History GameBreaker / TheElderScrolls

* The Ring of Hircine. Normally, becoming a Werewolf/Wereboar gives the player incredible powers, with an [[IdealIllnessImmunity immunity to disease]], a +30 bonus to various skills, and +40 bonus to all 4 physical attributes (giving the player almost as many stat points as leveling up 27 times, and even that is assuming that the player uses SaveScumming to get the maximum 6 points per level) which are balanced by several disadvantages, like having to murder a civilian once per 15 days or suffer a ''massive'' stat and health penalty, and a forced transformation once a month. Wearing the ring removes these disadvantages while keeping all the advantages, meaning that the only disadvantage that remains is having to deal with a few Knights once per in game year. And to top it all off, getting the Ring is fairly simple once you know where to find a Witch or Warlock Coven and have the necessary funds.

* Gallows Hall two gamebreakers, and both can be accessed right at the start of the game. The Staff of Worms is a staff of Dead Thrall: the Master level conjuration spell that permanently raises an undead. The Bloodworm Crown is a piece of headgear that provides the same effect as the Necromage perk, but also affects weapon damage against undead as well. It stacks multiplicatively with Necromage, increasing spell effects by 56% if both are active. Since Necromage was already a gamebreaker for vampire characters, this has only intensified things.

** Unbounded Frost will instantly freeze any enemies (and friends for that matter) within its area. Used in short bursts, it can easily stun-lock enemies.

* More crossbows have been added, and can be accessed right at the start of the game. Take a wagon to Solitude, and pay the fletcher a visit. Buy one, and you can make it (and its enhanced variant which ignores 50% of enemy armor) at any anvil provided you have the correct perks, without having to do any Dawnguard quests at all. At the start you can only really buy the Imperial and Silver Crossbows, the latter of which requires no smithing perks to make or enhance and does 2 points more damage than the steel crossbow the Dawnguard give you (and also does increased bash damage against undead. At higher levels you can buy crossbows made of other smithing materials, which do substantially more damage than the Dwarven crossbow mentioned above.

* Gallows Hall two gamebreakers, and both can be accessed right at the start of the game. The Staff of Worms is a staff of Dead Thrall. The Master level conjuration spell that permanently raises an undead. The Bloodworm Crown is a piece of headgear that provides the same effect as the Necromage perk, but also affects weapon damage against undead as well. It stacks multiplicatively with Necromage, increasing spell effects by 56% if both are active. Since Necromage was already a gamebreaker for vampire characters, this has only intensified things.
* Arcane Archer adds new arrows which do elemental damage.

* "Cast When Used" enchanted items can reach game-breaker status. Casting a spell in the usual fashion requires at least a second or two to go through the casting animation, costs [[{{Mana}} Magicka]] (quite a bit for more powerful spells), and has the possibility of failing (with more powerful spells more likely to fail). However, enchanting the spell onto an item to "Cast When Used" allows you to use it instantly with no Magicka cost, and cannot fail as long as the item has enough enchantment. The instant casting in particular is quite game-breaking, allowing you to BeamSpam enemies with powerful spells as fast as you can click the mouse/button. Even if your enchantment spell only does about 10 points of damage, you can cast it 5 times each second to kill enemies almost instantly. On PC, combine this with a macro from an external piece of software and you can basically have a button on your keyboard that functions as a "kill ALL the things" button as you will be casting as fast as the game can handle. AwesomeButImpractical taken UpToEleven.

* After complaints of UselessUsefulStealth in the previous games in the series, the devs apparently overcompensated. A stealthy character with the right perks and equipment becomes the single most destructive force in the game. It is possible to gain a ''30x'' multiplier on dagger {{Backstab}}s by combining the Assassin's Blade perk with the Shrouded Gauntlets. Want to take it UpToEleven? Use Valdr's Lucky Dagger, which has a 25% chance to trigger a CriticalHit, or the Orc's Berserker Rage which outright doubles damage. It stacks with the perk and gauntlets, meaning that you can effectively dish out 5 (basic damage) x 1.5 (critical damage) or 2 (Berserker Rage) x 30 damage (Assassin's Blade + Shrouded Gauntlet), that's '''[[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill 225/300 damage]]''', effectively a guaranteed OneHitKill on virtually everything, and that's not even counting any upgrade. Should you upgrade the dagger into legendary, not even a ''[[HumongousMecha Dwarven Centurion]]'' can survive a slice from your tiny steel dagger.

