History Main / CoolButInefficient

* Tablet computers are essentially giant smartphones straight out of old sci-fi movies, but without the convenience of phone calls and easy messaging. Even their feature of size is being overshadowed by the production of larger smartphones. This could end up a subversion with the growth of tablet-laptop hybrids, or two-in-ones, which are more portable than the average laptop without being a pain in the ass when it comes to extensive typing work.

* In ''Series/{{Castle}}'', the murder of a lottery winner leads the detectives to have a conversation about what they'd buy if they won the lottery, during which Detective Esposito says he'd buy a Ferrari. Castle, a millionaire mystery writer, points out that he has one, and it's not as great as you'd think. When Esposito insists that they're "hella fast", Castle points out that in rush hour traffic it's just as fast as any other car. Esposito and Ryan -- not being millionaires -- still frequently badgers and barters with Castle to get a turn driving the car [[RunningGag at every possible opportunity]].

** Also in 5th edition is the "Stunning Fist" ability for the Monk class. On paper it sounds very powerful, as very few creatures are immune to the "Stun" effect and the actual debuffs it provides can turn the tide of a battle. The problems with it however are threefold: Firstly, it consumes ki points which are a finite resource that the Monk needs to fuel most of its abilities. Secondly, it can only be applied to a successful attack which means it actually has 2 points of failure (a successful attack from the Monk and a failed save from the target), meaning it's more likely to fail than if it just targeted the saving throw like spells do. And finally, it targets the CON save, which is by and large the highest average among monsters in the game, meaning that the majority of the targets worth using it on are likely to just shrug it off anyways (even the ones that don't have Legendary Resistance). Effectively this means that the most reliable way to land it successfully is to combine it with flurry of blows and rely on the law of averages to brute force a botched saving throw, but this further aggravates the issue of Ki consumption and at early levels can consume your entire stockpile just to apply it to a single target. Legendary Resistance makes this even worse because even if you somehow get through, the enemy can just ignore the effect by consuming one of their charges. One might argue it could be used to drain legendary resistances, but at the point these become common spellcasters are likely to have plenty of more efficient spells to burn through those anyways. The fact that stun is such a good debuff is enough to prevent this move from being completely useless, but as it currently stands this is a horribly efficient way of applying it.

* The attempt in ''Film/JurassicWorldFallenKingdom'' to [[BeastOfBattle weaponize]] the ''Indoraptor'' was observed to be this in more than a few reviews. Basically, they engineer a HybridMonster that's incredibly dangerous in its own right, and direct it using a laser pointer that causes it to savagely attack anything that gets marked. Lethal, sure... but in what situation is lugging around a grizzly bear-sized AxCrazy monster, then bringing out the pointer and aiming it at your target at close range, and finally waiting for your pet monster to chase them down and attack them, more effective than just taking out a gun and shooting them?

** Quickenings are this as well. While useful if you get them early, in vanilla version of the game they usally consume all of your MP and while punching enemies from reality, flooding them with tsunami and finally sucking them in black hole looks cool, the final damage output really leaves to be desired. They can surpass damage limit, but they do never really good damage unless you get very lucky and get high combo. For the same MP you spend on them you could just cast spells like Scathe or Ardor and get much better result or buff your party and hack enemies to pieces with physical attacks. This was partially corrected in UpdatedRerelease versions, where they consume mist charges instead, so you keep your MP for your spells.

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXII'' gives you The Treaty-Blade and The Sword of Kings. These swords have the power to cut [[GreenRocks Nethicite]], but, more importantly, have been bequeathed by the Gods themselves. Naturally, these swords'll be amazing, right? Wrong. They each have 30 attack. To give you an idea, the maximum attack a weapon can have is 150 -- the kind of weapon your fighters will have at the time will have between 50 and 70. Admittedly, the swords good for dodging, but other than that, it's there to look pretty.

* In ''Film/TheForeigner'', Quan blows up a bathroom in Hennessey's building with a bomb that he intentionally designed to be flashy yet do minimal damage in order to send the message "IfIWantedYouDead".

