★ Top Ten Duelists Tournament #4 - Palpatine

Bart wrote:Kueller

Tondemonai wrote:For a long moment Mara gazed coolly at him, and Luke felt a sudden wave of misgiving ripple through his anger. "Such as?" Mara repeated. "Well, let's see.
Such as not moving your Jedi academy off Yavin when you first found out a really nasty dark side power was infesting the place. Such as not slapping down a tipped turbolaser like Kyp Durron the minute he started showing dark side tendencies of his own. Such as not providing adequate protection for your sister's children against kidnapping, despite the fact it had already been tried a couple of times. Such as unilaterally declaring yourself a Jedi Master after less than ten years on the job. How long a list do you want?"
Luke tried to glare at her. But there was no strength behind the glare, and with a grimace of embarrassment he dropped his gaze from her face. "You're right," he sighed. "You're absolutely right. I don't know, Mara. It's been... I don't know."
"Let me guess," she said, the sarcasm gone from her voice again. "Life as a Jedi has been a lot foggier than you ever expected it to be. You've had trouble understanding what you're supposed to do, or how you're supposed to behave. You've been gaining tremendous power in the Force, but more often than not you've been paralyzed with fear that you're going to use it the wrong way. Am I getting warm?"
Luke stared at her. "Yes," he said, not quite believing it. How had she known? "That's it exactly."

-Visions of the Future

Luke between 11 ABY & 19 BBY was far inferior to his DE self

after the trauma of falling to the Dark Side and losing his students to the Dark Side in the JA series, essentially shutting himself off to a significant portion of his power out of fear of misusing his power & falling to the Dark Side again until VotF.

None of Luke's feats between DE & VotF explicitly outstrip the likes of Maul or Kenobi tbh. 

He sat down on the sand, cross-legged and straight-backed, and brought his hands together in his lap, fingertip to fingertip. Concentrating on a picture in his mind, Luke dipped his awareness deeply into the flow of the Force beneath him. With eyes that looked inward, he found what he was seeking, like flaws in a near-perfect crystal. He extended his will.

The sand around him stirred. The rocks shuddered, shifted, then began to rise from the sea and the sand as though sifted from them by an invisible screen.

Swirling through the air as they sought their place, the stones took shape as broken wall and shattered foundation, as arch and gate and dome-the ruins of Darth Vader's fortress retreat. It hung in the air around and above Luke as it had once stood atop the cliff, a dark-faced and forbidding edifice.

There was no record in Imperial City's files to say whether his father had ever occupied the fortress, though it had clearly been built for him in accord with his instructions. It had been empty when it was destroyed by a B-wing's blasters, in the days after the New Republic reclaimed Coruscant.

Was this where Vader plotted his conquests in the Emperor's service?

Was this where he had come to rejuvenate after a battle? Had there been celebrations here, self-indulgent pleasures or cruelties? Luke listened for the echoes of the old evils, and could not be certain.

But that did not matter to his plans. As he had redeemed and reclaimed his father, he would redeem and reclaim his father's house.

Now the stones swirled again in the air, joined by others plucked from the sea and stripped from the face of the cliff. Now broken edge fused against broken edge, and the dark faces of the rock lightened as their mineral structure was reshuffled. Now heavy rock walls and floors thinned to an airy elegance as if they were clay in a potter's press.

Now a tower stretched skyward until it rose above the edge of the cliff.

When it was done, the last gap closed, the last rock transformed, the structure securely perched just above the sand on pillars of stone extending down to the bedrock, Luke brought the E-wing down the beach and nestled it in the chamber he had made for it. It was not a door that closed over the opening, though, but a solid wall that closed out not only the wind and the cold, but the world

Extending his hands and his will, Luke found the points of greatest stress within the structure and pressed upon them, found the points of greatest fragility and sundered them. With a roar that momentarily rivaled the wind, the hermitage collapsed in on itself, crushing the fighter still sealed within it.

But that was not enough to satisfy Luke, not enough to forever erase the temptation. One after another, he raised the pieces of the ruined hermitage, the broken ship, up out of the sand and into the air, crumbling them with the force of his thoughts, until it was a dense, swirling cloud of pebble-sized fragments and metal bits.

Then, with a final, explosive effort of will, he hurled the cloud of debris far out beyond the breakers, where it rained down on the churning water and vanished from sight.

Kenobi being a legitimate threat to Dooku arguably sits him in pre-VotF Luke's range imo.

