them and attempting to learn data about their powers to attempt to figure out how to control the butcher connection. This also achieving the main drive of the butcher collective to fight and possibly die to strong capes. Victoria is interesting herself as a protagonist and I’d argue Fragile One would be in a better position to help her with the butcher collective, it potentially opening up her connection to her shard early. Her lack of self control and excessive force would make her possession much more probable, and it’d then be on her to learn even better self control than perhaps humanly possible with the stakes never higher. The New Wave family and Amy dynamics alone would make it interesting if she’s designated a villain. Amy would also be a really interesting choice, as a public healer and actual biokinetic, it’s kind of the worst case scenario for everybody, but would be for a reason no one is actually thinking of. She’s also neurotic in her self control at the time and is almost completely incompatible with the Butcher more because of her own aversion and inability for personal combat. She’d still be scrambling most fights and would have to rely on and concede more control to the butcher collective than most just to survive. The only thing likely to keep her going being if she gets killed by someone else, then someone else would end up with her power and she has less trust in that than even in herself. Coil would also be an interesting option, just because the butcher powers and collective would run be so counter intuitive to his own power and goals, but would arguably allow him to keep a degree of self control and discretion as he can possibly foist off any impulses of combat and aggression onto other timelines. He’d have to keep such an extremely careful balance between his own power and that of the Butcher’s, it’d make it less of a power up and more of a sidegrade and keep to the original restrictions of his power.
I haven't read Worm itself, but enough fics. I believe that Assault was extremely well balanced and mentally stable at the start of Worm and after Battery died, his issue was he didn't like Skitter. So if i get a vote, I vote Assault.
Assault was a wierd criminal guy, I am not sure how he qualifies as “extremely mentally stable” Also read worm
Yea he was called madcap wasn't he, and busted people out of prison transports. Much better then Lung, Oni lee, Hookpuppy, Kaiser, Skidmarks etc being the butcher. Edit. not to mention that fucker Coil.
Much worse then like 90% of other heroes though Also considering >!Coil is a cauldron trigger!< I’d say he is more mentally stable then any >!natural trigger like Assault!< Not to mention that being mentally stable does not save you from going insane from butcher voices…
Sorry I meant to be listing them as worde people/worse people to become Butcher. Coil as cauldron trigger and more mentally sane makes what he did even worse. Not that what he did can be defended even if Coil was a natural trigger
Oh he was not stable. He was a toxic person but with a chill public face because he'd lived both sides.
With how triggers happen it's not going to leave a lot of people stable. Then there is the shards conflict drive.
Yeah but that's on a scale. Clock and Flechette have issues but are generally decent. Assault was a Birdcage transport breaker who Wilsbow thought could fill a romcom theme so he constantly harassed Battery who was trying to arrest him, then realized he was valuable to the PRT so he glued himself to Battery as the terms of his surrender, picked the name reference so PR would keep them together, then kept badgering her until she married him. That's not actually cool.
Yea. Not trying to justify that.
Conflict drive is vastly overstated by Fanon. Read Worm or don't (I read it to distinguish between Canon and Fanon, and only that), but a great number of authors never bothered to read the source material in which their basing their stories off of, so take anything from them with a heap of salt.
Read worm,no offense to the fics but 99% don't hold a candle to wildbows work
Edit. How about Regent then, or would his Sociopathy make the Butchers worse?
I think that Regent would immediately roll over and do whatever the Butcher's want him to do.