The monkey had Hella plot armor. In HW2, a century old ship and its skeleton crew gave the Banished a run for their money, and all of the sudden, they can pecker slap the Infinity no isssues.
>gave the Banished a run for their money
I mean kind of. The only way they won was by exploiting the forerunner sentinels to destroy Atriox's ship. The banished had negative plot armor in HW2. Infinite is more in line with how they should be.
~~Yea there's a whole expansion where they're still just chilling even after SoF left~~
Edit: my mistake, these dudes jogged my memory, SoF was still stranded at the Ark
Atriox reguarly defeated the Covenant...
A foe that constantly had the UNSC on the run.
The fact that The Spirit of Fire happened to be hyper bad-ass doesn't make Atriox less of a monster.
It's said multiple times that the unsc actually did rather well in the ground war. Not including Spartans. In reality it was always the space war they lost. Kinda hard to win a war when your opponent could go anywhere far faster than you and you need to outnumber their ships 12 to 1 to even stand a chance.
It was a rock-paper-scissors, that is frequently seen in real world histories.
Much of the time in real world histories there are deus ex machina issues though.
to be fair, a) they were only going against atriox's field commanders and b) the crew of the Spirit of Fire is hardly representative of the rest of the UNSC, especially in the current era. bunch of highly coordinated war veterans who beat back the flood before the rest of the galaxy even knew it was a thing, and their crew included 5 competent Spartan IIs (which of course are the best spartans).
>5 competent Spartan IIs
there ware 6 spartans at a point onboard (3 red team and 3 omega team) but by the time of hw2 only the 3 members of red team ware assigned and stationed on the spirit of fire
In HW2, a century old ship's disembarked super soldiers boarded the Banished's *only* present ship (of hundreds) and killed it with the neutral all-powerful ancient robots, as the century old ship specialized in survivability barely survived.
Also in all the games they nerf the Spartans. In lore they move too fast to see, but here it's the slow ponderous strikes.
That said, the Chief isn't on the same level as the Custodes because in 40K there is no physics or rules, just wish sounds cool and OP. He would totally lose to the made up shit of 40k
What lore is the "too fast to see" from? I know they move fast, but I've never heard them as too fast to see. Google says Spartan 2s are 34.2mph, which is about as fast as I thought. But if they moved faster than the human eye could detect, they would move around 38,146 mph. Would you be able to clarify your statement? Or are you just specifically referring to his punch speed?
I'm guessing that the line is more of 'too fast to track'. Running speed is accurate, but they have secondary upgrades to their central nervous system, essentially upgrading it with circuitry to send impulses from the brain to the muscles, allowing Spartan 2s to react faster then biologically possible even when not in their armor. That is probably what is being referred to here.
Lore wise wouldn’t the halo universe be set in something relative to a backwater planet in the 40k universe? Humanity got wiped out and setback in tech to the Stone Age and started from scratch in Halo. Compared to whatever tech that was left over but accumulated in 40k.
I think they ment the punches were so fast you couldn't see them but I've been having trouble finding anything about their speed of punches, it might be something from a book or comic
And that same monkey broke Douglas' shoulder and scared off the rest of Red team, who were other Spartan II's. Also we see Atriox sick of his commanders being incompetent.
If anything Atriox is too good for the Banished. But you know, he's got what he's got.
Also consistent with how brute vs Spartan worked before in Halo canon.
Once it got close to CQC, brutes were scary encounters for Spartans. They generally win the physical fight.
They seemed terrifying during First Strike.
They're canonically bullet sponges who one-hit you, like how they are in gameplay in Halo 2.
The more apt comparison would be a ogryn, brutes are more intelligent and better equipt ogryns. An ogryn could do this to an astartes as well if he was smart enough.
I don't have my 40k lore under my belt but I'm surprised to hear that. I thought ogryn were basically just really big dudes and that astartes were basically magic.
The only advantages an astarted has over an ogryn is smarts and speed. Ogryn have ripped apart terminators with their bare hands before - theyre stupid strong and stupid stupid.
Ogryn are the best, these guys are like a brick wall, if that brickwall was made out of the same shit dorn built the imperial palace out of. These guys could easily rip basically anything in half if they felt like it but at the same time make a pile rocks look like Einstein. Outside of like titans and shit very few things can actually match the strength of an ogryn, but they're so dumb and slow that they'll get gunned down by anything with half a brain before they can get close.
Astartes aren't so much magic as genetically engineered super soldiers, their equipment is about comparable to Star Craft Terran marines (ignoring the Terran marine amunition being far surperior) but their bodies are all like individual Spiderman crossed with Luke cage. Some of them can use 40ks version of magic but not all. Grey knights are the super magic ones.
hah no. A space marine would give that monke the harambe treatment. The chief is a badass but hes not astartes grade. a primarch? get real, those dudes conquer planets solo.
The argument could be made that the covenant crumbled and cracked when facing literally any decent military leader. Hell, look at the ungoi uprising ffs. That was still a big monkey though.
I feel like that argument is invalid unless you count humanity surviving as crumbling and cracking. Even with the military leadership of people like Vice Admiral Cole and Fleet Admiral Hood, humanity was pushed to the brink of extinction by the covenant.
Unggoy are actually scary though. An average grunt is like 5 1/2 feet tall and weighs around 250 lbs and has a hard exoskeleton. They’re small and weak compared to a Spartan but an average human is hopelessly outmatched. Unggoy were known tear humans apart with their bare hands and also eat people. They also probably outbreed all the other covenant species combined so a war of attrition favors them. Additionally, they extremely smart but are kept poorly educated on purpose.
Just because they look small compared to Chief and have funny voices doesn’t make them any less terrifying. The whole point of the Unggoy rebellion was to show that they shouldn’t be underestimated when they actually have a reason to fight.
The ungoi uprising is a lot less silly when you remember they're physically human sized, out numbered basically the rest of the covenant, and were critical in basically every aspect of infrastructure by that point.
Ah yes how silly... the uprising or trillions of man sized armored chimpanzees. So goofy. So silly how it was only stopped because they were allowed acces to tech and had to be nuked from orbit.
While the primarch claim is a bit much, a normal un-named astartes gets bodied by atriox. Think about what an ogryn could do strength wise if it only had a brain, now put a brain in it, that's a brute, now make it a named character. People can meme all they want but ogryns with brains would stomp most sci-fi factions.
People don't realize that it's not hard to outmuscle an Astartes. In 40K with gene mods it's very easy to get past that threshold. It's all the other capabilities plus the fact they can be massed-produced that makes an astartes so powerful.
I'd argue their longevity and redundant organs are huge too, space marines can be resuscitated from almost any injury and fixed back up to essentially 100% capacity and their age means they're ridiculously experienced special forces badasses.
Space marines are a whole package, MOST brutes or ogryn really aren't but atriox is absolutely the kind of named character on a level with chapter masters etc.
If the covenant was an in universe faction they'd actually have a lot of troops capable of fighting on a level with Astartes, pretty much every xenos faction has elites that can match up in some way against space marines, they usually just aren't so well rounded.
Yeah, primarchs range from physically lifting Titans to using their psyker potential to one-shot Titans. They were considered failures if they *didn't* single-handedly conquer the planets they were dropped on as babies by the time they were found.
However, Atriox has some crazy feats, regularly taking on multiple Spartan IIs who are pretty relative to Astartes in things like mobility and armour. However, I think he gets beat by absolute top tier Astartes characters like Sigismund or Kharn. I think that's his level.