I don't doubt Kueller tier 8 but I have a hard time seeing him scaling to tier 9 considering how post- & simultaneously pre-prime Luke was.

EmperorCaedus wrote:[There is nothing suggesting that DE is where the time-frame starts, as DE isn't even mentioned in this quote.]

Certainly not, it implies the Jedi Academy trilogy (which takes place shortly after DE, which is the time frame I initially implied is when he begins his notorious jobbing & restriction of his abilities) is when this pattern begins.

[You'd be right, if Mara didn't explicitly mention "more often than not". In order to say "more often than not" there would have to be a "not" in the first place. This means that Luke explicitly has used the full extent of his powers before VotF more than one occasion.]

Fair, which I'd consider his Baste Castle feat an example of (btw thanks for dropping that, been scouring the internet for that shit since 2016 lmao can't tell you how satisfying adding that to my collection of feats is. What's it from?). 

[This also contradicts the exact state Luke was in during his final duel with Kueller.]

Just gonna make some concise points since I don't have a huge amount of time to respond. 

a) Is the “sureness he has never felt before" in reference to his ability to actually cut Kueller, or his fighting ability? I haven't read the Kueller novel, but I recall someone mentioning his armor was relatively resistant to damage, so I'm curious if he has had trouble causing Kueller harm in the past.
b) It seems rather evident based on several lines in the fight that Kueller was directly amping himself off Luke (most notably Luke was making him stronger. Luke's response, his hatred, his own self-loathing at creating this thing, this student who had become a horror, was making the thing even stronger), implying his performance was either uniquely benefited by the fact he was facing Luke, a man he had a significant personal vendetta with & wanted very much to kill, or that he has a power similar to Scourge which allows him to feed off his opponent's darker emotions. If the former is true he was circumstantially amped against Luke & thus their fight isn't an accurate representation of his baseline. If the latter, his performance is heavily dependent on the emotions of his opponent, and when he doesn't have strong emotions to draw on is fodder enough to be challenged by Callista Ming (pretty piss-poor scaling).
c) I don't have any on-hand, but I recall one or more sources corroborating that in his later years when Luke experiences anger & rage during combat he becomes unfocused, and restricts his power subconsciously so as not to succumb to the Dark Side, which, if applicable to this situation, would mean Luke was performing sub-par to his peak while Kueller was evidently massively amped by the emotions Luke was radiating. 
d) The references to Sidious don't explicitly indicate to me comparability between the two power & skill-wise so much as simply similarities in them personally, I wouldn't personally draw that as reason to scale Kueller to DE Sidious-level based purely on a few similarities drawn in the way they sound.

[Also, I'm not sure why bringing feats into a saber tourney is relevant.]

Establishing a level of power is often essential to gauging one's augmentation capabilities, which significantly impacts one's ability to compete at all with an opponent. 

[It doesn't at all, as shown above.]

Agreed as far as his efforful feats are concerned, however consistently (or "more often than not") he doesn't demonstrate anywhere near that level of power & thus likely doesn't use it (which I've established with the VotF quote). Not being able to stop Desann, getting bodied by Kun-amped-Kyp, and basically everything outside his Baste Castle feat (and arguably his fight with Kueller) are all far inferior displays to his DE self, and hardly outside the range of Kenobi. My overall stance is unchanged, although in relation to his fight with Kueller the jury is still out as I do see some credible implications he was fighting rather effortfully.

[Check here. I explain why Kueller scales directly over a Tier 9+, in DE Sidious.]

I'll give it a look when I can, I've gotta deal with a water damaged phone today so it may not be till this weekend that I actually carve out some time for it.

Black Fleet Crisis I: Before The Storm wrote:He sat down on the sand, cross-legged and straight-backed, and brought his hands together in his lap, fingertip to fingertip. Concentrating on a picture in his mind, Luke dipped his awareness deeply into the flow of the Force beneath him. With eyes that looked inward, he found what he was seeking, like flaws in a near-perfect crystal. He extended his will.

The sand around him stirred. The rocks shuddered, shifted, then began to rise from the sea and the sand as though sifted from them by an invisible screen.

Swirling through the air as they sought their place, the stones took shape as broken wall and shattered foundation, as arch and gate and dome-the ruins of Darth Vader's fortress retreat. It hung in the air around and above Luke as it had once stood atop the cliff, a dark-faced and forbidding edifice.

There was no record in Imperial City's files to say whether his father had ever occupied the fortress, though it had clearly been built for him in accord with his instructions. It had been empty when it was destroyed by a B-wing's blasters, in the days after the New Republic reclaimed Coruscant.

