Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

@Kostya Anakin's Force potential is over double of Darth Vader's but Darth Vader is stronger than Anakin was at Mustafar because Anakin never achieved close to his full potential and Darth Vader even says he was stronger than the last time Obi Wan fought him.

Doesn't the Dark Side also gives you a power boost in general?

Isn't it more like you get more power faster, but at a steep cost? As opposed to just being more powerful overall.

The dark side does not make you more powerful, but for someone like Anakin it can be easier to draw on passion than balance and focus-thus, an apparent boost.

Anakin's skills as a duelist was unrivaled. At his peak Vader could never reach that level of speed and precision, his dueling style was stated to be clumsy but utilized overwhelming power that could defeat most wayward Jedi. What Vader did do was become stronger in the use of force abilities (just see the way the lab breaks apart when he first gets off the medical platform) and have better situational awareness, which is why if Anakin was pitted against Sidious, Windu or Yoda he also would have likely failed since they were more attuned to things other than lightsaber combat. Many pointed out that in ROTJ Luke jumped into the catwalks to avoid Vader, and instead of putting himself at a disadvantage by following him, he threw his lightsaber to break the catwalks and bring Luke back down. Anakin learned the hard way not to perform a direct assault against someone who has the high ground.

Vader seems to be really strong, what with his ability to rip apart AT-ATs with the Force, and still being able to duel like Anakin at his peak in the new canon, especially with his fight against Ahsoka. Palpatine outright says that any limitations Vader might have as Vader are more psychological rather than physical in the Darth Vader comics, IIRC.

edited 18th Oct '16 2:08:01 PM by higherbrainpattern

Palpatine stated that not only were Vader's limitations psychological, but that he may have been able to reach his maximum potential even with his physical limitations, if he could ever get past his actions and accept his decisions. In the Legends continuity, Vader knew a technique that allowed his to survive without his suit indefinitely, but could only use it a few minutes at a time because it eliminated his pain-disrupting his connection to the dark side.

In one Legends story, this was borne out when proximity to a powerful force crystal enhanced his abilities: not only could Vader overcome the limitations of his cybernetics, he could use and channel force lightning with no risk to himself.

edited 18th Oct '16 2:26:55 PM by ViperMagnum357

Vader is 80% of Palpatine. Max-potential Anakin is twice Palpatine.

And if I recall correctly, end-of-Legends Luke was beyond even that.

Character posters of the team

Looks like everyone went out and got some sweet tattoos together.

Seriously though, I want all of them for my wall. Even though there's no space and nothing I want to take down...

Remember though, that "Wars do not make one great" and that there was a lot more to being a Jedi than just the ability to conduct large scale military campaigns. The Jedi still had sophisticated training and still involved themselves extensively in the galaxy. This isn't like a game where the only way to get more powerful is to level up through experience points assigned by the number and types of things you kill. So for example even if someone never fought a battle, they might still learn the types of elaborate fencing, object manipulation, acrobatics etc we see in the Prequel Trilogy, to say nothing on applications in the force that are less flashy but more subtle, such as mind manipulation and whatever they call the divination style powers we see in the Star Wars universe.

Yeah, the Jedi were out of practice when it came to fighting wars, but they remained in practice at being Jedi.

And that's part of why the Clone Wars were such a perfect trap: The Jedi were the closest thing the Republic had to soldiers, so of course they would be put in charge of the army. But the Jedi were not soldiers or generals, and (according to the old EU) they got a lot of clones killed in the early battles before they gained experience. And then as they gained experience and became more battle-hardened, they started acting less and less like Jedi.

Even if Palpatine hadn't been playing both sides the whole time, the Clone Wars could very well have been the death knell for the Jedi Order. They would have come out the other side vastly changed, and I doubt they would have liked the changes.

Yeah, it wasn't like back during the wars against the Sith, when the Jedi were able to better compare themselves against the people they were fighting as a warning of what they could become if they slipped too far. The Jedi always followed the Force back in those days, but slip farther and farther away from the Force except for a small few.

Not only that, they got a lot of themselves killed in the early battles. Mace Windu took 200 Jedi to Geonosis to stop Dooku and rescue Obi-Wan. The novelization says only 20 made it out alive.

Mace himself pointed out that the Jedi are "Keepers of the peace, not soldiers." and it showed in their early handling of the war.

Another interesting bit about the Clone Wars Jedi from Legends: they'd been doing some detective work into the war's cause on the side and by the end suspected, but weren't certain, that it was a false flag. They'd also narrowed Sidious's identity down to somebody in the Chancellor's inner circle, but here's the interesting part: they actually ruled out Palpatine himself as a suspect, on the grounds that he was too obvious. After all, the Sith way is to pull strings from the shadows, so why would a Sith already be the most powerful and visible person in the Galaxy, right?

Mace was a moron in that battle. He had the Jedi spread out beforehand so they had to mass before they could charge, and then deployed them as an unsupported force.

To be fair they were also outnumbered by thousands and thousands of battle droids. Even if there were more Jedi the droids could have just overwhelmed them by sheer numbers even if they'd all stuck together.

In a Legends novel, Mace actually admits to himself that going in the way he did was dumb, and had he had the experience he'd accumulated over the war then, he would have sacrificed Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Padme and bombed the place from the sky.

That doesn't sound very Jedi-ish. :S

Or like Mace.

Which brings us back to the point that Discar raised about the Jedi losing themselves in the war.

Honestly, the best thing for Mace to have done was kill Dooku while he had the chance, then have his Jedi team to make a fighting retreat after freeing Obi-Wan and Anakin. By staying in that arena, they allowed themselves to be slaughtered. Accepting that Obi-Wan and Anakin are valuable Jedi and Padme is a member of the government they defend, casualties are inevitable, but punching through the droid's lines at one exit would have been less costly in lives than allowing the army to surround them in a tightening circle.

That was also brought up in the novel, in fact. Apparently, Windu had been mentally kicking himself for not doing that ever since Geonosis went down.

They were overconfident. They went in unprepared, expecting a clean sweep, not droids and weapons specifically designed to fight Jedi. In The Phantom Menace, two Jedi were more than enough to protect the Queen and her whole entourage— the difficulty there is keeping other people safe. Qui-Gonn and Obi-Wan are never in any real danger themselves, except from Darth Maul. Attack of the Clones flips the paradigm and undermines the Jedi's mystique, showing how badly outnumbered they are— and thus giving Palpatine the perfect excuse to ride to the rescue with the clones.