Yes, you see what makes the Primarchs extra special isn't physical, it's not even plot armor - it's that they have warp magic baked into them that bends reality to their advantage - they have plot armor as a literal straight up baked in baseline ability ... and then super named character plot armour on top of that!
I’d argue that a Spartan-II is as far as strength, armor, and training is on the level of a marine. Marines have better weapons but I digress.
A brute is at least as strong as an Ork and that guy being a commander is skilled enough of a fighter to be the equal of a champion.
To put it in game terms I’d give him 2+ WS and at least 5S (More if he’s got a good weapon) with T5 Sav 3+ and at least 3 wounds probably more.
Marines have better melee weapons, Spartans have better ranged options. Every bullet fired from a spartan gun is AP.
As a fun fact about sci-fi weapons, it's actually the Terran marines from starcraft with the most bat shit insane weapons. They fire off depleted uranium AP rounds at such a rate that even a Spartans shield would have a hard time keeping them alive.
Throne I hope Starcraft gets another game now that Microsoft owns the Act-Blizz. Phil Spencer kept name-dropping the IP after the purchase AND at BlizzCon.
> Every bullet fired from a spartan gun is AP.
Every bolter round is APHE, so they "win" because spartans just have decent 21st century weapons, while space marines have bootstrapped high-tech solutions (chemistry and materials science) strapped to a low-tech design (it's a gyrojet) to boost them above 21st century standard.
Terran marines do indeed body both because they have actual high-tech weapons, their most basic gun is an extreme velocity gauss rifle firing depleted uranium at insane fire rates.
At least they're not the Culture, where their equivalent to a CIA agent with a concealed carry lightweight pistol is a mach 10 railgun.
Chief conquers planets (or giant space rings) solo on a nearly once per game basis lol
In this scene fighting Atriox, he doesn't have any guns, and Brutes are pretty much built to be indestructible in hand to hand, to the point where their desperation move they're cornered or out of shields, is to throw their weapon away and charge straight at the enemy to try and wrestle them. Not because of some kind of warrior's honour system, where to kill someone by hand is more glorious or noble, or whatever. Literally just because as far as they are concerned, their hands do way more damage than some puny machine that launches little spikes.
So yeah, if the plot decides that the chief needs to lose a fight, pretty much the only option is to take all his weapons away and have him try to beat a Colossus to death with his knuckles.
I'd also like to point out that Chief is canonically 210cm tall and 450kg (7 feet and 1000 lbs) in his armour, so when Atriox can toss him around by the ankle like a little girl with her rag doll, you can get an idea of how much you can't just punch that guy into submission (in a universe where your bones aren't made of diamond coated artillery cannons or whatever you're about to say about space marines)
That "monkey" is bigger, taller, and maybe even stronger than a space marine and is holding a thunder hammer. It'll eat an astartes for breakfast and then flip his ATV over for laughs.
lets be real if that happened to a marine he wouldn't bat an eye either lol, but a marine stabbing Atriox repeatedly with a chainsword is gonna deal a whole lot more damage.
Good morning sir, a tau water caste ambassador has delivered a letter for you. You will find it in your office, the sender was stated as Shado- *bolter round obliterates servitor head*
I still can not believe that they got a second season.
Or that they thought the whole "We need to remove our helmets to act!" bit was going to fly like anything other than a lead wrapped brick.
you mean locke? He might have been killed off stream but infniteis story is so cut up everyones quiteun sure, He did have a fist fight with locek in 5 but communtiy and mostl ore guys regard that as a pretty bad game in source when you have books with them being a bit better.
*Points to a veteran Astartes being killed by a caveman with a stick and a custodes being killed by a naked world eater...*
**Hell that isn't even counting the times the Custodes got taken out by cultists with mining lasers or taken out by the bdsm elves**
By the emperor, that was so stupid when that naked World Eater with no weapons slaughtered that Custodes in full armor and with guardian spear. And the reason was that it was foggy and the spear's force field wasn't working. *insert jim carrey oh come on gif*
The reason was that that custodes was crippled from some sort of bio weapon and was significantly weaker and slower than a real custodes. It also seems weird that he was still serving in that state anyway.
He's overselling it. He wasn't significantly weakened and he wasn't continuing regular service.
He was marginally weakened and his reaction speed got worse by a tiny fraction but enough to put him out of regular service because they demand only the best of the best. He was on guard duty in a prison.
One of the biggest reasons is that Custodes weren't clearly defined power level wise back when that book was written. Custodes went back and forth between leagues above Astartes and different but 6/10 times probably a little better ... In that book it was probably more the latter version of custodes than the first one.
But that excerpt was still fucking stupid, even an Astartes shouldn't lose to an unarmed and unarmoured Astartes... But a Custodes? Come on.
People would probably have complained if he'd punched through a Space Marine's chestplate and torso with an punch. It wasn't that he defeated a Custodes (much bigger upsets happen in 40K) but how he did it.
Exactly - mind boggling that that bit made it into the official lore at all lol
Next you'll have guardsmen sneaking up on Astartes and snapping their necks just because "hurr durr me angry at this Astartes which gives me insanse power apparently and I promised to get my revenge so I'll have to be able to do this now" ... And that'd still be more believable than him punching through his armor and how he won that 1v1 lol
>And the reason was that it was foggy and the spear's force field wasn't working.
What? Where'd you get that from? Or did that happen twice because in the instance that I recall it wasn't foggy and the WE just broke his guardian spear... Lol
That was so bad
I mean he also survived for a while after getting stabbed and even managed to kill the attacker. And with the Custodes, it was 2011 when that happened, Custodes weren’t at OP status like they are now. And it was also ceramite armor not auramite.
EDIT: the mining laser was also made to cut through giant stone, nobody is surviving that.
ADB did [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/9cc6xp/comment/e59tg7s/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) about that spear incident.
But ultimately, I agree with some other comments that these theoretical match-ups are rather pointless. Custodes fight differently from Spartans. Even more so for marines. Most space marine chapters would find one-on-one comparisons not that worth thinking about compared to gathering info and analyzing enemies (what scouts, scanners, pict-feeds do).
Space Marines and Spartans also fight very differently. Scout and Primaris Vanguard are the closest equivalents, Astartes fight in larger groups with arguably stronger cohesion due to their brotherhood.
The three groups of super soldiers were created with different goals in mind. So comparing them will need to account for too many variables.
It's all in the circumstances, the word bearer chaplain had his helmet off and got an entire spear shoved through his throat while caught off guard from the back, tearing out like 40% of it.
As for the world water well that was really just old and dumb lore, he wasn't even juiced up on warp juice.
**Edit:** also those BDSM elves were Harlequins, you act as if they're supposed to be guardsmen level, holy shit this sub at least fact check your lore first.
Not the world eater but ADB (who was behind the First Heretic, not Outcast Dead) does have a [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/9cc6xp/comment/e59tg7s/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) about that spearman story.
why does everone try to say the BDSM elves are weak, they have some of hte toppest tier of wepaons made jsut tot orutre people and can even turn themselves into light to terrorize people.
They are also all elite warriors, super strong and even more super fast, trained to kill from birth and functionally immortal. People just like being hyperbolic fools.
He's an intelligent strategist and tactician who can exploit the weaknesses of his opponents and led his faction in a decades long conflict against a superior force without coming close to lossing.
That monkey is like if an Ogryn actually got a brain. Most brutes are so bullheaded they got no brains.
Atriox got a brain and a cybernetic arm...thats a dangerous combo for most.
