Well allow me to address it.
Originally posted by The EllimistFrankly I don't buy this chain, Yoda may have exerted himself in attempting to take the count down in lightsaber combat, but it remains feasible that Yoda would have been capable of dominating him with telekinesis, this is however, against the Jedi way.
Palpatine is obviously far stronger than the likes of Dooku/Maul/Savage etc. But, he still needs to engage the B-team in a precious several seconds of actual dueling that gives Windu time to sink into vaapad. His relative peer, Yoda, seems to be exerted when he duels Dooku in AotC. Dooku, in turn, struggles against (and loses to) Anakin and Obi Wan, each of whom frequently struggle against the likes of Maul and Savage. So if we buy this chain, Sidious cannot be inconceivably more powerful than anyone else in the PT.
Darth Sidious would have no such qualms and indeed has effortlessly dominated Dooku over hologram.
Likewise we know him capable of dominating Maul quite effortlessly, via powerscaling we know he'd obliterate Kenobi, and if we consider Yoda's Force induced vision in TCW to be accurate, we know Anakin would be obliterated by him as well. And by again powerscaling we can conclude that he could annihilate the B-team in an eye-blink, and indeed that's exactly what he did. The fact he chose to do so with a lightsaber is hardly a mark against him.
We've also seem him dominate individuals well in excess of all of the above i.e. if we consider non-canon endings to be against accurate, Darth Vader and Galen Marek.
So the idea that Sidious is "inconceivably" more powerful than his contemporaries is hardly unreasonable, and he is repeatedly appraised to be as such.
The story is different for Vitiate. He is apparently so much more powerful than pretty much everyone else in his era that it's kind of ridiculous. He is >>> all six dread masters combined, each one of which has fleet-soloing TP feats. He is >>> Revan 3.0, Malgus, Jadus, Satele, etc. He takes out entire strike teams of high powered sith and jedi.But solely on the basis of hype, we can hardly draw accurate conclusions from any of these claims as to just how much more powerful Vitiate is than these individuals.
On the other hand Revan, Meetra & Scourge were a legitimate threat to Vitiate as of Revan, something we can surmise from Meetra's oppurtunity to kill him, Scourge's visions, and the aftermath in which Vitiate created Voices to defend himself.
And note that as well, the primary reason Vitiate created Voices was as a means of self-defense, he was afraid that others could kill him as Revan & co. almost did, note that Palpatine never had any such fears.
So, if we have Sidious > Vitiate, we would have to put each dread master at < 17% of Palpatine's power, and subsequently make them insects compared to, say, Vader (80% of RotJ Palpatine). A lot of other TOR heavyweights seem to be on par with or weaker than the dread masters, so we'd have to assume that pretty much everyone in TOR is weaker than Kit Fisto by a substantial margin for the arithmetic to make sense.The problem here being that an off-hand remark from George Lucas, can hardly be considered a particularly accurate way of assessing power, beyond the basic generalities.
This becomes more loaded when we look at Vitiate's crazy progression; by the Revan novel he's already noticeably above Revan Reborn, then he gains several substantial power boosts from there. If Revan ~= Vader as some people believe, or even ~= Dooku, I don't think there's enough room between Vader/Dooku and Sidious to say that TOR Vitiate hasn't surpassed Palpatine.Again this entirely depends on the assumption that Revan would pose no threat to Vitiate, when we can only conclude that based of subjective statements made by Marr and the protag, who lack any first hand knowledge of the Emperor's abilities.
I also think that people intuitively get this impression. If someone created a thread "Malgus, Jadus and HoT vs. Valkorian", most people would probably say Valkorian (that's the impression the game gives you). But the thread about Palpatine vs. his apprentices has a decent chunk going for the apprentices. Vitiate gives off the vibe of being more unbeatable than Sidious.This is an accurate assement, but I feel the impression is given for different reasons.
The difference between Palpatine and Vitiate combatively is that Palpatine almost always resorts to lightsaber first, Force powers later, whereas Vitiate almost always attempts to overwhelm his opponents through sheer Force power. Simply put, Palpatine isn't want to abuse his Force advantage as Vitiate is, and tends to indulge his adversaries in lightsaber combat first.
But fact is many opponents Palpatine has faced, if not all of them i.e. Maul, Savage, Windu, Yoda, would and were quickly overwhelmed (with the exception of Yoda, though he too was ultimately beaten) by Palpatine's Force powers when turned against him. The fact he doesn't immediately do so however, gives the false impression that they can actually contend with him.
Originally posted by The_Tempest
Compelling arguments are pretty lopsided in the Emperor's favor. Anyone going to defend Valky in a compelling way?
Other then that, Valkorion established two superpowers from scratch. Both nearly eradicated the Republic and the Jedi Order on different occasions. The Eternal Empire, in particular, subjugated both the Republic and the Empire. Even before the invasion efforts of Empire and The Eternal Empire, Valkorion instigated conflicts that also nearly eradicated the Republic and the Jedi Order.