* The most basic Conjuration necromancy spell, Raise Zombie, can easily be used to raise your conjuration to level 50 by the end of Bleak Fall Barrow. How? Cast it on a corpse, then strike the raised creature with the weapon and/or attack spell of your choice, until the creature goes hostile. The moment it does so, you get a large amount of experience in Conjuration. Why? You only get Conjuration increases if your raised zombie engages in combat against something. That something can be anything, even yourself. As long as you don't kill the zombie before it turns hostile, you'll raise both your Conjuration and your favored attack skill. And zombie raising gives a TREMENDOUS increase compared to Daedra summons. Just cast it on any basic enemy (bandit, draugr, skeever), make it turn against you, kill it, and you'll be leveling up lightning fast. The best part? Any corpse will do, even ones that were dead before you entered the level. Bleak Falls Barrow is littered with basic corpses that you can raise then re-kill to boost your Conjuration at lightning speed. Oh, and if you've mastered Illusion, you can just raise the creature, cast Fury on it (only possible with the perk that allows Illusion spells to affect the undead), and you'll get the increases automatically. Even if you only intend to use Bound Weapons, this trick will let you have the levels necessary to get the Bound Bow spell (most expensive, requires level 50 Conjuration) and all the perks relating to Bound Weapons by the time you clear the barrow. ([[VideoGameCrueltyPotential Plus, there's the fun of getting to kill your enemies a second time]].)

!!Base Game

!!''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim''

* The Fortify Restoration glitch. All "Fortify" effects, no matter what they do, count as Restoration magic, and Fortify Restoration boosts them accordingly. This has no limit. Taking advantage of this lets you make potions that fortify your skills by the thousands and millions in [[http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/615804-the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/61198994 less than]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ9m7owVg_w ten minutes]]. Taking it too far however will [[GameBreakingBug crash the game]]. With the addition of legendary skills in patch 1.9.26.0.8, you can, after making your Fortify Alchemy and Fortify Smithing enchants more useful, make potions that sell for millions of gold, and improve the value of iron daggers by over 50,000 at base Alchemy and Smithing. With just one potion or weapon improvement of that magnitude you can level the requisite skill from 15 to 100, and then reset it and do it again. Indefinitely, with enough crafting materials. When that is done, and you have items of a ridiculous value in your inventory, you can sell each one for enough exp to boost speech from 15 to 100 as well, and buy even more crafting materials to continue the process. That's 3 skills you can trivially max out and reset for now infinite levels, for thousands of base Health, Magicka, or Stamina, along with armor that makes you nigh-invincible and weapons and poisons that indiscriminately kill enemies with a single grazing blow. The main downside to fully abusing this loop is the fact that [[ItsEasySoItSucks the game will very quickly stop being fun once the novelty wears off]], and understandably, this exploit was removed by the Unofficial Patch.

* In the unpatched version of the game, there is a glitch involving the Oghma Infinium, a RareCandy book meant to be single-use can be glitched into replicating endlessly, providing full skill and level cap within minutes. This exploit was later patched.

* The Mannequins in Honeyside can be exploited to duplicate any armor in the game. While any mannequin can do this, Honeyside is the easiest to obtain. This can allow you to duplicate expensive armors to sell, or duplicate armors that are only attainable once, such as the Nightingale Armor (coincidentally, the quest you need to start to get the Nightingale armor is the same town Honeyside's in: Riften).