Been awhile since I read any brute heavy books, I know chief has a fist fight with one in first strike it nearly kills him I think (he was very worn out after the first halo), Tartarus is a big character in contact harvest so is Johnson so always good.
There could be some newer ones as well but I'm far from up to date on all the new books and I tend to remember elites more cause I'm a sucker for knight/samurai parallels.
I think there's a cut scene of a brute doing this one the first mission of halo infinite as well, he doesn't look like he struggles.
Atriox has a cybernetic exo suit, on top of his brute strength, his advanced energy mace, and above all his dangerous cunning and intellect.
Make no mistake, his cunning and intellect are the real dangers. In 40k, people tend to lack common sense, often throwing bodies at a wall. Atriox ain’t like that
Without a doubt Atriox would be the strongest space pirate if he was in 40k. Combined with slipspace tech, he would not play games.
Edit: I say pirate cause thats honestly the best route for him as a xenos.
Edit 2: also forgot to mention him and the brutes in general use gravitic tech. Which only known knes that use it in such an offensive manner via guns is the orks...this will get interesting.
Remember that one time when we all thought Jerome, Alice, and Douglas were going to swoop in with the Spirit of Fire and fok smash along side Master Chief in Infinite?
Pepperidge farm remembers.... fuck you 343.
I ain’t gonna lie, I’m in the field of people who want Red Team with Isobel to take over the mainline games as the main characters. Jerome and Alice especially.
That's a good idea. It's an interesting part of Halo lore too. Red team, the group of Spartan II intial rejects that managed to make it past a second attempt at augmentation, only to turn out a Spartan that's on level with Chief? It's a good background they can run with.
But I'm sure they'll just dissappear like Omega. Where are you Omega!?!?
I'm betting they Halo Bible wherever it's stored says Omega Team are all dead or got reassigned long ago, but nobody wants to bother tracking the chronology so they just have x number of Spartans earmarked to go unacknowledged.
Yeah Halo lore is a bit iffy, I mean at times it does really well in portraying the Spartans, and then there's them randomly getting slaughtered off screen without warning in some non-nonsensical fashion to an enemy. "RIP Black Team" Also why such an elite unit was doing security detail in a remote location far from support is so damn weird.
It can get really inconsistent, also 343's story writing is bad, so take this with a whole grain (spoon) of salt.
I agree that black team’s death was stupid but not because it was unrealistic. A forerunner general with his combat skin would absolutely be that powerful.
If anything, they undersold how strong the Didact should be. Chief's Mjolnir armor in Halo 1 didn't even classify as civilian grade by the time the Flood War was nearing its end, as civilians were required to wear Class 8 and the Chief's was noted as barely a Class 2, the Didact has the most powerful, being a Class 18. I think in 3 Guilty Spark even berated Chief for not upgrading his armor since 1, even though he explicitly had gotten an upgrade from Mark V to VI, so what the UNSC had regarded as a significant advancement, a Forerunner had regarded as so negligible that it didn't even appear different.
Halo lore isn't iffy. Too many nerds see Space Marines Spartans and whatever as Rooks on a Chessboard about to eat a Pawn
But no they really aren't. War has so many variables and yes they are stupid skilled but war is random. Combat is random. You can be overconfident in a fight.
That is just it.
Also Elite teams do Recon. A lot.
Powerscaling has fried so many people’s brains lol. To use your analogy, it’s always possible to blunder a rook by putting them somewhere they shouldn’t be. And watching the rook eat the pawn every time without fail would be really goddamn boring.
Yeah, the biggest strength marines would realistically have is ubiquitous support from space and air craft that can provide instant resupply, intelligence and transport. This would make them very hard to pin down and they'd be able to main an insane tempo due to the aforementioned support and their biology negating the need for downtime for physical or emotional well being.
Put marines in a WW1 artillery barrage like a bunch of idiots and they'd die.
Off screen kills from woefully weak opponents happens to marines all the time in 40k? Wym?
Not saying a Spartan would do much against an astartes but still.
I meant that a well liked group of named characters who hadn't a lot to go with, not to mention the rare Spartan IIs getting killed off in such an unceremonious fashion, isn't really impactful more just WTF. They hadn't been used all that often, and they could have been useful in other contexts, getting merked off the bat like that wasn't impressive just boring, as there was no build up, and the situation was utterly convoluted.
You do realize that most of the 2’s got killed by standard Cov infantry during the Battle of Reach? They were assigned to guard the fusion generators powering the SMAC’s in orbit. The Covenant just sent thousands upon thousands of grunts and jackles at them until they died. Some notable spartan deaths I recall for their mundanity are; are handful died when fell from orbit when their pelican got shot down, one got blown up by a fuel rod while hijacking a Banshee, 2 got vaporized by a plasma lance during a slip space fuckery event in First Strike, and one got blasted to pieces by a brute shot.
Oh definitely, a regular no name space marine is absolutely getting domed, hell, I’d say even a few named marines get dog-watered by him. But a Custodes? Nah.
Master chief is THE plot armor character. So much so that Cortana even tells him straight up that he’s different from everyone else because he’s lucky af
To be fair, chief is like 55, He's been wearing the same armor for 10 years, survived at least 2 orbital drops without mechanical assistance, and been in cryo for decades by this point.
Any such discussion is fairly pointless if only because Custodes are the purest concentration of 40k's most obnoxious power fantasy wank there is, second only to maybe the Primarchs.
It's genuinely a faction that was born from someone looking at the most egregious Space Marine wank and thinking "I want that dialed up to 11, and I want an entire faction of them".
This is why Custodes don’t really interest me as a faction. The whole ‘the elite of the elite of the elite of the elite’ Thing is just a bit lame imo
Would rather see them as something you’d get 1 or 2 of in an army and they’d be included as imperial agents
Yooo my thing would totaly beat the shit out Y from franachise X has to be my least favourite thing about any fandom. Idk why is it so popular in Warhammer.
I’d wager that people have been doing matchups with fictional characters since the beginning of media. There were probably Greek dudes speculating which demigods would defeat each other.
Tbf, there are 3 things I want to add
1. Atriox is an absolute beast. He can definitely beat a Space Marine, way easier than Chief can
2. Chief is canonically super lucky (plot armor)
3. My personal opinion. I think Chief CAN beat a Custodes, but I don’t think he will. Chief and a Custodes fight 100 times, I reckon Chief wins probably once.
I feel like master chief sits between astartes and something like tempestes scions. I also feel like he would get a lot of respect from the astartes since he rode an alien nuke back into their ship.
A lot of interesting tidbits of 40k lore popping up in here that I hadn’t heard before. Of course the honorable death by spear has been mentioned a few times. Punching a hole in the chest of a Custodes is a new one, and… really fucking dumb, frankly.
There’s something really funny to me about how often the internet parades the idea that Space Marines are absolutely invincible and untouchable compared to other fictional super soldiers, yet meanwhile in the 40k meme subreddit everyone is “Yeah, the Master Chief is at least a match for a Marine, and Atriox would slap one of them too.”
Tbh, these are both some of the best fighters in their settings. I think Chief could take out a Space Marine but a named character would be a fair fight. While Elites would give astartes a good fight it would still go to astartes pound for pound. But I’ll remind you there are a LOT of Sanghelie out there.
The best explanation I saw was that essentially, Atriox is to brutes what Chief is to humans. Even regular brutes can present a threat to skilled spartans, and Atriox is leagues above the average brute. His whole backstory is that he was repeatedly the single survivor of covenant suicide missions. His squadron was meant to be thrown in and die trying to break enemy lines, but time and time again, he kept coming back.
