Tbh Im actually of the opinion that portrayal matters about as much as feats do, I think I oversimplified my comment just a bit so you guys somewhat misunderstood me, so I'll go into detail here. What I meant by the first part of my comment is that Mira scales to all spriggan tiers(except the top), even Larcade, despite him being above the average spriggan(not much above).
Even the high ones? Personally I feel her performance against Juliet and Heine isn't enough to put her above low S12 tier.
She did absolutely destroy them when she got serious, but the fact that it took so much MP to do so really isn't a mark in her favour.
I agree on Age Seal not being all that, and that higher tiers(probably even Larcade) could prob ignore it, but I disagree on the effectiveness of Larcades magic. His magic can be fought through, Eileen, Kagura and Sting all did it, I have no doubt Zeref, Laxus, GIldarts, etc could too if their lives were on the line.
While I do agree that his Magic
can be fought through, we know for a fact that Laxus and Gildarts got floored by it pretty much instantly. In Kagura's case she only experienced it for a short amount of time due to Larcade needing the tentacles, had she been in the same situation as Yukino, Laxus or Gildarts I'm unsure of whether she would have been able to come up with a work around before being floored (though I recognise there's little proof for this argument either way, so feel free to reject this, just what I think would be the case).
Fair enough on Sting fighting through the Hunger, though really I don't see that as a 'win button' for Larcade, rather its just a debuff to make his life easier. And while Slumber Magic can be resisted, anyone who can't escape to the world of shadows (basically anyone bar August, Gajeel, Rogue, Sting and potentially Irene) is going to fall pretty quickly, at least going from what we saw.
As for Larcade doing well against his direct counter, sure, but lets be honest, Sting isn't exactly top tier.
Yeah, I admitted this myself earlier. That said though, WSDM Sting should at least be near Spriggan tier at the
very least, so putting up an extremely difficult fight against a Spriggan that is immune to most of his magic is still good. I'm not exactly unbiased here though, so I could potentially be blowing this out of proportion.
Now for what I meant about the second part of my comment, about spriggans not being all that different, what I meant was that they're overall strength is more or less the same to the point where the "tiers" don't mean much, not that there is no difference in their individual stats. I've said before, characters on the same general level can have vastly different stats. Some have better durability, some have larger scale magic, some have more potent magic, etc.
Hmmmm...
I can get what you mean in that (using a Pokemon analogy here) their base stat totals are basically the same, but the difference is exactly what you pointed out - some Spriggans have superior skill in vastly more important aspects. Going back to Neinhart vs Wahl, we can see just by looking at their performances which one has the better 'stat investment'. Wahl has far better durability, versatility and intelligence. The only thing that Neinhart
might be better at is attack potency (as much as Neinhart disappoints me even I have to admit that his blast he used against Jellal was seemingly quite powerful when you consider its a nameless spell). But even then, Wahl has shown to have quite good attack potency himself.
Even if you want to discount the above, I would argue that the types of Magic/Curses they have are more than enough to put them on separate tiers. I think the best example of this is seen by comparing Ajeel and Invel. Both have elemental magics, both have roughly similar stats in all areas bar intelligence, and both have ridiculously large AoE attacks.
However, I consider Invel to be considerably stronger. His Ice Magic is just far more useful due to the instant freezing and mind hax. Just compare their encounters with Team Natsu. Ajeel wasn't exactly playing serious during their first run in, but the sheer difference between how each encounter went makes me think that doesn't necessarily matter for this debate. Ajeel looked to be winning due to his crazy AoE and desiccating sand (though the 'winning' part is dubious AF here since they weren't fighting back properly and he later got punked by Elfman and Lisanna). But Invel didn't just look to be winning, he outright insta-freezed them (apart from Gray). You could argue they got blindsided, but they were walking into a chilly area and knew that Invel used Ice Magic, it shouldn't have exactly been hard to figure out he was nearby. And given that Ice Mages have used flash-freezing throughout the manga, they should have prepared to face it.