* The Enhanced Dwarven Crossbow, available in ''Dawnguard'', is a huge game breaker for the following reasons: it's easy to get (just completing a set of six quests will make it available in a store in Fort Dawnguard), it has slightly higher base damage than a Dragonbone Bow (the most powerful regular bow in the game), and it has an innate ability to ignore 50% of enemy armor. Better yet, this is not an enchantment, so the crossbow can be enchanted on top of that. This is THE weapon to have if you're trying to create a stealthy sniper (or even if you're not trying, since [[MemeticMutation you're inevitably going]] [[ComplacentGamingSyndrome to end up as one anyway]]). Oh, and along the way, you'll unlock access to exploding crossbow bolts that stack fire, frost, or shock damage on top of the damage you're already doing. The only downsides are that it's louder than a bow and crossbows are slower to reload that standard bows, so a skilled archer can fire more shots (and thus do more damage) in the time it takes to reload the crossbow. (This bow vs. crossbow debate [[TruthInTelevision played out in real life]] during the Middle Ages.)
* Summon Durnehviir. While he does have as much health and is as unmountable as Odahviing, he knows (and can teach the Dragonborn) the "Soul Rend" Shout (Killing, Soul Trapping, and Resurrecting a hapless opponent), breathes frost and summons three friendly undead that are lot more stronger than common draugr. Oh, and you can summon him INDOORS. Surrounded by Falmer and chaurus? Durnehviir. Need to fight the skeletal dragon in the labyrinth? Durnehviir. Final battle against Alduin? DURNEHVIIR.
* Auriel's Bow, one of the MacGuffin items in ''Dawnguard'', is in fact an extremely powerful bow with a few bonuses that make it supremely powerful: Firstly, it does 60 sun damage to the undead (the best enchanted weapons a player can manufacture will only be able to add at most 60 bonus damage normally, unless you use alchemy boosts). Second, when using Sunhallowed arrows (all you need to make them is to take Elven Arrows to a certain NPC), it has a powerful sunburst effect that damages groups of enemies. Third, its damage rivals Daedric and Dragonbone bows, and can be greatly improved with Smithing. At max Smithing, it exceeds even a Dwarven Crossbow or Dragonbone Bow. Fourth, and this is the most incredible, if you shoot a Sunhallowed arrow at the Sun with this bow, it will turn the Sun into a KillSat, randomly blasting anything and everything nearby for a few minutes. Incredibly useful during battles with dragons during the day. Oh, and you get to keep the bow after the ''Dawnguard'' questline is over. It can also fire cursed arrows that do extra damage against the living and, when fired into the Sun, make it night. The latter ability is almost indispensable for vampires, but can also be used to make ideal sneaking conditions.
* The Aetherium Crown, one of the three possible rewards for the sidequest "Lost To The Ages" (you can initiate this by finding the book ''The Aetherium Wars'', which is liberally scattered throughout most cities and towns in Skyrim after installing ''Dawnguard'') allows you to retain two Standing Stone Abilities. How is this a gamebreaker? You can use this to obtain the Lover Stone ability (+15% to all exp gains) and any of the three Guardian Stone abilities (+20% to Warrior, Thief, or Mage abilities). Additionally, if you put the Lover Stone on the crown, you can remove it, get a sleeping bonus, and put it back on, negating the drawback of the Lover Stone. Stacked, that allows for up to a 30% general exp increase as well as 20% in exp gains to the expertise of your choice, greatly increasing the speed of your character growth. Or, if you've already maxed your exp, if you can locate the Lord Stone and The Atronach Stone, you can use them to greatly improve your defensive capabilities. Or the Apprentice Stone and the Atronach Stone, which means you get all the strengths of both stones while at the same time negating their weaknesses (The Apprentice stone increases your Magicka regen, but makes you twice as vulnerable to magic. The Atronach Stone increases your Magicka, and gives you 50% magic attack absorption, but halves your Magicka regen. Combine the two, and your magic defense is essentially the same, but you gain magicka each time you are hit with a spell, and you get a bonus to your Magicka at the same time). Another gamebreaker related to the Aetherium Crown: some Standing Stones grant a special power with a 24h cooldown; linking one of those stones to the Aetherium Crown allows you to use it, and removing the Crown then wearing it again completely clears the cooldown, so you now have a cool ability (opening locks, reanimating surrounding corpses as followers for 60 seconds, becoming invisible for 60 seconds, etc.) that doesn't consume mana and can be spammed at will.
* For Vampire Lords, most of their abilities constitute a DiscOneNuke, since their powers will eventually be overshadowed by a regular character's higher-level skills. However, there is one power that is going to be useful even if your character is at high levels. It's available as soon as you have access to your second perk: Vampiric Grip. It's telekinesis that works exclusively on enemies. When you use it, enemies are suspended in midair and they take light damage. When you let go, though, they get tossed with great force in any direction you choose, even straight up. Nearly every boss room in the game has a high ceiling, so you can grab just about every enemy in the game, then throw him straight up into the air. After he lands, he'll take a significant amount of damage. No matter how strong a boss may be, he won't survive more than a few round trip tickets from the floor to the ceiling and back. While this spell burns through Magicka quickly, it only takes two to three seconds at most to send an enemy skyward, and with sufficient Magicka regen, you can repeat it at will without fear of running out of Magicka. It has already been confirmed that it can toss ''giants'' effortlessly, leaving mammoths and dragons as the only creatures not yet confirmed to be affected by this spell. Meaning that, with the exception of the two largest creatures in the game, there's nothing that this spell can't lift and throw for you. Two seconds of effort, then gravity does the rest.

