Guy vs PoB

Guy vs PoB
Due to Gon being OOTed, arguments pertaining to him will not be considered, effectively making this battle a 2v3.

R1
PoB
* My synergy is good.
* My team defense is good.
* Jarlaxle is stealthy
* Ace + Jarlaxle have flashbangs or flashbang like objects
* Jarlaxle can fool the other team
* Ace + Hexis can BFR
* Team PoB's offense > Team Guy's Defense
* Team Guy has bad strength
* Team Guy is slow
* Balot's abilities / interception is not relevant
* Mustang is squishy and won't hit people

Judge's Notes: I don't have much to say for now.

Guy
* Roy hits hard and hot
* Roy is super duper accurate
* Roy has big AOEs
* Rune's offense is hard
* Rune is fast and accurate
* Jarlaxle's physicals are bad
* Jarlaxle's speed relies on a wonky feat + invalid scaling
* Jarlaxle has many abilities that won't work and will prompt him to waste time doing something not useful

Judge's Notes: While I think Guy is right in calling out that Jarlaxle's many options become a disadvantage rather than an advantage, I do not believe that his counterpoint to the wererat feat is a valid line of argumentation. PoB has more to do with it later, but effectively Guy's points relies on assuming context that isn't written. If we phrase the question as "what is more likely, this feat being in respects to raw speed, or being about some finesse", it heavily weighs in line with the former due to the fact that is all that is stated. I think it goes without saying that adding unwritten context to a feat to make it worse has weak basis over what is said outright.

R2
PoB
* Team PoB's characters have mobility granted more than just speed
* Ace + Hexis have good travel speed
* Roy is too slow to hit Team PoB
* Rune's concrete feat is unquantifiable, ergo its invalid
* The scaling between Rune and Boiled is invalid nor does it matter considering Team PoB's projectiles are stronger anyways
* Rune's steel door feat is invalid
* Rune's feats are inconsistent
* Rune's bullets lacking a bullet speed means they're invalid
* Wererat feat is valid, because the author clearly writes in a way that is meant to depict speed
* Scaling is valid
* Jarlaxle's speed is fine and his durability gets reinforced. His ability to spam knives sets up his team.
* Jarlaxle does waste time thinking about what to do
* Rune is slow
* Team PoB's synergy makes them hard to be one-shot and Team Guy suffers from being either too slow or being unable to keep up.

Judge's Notes: Whereas I do not think Guy's dissection of the wererat feat was valid, I do think that his attack on the scaling itself was, which PoB does well to actually backup that it works. He also makes good on Guy's point that Jarlaxle having many options would screw with him.

Guy
* Roy is at least somewhat fast and the window to act on his presence is short
* Rune is the fastest character present
* Rune is guaranteed to invalidate Hexis' defense and basically murderize Jarlaxle from the start
* __What has been proven here is that characters in Forgotten Realms can strike so skillfully their opponent does not realize they were struck__
* Crossbow feat is invalid
* Jarlaxle being decisive does not actually mean he will choose the right thing, and his chance of choosing the right thing can end up being stopped.

Judge's Notes: The same issue which I think is brought up. Guy's argumentation relies on context that isn't there as nothing about that feat pertains to skill. The "Magnificent Dance" as justification it was a skill feat and not a speed one also strikes to me as kind of weak, because there's not a ton of dots to connect between "dancing" and "skill at sword play". Moreover, being skilled + fast at the same time isn't a mutually exclusive thing (which PoB could have capitalized on). The greatest sin I think that Guy commits however is that he throws out alternative instances of what this feat can be, and ALL of them rely on outside context or are straight up disproved by further reading. Having MANY alternatives does not mean that the primary thing your opponent for ceases to be the most likely one. 99%, 0.5% and 0.5% is 3 alternatives, but no one in their right mind dismisses instance 1 because there are 2 more instances that aren't there.

R3
PoB
* His characters ARE fast enough to remove Mustang
* Balot's fire rate is slow
* Hexis' attack speed is fast
* Ace is super fast relative to his opponents and auto-wins if he gets a hit in.
* Mustang is super duper slow
* Aoe doesn't matter
* Rune hits less than the unphased of Hexis/Ace
* Jarlaxle's displacement cloak increases his survivability
* More wererat shit
* Jarlaxle has a 'go-to' method

Judge's Notes: I don't have much to say here. There is no active point which strikes to me as actively great, nor anything that stuck out to me as actively bad.

R3
Guy
* Reaction cycles is not defined.
* Jarlaxle sucks
* Roy's AOE can be done to completely blindside his opponents.
* Rune's feat indicates she is fast
* Rune has access to stronger bullets
* Wererat shit
* Scaling is invalid
* Jarlaxle's character response is not properly defined.


Judge's Notes: Alright, c'mon. Really? How do you conflate "durability cycles" with "reaction cycles"? Like ignoring the fact that's a mindnumbingly bizarre thing to confuse when they're literally different things by name, you had to go on a "durability page" to arrive to the "3 attacks per second" conclusion.  While I think PoB did not properly define what they were which could result in confusion, the way you fished out your attempt to undermine his argument actively looks poorly on your own credibility.

Final thoughts:

This contest to me was a thing of PoB making good to great points with one really terrible exception, while Guy fluctuated to points that were either excellent or just outright terrible. Had Gon NOT been OOTed, I could see Guy pulling a lead against PoB as a result, but the issue lies within that from the get-go, this is a 2v3. PoB solidly convinced me that Mustang was a dead weight pick, though to Guy's own credit, he also established Jarlaxle's usefulness is not going to be present in much great capacity. This leaves it down to Ace and Hexis versus Rune, who as PoB described, would not hurt either members of his team, and she has to actively switch to a different kind of thing in order to hurt his team.

That said, the glove argument was in the area of awful in my opinion. Much in the same way that I don't think we'd say a bee character has their stinger literally removed out their ass at the start of the fight, or that batman isn't fucking assnaked at the start of the battle, that was PoB's major slip up. Ultimately, the difference in debaters is that one made more consistently competent points, while the other made excellent or bad points with bounces between them. Due to Guy being robbed of Gon however, I would say this solidly goes to PoB.