* ''Tibia'' has a tendency to introduce new gimmicky mechanics and then completely forget about them. A notable example, the enchanting system allows you sacrifice a gem to turn a weapon into a FlamingSword or a weapon of some other element. Sounds awesome until you learn that the enchantment doesn't actually net you any significant increase of DPS, has unnecessary class/level requirements, and only a very small list of weapons can be enchanted. On top of it, the game ''discourages'' you from wielding your new flaming spiky sword by making the enchantment wear off after a certain number of hits. After six years of regular patches, the system still hasn't received any attention from the developers, not even expanding the list of enchantable weapons. Players still only enchant their weapons to create cool decorations for their house.

* ''VideoGame/MaxPayne 3'': The LaserSight attached to some of the weapons actually makes your aim actively worse. It may be realistic to have the laser jumping around when shooting, but still.

* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Extraterrestrial_mining The proposals to mine helium-3 in space]]. Helium-3 is a clean fuel for fusion reactors, and it's more abundant in space (e.g. on the Moon and in the gas giants) than on Earth, so isn't this a good reason to go to space? Well... [[http://teamphoenicia.blogspot.com/2011/04/guest-post-helium-3-lunar-chimera-by.html not quite]]. Helium-3 is very rare even on the Moon, fusion of it isn't perfectly clean (it still produces neutrons), there are fusion reactions that don't use helium-3 (like deuterium + tritium or deuterium + deuterium, which are much easier to achieve, or proton + boron-11, which is cleaner than the helium-3 reactions), helium-3 can be artificially synthesized on Earth, and we don't yet have ''any'' fusion reactors that produce more power than they consume.

* ''Film/TheIsland'' featured weapons that fired barbed hooks, like a taser, used to stop escaped clones. Except the hooks were bigger and looked more painful, and the thing didn't give an electric charge to subdue the struggling victim, now in horrible pain from having two huge anchors shot into his skin.

* The original ''VideoGame/StreetFighterI'' cabinet features [[PressureSensitiveInterface pressure-sensitive "punch" and "kick" buttons]] that on paper sound cool: The harder you hit them, the more damage you will do to your opponent. However, this ended up being a nightmare for both players and arcade operators: The former due to how painful they are in practice, and the latter due to how difficult they are to maintain. Capcom later released a revised version of the cabinet with the now-standard 3×2 arrangement of digital buttons with light-medium-heavy as one axis and punch-kick as the other, and this has been the standard for the series since.

** Naval combat on the whole. While naval combat is one of the coolest aspects to the game, it's largely seen as inconsequential because of the prohibitively high cost of naval units, that aerial units tend to be cheaper ''and'' outperform naval units, that all the properties to utilize and capture are on land, and that generally the only good reason to invest in a navy is to counter an opponent's navy (since both players know this, imagine how often that happens in competitive PVP) or if the map is tailor-made to rely on a navy (a rarity).

* ''VideoGame/DawnOfWar - Soulstorm'': the Immolator tank of the Sisters of Battle. Yes, burning everything for holy cleansing is fun, it's also a useful weapon to break enemy morale, and the zealot pyromaniac voice lines are funny. But the tank itself is expensive, fragile, takes 3 vehicle pop cap, and anything it can do to break morale is done cheaper and quicker with some Battle Sister Squads equipped with flamethrowers. The Conflagration upgrade (which makes this tank spread flames in circle for some time) looks awesome and can be situationally useful if you are surrounded, but most of the times it is not useful. The real purpose of Immolators is to upgrade their weapon to melta anti-tank cannons to combat enemy vehicles, but still this tank is a GlassCannon and will lose most engagements if not carefully managed and supported. Celestian Squads fully equipped with meltas and a signifer can be more durable. The Sisters of Battle fare better with vehicles when spamming the cheaper Rhinos, which turn surprisingly effective against infantry, until they can afford the late stage but very powerful Penitent Engine.

* ''VideoGame/DawnOfWar - Soulstorm'': the Immolator tank of the Sisters of Battle. Yes, burning everything for holy cleansing is fun, it's also a useful weapon to break enemy morale, and the zealot pyromaniac voice lines are funny. But the tank itself is expensive, fragile, takes 3 vehicle pop cap, and anything it can do to break morale is done cheaper and quicker with some Battle Sister Squads equipped with flamethrowers. The Conflagration upgrade (which makes this tank spread flames in circle for some time) looks awesome and can be situationally useful if you are surrounded, but most of the times it is not useful. The real purpose of Immolators is to upgrade their weapon to melta anti-tank cannons to combat enemy vehicles, but still this tank is a GlassCannon and will lose most engagements if not carefully managed and supported. Celestian Squads fully equipped with meltas and a signifer can be more durable. The Sisters of Battle fare better when spamming the cheaper Rhinos, which turn surprisingly effective against infantry, until they can afford the late stage but very powerful Penitent Engine.

