Talk:Cole MacGrath VS Alex Mercer/@comment-38742974-20190902081607/@comment-38742974-20190903074744

"You insist that Cole cannot turn off his electrical abilities and that it conducts whatever he touches. The only instances in which he cannot turn off his powers is when touching a puddle or a large body of water. "

Right, when he's touching something that is conductive and which directly contacts his skin, and not his clothing. We've proven that Alex Mercers organic material is conductive, and would need to make contact with his bare flesh in order to deliver any kind of wound. So the only way he could do any damage is to make contact with Coles bare skin, which if anything touches it, electrifies conductive materials like crazy.

When Zeke and Cole hug, they aren't bare chested while they're doing it - there's no skin on skin contact. But skin on skin (or flesh, or matter, or whatever you want to call it, but regardless, it can be substituted with skin here) is the only way Alex could use his melee powers on Cole. Like, if Alex slives up Coles jacket but doesn;t touch his skin, it ain't gonna mean shit.

"As for his electricity automatically zapping someone that touches him, I don't recall anything to support that. Enemies can hit him with the butt of their rifle"

Rifle butts are made of wood or plastic, both insulated materials. When has anyone ever made a metal gun stock?

"If Cole wanted to surge his body with electricity, he has to make that decision himself: it's not an automatic defense."

If that were true, he wouldn't electrocute himself in water.

"Alex Mercer may be more vulnerable to electricity than I gave him credit for, but that wouldn't dissuade him from trying to punch out, slash, or impale Cole. Say Cole zaps him automatically after a melee attack as you insist he can: Alex would be stunned momentarily, but Cole would be launched backward by a punch or wounded by a slash or stab"

The only possible way that could work is if Alex's fists could move faster than electricity.

A nerve contracting is an autonomous response, not one that requires thought or a conscious decision - the electricity makes the nerve contract away from whatever the fuck just zapped it. When the first few cells of Alex's fists, blades, or whatever, make contact with Coles form, the electricity from Coles body is conducted across Alex's still living tissue, and into Alex's nerves, spreding to his central nervous system. THe nerve contracts, pulling the fist, blade, or tentacle back. Since the punch would be moving slower than the electricity, then the electricity would his a nerve before the punch has completed, and the majority of the power behind it cannot be delivered, so all Cole felt was a tap.

Thats why Cross takes no damage when he uses the Baton - Alex recoils his attacks, so there's no follow through and no damage.

"To clarify, Cole can summon an individual bolt of lightning, but he CANNOT change the weather to cause a thunderstorm ala Storm. I made the point in the battle that Cole would have unlimited power IF a thunderstorm took place, but otherwise, he cannot force the weather to his whim to cause it."

I seem to recall it being a conscious decision on his part to cause a storm that night, but fair enough, I may be misremembering that aspect. However, I would point out that civilians aren't going to be as dumb as the AI in a prototype game, not just running a block and figuring that they're probably safe. The longer the battle goes, the further and further people are going to be running and trying to get away.

"And yes, Cole can sense Alex's location, but Alex can do the same with his own senses. In essence, both can always tell where the other goes, but as I argued, Alex is better-suited to escape from Cole than the other way around."

I would argue against this point, as the moment Alex tries to run away, Cole can fire off a barrage of ice missiles, and make sure they all hit Alex by throwing a single lightning bolt at him. Alex can run faster, undoubtedly, but he doesn't need to outrace Cole, he needs to outrace the lightning, and thats a race he won't win.

"Electricity stunning Alex completely, it's highly debatable what one bolt from Cole would do to him. From my perspective, it's a quick zap versus a baton being held down on Alex,"

There's no reason it needs to be any more than that. Its a way to, from a distance, interrupt your opponent at any point any time they are attmpting to do anything. If you are interrupted while trying to attack, the attack will have its potential hugely undercut.

"Even if he did, it's not on Samus' ice beam or Sub-Zero negative million degrees Celsius levels of cold where a person's skin and body are literally reduced to ice, but something more akin to ice forming around the target to to entrap them. "

You just described what Samus and Sub Zero do, since their power doesn't remove the skin from their enemies. For the amount of raw ice instantly created, I would check the tapes, the amount that Cole can produce should more than comparable to the amount that Sub Zero can produce instantly, and superior to the amount Samus can produce.

And I would argue that Blackwatch using liquid nitrogen to keep the Blacklight virus samples dormant would indicate that the temperature would cause some huge issues for Mercer.

"A fraction of a tactical nuke is still far greater than anything Cole has ever survived and speaks volumes about Mercer's regeneration."

But we're not directly comparing them, its a question of whose attack variety and capability is enough to kill the other one. To use a past example, Carnage could survive WAY more than Lucy, but it didn't Elfen matter, cause Carnage had no reliable way to hit Lucy, while Lucy's attacks were enough to kill Carnage.

"The thing with Cole beating the Beast at the end was that this wasn't standard Cole: it was Cole after using the RFI, a device that could physically weaken the Beast, to power himself up."

No, that was after Cole had absorbed all the Blast Shards. The RFI didn't empower Cole, it was causing him to die, just like all Conduits. You can't just pretend that Cole at the beginning of Infamous 2 is his real power level, you'd need to take him as he was during the final battle, after he had grabbed all the shards. If he had not died, that would have been his perpetual level of power from then on, that wasn't some temporary RFI-induced super mode. And at that level of power, he could deliver a beatdown to The Beast that outdid the damage the latter received from the nuke.

"Let me just say this as I wrap up: I'm not trying to prove you wrong. I'm simply offering my perspective and how I perceive these two characters. I could be wrong, and I'm not about to claim what I wrote is right and everyone who disagrees is wrong."

And I'm just giving across mine. I am bringing up things that I feel were adressed incorrectly that would have swng the fight in another way.