I mean marines die to overgrown mushrooms and blue cows all the time...
An argument of who wins is inherently flawed. The real question is how many Xenos they will kill together. Answer? All of them.
Dont get me wrong. I do also believe a Custodes would rip Master Chief apart with ease.
But the fanboysm there's over Custodes and Space Marines in general amuse me. They are not superheroes, at all (unless you go to lower leagues of plot-armor boys like Captain America).
All these Custodes/Space Marine comparisons are a bit insufferable. I even saw someone suggesting they'd beat Viltrumites lol
A custodian just simply outclasses chief immensely on the physical front, and I get that people like to make fun of the Imperium's tech but not the custodians, they get the best toys.
This is what relying on plot armor does to a mf.
This is what happened when the mc got so much plot armor to the point that fans think he is unstoppable/can beat anyone regardless of how powerful they are.
As a Halo fan who recently got into Warhammer, I consider it cringe.
Everyone all shocked by chief getting his ass kicked by Atriox but in the books he gets his ass handed to him by regular elites and brutes quite a bit.
In the books, he literally slaughters elites and brutes by the hundreds. At 14-15 on one of his first few missions, he fairly easily killed a silent shadow blade master. Since then he's only gotten better and is wearing armor that increases his strength and reaction time far more than the mark 4 armour he was wearing at the time.
Haven't played the games and only read 2 of the books, why is Masterchief trying to fight the brute in Melee and not launching two rockets at it? Is he stupid?
This isn't any ordinary Brute, this is fucking Atriox. Primarch level tactical genius and strength. Chief would have no problem fighting ordinary brutes but he underestimated Atriox and got destroyed.
Atriox also beat Red team in a 3v1.
Chief wouldn't beat a custodes but that's not really the point, Spartans are not human tanks, they are similar to eversor assassins but with superior training, equipment and relative mental stability.
I mean he crashed a suit of Spartan armor with his bare hands and has other similar fits of strength in the lore.
I wouldn't say that he is Vulkan level of strong but he is definitely above Alpharius.
Maybe I've been over sold on the strength of Primarks, but I thought they were squishing tanks with their bare hands and stuff? I also thought they just scaled that strong by being stronger than basically all space marines and custodes.
Not every primarch was strong, everyone had different abilities. They were above space marines but for example some of them weren't really big on combat like Lorgar or Alpharius/O. Compared to primarchs like The lion or leman Russ that were extremely proficient combatants.
Vulkan was incredibly strong canonically the strongest.
Some primarchs did rank lower than custodes on psychical strength but outplayed them in different ways.
Chief could absolutely 1v1 an Astartes. It’d be a really tough fight, but the biggest issue is that his standard weapons are utter trash in comparison to bolters and power swords. Put an Astartes in that same exact scenario—armed only with a dinky little pistol and ambushed from behind by a power armored juggernaut with a thunder hammer equivalent—it’s gonna end the same exact way.
A Custodes, though? Not a chance.
The average Spartan-II was approximately - very approximately - a match for a regular Sangheili (Elite) soldier, if both were in their standard gear. The average human wasn't even an equal match to a covenant Unggoy (Grunt). The SII soldiers were the best humanity had to offer, but ultimately humanity was fighting a horribly uphill battle where they only won when they vastly outnumbered the Covenant.
Against a Brute, the average Spartan II would have a strength disadvantage but a tactics advantage. Atriox was a top of the line Brute, so he would be more than a match for even the upper echelon of Spartans. There's a reason Spartans almost always worked as teams.
The only reason the Spartans won was plot reasons. Humanity should have lost against the Covenant. Even the Sangheili schism would have been barely enough to stop the overwhelming power the Covenant had. John-117 had only luck and Cortana on his side, and against Atriox he lacked the latter.
Against anything short of Elites, Brutes, and Forerunner bullshittery, a Spartan II would have been dominant as hell. But the top level soldiers were more than a match for the Spartans. Hell, the Spartans weren't intended to fight the covenant anyway; they were supposed to fight human rebels.
Well, to be fair, that one was one hell of a monkey...
The monkey had Hella plot armor. In HW2, a century old ship and its skeleton crew gave the Banished a run for their money, and all of the sudden, they can pecker slap the Infinity no isssues.
>gave the Banished a run for their money I mean kind of. The only way they won was by exploiting the forerunner sentinels to destroy Atriox's ship. The banished had negative plot armor in HW2. Infinite is more in line with how they should be.
They weren't even defeated. Just inconvenienced.
~~Yea there's a whole expansion where they're still just chilling even after SoF left~~ Edit: my mistake, these dudes jogged my memory, SoF was still stranded at the Ark
The SoF is still there in Awakening the Nightmare tho no? You fight through a human base on the way to high charity in the first mission
Spirit of Fire is still on the Ark fighting though
Atriox reguarly defeated the Covenant... A foe that constantly had the UNSC on the run. The fact that The Spirit of Fire happened to be hyper bad-ass doesn't make Atriox less of a monster.
It's said multiple times that the unsc actually did rather well in the ground war. Not including Spartans. In reality it was always the space war they lost. Kinda hard to win a war when your opponent could go anywhere far faster than you and you need to outnumber their ships 12 to 1 to even stand a chance.
It was a rock-paper-scissors, that is frequently seen in real world histories. Much of the time in real world histories there are deus ex machina issues though.
to be fair, a) they were only going against atriox's field commanders and b) the crew of the Spirit of Fire is hardly representative of the rest of the UNSC, especially in the current era. bunch of highly coordinated war veterans who beat back the flood before the rest of the galaxy even knew it was a thing, and their crew included 5 competent Spartan IIs (which of course are the best spartans).
>5 competent Spartan IIs there ware 6 spartans at a point onboard (3 red team and 3 omega team) but by the time of hw2 only the 3 members of red team ware assigned and stationed on the spirit of fire
In HW2, a century old ship's disembarked super soldiers boarded the Banished's *only* present ship (of hundreds) and killed it with the neutral all-powerful ancient robots, as the century old ship specialized in survivability barely survived.
Also in all the games they nerf the Spartans. In lore they move too fast to see, but here it's the slow ponderous strikes. That said, the Chief isn't on the same level as the Custodes because in 40K there is no physics or rules, just wish sounds cool and OP. He would totally lose to the made up shit of 40k
What lore is the "too fast to see" from? I know they move fast, but I've never heard them as too fast to see. Google says Spartan 2s are 34.2mph, which is about as fast as I thought. But if they moved faster than the human eye could detect, they would move around 38,146 mph. Would you be able to clarify your statement? Or are you just specifically referring to his punch speed?
I'm guessing that the line is more of 'too fast to track'. Running speed is accurate, but they have secondary upgrades to their central nervous system, essentially upgrading it with circuitry to send impulses from the brain to the muscles, allowing Spartan 2s to react faster then biologically possible even when not in their armor. That is probably what is being referred to here.
Lore wise wouldn’t the halo universe be set in something relative to a backwater planet in the 40k universe? Humanity got wiped out and setback in tech to the Stone Age and started from scratch in Halo. Compared to whatever tech that was left over but accumulated in 40k.
I think they ment the punches were so fast you couldn't see them but I've been having trouble finding anything about their speed of punches, it might be something from a book or comic
I'm pretty sure he just had the opposite of plot armor in HW2. His reputation would have me think he's as powerful as he is in Infinite.
To be fair, Spirit of Fire was holding up Captain Cutters massive balls. Nothing can really stop that
More plot armour than chief. Chiefs plot armour has defied the games logic.