* ''Hearthfire'' makes alchemy in general absurdly effective by adding the ability to grow your own plants at the three homesteads. You can plant certain ingredients in plots outside the house or in the greenhouse if you've built it. In one day, a grown plant will emerge that will give anywhere from three to five of the ingredient, compared to one in the wild. The plant regenerates every three days, or you can just rip it out and replant it to do it in one. The speed at which you build up ingredients is absurd if you have both your greenhouse and outdoor plants at full capacity, and that's just one house. You can effortlessly make your own health potions, boost potions, and deadly poisons instead of having to wander the countryside for rare ingredients. You still have to hunt for insects, fish, nirnroots, creature parts, etc, but this takes 99% out of the previous hard work that went into alchemy use. Alternatively, with a few choice ingredients, you can create an extremely valuable potion that you can simply sell to alchemists for whatever ingredients you need, and endlessly craft more for a continuous source of revenue.
** Windstad Manor, one of the three homesteads you can build, also has its own fishery, in addition to being near an infinite supply of Deathbells, a vital ingredient in brewing poisons. Since some species of fish are also important poison ingredients, you now have the means to brew all the deadly poisons you could possibly need without having to leave your property.
** One of the [[SimpleYetAwesome simplest potions]] you can make is by mixing Wheat with Blue Mountain Flowers, giving you Restore Health and Fortify Health with no drawbacks. Both ingredients can be found almost anywhere, are sold for dirt cheap if you somehow run out of free samples, and can be grown en masse at any of the ''Hearthfire'' houses. Once your Alchemy level is high enough, your homebrew potions will outpace store-bought ones and you'll never need to buy them again. In fact, you can make a tidy profit from selling your excess!
** Two words: Salmon. Roe. One of the new ingredients added by ''Hearthfire''. Not only does it allow to craft the longest-lasting waterbreathing potions (300 seconds, without any points invested in Alchemy), it's also a key ingredient to craft ''THE'' most expensive potion in the entire game : just mix salmon roe with Nordic barnacles and garlic at an alchemy lab and you'll get a potion that, other than being extremely useful in its own right (waterbreathing + health regeneration + magicka regeneration) can be sold for ''over 700 gold coins a piece''. Even with base Speech skill, most merchants will only have enough money to buy a single one of those. You can also craft a similarly expensive potion with Histcarps and Jazbay grapes instead of the barnacles and garlic, all of which (barring the grapes) are incredibly common ingredients. The best part? ''You can build a fish hatchery in your homestead, allowing you to regularly harvest salmon roe''.
** The alternate recipe (the one with grapes and histcarps) also has a tremendously useful effect: ''it boosts your magicka by 200 points for 5 seconds''. Sure, that's a very short time, but with the right timing, it can be used to cast very powerful and expensive spells or give you a huge second wind in combat.

* A new enchantment, Chaos, in ''Dragonborn'' allows an enchanted weapon to have a 50% chance of doing additional fire, shock, and/or ice damage with each swing. This enchantment benefits from perks relating to all three damage types, regardless of which one is actually triggered when you attack. In addition, the bonus to frost enchantments when applied to Stalhrim weapons also applies to the Chaos enchantment. A master enchanter with potion boosts (and the boosts to potions and enchanting also found in ''Dragonborn'', but without the restoration boosts) can place an enchantment that does over one hundred and fifty damage from each element. An added bonus is that Chaos enchantments, if combined with a second enchantment, boost the power of the second enchantment. The Absorb Health enchantment can hit for 100 health each swing when stacked on a Chaos weapon, doing ridiculous damage and making you practically immortal. Elemental resistant enemies are less vulnerable to this, but even they can be wiped out with just a few swings on the highest difficulty.
** Stacking Fortify Destruction enchantments to reach 100% will give the above enchanted weapons INFINITE CHARGES! Using the Fortify Restoration glitch allows you to enchant 1 item instead of having to enchant 3-4 items to reach 100%. Enchant a 2nd weapon (preferably a dagger) with chaos & absorb stamina & you now have infinite stamina during combat!
* After the conclusion of ''Dragonborn'', the Black Book that takes you to the final boss battle gives you the ability to reset your perks anytime, anywhere. If you used the Oghma Infinium glitch (or the Fortify Restoration loop) to max out your stats, this means that your character now can be used to clear every questline in the game, and you can use it to make insanely powerful equipment, then transfer the perks from your crafting skills to your combat skills. 80 perk points can now be placed wherever you please, any time you please. If you want to do everything in the game, you now have the power to do so with a single character.

