u/Deuce-Wayne

People rarely talk about his abilities in context.

What makes Vitiate extremely dangerous is not his raw power. It's better to think of Vitiate as a spirit that inhabits bodies, these are the "Voices". His actual body is the Pureblood one (and it's by far his coolest look).

The domination/control ties into his two best abilities: Immortality, and controlling others via mental domination, exerting his influence over even strong-willed characters.

He's the Batman meme of needing prep time, but he's only able to do those rituals because of his latent power at controlling others.

The clearest example of this is on Ziost. Long story short, as a spirit, Vitiate was able to control most of the planet and plunge it into chaos. The death and destruction fueled Vitiate, culminating with him essentially vaporizing the planet. Here is a video of it

Complicating matters is that he can't be killed conventionally (though he can definitely be contained).

Putting things simply, he can only be killed by destroying his original body - and that can only be destroyed by someone who has been, basically, "touched" by the Emperor in some form or another. It's a double fail-safe: in order to kill him, you have to have been opened to his power, making the opportunities to defeat him extremely rare and circumstantial, which is why he lived so long.

Putting all this into context, whenever Vitiate gets brought up in versus matchups, we should specify that

A) he only has his original body, and

B) he has none of his spirit-projection or control bs.

Otherwise, he immediately dominates everyone outside of top-tier characters, and against those characters he probably escapes via spirit projection. In a sense, if we were to teleport Vitiate into 19 BBY, he could probably replicate Order 66 purely on his own just by getting the Jedi to kill themselves. (The reason why he couldn't do this within TOR context is because of Revan. Revan wasn't lying when he said he saved the galaxy several times over or whatever)

As for his actual raw combative powers, he has receipts, but his displays tend to vary a lot because he's almost never seen at his true top strength, there's always these weird little caveats. And more importantly he always avoids fighting if it can be helped.

I think his most powerful would've been as Valkorion, where he was consolidated into that one body. In that form, he was able to casually one-shot Darth Marr, and whenever you allow him to grant some of his power, you become overwhelmingly strong.

I don't know if we can count the final showdown where you're battling all 3 of his forms because it's just unclear exactly what that fight means since it takes place inside Satele's mind.

- This is really just for fun based off my own experience.

- Not all characters or character alts are included for simplicity/brevity. For example, Kait has like a thousand alt skins in Gears 5 that vary drastically in skill, so I only included her default as an average of them all.

- No guest characters, except for Terminator. You can't really make a list like this without adding that bastard.

- I avoided most Black Steels as they automatically soak up the top 2 tiers.

- Ordered from left to right as well. I.e., Baird is the ultimate run-for-your-life character/skin across all of Gears pvp, compared to Karn who is respectable but doesn't have the veterancy. Baird has been holding it down since GoW 1.

- The Theron skins are tricky because I feel like 90% of the time, they're the worst player on any given team; but that other 10% of the time, they're basically unkillable. Therons are just too big and slow/lethargic.