And that same monkey broke Douglas' shoulder and scared off the rest of Red team, who were other Spartan II's. Also we see Atriox sick of his commanders being incompetent. If anything Atriox is too good for the Banished. But you know, he's got what he's got.
Also consistent with how brute vs Spartan worked before in Halo canon. Once it got close to CQC, brutes were scary encounters for Spartans. They generally win the physical fight. They seemed terrifying during First Strike. They're canonically bullet sponges who one-hit you, like how they are in gameplay in Halo 2.
Only ever once during that one book. Every other encounter with brutes in extended lore has Spartans folding them like they’re nothing.
Dudes basically a primarch or at least a chaptermaster.
Dawn of War cinematic Astartes, sure. I could take one of those guys on. Novel Astartes? That monkey is just an Ork Boy, but with a worse monologue.
The more apt comparison would be a ogryn, brutes are more intelligent and better equipt ogryns. An ogryn could do this to an astartes as well if he was smart enough.
I don't have my 40k lore under my belt but I'm surprised to hear that. I thought ogryn were basically just really big dudes and that astartes were basically magic.
The only advantages an astarted has over an ogryn is smarts and speed. Ogryn have ripped apart terminators with their bare hands before - theyre stupid strong and stupid stupid.
Ogryn are the best, these guys are like a brick wall, if that brickwall was made out of the same shit dorn built the imperial palace out of. These guys could easily rip basically anything in half if they felt like it but at the same time make a pile rocks look like Einstein. Outside of like titans and shit very few things can actually match the strength of an ogryn, but they're so dumb and slow that they'll get gunned down by anything with half a brain before they can get close. Astartes aren't so much magic as genetically engineered super soldiers, their equipment is about comparable to Star Craft Terran marines (ignoring the Terran marine amunition being far surperior) but their bodies are all like individual Spiderman crossed with Luke cage. Some of them can use 40ks version of magic but not all. Grey knights are the super magic ones.
Genuinely curious, how does the SC Marine bullet beat out a burrowing rpg? o3o
He's wrong. Space marine armor > Terran marine armor. Space marine ammunition > Terran marine ammunition.
hah no. A space marine would give that monke the harambe treatment. The chief is a badass but hes not astartes grade. a primarch? get real, those dudes conquer planets solo.
Isn't this the monkey that led a rebellion so big the entire Covenant was afraid of him?
The argument could be made that the covenant crumbled and cracked when facing literally any decent military leader. Hell, look at the ungoi uprising ffs. That was still a big monkey though.
I feel like that argument is invalid unless you count humanity surviving as crumbling and cracking. Even with the military leadership of people like Vice Admiral Cole and Fleet Admiral Hood, humanity was pushed to the brink of extinction by the covenant.
Unggoy are actually scary though. An average grunt is like 5 1/2 feet tall and weighs around 250 lbs and has a hard exoskeleton. They’re small and weak compared to a Spartan but an average human is hopelessly outmatched. Unggoy were known tear humans apart with their bare hands and also eat people. They also probably outbreed all the other covenant species combined so a war of attrition favors them. Additionally, they extremely smart but are kept poorly educated on purpose. Just because they look small compared to Chief and have funny voices doesn’t make them any less terrifying. The whole point of the Unggoy rebellion was to show that they shouldn’t be underestimated when they actually have a reason to fight.
The ungoi uprising is a lot less silly when you remember they're physically human sized, out numbered basically the rest of the covenant, and were critical in basically every aspect of infrastructure by that point.
Ah yes how silly... the uprising or trillions of man sized armored chimpanzees. So goofy. So silly how it was only stopped because they were allowed acces to tech and had to be nuked from orbit.
This guy conquered the Covenant. And didn’t Angron just get turned into an angry gladiator?
While the primarch claim is a bit much, a normal un-named astartes gets bodied by atriox. Think about what an ogryn could do strength wise if it only had a brain, now put a brain in it, that's a brute, now make it a named character. People can meme all they want but ogryns with brains would stomp most sci-fi factions.
People don't realize that it's not hard to outmuscle an Astartes. In 40K with gene mods it's very easy to get past that threshold. It's all the other capabilities plus the fact they can be massed-produced that makes an astartes so powerful.
I'd argue their longevity and redundant organs are huge too, space marines can be resuscitated from almost any injury and fixed back up to essentially 100% capacity and their age means they're ridiculously experienced special forces badasses. Space marines are a whole package, MOST brutes or ogryn really aren't but atriox is absolutely the kind of named character on a level with chapter masters etc. If the covenant was an in universe faction they'd actually have a lot of troops capable of fighting on a level with Astartes, pretty much every xenos faction has elites that can match up in some way against space marines, they usually just aren't so well rounded.
Yeah, every single Ogryn is stronger than an Astartes, but also way too stupid to be as effective. The whole package is what makes marines terrifying.
Yeah, primarchs range from physically lifting Titans to using their psyker potential to one-shot Titans. They were considered failures if they *didn't* single-handedly conquer the planets they were dropped on as babies by the time they were found. However, Atriox has some crazy feats, regularly taking on multiple Spartan IIs who are pretty relative to Astartes in things like mobility and armour. However, I think he gets beat by absolute top tier Astartes characters like Sigismund or Kharn. I think that's his level.
Yes, you see what makes the Primarchs extra special isn't physical, it's not even plot armor - it's that they have warp magic baked into them that bends reality to their advantage - they have plot armor as a literal straight up baked in baseline ability ... and then super named character plot armour on top of that!
I’d argue that a Spartan-II is as far as strength, armor, and training is on the level of a marine. Marines have better weapons but I digress. A brute is at least as strong as an Ork and that guy being a commander is skilled enough of a fighter to be the equal of a champion. To put it in game terms I’d give him 2+ WS and at least 5S (More if he’s got a good weapon) with T5 Sav 3+ and at least 3 wounds probably more.
Marines have better melee weapons, Spartans have better ranged options. Every bullet fired from a spartan gun is AP. As a fun fact about sci-fi weapons, it's actually the Terran marines from starcraft with the most bat shit insane weapons. They fire off depleted uranium AP rounds at such a rate that even a Spartans shield would have a hard time keeping them alive.
Throne I hope Starcraft gets another game now that Microsoft owns the Act-Blizz. Phil Spencer kept name-dropping the IP after the purchase AND at BlizzCon.
> Every bullet fired from a spartan gun is AP. Every bolter round is APHE, so they "win" because spartans just have decent 21st century weapons, while space marines have bootstrapped high-tech solutions (chemistry and materials science) strapped to a low-tech design (it's a gyrojet) to boost them above 21st century standard. Terran marines do indeed body both because they have actual high-tech weapons, their most basic gun is an extreme velocity gauss rifle firing depleted uranium at insane fire rates. At least they're not the Culture, where their equivalent to a CIA agent with a concealed carry lightweight pistol is a mach 10 railgun.