* A lot of ''ComicBook/{{Watchmen}}'' involves the idea that superheroes are this. Pretty much every time we actually see any of the characters busting criminals, they're shown to do that job very well... but as Dan points out in retrospect of his own career, you don't need an individual with years of martial arts training and expensive gadgetry to break up mob rings or catch purse-snatchers when a moderately funded police force can do the same dang thing. In a world where there aren't equally grandiose supervillains, a superhero is just a waste of talent and resources. The only superheroes shown to accomplish anything particularly meaningful are the ones to abandon crimefighting altogether in favor of government or corporate work.

** The ultimate humiliation for the scyted chariot (and the war chariot in general) came when it was deployed against the Romans, with Roman generals apparently getting off on inventing worse and worse humiliations every time they faced them. The first time (Magnesia) they limited themselves on [[DeathFromAbove hitting the charioteers and the horses with thousands of arrows and javelins]], but at Chaeronea Sulla dealt with them by having his soldiers ''charge at them, stop and redeploy in a shield wall right before impact'' (the Roman soldiers reached the chariots when they were still slow and accelerating, and thus the result was that the chariots were stopped dead by the shield wall and the Romans ''asked for more to play''), and at Orchomenus he had his soldiers ''move away and let the horses driving the chariots impale themselves on the posts behind them'' (that was the plan B. Plan A was to dig a ditch and force the chariots in a ''swamp'', but the enemy general realized what was happening and attacked right as the Romans started digging). All of this happened when the Romans were for some reason without [[MundaneSolution caltrops]] to throw in their path (they had invented them due the Celts of Northern Italy using a different model of chariot, and were so efficient that by Caesar's time the only Celts who still used it were the more isolated Bretons, who apparently had not yet gotten the memo).

* ''Fanfic/DatingWhatDaddyHatesRWBY'': The boy chosen for Weiss' ArrangedMarriage is very muscular, in that he has exercised in such a way to ''appear'' muscular and attractive. When he goes on a nature hike, it quickly becomes apparent that he has no real-world physical experience, and he is soon exhausted. In contrast, Sun and Weiss, who are training to be a Huntsman and Huntress and have much more slender builds, don't even break a sweat walking through the woods with heavy packs. Weiss, who is a SquishyWizard by Huntress standards, ends up carrying the boy's pack in addition to her own with no apparent extra effort.

* ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'': ''Mist of Pandaria'' introduced the warlock talent Harvest Life, which increased the damage and healing of Drain Life while also turning it into an [=AoE=] ability that hit all valid targets near your target. While popular with beginners, most veteran warlock players considered it a subpar ability, only useful for the healing it provided as it did less damage than a normal [=AoE=] rotation. But because it was one of the first talents available, many low level warlocks chose it... only to get immediately killed by the ten enemies they just aggroed. If used in most dungeons, ''especially'' Scholomance, expect a TotalPartyKill and to be kicked from the party.

*** They introduced a holographic communicator (and extension of holodeck technology) to replace the viewscreen communicators, which sounds cool until you realize it needed a special podium retrofitted to send and receive from and having a person just blink into existence on the bridge or ready room gave everyone including [[MemeticBadAss Sisko]] a serious case of the UncannyValley creeps. It was quietly dropped as even the viewer could see that it offered no improvement over the viewscreens already in use.

* PlagueDoctor/s. Yup, you read that correctly. Many medical historians agree that the doctors' outfits were often full of bacteria because of lack of cleaning,[[note]]UsefulNotes/{{Nostradamus}} (better known today for being an alleged prophet) might have inadvertently became a successful plague doctor because he was a NeatFreak; he had no idea that he was killing germs because nobody knew yet that germs where what caused disease, he just didn't want to be dirty.[[/note]] making the belief that Plague Doctors spread disease instead of curing it a SelfFulfillingProphecy.