Game Breaker / Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition

• Almost anything can be a game breaker if taken to a great enough extreme. Characters can instantly end every encounter with a successful Diplomacy check which it is possible to render impossible to fail at a very, very low level. This is only the tip of the iceberg; even without exploitative min-maxing, all the spellcasting classes are almost hopelessly broken by the seventh level, and canny players can break the game with low-level spells like Color Spray, Sleep, and Glitterdust. The so-called "save or suck" spells all instantly incapacitate monsters or otherwise render them unable to fight, and many of these spells exist even at the lowest levels, allowing spellcasters to bypass the entire hit point system and kill monsters with a single roll. Worse, spellcasters also have huge levels of flexibility and can make themselves effectively invincible against many ordinary attacks, have near-infinite mobility by mid-levels, have the best offensive and defensive capabilities, and are the best at making magic items, which themselves can often act as game breakers or exaggerate a character's game-breaking abilities. Even non-spellcasting classes can frequently do incredibly convenient things, such as dealing more damage than any monster has hit points in a single round by mid-levels. As is noted in the unofficial (but widely accepted) tier list for the game, the third tier is not an insult to characters. A third-tier character is capable of defeating any monster in the game; they simply are not God.
• The Game-Breaker status of so many things in 3.x is so universally known that the most common Character Tiers consider Tier 3 (the upper middle tier) to be the "not as broken" category, while both Tier 2 and Tier 1 are considered this trope. The difference is simply that a Tier 2 class is broken but still somewhat predictable and restricted in how it's broken, while a Tier 1 class can functionally do anything if given a bit of time to prepare.
  • 3.x's Wizard in particular is iconic for its broken status, and being a major inspiration for Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards. It had always been a class with an insane amount of options at its disposal, but so many of the things that made playing a Wizard a risky option in earlier editions were removed, and the result was a class that was functionally unstoppable when properly played past about 5th level. Their casting keyed off the highly useful Intelligence, giving them a mess of skill points. Their Squishy Wizard status was easily allayed with a few protective spells (Mage Armor lasted hours and boosted you up to the level of scale mail, and Mirror Image or Displacement made you almost unhittable). Their spells per day were a little limited compared to the Sorcerer, but this was remedied simply by specializing (especially as the Enchantment and Evocation schools were seen as below-par), and they also advanced through levels faster. Their spellbook, theoretically their weak spot, could be hidden through magic (such as Rope Trick or Shrink Item). And that spellbook itself snapped the game in two, giving a Wizard an arsenal of tricks for a pittance of gold that could handle virtually any situation. And these are just their weaknesses; a Wizard can cover every listed bullet on the Story-Breaker Power page, and many of the below game breakers relating to spells are specifically Wizard spells. Even when restricted to core, Wizards can do things most classes scarcely dream of.
  • The following two classes are the reasons why CoDzilla (Cleric-or-Druid-zilla) became a D&D meme:
    • A Cleric with the proper buffs up can be a better Fighter than most proper Fighters. Even when they aren't shooting for this, they have similar strengths to the Wizard in terms of their insane versatility, and are arguably better in several regards. They can prepare any spell on the Cleric spell list without needing to pay anything or watch for a spellbook. Their starting weapon and armor proficiencies are enough to get them through the early game with no problem, and they get to do most of the few things a Wizard can't easily do (like healing). Their skill points are a bit poor, but between the stupidly good Divine Insight and the Cloistered Cleric variant, that's nowhere near as big a problem as you'd think. And with their domains, they have a whole other level of customization that allows them to assume almost any party role. Clerics may not have as many broken tricks as the Wizard, but they are no less deadly, and in some regards even easier.
    • Even sticking to core, Druids have powers (casting, Wild Shape, and animal companion) of which a single one would make a competent character. They have special abilities that are more powerful than entire classes. As an example, the guy who built the system showed a variant where all spellcasting became extremely difficult, knocking most spellcasters from the lofty heights of tier 1 and 2 down to tier 6. Druids however were still at the high end of tier 3. Why? A single class ability of course: Wild Shape, an ability that is in and of itself more powerful than a Fighter's whole class (indeed, a Ranger variant with a nerfed version of Wild Shape as its primary ability is at the low end of tier 3). Sufficiently tweaked-out animal companions can also become stronger than Fighters.