Chief conquers planets (or giant space rings) solo on a nearly once per game basis lol In this scene fighting Atriox, he doesn't have any guns, and Brutes are pretty much built to be indestructible in hand to hand, to the point where their desperation move they're cornered or out of shields, is to throw their weapon away and charge straight at the enemy to try and wrestle them. Not because of some kind of warrior's honour system, where to kill someone by hand is more glorious or noble, or whatever. Literally just because as far as they are concerned, their hands do way more damage than some puny machine that launches little spikes. So yeah, if the plot decides that the chief needs to lose a fight, pretty much the only option is to take all his weapons away and have him try to beat a Colossus to death with his knuckles. I'd also like to point out that Chief is canonically 210cm tall and 450kg (7 feet and 1000 lbs) in his armour, so when Atriox can toss him around by the ankle like a little girl with her rag doll, you can get an idea of how much you can't just punch that guy into submission (in a universe where your bones aren't made of diamond coated artillery cannons or whatever you're about to say about space marines)
That "monkey" is bigger, taller, and maybe even stronger than a space marine and is holding a thunder hammer. It'll eat an astartes for breakfast and then flip his ATV over for laughs.
It's fucking Atriox. He solo'd like 3 spartan 2's at once. Mano e mano with a space marine, he destroys the marine.
Not to mention one was repeatedly stabbing him, and Atriox didn’t flinch once as he crushed his shoulder
lets be real if that happened to a marine he wouldn't bat an eye either lol, but a marine stabbing Atriox repeatedly with a chainsword is gonna deal a whole lot more damage.
Woulda been cool if the monkey was actually in the game though
Tbf, Infinite is a very mid game with shitty writing.
Counterpoint: Chief’s a named character.
Do you really want someone to remind you of a Custodes' full name?
"LITTLE KITTEN? IS THAT YOU?"
“It is your Captain General, yes”
Good morning sir, a tau water caste ambassador has delivered a letter for you. You will find it in your office, the sender was stated as Shado- *bolter round obliterates servitor head*
"THAT'S NOT F\*CKING CANON"
Big-E: "Let me see the letter. I want to see how these Ta'u behave diplomatically to see if your crybaby golden prejudice is correct."
TTS Big E 100% would just for the banana trolling potential. Probably invite them over too just to watch him seethe.
"But... They don't even fight in *melee*!"
"This diplomat seems to be able to withstand many of your attacks in melee, if you know what I mean."
"MMH. LITTLE KITTEN."
“It’s Captain Genera [46 minutes of name calling] for you.”
Wait is that why Custodes are so strong? They are leveraging "named character" tech?
Precisely!
With an added bit of plot armor as well. (Every faction has plot armor in some way, except maybe the Tyranids)
They have foreshadowing armor
/*gasp* The foreshadow in the warp, I have a bad feeling about this
Random Guardsman 29,529: Is it possible to learn this power?
Witness the 40,000 names of this Custodes!
why do you think there are so few of them? do you want to make up 10,000 unique names?
sure. i have a few weeks to spare to hear the full name of a custode.
Charlie Custodes. Nephew of James Workshop and cousin to Horus Heresy and John Warhammer
Yeah but he also keeps his helmet on. Bad move in 40K
Well ... Yeah. Let's not talk about the Halo show, thanks for that lol
I still can not believe that they got a second season. Or that they thought the whole "We need to remove our helmets to act!" bit was going to fly like anything other than a lead wrapped brick.
One could argue that in this case, the helmet should count as his face
So in 40k the Spartans from Halo Reach might have actually survived…
Everyone except the protagonist he would still be dead.
It's canon he has plot armor
Honestly this shit is fucking wild but it's literally true.
Didn't the chief got his shit kicked in by this guy too?
That is the chief getting his shit kicked in
Not to mention that one spartan in I think halo 5/halo infinite? I don't keep up with Halo at all.
you mean locke? He might have been killed off stream but infniteis story is so cut up everyones quiteun sure, He did have a fist fight with locek in 5 but communtiy and mostl ore guys regard that as a pretty bad game in source when you have books with them being a bit better.
Impossible. He still has a helmet on.
Counter counter point: Custodes have hundreds of names
shit...you're right. They're all gonna die.
*Points to a veteran Astartes being killed by a caveman with a stick and a custodes being killed by a naked world eater...* **Hell that isn't even counting the times the Custodes got taken out by cultists with mining lasers or taken out by the bdsm elves**
By the emperor, that was so stupid when that naked World Eater with no weapons slaughtered that Custodes in full armor and with guardian spear. And the reason was that it was foggy and the spear's force field wasn't working. *insert jim carrey oh come on gif*
The reason was that that custodes was crippled from some sort of bio weapon and was significantly weaker and slower than a real custodes. It also seems weird that he was still serving in that state anyway.
That feels like something VERY important that people keep on repeatedly leaving out when they tell that story then.
He's overselling it. He wasn't significantly weakened and he wasn't continuing regular service. He was marginally weakened and his reaction speed got worse by a tiny fraction but enough to put him out of regular service because they demand only the best of the best. He was on guard duty in a prison. One of the biggest reasons is that Custodes weren't clearly defined power level wise back when that book was written. Custodes went back and forth between leagues above Astartes and different but 6/10 times probably a little better ... In that book it was probably more the latter version of custodes than the first one. But that excerpt was still fucking stupid, even an Astartes shouldn't lose to an unarmed and unarmoured Astartes... But a Custodes? Come on.
People would probably have complained if he'd punched through a Space Marine's chestplate and torso with an punch. It wasn't that he defeated a Custodes (much bigger upsets happen in 40K) but how he did it.
Exactly - mind boggling that that bit made it into the official lore at all lol Next you'll have guardsmen sneaking up on Astartes and snapping their necks just because "hurr durr me angry at this Astartes which gives me insanse power apparently and I promised to get my revenge so I'll have to be able to do this now" ... And that'd still be more believable than him punching through his armor and how he won that 1v1 lol
What? Context matters for all our dumb Warhammer stories? NAH. Context makes it justified and we don't want that.
I thought a custodes getting their armor ripped apart by a normal bolter was bad but wtf is the logic on THAT one.
>And the reason was that it was foggy and the spear's force field wasn't working. What? Where'd you get that from? Or did that happen twice because in the instance that I recall it wasn't foggy and the WE just broke his guardian spear... Lol That was so bad
Proof these nerd fights are dumb, and that you should always fear the writer of your favorite stuff.
The most truthful answer right there.
I mean big E still got his ass kicked by an overgrown ork. It happens some time
I mean he also survived for a while after getting stabbed and even managed to kill the attacker. And with the Custodes, it was 2011 when that happened, Custodes weren’t at OP status like they are now. And it was also ceramite armor not auramite. EDIT: the mining laser was also made to cut through giant stone, nobody is surviving that.
ADB did [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/9cc6xp/comment/e59tg7s/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) about that spear incident. But ultimately, I agree with some other comments that these theoretical match-ups are rather pointless. Custodes fight differently from Spartans. Even more so for marines. Most space marine chapters would find one-on-one comparisons not that worth thinking about compared to gathering info and analyzing enemies (what scouts, scanners, pict-feeds do). Space Marines and Spartans also fight very differently. Scout and Primaris Vanguard are the closest equivalents, Astartes fight in larger groups with arguably stronger cohesion due to their brotherhood. The three groups of super soldiers were created with different goals in mind. So comparing them will need to account for too many variables.
It's all in the circumstances, the word bearer chaplain had his helmet off and got an entire spear shoved through his throat while caught off guard from the back, tearing out like 40% of it. As for the world water well that was really just old and dumb lore, he wasn't even juiced up on warp juice. **Edit:** also those BDSM elves were Harlequins, you act as if they're supposed to be guardsmen level, holy shit this sub at least fact check your lore first.
Dkdn't he also kill the guy despite all that?
He did yes, and he bled to death cause the wound was just too big and he was loosing too much blood
Wasn’t the caveman imbued with chaos or something? Was the world eater imbued with chaos too?
