notes: need to rewrite in better detail and need proofreading. need to discuss with group about any missing errors or opinions.
calculating: Leon, Alucard, Maria (child), Maxim, Soma (aos dos), Maria (SAT), Simon (CV1)

Top 5 strongest Castlevania characters (gameplay-wise)

No. 5

No. 4

No. 3 Alucard (Symphony of the Night)


Keep in mind that for Alucard, there is a right way to level him and a wrong way to level him. Every level, Alucard gets random stats gain of anywhere from 1 to 4 stat points. This process is irreversible. He also gains 4 or 5 MP randomly. Alucard's starting stats are also dependent on your performance of Richter vs Dracula (which you cannot get the best results unless you have completed the game already). So if you perform poorly, you cannot undo this either.

Assuming you start with Alucard's best stats, keep only his best level ups, the picture shown will be his stats by Level 99. A fully powered Muramasa will also be 999 Attack Power. Note that to get this though, you have to reset an insane amount of times to get the best level up. In addition, past level 70+, enemies give very little experience. By the time you reach Lv 80, you will have to kill tens of thousands of enemies to get a level up. The maxing Muramasa process is extremely time consuming. In short, if you want the best results as the featured stats here, be prepared to sacrifice hundreds of hours.

Alucard can get up to 4900+ HP. That is even more than some of the bosses in the game. In the game, few attacks deal more than 100 damage to you, so you will be close to indestructible with this much HP. Example, around 120 enemy attack from Guardian minus Alucard's 60 defense gives 60 damage.

Alucard has a relic that makes him immune to curse, and with bonus 40 CON, even poison clears off almost immediately.

Furthermore, there are many ways to destroy your enemies. There's the Shield Rod combos with Alucard Shield and Dark Shield, which can deal powerful attacks while making you temporarily invincible. Crissaegrim (Valmanway) also can deal nearly 200 damage per hit with such high stats, dealing 4 rapid hits each time. Other useful attacks include Double Heavenly Sword attack.

Note that there is a wrong way to level up Alucard. The best level up involves 4 points in all stats. The worst have only 1 point, and not in Strength. For example, if you levelled up Alucard to Level 99, every stat only at 1 point, and never in Strength, what you will have is a Lv 99 Alucard with only 7 Strength. A very bad situation. (This is just an example. Unless you're intentionally trying to get the bad level all the time, you won't get into it.) This is the worst case scenario, and this Alucard would be the weakest character, rather than the strongest character.

Assuming even if you don't try too hard, just making sure Alucard has at least 3 points per level up (with one of the points being Str), and reach about Lv 65-70, he will still be very powerful, at around a thousand HP, and stats ranging in the 60-70s. He will still have an arsenal of powerful attacks, including Crissaegrim, Masamune, Double Heavenly Sword, Shield Rod Combos. Slightly weaker ones will be the Fist of Tulkas and the Sword Familiar. Once you complete the game at least once, you also can collect the Ring of Varda, which adds a large amount of stats. You can equip up to 2 of these in addition.

Note: The STR stat is the most important one. Base CON is almost useless, mainly because it is only 1/8 as effective as a bonus +CON. (Basically, if you have base CON 8 and have a bonus of CON +8 from an equipment, the result is NOT 16. The base is only 1/8 as much as effective as the bonus.) For INT, it is only 1/4. An Luck is a non-combat stat, but is essential in item collection. STR is the only one where bonus is the same as base.

Note: Through use of glitching, it is possible to get maximum Hearts, HP, as well as Map count, which affects the Walk Armor. But here, we are comparing without any form of cheating and glitching, just pure grinding and farming.

No. 2 Hector

First of all, I would like to say that Hector himself isn't what gives him this high rank, it's his Innocent Devil. If you haven't played Curse of Darkness (I would rather like to call it Curse of Grinding. You'll know why if you keep reading on), then lets compare it to Portrait of Ruin's duo, Jonathan and Charlotte. We all know that Jonathan is the cake (powerhouse) while Charlotte is the icing (extra support/damager). But for Curse of Darkness's hero being the powerhouse, it's actually his Innocent Devil.

Innocent Devil = the cake
Hector = the icing

I'm pretty sure that you're one of the many people who will be thinking, "How is that possible?". Well, there is a way to turn your Innocent Devil into a pure killing machine. But before we get to that, lets talk about Hector, the sidekick, and what extra damage he can do. First of all, here are some options to what Hector should be using for his weapon:

Death Scythe: highest attack, Dark element
War Hammer: second highest two handed axe weapon (I put this in even though there's already the Death Scythe because it has better combo enders)
Hien: fast, simple, Light element
Chauve-souris: great mob control weapon
Laser Blade: all around good weapon for any occasion.

Next, any armors that boost STR. Now we go to the accessories. The main accessory is Megingelos. For every 10 HP lost, you gain 1 extra damage. Also add in the extra stats from having an Innocent Devil out. As for the final touch, any element that enemies is weak to. There you have it, the extra damage dealer which in my opinion, is enough to do great (not excellent) in killing stuff.