Was this where Vader plotted his conquests in the Emperor's service?

Was this where he had come to rejuvenate after a battle? Had there been celebrations here, self-indulgent pleasures or cruelties? Luke listened for the echoes of the old evils, and could not be certain.

But that did not matter to his plans. As he had redeemed and reclaimed his father, he would redeem and reclaim his father's house.

Now the stones swirled again in the air, joined by others plucked from the sea and stripped from the face of the cliff. Now broken edge fused against broken edge, and the dark faces of the rock lightened as their mineral structure was reshuffled. Now heavy rock walls and floors thinned to an airy elegance as if they were clay in a potter's press.

Now a tower stretched skyward until it rose above the edge of the cliff.

When it was done, the last gap closed, the last rock transformed, the structure securely perched just above the sand on pillars of stone extending down to the bedrock, Luke brought the E-wing down the beach and nestled it in the chamber he had made for it. It was not a door that closed over the opening, though, but a solid wall that closed out not only the wind and the cold, but the world.

Black Fleet Crisis III: Tyrant's Nest wrote:Extending his hands and his will, Luke found the points of greatest stress within the structure and pressed upon them, found the points of greatest fragility and sundered them. With a roar that momentarily rivaled the wind, the hermitage collapsed in on itself, crushing the fighter still sealed within it.

But that was not enough to satisfy Luke, not enough to forever erase the temptation. One after another, he raised the pieces of the ruined hermitage, the broken ship, up out of the sand and into the air, crumbling them with the force of his thoughts, until it was a dense, swirling cloud of pebble-sized fragments and metal bits.

Then, with a final, explosive effort of will, he hurled the cloud of debris far out beyond the breakers, where it rained down on the churning water and vanished from sight.

Just gonna make some concise points since I don't have a huge amount of time to respond. 

a) Is the “sureness he has never felt before" in reference to his ability to actually cut Kueller, or his fighting ability? I haven't read the Kueller novel, but I recall someone mentioning his armor was relatively resistant to damage, so I'm curious if he has had trouble causing Kueller harm in the past.

b) It seems rather evident based on several lines in the fight that Kueller was directly amping himself off Luke (most notably Luke was making him stronger. Luke's response, his hatred, his own self-loathing at creating this thing, this student who had become a horror, was making the thing even stronger), implying his performance was either uniquely benefited by the fact he was facing Luke, a man he had a significant personal vendetta with & wanted very much to kill, or that he has a power similar to Scourge which allows him to feed off his opponent's darker emotions. If the former is true he was circumstantially amped against Luke & thus their fight isn't an accurate representation of his baseline. If the latter, his performance is heavily dependent on the emotions of his opponent,

Yet Kueller glowed, as if the pain of those million voices had fed something within him, had made him even greater than he had been before.

"More than enough," she said. "Too many. Kueller's using them to build strength. He's absorbing the dark side like a droid hooked up to a power cable. If this continues, he may be unbeatable."

and when he doesn't have strong emotions to draw on is fodder enough to be challenged by Callista Ming (pretty piss-poor scaling).

"There are more than you imagine," Luke said, thinking of Callista. She would provide quite a battle against Kueller, even without the Force." 

c) I don't have any on-hand, but I recall one or more sources corroborating that in his later years when Luke experiences anger & rage during combat he becomes unfocused, and restricts his power subconsciously so as not to succumb to the Dark Side, which, if applicable to this situation, would mean Luke was performing sub-par to his peak while Kueller was evidently massively amped by the emotions Luke was radiating. 

d) The references to Sidious don't explicitly indicate to me comparability between the two power & skill-wise so much as simply similarities in them personally, I wouldn't personally draw that as reason to scale Kueller to DE Sidious-level based purely on a few similarities drawn in the way they sound.

Establishing a level of power is often essential to gauging one's augmentation capabilities, which significantly impacts one's ability to compete at all with an opponent. 

Agreed as far as his efforful feats are concerned, however consistently (or "more often than not") he doesn't demonstrate anywhere near that level of power & thus likely doesn't use it (which I've established with the VotF quote). Not being able to stop Desann, getting bodied by Kun-amped-Kyp, and basically everything outside his Baste Castle feat (and arguably his fight with Kueller) are all far inferior displays to his DE self, and hardly outside the range of Kenobi. My overall stance is unchanged, although in relation to his fight with Kueller the jury is still out as I do see some credible implications he was fighting rather effortfully.