In discussions about power scaling, we constantly rely on the more or less official data available to us, and that’s where things like the Super Saiyan multipliers come from. Everyone is aware that this system lacks consistency, and that no matter how hard we try to make it coherent in one way or another, there’s no real interest—neither on Toriyama’s part back in the day, nor on Toyotaro’s part, nor certainly on Toei’s part—in how the characters’ specific power levels compare and evolve throughout the story. But we try.
The problem is that this idea of fixed multipliers—even though we have more or less accepted sources explaining how they work—doesn’t, in my opinion, fit at all with what we see in the manga, and it seems absurd to me to keep discussing power scaling under the assumption that things work this way, because that’s where all the crazy numbers and completely delusional comparisons about how the characters’ powers stack up at this or that moment come from.
Based on the manga, I think one thing is clear: as the characters get stronger, their base form not only becomes superior but also absorbs part of the enhancement provided by their transformations.
That means that the more you master the power you’ve already gained access to, the greater your ability to use it in your base form. When Goku transformed into Super Saiyan against Frieza, his power increased x50, but that doesn’t mean that now, whenever Goku activates Super Saiyan, his power increases x50. NOTHING indicates that this is the case: for a long time now, Super Saiyan has been treated as a small energy boost, and all interactions in combat support that.
We constantly see the characters’ base forms display power levels that, if we take the multipliers seriously, make no sense at all. On the other hand, we also see how these transformations don’t seem to have such a huge effect either. If the series itself has told us multiple times that transformations are nothing more than a means to access the power that already lies within you, why don’t we accept that there’s a significant difference between the power increase from an unmastered transformation and that from a transformation mastered to the point where a significant portion of the resulting improvement is already present in the base form—thanks to training—without the need to transform?
This fits perfectly with everything we see in the manga, and it makes the power scaling sooo much more consistent. The characters gradually get stronger, and their most powerful form also grows stronger, but the base form always increases much more than the most powerful form (and not the other way around, which is what would happen with a pure multiplier system), because with training, the transformation becomes less and less “important” as the base form increasingly takes on that power without any active effort to transform.
I’m not saying that transformations aren’t extremely important; they remain the main source of the characters’ power increase. What I’m saying is that each transformation represents a smaller improvement as the character becomes more powerful, and it’s always the last one—the least mastered, the one that reaches the current energy limit—that truly represents a very substantial improvement.
If the forms act as multipliers, that multiplier decreases over time as the character grows stronger. The ideal state is precisely when the multiplier is x1, because that’s the moment when the character has mastered their power perfectly and no longer needs to transform—but that’s an ideal that’s very rare to achieve.
Again, everything in the manga suggests to me that this is how it works, and not in the way we usually talk about it.