Now lets go to the star of the show. The one who actually destroys the game, the Innocent Devil. First of all, prepare to do alot of grinding, which is why I call this game Curse of Grinding. This is rather confusing, so I'll try to explain it in a more simple way. When your I.D. releases a shard, it gains 10% of its parent's stats. After another shard, it gains an extra 1%. Overall, the max bonus you can ever get is %11.

Okay, so lets start on how to make the killer. I'm going to use the Mage type as the example. Believe me, every stat for I.D.s is pretty much useless except for MAG and hearts (MAG being more important than hearts). MAG because most I.D. skill damage comes from MAG and hearts, well, as your MP for the skills. The Talon Rod gives the most MAG out of all the Mage types so we're going to aim for Talon first. Since every level up for the I.D. gives stats according to their profile (the game doesn't give exact stats per level, you'll have to check a guide or something), you'll want all 98 level ups from the Talon Rod. But wait, how can grind crystals to get to Talon if we get exp from killing monsters? Well that's where you go and grind on Skeletons because they don't give any exp. Once you finished grinding crystals and got your level 1 Talon Rod, it's time to start grinding it to level 99. Once you get to level 99, get a shard from it (10% bonus), repeat the process all over (level one Talon Rod) and get another shard (1% bonus). You will have the highest possible MAG you can get for the Mage type. Here is the formula so you can determine what is the highest stat you can get for a type:

2.8 (MAG stat every level) x 98 (98 level ups) = 274.4 + 20 (lvl 1 MAG stat) = 294.4 + 11% = 32.384 = 326.784

Basically being 326 MAG for Mage type. This is all from a fresh generation 1 Mage (where you get it ingame) but I'm sure 99% of you have been messing up on your stats. Is it too late? No. But you'll have to keep repeating the process (level one Talon Rod) until you reach 326 MAG (the moer you have messed up, the more cycles you'll have to do).

Okay, now you have your max MAG, now what? You aim for the skills you want. There's obvious skills which are very good compared to most of the skills which are useless. I'm too lazy to list them but you can check the Curse of Darkness section on this wiki for details. How is damage calculated:

MAG x 3 + MAG x 1 + MAG x 3

That is a 3 hit I.D. skill. The first and third hit does 3 times the MAG you have. Since you have 326 MAG, that would be 978 x 2. As for the 2nd hit, it's 326 since it's multipled by 1. So it leads to:

978 + 326 + 978 = 2282… damage!

Also considering that most skills are nearly spammable, nevermind normal enemies, you'll be killing bosses in a matter of seconds. Add that with Hector adding in additional damage and you have a perfect duo.

No.1 Shanoa

Ah, yes, Shanoa. Who would've thought that the most powerful character from the Castlevania universe would be the only female protaganist (if not including Sonia)? Lets start off with how the Order of Ecclesia system works for her. She uses "glyphs" which you can call her left hand ane right hand.
She can equip "weapons" and "spells". Pretty much sounds like what Alucard can do by equipping stuff onto his left and right hand right? Quite but not exactly. Shanoa has the ability to switch hand to hand rapidly by pressing the left hand button and the right hand button back and forth. With quick enough weapons, you can slice n' dice through enemies like a nerfed Cris. Even though the MP meter is supposed to make this less spamful, it doesn't help much. Okay, so lets see, she can deal a great amount of damage in a short amount of time compared to most other characters who have to wait for their attack to finish before attacking again. Lets go onto the next thing. There's "atribute points in this game". What they do is make your damage rise when attacking depending on what attribute point you are raising. Lets say if you're raising ice, then your attack damage will rise when you use ice element attacks. For around every 300 points, you gain 1% extra damage. The highest it can go is up to 65535 which should be about 300% extra damage. So lets use rapier glyphs as an example because they're quick. If they do 10 damage per hand, that would be 30 damage per hand. Add to the fact that you can spam attacks VERY fast if your fingers can handle it, you'd be getting at least 3 attacks into the enemy in a second which would be 90 damage a second. Enemies also tend to not flinch or move when getting hit so you'd be able to kill them before they could even get a move off. Of course, it takes alot of time to max out your attribute points, which is why I would like to call this game, "Grind of Ecclesia".

Okay lets get to the better stuff now. Remember how I said that attribute points count by percentage? Which basically means that the higher damage you can get, the much more effective it will be. Put on the correct gears (whether it's STR or INT) and put on two Death Rings and watch your damage explode. But wait, that's not the main thing that makes Shanoa broken. It's her Union glyphs. Think of them as the "Item Crash" of the game. Take out the two Death Rings and replace them with two Judgement Rings and see your damage. But wait, we're missing the final touch, and that's Dominus Agony, yet ANOTHER massive boost to your damage. The most famous Union glyph in terms of speed, range, damage, etc is the Nitesco + any weapon glyph. With an added 43 attack power to the Union (which I don't think is mentioned in the game) and an element of darkness and fire, you'll easily be doing over 5000 damage an attack which is enough to kill everything in the game in one hit except for Dracula which takes two and Wallman (because he has infinite HP).

With that in place, who needs to gear switch for special occasions when you can just use one attack for EVERY occasion? I'm talking about bosses, since the attack does have a few drawbacks like using up hearts and Dominus Agony stripping your health away (which you can turn off and still do massive damage anyhow).

P.S. I don't like Order of Ecclesia so I'm not biased LOL.