* The "Marked For Death" Shout is this due to an oversight in programming. Instead of reducing armor values for the duration of a minute, it permanently reduced armor values every time you Shouted at something. The effect stacking allows for negative armor values to occur, and this multiplies physical damage by an absurd amount. Even high leveled dragons can die in as few as two Power Attacks with enough Shouting.

* For werewolves with ''Dawnguard'' installed, casting Soul Trap or any necromancy spell on an enemy whose heart you've eaten in werewolf form will for some reason count as eating their heart again, allowing you to earn werewolf perks twice as fast.

* Accessing a non-transformation-hostile follower's inventory in the midst of transforming (into a Vampire Lord or Werewolf) allows you to equip multiples of the same equipment piece, allowing you to stack whatever enchantments they have. This can be combined with multiples of any Amulet of the Nine Divines to get any number of ridiculous buffs, like 100% better prices, ludicrous Magicka Regeneration, increased damage blocked with shields and the most-game breaking, the power to ''completely eliminate cooldown time between shouts''. The Dragonborn can then spam, and even combo, whatever shouts they please, including any AwesomeButImpractical shouts that have been previously restricted by long cooldown times, barring the Dragon Aspect shout.

* A simple, rare alteration spell, Transmute, can easily be this. It's almost impossible to find in shops, but it is guaranteed to be found in Halted Stream Camp, a bandit lair in walking distance of Whiterun, on a table in plain view. The spell does two things: when cast, it will turn a single piece of iron ore into silver, or a piece of silver ore into gold. Two castings of the spell will turn a lump of iron ore, the most commonly found ore in the game, that has multiple mines spread through Skyrim, into one of the most expensive. And crafting jewelry requires no levels in Smithing whatsoever. An adept level spell, it has a high Magicka cost (nearly 100), but with high Magicka regen (or just by waiting an hour after each use, which restores it for free), you can spam it repeatedly, and an adept in Alteration can cast it at lower cost. Turn the gold ore into ingots, then jewelry, enchant them, and you have some high grade VendorTrash to sell. This allows you to raise Smithing, Speech, and Enchanting easily (enchanted rings and necklaces sell quite well). It's practically money for nothing. The best part? Halted Stream Camp, the best place to find it, is AN IRON MINE. There are 16 iron veins inside, so you can pull 48 gold ore in just one run. And you won't even need to bring your own pickaxe, they can be found all over. Just one more reason to use your spells.

* The Telekinesis spell can quickly raise your Alteration to 100 in minutes. To obtain it, you either need a 40 in Alteration or to do the Mage Guild Quest for Labyrinthian. The spell allows you to draw any inventory item to your character, at an extremely high Magicka cost. However, it grants a shocking amount of skill increase when maintained. The crazy thing is that if you fast travel while using telekinesis, ''the game treats it as if you've walked that distance continually casting the spell''. Fast travel, wait for the loading screen to disappear, open your skill menu, reset your Alteration 100 to Alteration 15, rinse and repeat. Since the object you were holding remains at the fast-travel point of arrival, you don't even need some new junk every time you do this - two pieces of VendorTrash are entirely sufficient. That way you'll hit the "I've maxed out every perk there is in the game" point so fast you'll be wishing you'd left something to level the old-fashioned way, because now there's next to no character building left to do (and you're ridiculously overpowered on ''any'' difficulty level).

* Acquiring the Ohgma Infinium instantly grants you an extra 50 stat points to distribute as you please, in a game where each level grants 3 to 6 points. This makes it a pretty useful RareCandy artifact, but what puts it on this page is that it can be acquired multiple times fairly easily and at a relatively low level. All you need to do to get it is find someone willing to tell you rumors and talk to them until they mention someone talking about the artifact in a tavern, go to the tavern and pay someone around 500 gold, and complete two dungeon crawls whose contents are scaled to your level. The odds of them talking about an artifact are 2% per level, making it annoying to try to get this rumor in particular at low levels, but there's no consequence for just asking them over and over until they say what you want them to. Do this a few times and you can have attributes higher than most late-game characters.