      
      One disadvantage to Wild Shape is that you can't cast spells in animal form — unless you take the Natural Spell feat, a core feat which lets you do just that. This combination allows druids to have their cake and eat it too, gaining the animal's combat ability along with their druidic spells. The feat is so universally taken that it's joked in druid guides that you mysteriously lose your 6th-level feat and nobody knows why.
  • The Archivist essentially mashes together the cleric and Wizard, with exactly the results you'd expect. They cast like a Wizard from a prayerbook, but scribe cleric spells into that book. Where are they broken? As long as they have a scroll for it, they can scribe any divine spell. That means, in theory, they can use not just cleric spells, but also druid spells, paladin spells, ranger spells, prestige class spells, every spell that's part of a domain... oh, and since many of those spells are lower-level than their cleric counterparts, the archivist even picks them up earlier. Oh, and there are divine bard and Wizard variants, so in theory those spells are on the table, too. Though they're massively dependent on how much a DM will actually let you find or purchase such scrolls, an archivist at full power can cast essentially any spell in the game.
  • Eberron's Artificer may be rather cumbersome to manage and need a fair bit of downtime, but when unrestricted, there is very little they can't do. With the power of magic items, they can duplicate almost any spell in the game, have magical gear several levels ahead of when they're supposed to, and accomplish some bizarre feats. Being able to craft almost anything opens up entire lanes of possibilities, and makes them very difficult to nail down. A good artificer can fill almost any role, being unparalleled in terms of party support, battlefield control, healing, blasting, and even melee combat.
  • The Erudite class in Third Edition is not broken in and of itself. It has the ability to eventually learn every psionic power there is, but this just makes it the psionic equivalent of a Wizard, whereas other psionic classes would be focused spellcasters like Beguilers or Warmages. The "Mind's Eye" series of columns on Wizards of the Coast website, however, provides an alternate class feature called Convert Spell to Power. For the cost of giving up a single bonus feat at 1st level, this feature grants Spellcraft as a class skill and allows the Erudite to use it to study any arcane spell, convert it into a psionic power, pay a small (e.g., 400 XP at 20th level) cost to permanently learn that power, and then use it at will for as long as their Mana Meter holds out. So not only is your Erudite a psionic-type Wizard, he's now also an arcane mutant-type Wizard that can spontaneously cast like a Sorcerer and isn't subject to arcane spell failure. To cap it all off, the spell-to-power Erudite can even ignore costly material components. The price of these materials is often the only thing preventing incredibly powerful spells from being cast as routinely as any other spell of their level.
• Some of the monsters fall into this category as well against unprepared players. Many monsters have instant death or incapacitation abilities which can take a PC out of combat or, in some cases, even turn them against their allies; enemy spellcasters are a particular nightmare, due to having access to every superior ability that the players have (and, thanks to polymorph and similar shapechanging abilities, players have access to every formidable monster ability as well). High level combat in 3.x edition (including Pathfinder) is often described as "rocket tag" for this reason — whoever fails their saving throw first, loses. Assuming the ability in question even allows you to roll a saving throw. Feats which improve your ability to act first in combat thus are viewed as extremely powerful, simply because very frequently, it gives you an enormous edge by allowing you to take out one or more enemies before they can even act — and prevent them from doing the same to you.
