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This site has always been obsessed with power levels; it's amusing to see how many comments are on this post. I have never cared very much about power levels, and Dom said he never cared much either, but once we got our hands on the notes and saw all the detail on power rankings, making a list was just too tempting. So I guess the obsession rubbed off on me through Dom...

I didn't create this just to come up with the strength scale, I also wanted to look at how old some Aes Sedai were and their training times and nationality breakout etc ... Was a fun exercise to figure out who is Black Ajah and try and infer if strength level might play a role or if it was more heavily weighted toward specific nationalities etc ... Basically I wanted to look at as many data points as we have available cause I'm a nerd like that

I get it, and I did some of that on my half-assed spreadsheet. I wanted to do more but I had to do other stuff.

Some characters are more obsessed with strength than others. Considering the strengths RJ assigned to the Forsaken, it seems that they were kind of oddly not obsessed with strength. Most of the development of the Forsaken happened at a time when RJ hadn't really decided on their strengths, and I think it shows. (And not just in the BWB, where there was a half-assed effort to order the Forsaken by strength.)

The Aes Sedai hierarchy is based on strength, but then they have this weird custom where they're not supposed to talk about it, and RJ went so far as to have Eadyth say she felt the need to scrub her teeth after talking about it.

It was probably some time while RJ was writing books 5-7 that he felt the need to start making notes on Aes Sedai strengths. That would have been when he came up with the first system, with Elaida on top. Then somewhere between TPOD and COT he started using the new system. That's probably when he started trying to decide on Forsaken strengths.

I think it's pretty obvious that he started to explore that no earlier than TSR where we first start hearing a little about various strength levels in more specific detail, but the first 3 books we don't really hear much about it aside from big generalities. I think it's clear that RJ didn't have a formal system in place until TPOD, possibly TSR as we have a few hints in that book as we start to meet channelers outside of Aes Sedai and characters like Egwene start to actually pay attention to strength for the first time (i.e. it's in TSR where Egwene first gives thought to being stronger than Moiraine). By the time we get to later books it's practically obsessive from Elayne or any Aes Sedai to note the strength level of another woman.

There are close to 300 characters who have a specific strength level listed for them, and most of those strengths were explicitly laid out in the books too ... when you stop to think about how much work went into simply introducing 300 characters and mentioning a detail like that for all of them it's no surprise that so many fans are relatively obsessed with OP strength. The characters were fairly obsessed with it too!

I think the Forsaken are an interesting way of showing us that the top levels are all pretty much equals in terms of "who would win in a fight" ... skills and Talents and such would be vastly more important to individuals such as these, theoretically they all have the level of strength necessary to be a huge threat to any of the others so it's all kind of "shades of gray" IMO. Seems like at a certain point strength had little to do with effectiveness too. Basically anyone level 13 or above was strong enough to individually perform pretty much all of the OP weaves we knew of and was strong enough to withstand the Choedan Kal, beyond that level skill seems to be the only real differentiator. The Companion's strength listings for the Forsaken only seem to highlight that to me as there is a spread of 10 levels between the strongest and the weakest, yet there isn't a whole lot of effectiveness difference that isn't related to skill or Talent.