** Elsweyr Fondue is very useful for low level mages (and any non-mage player character who need to cast spells). Like the Vegetable Soup, its effects last 720 seconds. It increases Magicka by 100 and fortifies Magicka Regen. Two of its ingredients, ale and Eidar cheese wheel, are cheap, common in houses, inns, and general[=/=]food stores (both as items lying in the place, and as goods available for sale), and their low price results in them being free to be picked up if their owner is a friend of the Dragonborn. The third and final ingredient, Moon sugar, is much rarer in the game world, and more expensive, but Khadjit roving merchants ''always'' carry some of the stuff, and the higher price of the ingredient stops being an issue once you progress a bit in the game.

** Orcs have only one racial ability, but it so powerful that the developers did not need to give them another - Berserk. Take half damage, deal double damage, for 60 seconds. You can kill a LOT of enemies in 60 seconds, or one genuinely powerful enemy. As long as you are quick enough, once a dragon lands, an Orc can damage 50% of a dragon's health before it can take off, which will cause the dragon to be grounded. From there, you can finish it off without worrying about it taking off and attacking from the air. It's so overpowering that a few mods opt to {{nerf}} it by making the player take ''additional'' damage while using it instead, which is more appropriate for a [[TheBerserker berserker rage]].

* A custom enchanted dagger easily become a game-breaker. Enchant a dagger with "Drain Health 100pts for 2-3 seconds" and "Weakness to Magic 100pts for 2-3 seconds". As daggers are the fastest striking weapon in the game (about two hits per seconds), you can quickly dish out enough damage to kill any foe in only 3-4 hits. So the first hit, the target loses 100 health. The next (due to Weakness to Magic) 200, the next: 400, then 800, then 1600...more than anything in the game actually has. Throw in a Soul Trap enchantment if you wish to quickly fill up soul gems for enchanting and recharging the dagger.

** Another expensive enchantment is Absorb Health, and the Gauldur Blackblade always comes with this enchantment and can be disenchanted, so no need to rely on luck to find this enchantment out in the wild or pay that expensive price yourself to get it from a shop.
** Soul Trap pales before the most expensive enchantment in the game: Banish Daedra. However, this enchantment can only be obtained at higher levels. Same goes for Paralysis, the second-most expensive enchantment. With the perk that allows you to put two enchantments on one item, you can turn an investment of a few dozen gold into an iron dagger and a filled petty soul gem into a profit of several hundred gold.

* The Enhanced Dwarven Crossbow, available in ''Dawnguard'', is a huge game breaker for the following reasons: it's easy to get (just completing a set of six quests will make it available in a store in Fort Dawnguard), it has slightly higher base damage than a Dragonbone Bow (the most powerful regular bow in the game), and it has an innate ability to ignore 50% of enemy armor. Better yet, this is not an enchantment, so the crossbow can be enchanted on top of that. This is THE weapon to have if you're trying to create a stealthy sniper. Oh, and along the way, you'll unlock access to exploding crossbow bolts that stack fire, frost, or shock damage on top of the damage you're already doing. The only downsides are that it's louder than a bow and crossbows are slower to reload that standard bows, so a skilled archer can fire more shots (and thus do more damage) in the time it takes to reload the crossbow. (This bow vs. crossbow debate [[TruthInTelevision played out in real life]] during the Middle Ages.)

** During character creation, you can choose special advantages and disadvantages that make you stronger or weaker in certain fields. In an attempt to avoid players just giving themselves all the good traits, the game will increase the amount of experience you require to level up the more advantages you take without offsetting disadvantages. However, because of a quirk in how poison, disease, and paralysis work (they're considered 'magic') it's possible to give yourself "Critical Weakness" to all three, considered by the game to be a massive disadvantage, but then take the "Immunity to Magic" advantage, which cancels them out while still decreasing the amount of XP required to level up regardless (as well as making you immune to fire, frost, and lightning, of course).

* The Character Creation is far more flexible than in any other game in the series.
** The way character creation works is that you can choose special advantages and disadvantages that make you stronger or weaker in certain fields. To try and avoid players just giving themselves all the good traits, the game will increase the amount of experience you require to level up based on what traits you choose. However, because of a quirk in how poison, disease and paralysis work (they're considered 'magic') it's possible to give yourself critial weakness to all three as well as an immunity to magic, which cancels them out but will decrease the amount of XP required to level up regardless (as well as making you immune to fire, frost, and lightning, of course).

