SPOILER How strong should bak'al be

Exhibit 1: Ran away from CoW even after he gets his armies decimated
Exhibit 2: Has War's blessing
Exhibit 3: Took a fat L to Lari during ROL 5

 

I think he should be treated as a "general" of the corrupted. On his own he isn't very powerful, but he gets exponentially more dangerous the more corrupteds he has in his "army"

 

Bak'al didn't run away from CoW. The issue was that he couldn't control CoW, and it just decimated his army, preventing him from continuing his offensive against Troms. He didn't retreat because CoW is stronger than him (because it isn't), but because his plan was foiled by another corrupted.

 

god damn it the bak'al slander and agenda is getting to me

 

I think he has to be pretty strong if he's working for the Dark.

 

Bak’Al went toe to toe with Lari and ultimately lost in RoL 5, Lari could have beaten the parasite if she wasn’t a pacifist, because she insisted on trapping it in another RoL quest, so I would say right below the parasite.

On an unrelated note, I hope we get something where we fight Bak’Al and all the legends from lore. If that already exists and I’m just blind…

 

Lari could have killed Lvl 2 Parasite. It wasn't so much a statement of Lari's strength as it was of how weak the parasite was at that point. Lari does try to fight the Parasite with Dullahan's help much later on, but ends up losing. Lari of course, probably gained knowledge and power in the following centuries, but how much and what remains unknown and undefined and unmentioned, so there's not much of a conclusive relationship between Bak'al's and the Parasite's power levels.

 

Wynncraft in general has a really silly powerscaling issue, like most level-based video games. Charon for example is hyped up as this powerful and successful city-destroying threat and then you fight him and he's just some low-level guy that walks at you and occasionally shoots a fireball. Being a level based MMO, there will always exist the question: are levels just a gameplay thing or do they actually represent power level? How exactly can one justify a random forest critter being a higher level than a city-destroying threat? The answer can be one or another, but sometimes it can be both or even neither. It's just an inconsistent thing that comes with having a level system.

But anyways, on this specific topic I've actually done an unexpectedly massive (and frankly bordering on obsessive) amount of research on Wynncraft lore to write this, and I've come to the crushing realization that Bak'al... is actually a straightup fraud tbh.
It's funny, because several parts of the lore really want to portray him as this extremely powerful and uncontestable being ("Bob stands as the only being in history who could contend with the terrifying leader of the Corrupt on their own"), but the actual rest of the lore tells a completely different story.

His feats in secret discoveries would imply him to be a similar threat to Charon, but... not really? His biggest feat is destroying Akias which is really more of a settlement than a town, far less than what Charon did, and got completely dogwalked by Bob. I know Bob is meant to be, like, the most powerful hero ever, but it's more of the ease in which he beats Bak'al that makes him look weak. In almost every one of Bak'al's appearances and even in the lore itself he's either killing some basic-level civilians and guards, or he's getting his ass kicked, or he's doing nothing at all.

He does have success in the lore, but pretty much everything he did comes with a big asterisk that effectively discredits his power and makes him look like a warlord of attrition rather than a genuinely powerful being of his own merit.

• He killed many of the Twains, but only decades apart from one another and only after they were all driven apart by a feud (and Marius whose death caused that feud is not even mentioned as being killed by Bak'al). Also, in a Hunter's Calling, Bak'al explicitly states "I am unfamiliar with Twain magic." That's a pretty silly statement from someone who allegedly killed most of them. I guess maybe it could have been before then, but it's not really clear.
  
  
• He destroyed Detlas and many other unnamed towns, but that was long, long before Wynn's citizens had access to magic. ("Fire spreads from his hands like magic. If only we had such power")
  
  
• He was planning to attack Troms but then his army died, clearly illustrating that he can't do it on his own. Moreover, the CoW could destroy Troms on its own, in an instant. And if CoW wasn't more powerful than Bak'al, then why would Bak'al need it to destroy Troms instead of just doing it himself? Bak'al wasn't magically restricted like the CoW was, so if he actually was more powerful than the creature that could destroy Troms easily when unbound, then why couldn't he do so within literal decades? Quite simply, he isn't.
  
  
• Even when Troms eventually did fail, it had nothing to do with Bak'al. It was due to an infected soldier "betraying" Skien and Bak'al isn't even mentioned as being there when it happened. And even if he were, it would only support the point that Bak'al can't do anything on his own and is really nothing more than a tactician who happens to be... somewhat powerful.

I could dig even deeper than that but you probably get the point. Now, those do take place in the distant past long before the current game's setting, but even in the present day Lari claps his cheeks to the point that he has to resort to ragebaiting her; and multiple levels before then, we ourselves actually can beat Lari in a fight, making us definitely stronger than Bak'al.
In conclusion, Bak'al is honestly a pretty weak fraud with all things considered.

Lore-wise he has to be weaker than Lari who herself is weaker than the Parasite, which means he's also significantly weaker than the Eye. He also has to be weaker than the CoW. Gameplay-wise I can't imagine him being any more than a dungeon boss.

I tried to avoid using information that I can't fact-check within the game myself when I was researching, like here on Nesaak's page where it explicitly says that Bak'al never once attacked the town himself, but on Bak'al's page it says the opposite and he actually did attack Nesaak. Conflicting lore is nothing new of course, I just thought I should mention that since I did all that research and more than a few things on the wiki don't have sources listed for me to fact-check.

 

Levels are a gameplay thing

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Not referring to magic, referring to the fact he'd exceedingly powerful compared to the average person

 

The journal is specifically dated at 78AP, and Wynn didn't learn magic until after 900AP. I guess it's technically possible the writer happened to be one of the cursed, but the cursed I'm pretty sure were only sent to Wynn because of the war, not before it. The only magic before 900AP was in a very few select individuals, like the Twains.

From Llevigar's Secret Library, Chapter II: Wynn History, Part 2:

• "They introduced the long needed magical arts, that the Fruma province withheld from the educational circuit, reserved only for the servants of the monarchy."
• "Now there appears to be a strong alliance between all 3 provinces, through the proxy of Wynn."
• "Villagers benefit monetarily from Wynn, Wynn benefit from the magical knowledge of them in exchange."