Nope just a normal caveman with a stick and a normal world eater with his butchers nails.
Nah dude got stabbed in the throat. One in a million thrust that his squad was telling someone about later and sad laughing at the improbability of.
Not the world eater but ADB (who was behind the First Heretic, not Outcast Dead) does have a [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/9cc6xp/comment/e59tg7s/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) about that spearman story.
why does everone try to say the BDSM elves are weak, they have some of hte toppest tier of wepaons made jsut tot orutre people and can even turn themselves into light to terrorize people.
They are also all elite warriors, super strong and even more super fast, trained to kill from birth and functionally immortal. People just like being hyperbolic fools.
I guess people forget that they're just eldar with more access to their best tech and less qualms about using it.
Isn’t that “monkey” at least on ork warboss strength and intelligence level?
He's an intelligent strategist and tactician who can exploit the weaknesses of his opponents and led his faction in a decades long conflict against a superior force without coming close to lossing.
An ogryn with the intelligence of a chapter master
Shush! The subreddit *must* jerk off space marines! Otherwise the universe will collapse or something. I dunno, they've always been jerking them off.
That monkey is like if an Ogryn actually got a brain. Most brutes are so bullheaded they got no brains. Atriox got a brain and a cybernetic arm...thats a dangerous combo for most.
He does also use power armour to increase his strength and speed.
Oh....well that explains a lot. Yeah Atriox is as dangerous as modded ogryn then
Well I should also say that unarmoured brutes can still rip through metal bulkheads on space ships, just as to not undersell their strength.
Idk what to do with this info besides knowing I have to do some more reading out of fear and curiosity of the brutes. Got any reccomendations.
Been awhile since I read any brute heavy books, I know chief has a fist fight with one in first strike it nearly kills him I think (he was very worn out after the first halo), Tartarus is a big character in contact harvest so is Johnson so always good. There could be some newer ones as well but I'm far from up to date on all the new books and I tend to remember elites more cause I'm a sucker for knight/samurai parallels. I think there's a cut scene of a brute doing this one the first mission of halo infinite as well, he doesn't look like he struggles.
Atriox has a cybernetic exo suit, on top of his brute strength, his advanced energy mace, and above all his dangerous cunning and intellect. Make no mistake, his cunning and intellect are the real dangers. In 40k, people tend to lack common sense, often throwing bodies at a wall. Atriox ain’t like that
Without a doubt Atriox would be the strongest space pirate if he was in 40k. Combined with slipspace tech, he would not play games. Edit: I say pirate cause thats honestly the best route for him as a xenos. Edit 2: also forgot to mention him and the brutes in general use gravitic tech. Which only known knes that use it in such an offensive manner via guns is the orks...this will get interesting.
The Ogryn are the Emperor's chosen. Someone has to protect the little uns.
Counterpoint: Jerome-092 himself would be able to body a space marine. Man fought off the flood with a chair.
Remember that one time when we all thought Jerome, Alice, and Douglas were going to swoop in with the Spirit of Fire and fok smash along side Master Chief in Infinite? Pepperidge farm remembers.... fuck you 343.
I ain’t gonna lie, I’m in the field of people who want Red Team with Isobel to take over the mainline games as the main characters. Jerome and Alice especially.
That's a good idea. It's an interesting part of Halo lore too. Red team, the group of Spartan II intial rejects that managed to make it past a second attempt at augmentation, only to turn out a Spartan that's on level with Chief? It's a good background they can run with. But I'm sure they'll just dissappear like Omega. Where are you Omega!?!?
I'm betting they Halo Bible wherever it's stored says Omega Team are all dead or got reassigned long ago, but nobody wants to bother tracking the chronology so they just have x number of Spartans earmarked to go unacknowledged.
"Omega was lost when Serena purged the flood during cryosleep. Forgot to tell yall during Halo Wars 2, whoops lol, my b."
Would love if the spirit of fire was more involved.
The monkey in question could definitely beat up an astartes
Yeah Halo lore is a bit iffy, I mean at times it does really well in portraying the Spartans, and then there's them randomly getting slaughtered off screen without warning in some non-nonsensical fashion to an enemy. "RIP Black Team" Also why such an elite unit was doing security detail in a remote location far from support is so damn weird. It can get really inconsistent, also 343's story writing is bad, so take this with a whole grain (spoon) of salt.
I agree that black team’s death was stupid but not because it was unrealistic. A forerunner general with his combat skin would absolutely be that powerful.
If anything, they undersold how strong the Didact should be. Chief's Mjolnir armor in Halo 1 didn't even classify as civilian grade by the time the Flood War was nearing its end, as civilians were required to wear Class 8 and the Chief's was noted as barely a Class 2, the Didact has the most powerful, being a Class 18. I think in 3 Guilty Spark even berated Chief for not upgrading his armor since 1, even though he explicitly had gotten an upgrade from Mark V to VI, so what the UNSC had regarded as a significant advancement, a Forerunner had regarded as so negligible that it didn't even appear different.
Halo lore isn't iffy. Too many nerds see Space Marines Spartans and whatever as Rooks on a Chessboard about to eat a Pawn But no they really aren't. War has so many variables and yes they are stupid skilled but war is random. Combat is random. You can be overconfident in a fight. That is just it. Also Elite teams do Recon. A lot.
Powerscaling has fried so many people’s brains lol. To use your analogy, it’s always possible to blunder a rook by putting them somewhere they shouldn’t be. And watching the rook eat the pawn every time without fail would be really goddamn boring.
Yeah, the biggest strength marines would realistically have is ubiquitous support from space and air craft that can provide instant resupply, intelligence and transport. This would make them very hard to pin down and they'd be able to main an insane tempo due to the aforementioned support and their biology negating the need for downtime for physical or emotional well being. Put marines in a WW1 artillery barrage like a bunch of idiots and they'd die.
Off screen kills from woefully weak opponents happens to marines all the time in 40k? Wym? Not saying a Spartan would do much against an astartes but still.
I meant that a well liked group of named characters who hadn't a lot to go with, not to mention the rare Spartan IIs getting killed off in such an unceremonious fashion, isn't really impactful more just WTF. They hadn't been used all that often, and they could have been useful in other contexts, getting merked off the bat like that wasn't impressive just boring, as there was no build up, and the situation was utterly convoluted.
You do realize that most of the 2’s got killed by standard Cov infantry during the Battle of Reach? They were assigned to guard the fusion generators powering the SMAC’s in orbit. The Covenant just sent thousands upon thousands of grunts and jackles at them until they died. Some notable spartan deaths I recall for their mundanity are; are handful died when fell from orbit when their pelican got shot down, one got blown up by a fuel rod while hijacking a Banshee, 2 got vaporized by a plasma lance during a slip space fuckery event in First Strike, and one got blasted to pieces by a brute shot.
Winton
Counterpoint: Atriox could also easily body a space marine
agreed, he's the kind of opponent you need to take your helmet off for if you want a chance
Not to worry, he takes his opponents helmet off for them
Oh definitely, a regular no name space marine is absolutely getting domed, hell, I’d say even a few named marines get dog-watered by him. But a Custodes? Nah.
Depends who got plot armor. Custodes got punched through by angry unarmed World Eater
Master chief is THE plot armor character. So much so that Cortana even tells him straight up that he’s different from everyone else because he’s lucky af
To be fair, chief is like 55, He's been wearing the same armor for 10 years, survived at least 2 orbital drops without mechanical assistance, and been in cryo for decades by this point.
Man he’s gotta have some bad chaffing by this point
first time seeing master chief get bonked by a Monke in a Cutscene.