• Using the Serpent Kingdoms sourcebook it's possible to construct a perfectly legal character (a kobold dubbed "Pun-Pun" by its creator) who possesses every ability in the game (including godhood) at infinite strength and is immune to all negative effects at level 1. This combination does require assuming a certain intelligent NPC involved in the process (and by extension, the DM) to follow a very specific script without any deviation, as well as asking (and trusting) an Efreet to grant you three wishes. There are slightly more delayed/demanding versions that don't involve this Batman Gambit or cheesing off of genies, however, only requiring you to get up to level 5 instead of requiring the rest of the universe to conspire in your character's favor. Either way, the entire setup is essentially just a quick fasttrack to the Manipulate Form ability of the Sarrukh, which is the real Game-Breaker involved. The Sarrukh's Manipulate Form allows it to touch a target and give them a new ability or change an ability score to an amount maxing out at their own score in that stat, as long as the target is a reptilian creature from Toril, permanently. Aside from a brief spell of unconsciousness, there are no other limitations on the ability. It was blatantly meant for story purposes to let Sarrukhs create customized minions—but in the hands of Pun-Pun and his viper familiar, it becomes the route to gaining every ability in the game. It is the de facto most powerful build of all time, combining every Game-Breaker in existence in ways that would otherwise be impossible. (And notably, the most well-known version of the build assumes that Manipulate Form can only give you abilities that actually exist.)
• A particularly special example is the Omniscificer. There is a spell which allows you to share the damage you take with others, and it is possible to cast this spell in both directions; because each person receives half the damage given, if you cast this on four people taking half the damage of a fifth person, and in turn dealing back to that fifth person half the damage they themselves receive; as you would then be receiving back a quarter of the damage you originally took from each of the four people, you thus have created an infinite damage loop (so long as you have dealt yourself at least 4 points of damage - say, by jumping off a 40 foot cliff), causing you to instantly take an infinite amount of damage as the damage washes back and forth between you and your helpers. Ordinarily this would be extremely fatal, but there is another spell which allows you to stay alive for a short period of time despite being reduced to -10 or fewer hit points (which would normally kill you). There is also a spell called masochism which causes you to gain a +1 bonus to all your skill checks per 10 damage you took in the previous round; as you have taken an infinite amount of damage, you now have a literally infinite bonus to all your skill checks, allowing you to succeed at any skill check automatically. Better still, there are (extremely large) penalties you can take to many skill checks to instantly take certain actions, and other skill checks are by their very nature instant (such as knowledge checks). This means that the Omniscificer can, among other things, instantly succeed at every knowledge check possible and thus know everything that can possibly be known from a successful knowledge check. They also have an infinitely large diplomacy (and bluff, and intimidate) check, meaning that they can convince anyone of anything, and with the proper spells, can communicate with anyone (including the gods), meaning that they can convince the GODS of anything. Now, all of this is impressive, but they are still stuck in an infinite damage loop; however, they can simply dismiss the spell creating that loop, and then fall over into a bucket of water and voluntarily fail a drown check. Due to the way that drowning rules work in D&D, when you fail your first drown check, your hit points are instantly set to 0... meaning that it heals you from -infinity hit points to a much more tolerable 0 hp, from which you can easily be resuscitated with any manner of curative magic (or alternatively, a contingent cure minor wounds spell). Or the characters simply die and then fall into the bucket. The order of operations isn't explicit in the core book.
  • The description of how drowning works in the Stormwrack supplement book makes this a moot point, and the whole process impossible (without dying). Characters who can't/don't hold their breath start drowning the round after they fall into the water.
• The Haste spell in the original 3.0 version of Dungeons & Dragons. Originally redesigned the way it was to "show off" the new action rules, designers learned the hard way that there was such a thing as an action "economy" in their resulting game... and whoops, they broke it. Nerfing this spell was arguably one of the primary reasons for the creation of 3.5.
  • To make this one step worse, the "speed" armor enchantment permanently duplicated the haste spell and was cheap, which wouldn't have been so bad, except then the Arms and Equipment Guide established that armor enchantments could be added to bracers which could be worn by characters who don't normally get to wear armor. Every mage in his right mind bought a pair as soon as he could afford them, as an item that grants +1 armor bonus, +4 dodge bonus, AND lets you cast twice as many spells per round without having to ever take the action to cast Haste is a steal at 16,000 gp.
