Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-65.94.50.112-20131215233249/@comment-10380701-20140124135951

StormFlower being useless is a wrong assumption. It was the reason the Deathstalker's tail was pretty much fucked over.

Sure, it looks useless against the Taijitu and the Deathstalker's armor.

Except against a crowd of Beowolves, it will work well, given it's rapid fire nature. But we never saw any of that sort happen... yet.

Ren's getting a lot of flak for being tired out in the end of the Deathstalker fight. Multiple factors throughout the entire Initiation fucked him over. There's the Taijitu fight... the Ursa shenanigan with Nora... and being slammed to the wall. Besides him, no one else had to do that.

So in theory, Ren is most likely on par with most of the characters in almost every field except Aura, where he shines the most. He's no more powerful than Weiss, one of the best Dust users among RWBY and JNPR.

As for the other students fighting the Taijitu, besides Weiss, Yang and Nora, I'd say they'll have some issues.

Weiss won't have a problem being cornered by it, since she can jump around thanks to her Glyphs.

Yang can beat the shit out of the Taijitu with sheer force alone. Her only problem would be coordinating her attacks to hit both heads.

Nora... is Nora. She'll just bash it's other head to the ground before riding the second head like a horse before breaking it.

Pyrrha may have some issues alone. This mostly stems from the fact that we haven't seen her fight alone yet, so we don't know how skilled she is with her weapon besides a few well-placed sword swings and a spear to the eye of the Deathstalker.

Ruby, as stated by 82.12.156.248 above me, is badass, but inexperienced. She'll rush into it head on and get attacked by the second head.

Blake will be slightly better prepared, but I doubt her weapon is sharp enough to take it down, unless she goes for the eyes.

Jaune... is Jaune. It's like a lion taking on a T-rex.

...I like how this thread went from making Blake weak, into making everyone weak. Which is true. RWBY and JNPR have shown badassery in episode 8. But they're first years. At the moment, they're still level 5-8. They have countless level grinding to do before they can be considered to be as strong as Glynda for example. That, and apparently weapon upgrades in future seasons.

TL;DR Everyone is weak in their own way.