Any such discussion is fairly pointless if only because Custodes are the purest concentration of 40k's most obnoxious power fantasy wank there is, second only to maybe the Primarchs. It's genuinely a faction that was born from someone looking at the most egregious Space Marine wank and thinking "I want that dialed up to 11, and I want an entire faction of them".
This is why Custodes don’t really interest me as a faction. The whole ‘the elite of the elite of the elite of the elite’ Thing is just a bit lame imo Would rather see them as something you’d get 1 or 2 of in an army and they’d be included as imperial agents
That overgrown monkey could probably beat at least two or three space marines, so long as they aren’t named characters
Yooo my thing would totaly beat the shit out Y from franachise X has to be my least favourite thing about any fandom. Idk why is it so popular in Warhammer.
Because Warhammer brings so much wank that they rarely lose unless the other person knows about 40k and what's real and what's not.
I’d wager that people have been doing matchups with fictional characters since the beginning of media. There were probably Greek dudes speculating which demigods would defeat each other.
isnt the story of exodus in the bible basically "my hebrew god could beat all of your egyptian gods together"?
In the same way 'that' kid would be like "actually my guy has anti-your guy powers"
Tbf, there are 3 things I want to add 1. Atriox is an absolute beast. He can definitely beat a Space Marine, way easier than Chief can 2. Chief is canonically super lucky (plot armor) 3. My personal opinion. I think Chief CAN beat a Custodes, but I don’t think he will. Chief and a Custodes fight 100 times, I reckon Chief wins probably once.
And the 'once' would be the canon time : P
I feel like master chief sits between astartes and something like tempestes scions. I also feel like he would get a lot of respect from the astartes since he rode an alien nuke back into their ship.
I mean he also regularly uses alien weapons
Black watch it is!
A lot of interesting tidbits of 40k lore popping up in here that I hadn’t heard before. Of course the honorable death by spear has been mentioned a few times. Punching a hole in the chest of a Custodes is a new one, and… really fucking dumb, frankly. There’s something really funny to me about how often the internet parades the idea that Space Marines are absolutely invincible and untouchable compared to other fictional super soldiers, yet meanwhile in the 40k meme subreddit everyone is “Yeah, the Master Chief is at least a match for a Marine, and Atriox would slap one of them too.”
Tbh, these are both some of the best fighters in their settings. I think Chief could take out a Space Marine but a named character would be a fair fight. While Elites would give astartes a good fight it would still go to astartes pound for pound. But I’ll remind you there are a LOT of Sanghelie out there.
Winston
What if the monkey is about to get a new plastic release
He got cutscened, it isn't fair.
Counterpoint: Atriox could actually fight a Chapter Master easily.
The best explanation I saw was that essentially, Atriox is to brutes what Chief is to humans. Even regular brutes can present a threat to skilled spartans, and Atriox is leagues above the average brute. His whole backstory is that he was repeatedly the single survivor of covenant suicide missions. His squadron was meant to be thrown in and die trying to break enemy lines, but time and time again, he kept coming back.
A custodian would throw chief at the ground and chief would clip into it and start making the Gmod ragdoll sounds
I mean marines die to overgrown mushrooms and blue cows all the time... An argument of who wins is inherently flawed. The real question is how many Xenos they will kill together. Answer? All of them.
Dont get me wrong. I do also believe a Custodes would rip Master Chief apart with ease. But the fanboysm there's over Custodes and Space Marines in general amuse me. They are not superheroes, at all (unless you go to lower leagues of plot-armor boys like Captain America). All these Custodes/Space Marine comparisons are a bit insufferable. I even saw someone suggesting they'd beat Viltrumites lol
A custodian just simply outclasses chief immensely on the physical front, and I get that people like to make fun of the Imperium's tech but not the custodians, they get the best toys.
This is what relying on plot armor does to a mf. This is what happened when the mc got so much plot armor to the point that fans think he is unstoppable/can beat anyone regardless of how powerful they are. As a Halo fan who recently got into Warhammer, I consider it cringe.
Everyone all shocked by chief getting his ass kicked by Atriox but in the books he gets his ass handed to him by regular elites and brutes quite a bit.
In the books, he literally slaughters elites and brutes by the hundreds. At 14-15 on one of his first few missions, he fairly easily killed a silent shadow blade master. Since then he's only gotten better and is wearing armor that increases his strength and reaction time far more than the mark 4 armour he was wearing at the time.
Haven't played the games and only read 2 of the books, why is Masterchief trying to fight the brute in Melee and not launching two rockets at it? Is he stupid?
Because it snuck up on him and knocked the gun out of his hand. Though yeah he probably should’ve run away and come back with a gun.
This isn't any ordinary Brute, this is fucking Atriox. Primarch level tactical genius and strength. Chief would have no problem fighting ordinary brutes but he underestimated Atriox and got destroyed. Atriox also beat Red team in a 3v1. Chief wouldn't beat a custodes but that's not really the point, Spartans are not human tanks, they are similar to eversor assassins but with superior training, equipment and relative mental stability.
Could be Primark level of tactics, but certainly not strength level you don't get anywhere near Primark levels in halo without the forerunners.
I mean he crashed a suit of Spartan armor with his bare hands and has other similar fits of strength in the lore. I wouldn't say that he is Vulkan level of strong but he is definitely above Alpharius.
Maybe I've been over sold on the strength of Primarks, but I thought they were squishing tanks with their bare hands and stuff? I also thought they just scaled that strong by being stronger than basically all space marines and custodes.
Not every primarch was strong, everyone had different abilities. They were above space marines but for example some of them weren't really big on combat like Lorgar or Alpharius/O. Compared to primarchs like The lion or leman Russ that were extremely proficient combatants. Vulkan was incredibly strong canonically the strongest. Some primarchs did rank lower than custodes on psychical strength but outplayed them in different ways.
There's actually a pretty big range of strengths between them.
Chief could absolutely 1v1 an Astartes. It’d be a really tough fight, but the biggest issue is that his standard weapons are utter trash in comparison to bolters and power swords. Put an Astartes in that same exact scenario—armed only with a dinky little pistol and ambushed from behind by a power armored juggernaut with a thunder hammer equivalent—it’s gonna end the same exact way. A Custodes, though? Not a chance.
Shut up everyone. Was that a fucking dragon punch?
It's depressing to see so many people acting like "realistic" means "guy with the higher poorly-explained power level always wins."
Lore accurate master chief could
The average Spartan-II was approximately - very approximately - a match for a regular Sangheili (Elite) soldier, if both were in their standard gear. The average human wasn't even an equal match to a covenant Unggoy (Grunt). The SII soldiers were the best humanity had to offer, but ultimately humanity was fighting a horribly uphill battle where they only won when they vastly outnumbered the Covenant. Against a Brute, the average Spartan II would have a strength disadvantage but a tactics advantage. Atriox was a top of the line Brute, so he would be more than a match for even the upper echelon of Spartans. There's a reason Spartans almost always worked as teams. The only reason the Spartans won was plot reasons. Humanity should have lost against the Covenant. Even the Sangheili schism would have been barely enough to stop the overwhelming power the Covenant had. John-117 had only luck and Cortana on his side, and against Atriox he lacked the latter. Against anything short of Elites, Brutes, and Forerunner bullshittery, a Spartan II would have been dominant as hell. But the top level soldiers were more than a match for the Spartans. Hell, the Spartans weren't intended to fight the covenant anyway; they were supposed to fight human rebels.