There's a part of me that enjoys knowing the upper levels of a character's ability and how that might compare to another, but I think it needs to be meaningful and reliable (not 100% of the time) assessment. Not just flavor text or a way for an author to just make a character look cool. I think if it's done right, it can illustrate what cleverness can do or how limiting assessments can be. When done wrong, the author gives up keeping track, like in dragon ball, or makes a fight a guaranteed outcome.
I also think it's cool if an author has the hard numbers in their head and uses that to inform a fight on the page.
On the other hand, I also like power levels to be somewhat vague. I don't like vancian style magic because there's a set number of charges in certain abilities. I get why that works in a game for the sake of balance, but it felt weird watching How to Train Your Dragon and having dragon abilities so codified that you could count how many times it could use its breath weapon. I think I'd have been more okay if numbers like that were an average instead.
Does that make sense? What about you? Where do you stand on the transparency of power levels and rankings?
The enemies in late DBZ had to be insane regenerators to counter Krillin's Destructo Disk.
He could clip Vegeta's ape form and actually cut a piece off of Frieza. And Frieza was so impressed with the move, he stole it to use against Goku.
It is kinda funny. Like, I realize it would kill the vibe but just having krillin wreck a big bad guy by being an ice cold motherfucker would be awsome. Just like some god wrecks the sayans and krillin just cuts the god in half because they were too cocky to dodge.
It might be funny, but I'd love a story focused on Krillin. He's the strongest human by far. At almost every major fight, he showed up knowing full well he'd probably die. He has died several times and kept coming back for more.
He doesn't have the Saiyan gene (yikes) that makes him like fighting. He's been fighting enemies above his weight class since puberty. He invented a technique that could cut Frieza in half if it connected. He showed up to fight Frieza three times and lived two of those times.
He managed to act with compassion for someone like Android 18 (I'm choosing to not see it as a transactional thing that resulted in him marrying her.)
Honestly, Krillin deserves a chance to deal the final blow for once.
I'm not going to talk about Super making him into a cop though.
In that instance, and only that instance, am I okay with him getting the tar beaten out of him.
Imagine they did a movie where he scooped the dragon balls and wished for just five S-cells. Just little tiny hairs standing straight up in his head.