• Harm in 3.0. A no-save touch attack^note which 98% of the time are nigh-impossible to miss with that leaves a target with 1d4 HP. So the more hit points a target has, the more damage it's going to take. (It did the same in earlier editions, but Third Edition increased the Hit Points of most non-mooks about fourfold while keeping damage spells the same; so Harm became four times as effective as most other spells of its level.) If the cleric is feeling even more sadistic, they can toss in a Quickened Inflict Light Wounds. ILW is normally a poor spell, but it's guaranteed to deal at least 6 damage (assuming you're a high enough level to cast Harm yourself) to an opponent who has no more than 4 HP left, resulting in a one-turn KO. 3.5 instead has Harm deal 10 damage per caster level with a save for half damage, bringing it more in line with other damage spells.
• There is what is dubbed the Locate City bomb. The spell "Locate City" (a harmless divination spell) has an area of effect of 10 miles per caster level. Exact Words matters here. By the intent of the spell, that number ought to be its range (and if you tried using it in a real game, the DM would definitely tell you to act like it is the range over letting you nuke their setting over what is essentially a typo), but making it the area of effect allows one to use an obscure series of feats to first give it the Cold subtype, then deal 2 Cold damage to everything in the area of effect, then change it to an Electric type spell. You can then use another feat that gives an Electric spell a Reflex save, allowing you to apply the Explosive Spell metamagic, forcing a second Reflex save to avoid being blasted to the edge of the area of effect. Failing this save will deal 1d6 damage for each 10ft travelled, allowing someone to instantly wipe out a whole city of commoners with no collateral damage (except for the blood splatters). Eventually, players figured out that this didn't actually work, but as all the problems were due to Locate City having a 2-D circle as its area of effect, some slightly higher-level spells that scaled to a 1 mile/caster level sphere fixed them. Although this is a mere 10% of Locate City, it should be noted that on average the damage dealt by one mile in this fashion is roughly four times the HP of the biggest, baddest dragon a party is likely to ever see before epic levels. Unfortunately, however, if there is any obstacle anywhere between a given victim and the nearest edge of the blast, they simply smack into it for 1d6 points of damage and stop moving. Thus, any commoners who are inside or otherwise near any impediment to movement would only be injured. There is also the risk of the caster being caught in the radius. And of course, if someone succeeds their Reflex save, they don't get blown away either.
  • Alternately, modify the spell to deal ice damage then add in Fell Drain. A Fell Drain spell automatically gives everybody in the area 1 negative level... which will kill any level 1 commoner with no save, and then cause them to rise from the dead as a wight. When the wights are all up, they can go kill everybody who's still alive and turn them into more wights. The fun part is that the PCs all will survive this combo easily, while the original combo, if it worked, would kill all of them as well.
• A simple spell which is not high level, is already in the Player's Handbook, and doesn't require a cheesy combination for it to work is the 3rd-level Bard spell, Glibness. In a game system where +4 or +6 to a roll is considered a considerable bonus, Glibness gives +30 to your bluff checks for its duration (10 minutes per caster level, a minimum duration of over an hour). The penalty to your Bluff skill check for telling a lie that is completely and utterly unbelievable ("I am the Moon.") is only +20 to the opposing Sense Motive check. With Glibness, you can quite easily convince a king that you and he were actually secretly swapped at birth and that by all rights he's sitting on your throne. A single spell that can make a GM scream in fury. Glibness' power was highlighted to great effect in an Order of the Stick strip. The intended balance is that Glibness only provides its bonus for the purpose of telling lies and not any of the Bluff skill's combat applications, but as has been shown, lying is quite broken enough by itself.
  • Glibness can be seen as a subset of the entire game breaker that is otherwise known as the Diplomacy skill. Under the rules as written, it requires a result of 50 to turn someone willing to take risks to hurt you (Hostile) into an ally willing to take risks to help you (Helpful). Considering it's legally possible to build characters who get +72 to their Diplomacy rolls by level 6, in theory you need never carry a single weapon nor fight anyone in your life, since you'll only have to open your mouth for roughly 10 seconds to enlist the help of anything smart enough to have a language.^note Just be sure to toss in a relatively easy to obtain Omniglot effect
  • Of course, you have to have a common language (or other way to communicate) and the things trying to hurt you have to be smart enough to understand the concept of "friend" (and preferably not in an unhelpful way), so it's not foolproof. Also, no facet of the Bluff skill ensures against the target changing their mind in the face of contrary evidence. A bluff is given no guarantee of lasting any longer than it might take to notice proof to the contrary (which, for a claim like "I am the moon", may be seconds at best) - "usually 1 round or less" is the most the rules afford.
