The Current State of Eternias Meta

[GSM]

characters with sigs (sometimes multiple sigs) are not exactly the most normal measure of game balance

It's difficult to neglect those characters in a conversation about game balance when they oft are the most influential individuals in the game. No character, regardless of their talent and efforts, should be unbeatable.

The thing is that he isn't unbeatable. He's a player character with a lot of power, but he isn't flawless, and he plays to cover those flaws.

I can take rounds off of him, and I don't think myself as the strongest build out there. Sure, I'm an Imperfect, but there are others with just as influential builds that can easily feud with him. I'm not name dropping anyone, but he is one of the very few antagonists in the world that is actually strong to this extreme.

What you're failing to realize is that this is a combination of literal OOC months of dev (uniques, sigs, event rewards, etc), not to mention a character that has contributed a ton into other peoples' dev. This is a man with more dangers than most people have spars. By all accounts, this man has literally trained up his very own bar and completely mastered it. He has WORKED for this power. But, again, every single time he does something, each time he's allowed to participate in an active scenario or event, people whine and bitch about it and say that he doesn't need Aether and that he blows people up too fast and he's this and that and whatever.

Yes, he has 4 invulns. The problem with invuln stacking, in my mind, is with builds that want to exclusively sit in invulns and heal in them (read Ribcage and Spirit Meld, two invulns in sustain/defensive play-orientated trees, which are the most commonly used for sustain invuln stalling). Xarxes uses invulns incredibly aggressively and has absolutely no way to heal on his bar. And 3 of these invulns take up slots on his bar, whereas 2 of his invulns are master tokens. Get real, most people couldn't even make a build like that work if they tried, but it's literally required for Xarxes because of Fairy DR and his obscenely low Vit- otherwise he just dies.

And, need I remind you, the damage being thrown out in RPBs now is to a point that invulns are necessary to play the game for average players. Xarxes has the worst of it, because he is even frailer than most characters ever will be. It's literally a game of nuclear tag now, and Xarxes is the ultimate end point of it.

Either he explodes, or you explode, and he will outplay literally anyone in any given moment. But saying he's unbeatable is discounting just how much he's had to work for all of this, only to be thrown under the bus and treated like a cardinal sin if he does anything shy of showing up and doing a few emotes.