[OEAO]

Some interesting thoughts from you all, and thank you @Grey_Waves for indulging my finals procrastination fake-court post.

I think responding to a few points made by IS will help me in clarifying why I don't see Kurrok/Fires the same as Glad/Blast, or KoW/Gilbert, or Heavies/Grimnak, or...

Originally Posted by infectedsloth

I believe you've set up separations of power and consolidation of rank are a false dichotomy.

I think you may have misunderstood; see below. It's certainly not a "one-or-the-other" situation.

Hard disagree that Fire are plenty good without Kurrok.

You definitely misunderstood what I wrote there. I wasn't saying that Fires are good without Kurrok. My point was that Fires aren't the issue. Making Fires better isn't really what would fix the core problems of the army. The flaws pretty much all lie within Kurrok (unless you want to make the argument that the army would have no issues if Fires had 8 move and 7 defense, but that's less realistic than an alternate reality where Kurrok is cheaper or more survivable).

And this is where I distinguish Firestorm from the other combos people have given examples of. The flaws in Firestorm lay in one half of the duo. This isn't true of any of the other pairs. Glads and Blasts are both nuts. Grimnak and Heavies are both very efficient. Knights do all the leg work, but Gilbert's facilitation of that is insane.

Sure, Kurrok is giving you the ability to play Firestorm. Ranking them together isn't necessarily wrong (I think it is, but we're allowed to disagree, of course!). However, my underlying point is that the precedent exists to where I don't HAVE to rank them together if I don't feel it's the correct thing to do. At the end of the day, that post was just meant to clarify the history of the rankings and my own personal philosophy when it comes to maintaining the rankings.

I suppose my stance can be best clarified at this:
(1) Years of results and my own experience is the bulk of the ratings. As such, figures played together will often end up together.
(2) Building off that starting point, I'm interested in WHY the results are the way they are. To do that, I try to understand what's happening in armies, which is the separation of powers principle (breaking the whole down into its distinct components).
(3) Using some combination of these, the final ratings of these figures are determined. Again, figures played together will often end up together, but I don't think they need to be ranked together simply because they're co-dependent.

I think I may move Kurrok back up to B+. Anywhere in the B range is fine. And the real history behind the power rankings is that they largely began as a joke. With my own history of moving Hatamato Taro up to A+ (for a year and a half, no less!) and renaming all the ranks to Marvel movies, I certainly don't take these rankings seriously at all times.

Mezzo's and PK are not Bread and Butter, so this comparison is moot.

This just isn't true for a few reasons. First of all, PKs were played essentially like Bread and Butter when Jexik put them at A-. Second, I could have picked many other figures in the A- range, including a Bread and Butter unit like Romans. I simply picked two clear examples. Romans have terrible matchups into 10th, Zelrig, and Glad/Blast, to name a few. Greenscales are bad into the bonding melee squads (Heavies, Knights, Dwarves, Romans, and probably Death Chasers, although I admittedly haven't played that matchup). Regardless, the point is that bad matchups are allowed, and saying that that underlying point is "moot" because the unit roles of two quick examples given aren't the same is false.