The struggle defines the diff
Zoro struggling this long using all he did and needing sanji to motivate him by logic don’t make it a low diff
"Needing Sanji to motivate him" is an outrageous statement 😂😂 You're acting like Sanji is one of Zoro's power-ups, like some kinda temporary strength buff lmfaoo.
Zoro didn't "
need" Sanji to motivate him. He just
needed to get serious.
If we assume that Zoro used KOH vs Lucci (he didn't), then this is what your powerscale would be feat-wise:
Serious Base Zoro > G5 Luffy >> casual KOH Zoro ~ casual base Nitoryu Zoro ~ Awakened Lucci.
Do you see how little sense this makes? You cannot scale characters using low-end feats, otherwise, you end up with foolishness like the above.
G5 Luffy was canonically outperformed by base Zoro vs Lucci. Does that mean that we disregard every other G5 Luffy feat and focus on his low-ends? Of course not. G5 Luffy is obviously stronger than Base Zoro, even if base Zoro has better feats vs the same opponent.
And base Zoro is canonically far stronger than Lucci. If Zoro fights Mihawk and it lasts 10 days until Zoro finally gets serious and one-shots, then of course it would mean that Zoro is
capable of low-diffing Mihawk. Because there was
absolutely nothing stopping him from ending the fight at any time he wanted.
We're not saying that Zoro vs Lucci was low-diff. Zoro raised the difficulty of the fight by playing around for so long. What we're saying is that Zoro is
capable of low-diffing Lucci, as he showed that he can casually dispatch him the second he gets serious.
Luffy is also
capable of low-diffing Lucci. He didn't
need to use G5, he could've embarrassed Lucci with ACoC and G2/3. But he didn't - he decided to use his most taxing power-up and increased the difficulty of the fight. Oda does certain things for plot, but the powerscale is very obvious.
He wanted to make it so clear that Lucci wasn't a match for base Zoro, that even the one time Lucci got the upper hand, Oda said it was due to a distraction and Lucci still did no damage. Even I'm surprised that he gave Lucci nothing here lmao, he wanted him to be totally outclassed by base Zoro. It's honestly an insane feat of strength, as Lucci is genuinely YC1.