  • Pathfinder closed this loophole by doing what any sensible GM would do and stating in the rules that some things are so unbelievable no Bluff check will ever let you convince anyone that they are true. Additional sourcebooks later clarified that a very assured Bluff check just makes the listener think you are very confident in what you say, that is, not actively lying to them. A king being told by a very convincing stranger that they were swapped at birth will likely conclude that the strange fool he's speaking with believes very strongly in a false scenario.
• Blink, Ethereal Jaunt, and similar spells which let the caster pass through walls and ignore attacks have been the bane of many an unseasoned DM. Heck, just about everything on the Story-Breaker Power page is available as a spell.
• It's hard to find a use for Invisible Spell (viewers cannot tell that your spell has taken effect) that isn't overpowering. Common uses include Invisible Summon Monster, Invisible Fog Cloud (only obscures the vision of creatures who can see invisible things), Invisible Invisibility, and Invisible True Resurrection.
• By combining feats from multiple sourcebooks, it's possible to reduce the cost of Bestow Power (transfers psionic energy to another creature) until it can transfer at greater than 100% efficiency, allowing a character to recharge their psionic abilities between fights. This wouldn't be as notable if psionic characters didn't have the ability to boost the strength of their powers by expending larger amounts of energy (meaning that a character using this trick can "go nova" in every fight with no consequences).
• Prestige classes:
  • The Planar Shepherd, which happens to be custom made for Druids (and possibly the only Prestige Class strictly better than more Druid levels). It advances all the important druid tricks and is easy to qualify for, and provides two massive gains. The first is an enhanced Wild Shape that expands your list to include any magical beast, and later, any elemental or outsider, from a chosen plane, while also gaining any supernatural abilities they might have. So you go from being able to turn into a bear or a dinosaur to being able to turn into, say, an angel with a mess of spell-like abilities and cleric spellcasting. The second is the Planar Bubble ability, which allows you to create a 20-foot radius that shares your chosen plane's properties, while being immune to all harmful effects. The most obvious use is choosing a harmful plane to screw with your enemies, or a magic-boosting plane to power yourself up—and the most infamous use is choosing the Dal Quor Plane, where time flows ten times faster, to essentially give yourself ten free turns.
  • The Dweomerkeeper's Supernatural Spell feature allows the player to cast spells as supernatural abilities, meaning that most standard limitations of those spells are now removed. Say hello to effectively-costless Limited Wish, Permanency, and Miracle, folks! Its Mantle of Spells feature allows the player to convert their prepared spells into a set of spells they choose, and it even gets a metamagic reduction to top it off. The most infamous build combines it with the Initiate of Mystra feat, which also gives the potential to cast in an antimagic field and adds some rather nasty spells to the list, and the Divine Metamagic trick, resulting in a monster of a character who can cast almost any spell and ignore most restrictions on them, often while sitting inside of an antimagic field.
  • The Incantatrix. First, the requirements: third-level spells, three skills you were already taking, a feat you were already taking, and a feat that you can actually buy. Most casters qualify by accident. It gives full spellcasting progression, which means it's automatically better than continuing with most caster classes. Most full casting prestige classes provide minor benefits or only run for a few levels, but the Incantatrix runs for ten - and its features are some of the strongest in the game, with three free metamagic feats^note And considering that the only non-spell class features a Wizard has is a familiar (which rarely matters outside of scouting, and that's assuming it hasn't been traded away) and 4 bonus feats (one of which you will have already earned by getting to 5th level (the earliest entry into the class is 6th) the only downside is that they have to be metamagic feats and not item creation feats or Spell Mastery, (which is generally not worth the feat as its only needed if you lose your spellbook, and most DMs consider that to be a cheap tactic)., applying metamagic effects to an ally's spells (or your own), stealing continuous effects from enemy casters, and a capstone so overpowering that it's normally an epic feat. Pump up Spellcraft, and you can cast all your buffs at the start of the day, and Persist them at minimal effort. Picture a 20th-level Wizard with Prismatic Sphere, Shapechange, Superior Invisibility, True Seeing, Haste, Freedom of Movement, Globe of Invulnerability, Elemental Body... all at the same time, all day long.