** The way character creation works is that you can choose special advantages and disadvantages that make you stronger or weaker in certain fields. To try and avoid players just giving themselves all the good traits, the game will increase the amount of experience you require to level up based on what traits you choose. However, the game doesn't make what should logically be opposite dis/advantages [[MutuallyExclusivePowerups mutually exclusive]], so you can do things like make yourself immune to magic (which will increase the the amount of XP required to level up) but also critically weak to poison, disease and paralysis (which does nothing since they're considered 'magic' and you're immune to magic, but will decrease the amount of XP required to level up regardless). Another possible method is to forbid yourself from using certain weapons and armor you're never planning to use anyway, which again decreases required XP to level up but doesn't really hinder you.

** The Ignite spell, one of two spells gotten by wearing the Ahzidal's Ring of Arcana from a Dragonborn DLC Quest, has the potential to outclass most, if not all other Destruction Spells when optimized. It deals 4 damage per second for 15 seconds, up to 42 when dualcasting (it's also compatible with the Impact perk) with both "Augmented Flames" perk and the aforementioned "Aspect of Terror" perk. This is already solid on it's own, but what takes it to gamebreaking levels is the fact that the damage-over-time effect can **stack** with multiple casts. Between the split-second charge time and the pittance of magicka it takes to cast (one of the cheapest among Destruction spells), the Dragonborn can effectively melt the health of nearly any enemy. The only downside is that the quest to get the ring that allows its use is very expensive and time-consuming.

* After complaints of UselessUsefulStealth in the previous games in the series, the devs apparently overcompensated. A stealthy character with the right perks and equipment becomes the single most destructive force in the game. It is possible to gain a ''30x'' multiplier on dagger {{Backstab}}s by combining the Assassin's Blade perk with the Shrouded Gauntlets. Want to take it UpToEleven? Use Valdr's Lucky Dagger, which has a 25% chance to trigger a CriticalHit. It stacks with the perk and gauntlets, meaning that you can effectively dish out 5 (basic damage) x 1.5 (critical damage) x 30 damage (Assassin's Blade + Shrouded Gauntlet), that's '''[[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill 225 damage]]''', effectively a guaranteed OneHitKill on virtually everything, and that's not even counting any upgrade. Should you upgrade the dagger into legendary, not even a ''[[HumongousMecha Dwarven Centurion]]'' can survive a slice from your tiny steel dagger.

** Winstad manor, 1 of the 3 mansions you can build, also has its own fishery, in addition to being near an infinite supply of Deathbells, a vital ingredient in brewing poisons. Since some species of fish are also important poison ingredients, you now have the means to brew all the deadly poisons you could possibly need without having to leave your property.

* The Fortify Restoration glitch. All "Fortify" effects, no matter what they do, count as Restoration magic, and Fortify Restoration boosts them accordingly. This has no limit. Taking advantage of this lets you make potions that fortify your skills by the thousands and millions in [[http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/615804-the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/61198994 less than]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ9m7owVg_w ten minutes]]. Taking it too far however will [[GameBreakingBug crash the game]]. With the addition of legendary skills in patch 1.9.26.0.8, you can, after making your Fortify Alchemy and Fortify Smithing enchants more useful, make potions that sell for millions of gold, and improve the value of iron daggers by over 50,000 at base Alchemy and Smithing. With just one potion or weapon improvement of that magnitude you can level the requisite skill from 15 to 100, and then reset it and do it again. Indefinitely, with enough crafting materials. When that is done, and you have items of a ridiculous value in your inventory, you can sell each one for enough exp to boost speech from 15 to 100 as well, and buy even more crafting materials to continue the process. That's 3 skills you can trivially max out and reset for now infinite levels, for thousands of base Health, Magicka, or Stamina, along with armor that makes you nigh-invincible and weapons and poisons that indiscriminately kill enemies with a single grazing blow. The main downside to fully abusing this loop is the fact that [[BoringInvincibleHero the game will very quickly stop being fun once the novelty wears off]], and understandably, this exploit was removed by the Unofficial Patch.

