I disagree that we shouldn't assume Imu is strong since he fought Rocks, Kaido, and Whitebeard 1v3
"Strong attacker", not "Strong". Strong he is, obviously, about attacker is an unknown. We have 3 attacks done by him. One against Sabo, where he used speed. One against Xebec, where Xebec didn't even feel anything. And one Against Broggy, where he used the grimoire and summoned a revolver that exploded his entire arm.
With the Trident that is the first attack that he made, and the attack was blocked.
Note he fought against Rocks, Whitebeard, Kaido, Linlin, Roger and Garp, with Saint Saturn body, and used Saint Saturn tentacles attacks, and all of them evaded and cut those tentacles apart.
That is not a showing of strong attacker.
and I disagree that Brook might be a shield specialist since we know he's a fencing specialist.
They are not exclusive. Brook is also a Pianist, Violinist, Guitarrist specialist, and he said many more instruments specialist.
In fact it just might be that he prefers fencing, and so he discarded the shield, given that you can't really fence with a shield.
But I agree there's no reason Brook shouldn't be able to block the attack because, like I said, powerscaling in One Piece is bullshit.
Things don't work like that. Is never a simple 1 things vs 1 thing. You just need to see sports, specially fighting sports like boxing or MMA to understand it. You can one time make a perfect defence to an attack, and the other time take the full attack.
The world is made of probabilities, because there is many variables, many of them are really a case of the situation. It could be as simple as the positioning of Imu being really bad, and that of Brook really good. And he would be able to defend an attack that otherwise he wouldn't.
If powerscaling is just using simple quantifiers and/or qualifiers. Than it is the powerscaling that is wrong, and not how the actual fight is shown.
Anyone can fight anyone and put up a good fight.
How many fights in real life have stronger foe being defeated by weaker ones. How many sports have stronger teams lost with weaker teams.
In fact when two teams/foe compete against each other, you can only be sure of the probability of the result. Example, if team A is way stronger than team B, then the only thing that you can only say, is that in most claches team A will defeat team B.
The same with individual fights.
While One Piece shows this aspect, it still for the most part shows the most probable outcomes, for the most part.
Oda normally with the main characters, normally Luffy fights, he shows the enemy that is stronger winning multiple times, the mains going again and again, until they get that one, low probability win.
If I would talk one thing bad about this scheme, is the fact that the mains always get back up and get another fight, but the foes only fight only until that one defeat. They should get back up and get another chance, like the ones that the main(Luffy) have.
Other than that, One Piece fights are good and well made, and make a lot of sense. For the most part.
Also I see a lot of people not understanding how Haki works, and they think that is the universal quantifier that decides who wins, and that it nullify everything else. It doesnt. But that is a conversation for another time.