  • The Hulking Hurler. The damage of a thrown object is proportional to its mass and limited only by your carrying capacity. If you qualify for the class at all, it's a one-hit-kill. Optimized HH builds have been known to do TRILLIONS of damage. The supposed 'balancing factor' for the Hulking Hurler was that it required the character taking the prestige class to be Large size or larger, which put it out of reach for most PCs without taking a truckload of monster hit dice or level adjustment. It probably wasn't meant to be used by player characters at all, but players found ways around the restriction (such as enlarge person with permanency), or the rather low-LA half-ogre. Or the goliath race, which counts as Large for some things including (thanks to a Word of God clarification in the game's FAQ) meeting the requirements for feats, spells, prestige classes, etc that require the character to be Large sized making it easy for characters to qualify for a class that wasn't designed for players.
  • The ur-priest. Nay-Theist characters who steal power from the gods, they gain cleric-style casting that happens to be better than most clerics. Though it starts a bit slow, its rate of growth is explosive, gaining a new level of spells with every character level. A proper ur-priest can earn 9th-level spells three levels before the clerics, if they enter it as soon as possible. Its own class features are a little lackluster, but that just means you can start as an ur-priest and then immediately hop into something else that advances its casting. The class is so powerful that it can even be used to buff up prestige classes that are otherwise hampered by bad casting advancement, like the mystic theurge. And one of the few features it does pick up is Rebuke Undead, making Divine Metamagic antics feasible. You do have to be evil and pick up some lackluster feats to play one, but it's well worth the trouble for an aspiring overlord.
  • The tainted scholar is a class one badly hopes wasn't meant for player use. It uses The Corruption to cast spells, including replacing its casting stat with its Taint score. Said Taint score can increase every time you cast a spell. You can also take Constitution damage to remove the level boosts on metamagic, letting you do some truly insane feats. You're locked into it, but that doesn't really matter when it provides full casting, allows features of its own, and even has a better HD than most arcane casting classes. If you take too much Taint, you die, but simply becoming undead or gaining the Evil subtype in some fashion makes you immune to this, and even then, you can comfortably have a Taint and Depravity score of 30 or 40 without being much in danger.
  • The Soul Eater definitely wasn't meant for players, but it's not at all difficult for them to qualify for. At 1st level, it sticks a Level Drain effect on anyone to be hit by a natural attack. There are so many routes to increase your numbers of natural attacks; a two-level dip in totemist alone nets four attacks. And at 7th level, the Level Drain gets twice as strong. Anyone you kill turns into a wight under your command, netting a free army. And at 6th, you gain the ability to shapeshift into anyone you've killed in the last 24 hours, gaining all their abilities. Want to break the game as a melee class? The world is your oyster.
  • The Illithid Savant prestige class (although, honestly, if your DM lets you play as a mind flayer and also lets you take a prestige class clearly designed for NPC use, he deserves what he gets). Basically, the Illithid Savant is like Sylar, gaining the powers, special abilities, and even spellcasting of those whose brains he eats. (For extra cheese, eat the brain of a Sorcerer or Wizard who can cast Gate. Now if you want a particular ability, just summon up the creature who has it virtually at will.)