* The Fortify Restoration glitch. All "Fortify" effects, no matter what they do, count as Restoration magic, and Fortify Restoration boosts them accordingly. This has no limit. Taking advantage of this lets you make potions that fortify your skills by the thousands and millions in [[http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/615804-the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/61198994 less than]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ9m7owVg_w ten minutes]]. Taking it too far however will [[GameBreakingBug crash the game]]. With the addition of legendary skills in patch 1.9.26.0.8, you can, after making your Fortify Alchemy and Fortify Smithing enchants more useful, make potions that sell for millions of gold, and improve the value of iron daggers by over 50,000 at base Alchemy and Smithing. With just one potion or weapon improvement of that magnitude you can level the requisite skill from 15 to 100, and then reset it and do it again. Indefinitely, with enough crafting materials. When that is done, and you have items of a ridiculous value in your inventory, you can sell each one for enough exp to boost speech from 15 to 100 as well, and buy even more crafting materials to continue the process. That's 3 skills you can trivially max out and reset for now infinite levels, for thousands of base Health, Magicka, or Stamina, along with armor that makes you nigh-invincible and weapons and poisons that indiscriminately kill enemies with a single grazing blow.

''Franchise/TheElderScrolls'' series has a number of GameBreaker examples.

* The Fortify Restoration glitch. All "Fortify" effects, no matter what they do, count as Restoration magic, and Fortify Restoration boosts them accordingly. This has no limit. Taking advantage of this lets you make potions that fortify your skills by the thousands and millions in [[http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/615804-the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/61198994 less than]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ9m7owVg_w ten minutes]]. Taking it too far however will [[GameBreakingBug crash the game]]. With the addition of legendary skills in patch 1.9.26.0.8, you can, after making your Fortify Alchemy and Fortify Smithing enchants more useful, make potions that sell for millions of gold, and improve the value of iron daggers by over 50,000 at base Alchemy and Smithing. With just one potion or weapon improvement of that magnitude you can level the requisite skill from 15 to 100, and then reset it and do it again. Indefinitely, with enough crafting materials. When that is done, and you have items of a ridiculous value in your inventory, you can sell each one for enough exp to boost speech from 15 to 100 as well, and buy even more crafting materials to continue the process. That's 3 skills you can trivially max out and reset for now infinite levels, for thousands of base Health, Magicka, or Stamina.

* After the conclusion of ''Dragonborn'', the Black Book that takes you to the final boss battle gives you the ability to reset your perks anytime, anywhere. If you used the Oghma Infinium glitch to max out your stats, this means that your character now can be used to clear every questline in the game, and you can use it to make insanely powerful equipment, then transfer the perks from your crafting skills to your combat skills. 80 perk points can now be placed wherever you please, any time you please. If you want to do everything in the game, you now have the power to do so with a single character.

** For minimal effort you can make Vegetable Soup at a cooking station. Eating it gives you a small boost to Health and Stamina regen per second for 720 seconds. While you can still be overwhelmed by groups of enemies, the regen rate boost is enough to allow you to defeat nearly any single foe in the game without much risk; the Stamina allows to continuously spam power attacks. Its four ingredients (potatoes, leeks, tomatoes, and cabbages) are found in lots of containers and sold by most food merchants, they're also very cheap; with Hearthfire, you can even get most of those ingredients for free since they can be grown in the garden of your estate.

** Two words: Salmon. Roe. One of the new ingredients added by ''Hearthfire''. Not only does it allow to craft the longest-lasting waterbreathing potions (300 seconds, without any points invested in Alchemy), it's also a key ingredient to craft ''THE'' most expensive potion in the entire game : just mix salmon roe with Nordic barnacles and garlic at an alchemy lab and you'll get a potion that, other than being extremely useful in its own right (waterbreathing + health regeneration + magicka regeneration) can be sold for ''over 700 gold coins a piece''. Even with base Speech skill, most merchants will only have enough money to buy a single one of those. You can also craft a similarly expensive potion with Histcarps and Jazbay grapes instead of the barnacles and garlic, all of which (barring the grapes) are incredibly common ingredients. The best part ? ''You can build a fish hatchery in your homestead, allowing you to regularly harvest salmon roe''.
** The alternate recipe (the one with grapes and histcarps) also has a tremendously useful effect : ''it boosts your magicka by 200 points for 5 seconds''. Sure, that's a very short time, but with the right timing, it can be used to cast very powerful and expensive spells.