Just caught up on this season, and can someone please fucking explain to me how Cinders power levels, skill set, and abilities work?
Phase 1 Cinder, pre-Amber, pre-Maiden was a total scrub who didn't seem like she can handle herself in a fight at all whatsoever. Her weapon was a crappy bowgun. During the fight with Amber, the only thing she could do is take shitty little pot shots with her crossbow, and leaves all the fighting to her flunkies .She specifically recruited Emerald, with a hacked ability to give her any advantage she could have, and Mercury, probably the best fighter that she could hope to recruit as a follower, considering the point that she had no power level herself at the time, to cover her weakness.
Phase 2, when she's half-Maiden she drops her crossbow completely, and uses her dust and 1/2 fire powers completely as a crutch. We never see her do anything that impressive, it's never implied she could do anything that impressive, and all she ever does is throw fire around.
Just as she hits Phase 3 and goes 100% Maiden she's utterly destroyed by Ruby, loses an eye, loses an arm, and is bodily fucked up. It takes 6 months to a year before she can move, talk, or use powers again, and now she must learn how to exist with severe handicaps from scratch. She never had time to train or even get used to her Maiden powers, let alone learn new fighting styles in a new body.
Relatively immediately after that, she can hold her own in both a maiden and a giant sword battle with Raven. Raven, who has been trained properly in one of the Academy's, who has vastly more life and battle experience than Cinder, and who has been a maiden for years, with a much greater knowledge of that power and using it. Also, Cinder as far as we know has never fought with a sword before.
This season she's suddenly a hyper super competent expert martial artist, despite apparently never using martial arts before, who can hold her own with Neo using no maiden Powers.
WTF.