Sorry, got a little off-topic at the end there! I guess the TL;DR version is that while their MP and overall stats should leave them in roughly the same tier, the differences in
what aspects of strength they are skilled in and of what kinds of Magic/Curses they use is far too extreme to have their in the same tier as each other. I hate to beat a dead horse but just compare Neinhart and Bradman:
Neinhart: Poor durability, his primary Magic relies on circumstance and his back up Magic's strength is hard to gauge
Bradman: Intangible, AoE poison effect, has a whole collection of hax, enough Magic Power to match Gajeel's Roar despite Gajeel himself saying he didn't have much in comparison to the other S12 members, and even when Bradman does die he almost certainly takes the opponent with him
I just don't see how these two are even close to being in the same tier.
The way I consider character stats in Fairy Tail is pretty much the same as how Mashima laid out the stats for the Demon Gates, except replace Curse Power with Magic Power.
Can't find a translated version but from top to bottom it's Health, Attack, Defense, Speed, Intelligence, and Curse Power. If I were to judge a spriggan like Neinhart it would be:
Health: 3000
Attack: 6000
Defense: 3000
Speed: 1000
Intelligence: 2000
Magic Power: 12000
And for a spriggan like God Serena it'd be:
Health: 4000
Attack: 5000
Defense: 12000
Speed: 5000
Intelligence: 5
Magic Power: 10000
That's generally how I've thought of FT power levels since the end of Tartaros. And to a lesser degree even before GMG. As for Wahl vs Ajeel. Spell size means nothing to me, so Wahl busting a bunch of buildings doesn't impress me. Ajeel moisture drain is mediocre too. Killing Wahl with a named attack rather than a nameless nuke does get some credit from me, but not enough for me to consider them a tier apart. The stats I'd estimate for them are:
Wahl
Health: 5000
Attack: 5000
Defense: 7000
Speed: 5000
Intelligence: 3000
Magic Power: 9000
Ajeel
Health: 5000
Attack: 3000
Defense: 4000
Speed: 5000
Intelligence: 2000
Magic Power: 10000
While I do love the Tartaros info cards (seriously, why did they ever stop producing those, they were so helpful), I'm not sure how well it works with the Spriggans. There would need to be a new category or two for a measurement of hax, otherwise we encounter issues such as:
- How high is DiMaria's attack value? Offensively, Time Seal is bananas against most mages since she can just kill them by slitting their throats. But then you also have DF Wendy easily blocking her God Soul Chronos Lasers.
- How high is Wahl's defense value? His Weakness Magic allows him to be completely immune to one certain type of magic at a time, forming a near unbreakable defense. Yet when someone gets around Weakness he will be far less durable.
Now there are counter-arguments to my issues, but personally I don't think they hold much weight:
Counter-argument: "In the case of DiMaria you would just choose to measure the power of her beams, because her method of killing in Age Seal is not part of her Magic skill set, its simply a knife."
But Age Seal is her spell and its what enables her near instantaneous stomping, so shouldn't it factor in to her offense score?
Counter-argument: "As for Wahl, much like Torafuzar you would count his Weakness Magic into his defense score because you have to get through that to exploit his naturally less durable body."
But then how do we account for versatile mages? If someone who knows more than one type of Magic fights Wahl they could theoretically just keep switching up the attacks, meaning that his defense score that factors in Weakness Magic is null. At which point we then need to have a figure for his non-Weakness Magic durability, but as it is with the Tartaros cards that wouldn't be possible.
I'm aware that this is pretty nitpicky, however these sort of questions would have to be considered otherwise certain cards could end up being useless.
I'm not about to get into an argument for how fast Irene's meteor was.
Irene vs August PTSD intensifies 
Do not fear, i am in the process of making these cards, so that you can enjoy figuring out the digits more vividly.
these arguments are actually pretty valid, but its kinda too late since i made a good number of these cards. I was even messing around with certain abilities and magic.