  • The Beholder Mage is another class that was clearly not designed for players, and entry into it due to it requiring you to be a beholder is very, very difficult without heavy-duty Munchkining. But if you do somehow get into it? A Beholder Mage is a class that combines the best traits of Sorcerers and Wizards, being able to learn any spell and cast any spell with no preparation. Its casting advancement is absurd, gaining a new level of spells with each level gained. Oh, and due to the mechanics, the beholder sacrifices its eye rays to cast each level of spell, which sounds like a negative until you remember that for a beholder, using an eye ray is a free action—meaning that a Beholder Mage can theoretically cast ten spells in a single round. Much like the Illithid Savant, general perception is that any DM who lets you have it is clearly off their meds.
• Spells:
  • Consider the spell Shivering Touch from the sourcebook Frostburn (and well you should, since the game's creators clearly did not). When you cast it, you touch your target (usually not hard since D&D's combat system tends to focus around getting through armor to inflict damage rather than simply touching them - though spellcasters or creatures with certain exotic or class-granted defense bonuses may have very high touch AC). That target then suffers between 3-18 points of damage to its Dexterity. Because the aforesaid monsters generally have a low Dexterity, depending on how well you roll this will actually penalize an opponent's AC by up to -5 if you take their Dexterity to 0, and also render them unable to move. The phrase 'sitting duck' then applies to your opponent. As an added bonus, unlike most other seriously powerful spells in Third Edition, Shivering Touch does not allow a saving throw against it. The only beasts that stand a chance of avoiding death by clumsiness are those with spell resistance. Not bad for a spell which any cleric or wizard can cast from level 5; in some spheres this spell is called the dragon killer. And that's even before you look into things like applying metamagic to it.
  • Want to break the game with just two spells? Cast Contigency, make your contigent spell Celerity. Congratulations; the next time somebody threatens you, you get a free standard action to do whatever you want. You can even cast Twinned Celerity. Then use the extra actions from Twinned Celerity to cast TWO Twinned Celerities. Sure, you get dazed next turn, but if there's an encounter you can't finish or escape when given four free standard actions, it's time to give up on the whole "wizardry" thing.
  • Polymorph. Any. Object. All but the most frugal interpretations of this spell are absurdly broken, particularly considering that some interpretations allow for removal of the HD limit to Polymorph (an example of the spell is turning someone into a stone, which has no HD), or transforming a creature repeatedly to make any form permanent. How do you feel about permanently turning the party Fighter into a giant? Or the party Wizard into an ethergaunt with 27 Intelligence? Plus, in a pinch, it's a nasty little save-or-die.
  • Shapechange isn't as broken as PAO, but it more than makes up for it in versatility. Unlike the other Polymorph spells, Shapechange lets you assume the supernatural abilities of whatever you turn into. Turn into a Chronotyryn and take two turns! Turn into a Solar and gain full cleric casting! Turn into a Golem and gain near-complete spell immunity! And that's ignoring the fact that you can assume another form mid-shapeshift.
  • There is no usage of Genesis (once an epic spell, 'downgraded' to a 9th-level spell) that isn't completely broken. Free demiplane? That only you know the location of? And you can determine the traits of? Including, say, making it a Fast-Flowing Time plane? Or giving it morphic traits, letting you warp it to your will? About the only justification for it is that by the time you've gotten 9th-level spells, the game is basically over anyway.
  • The Orb spells introduced in Complete Arcane, which take nearly every complaint about blasting in the game and throw it in the trash. They have good damage, hit on a ranged touch attack, ignore Spell Resistance, come in every damage type (including the nigh-unresistable Sound and Force), don't offer a Reflex save, come in lesser and greater versions, and apply bonus effects on top of their damage. On top of all that, they're inexplicably Conjuration rather than Evocation spells, meaning a specialist wizard can safely bar Evocation and still have a powerful blasting option.
• Want to destroy the world? Pick a melee class. The metabreath feats in the Draconomicon allow a creature with a true breath weapon—which was not available to players at the time without jumping through a lot of hoops—to improve the damage/range/staying power/etc. of a breath weapon at the cost of extending the cooldown between uses, and they could be stacked with themselves. A 5th level green dragon shaman with 17 Constitution and the feats Enlarge Breath, Clinging Breath, and Lingering Breath could, in a single round, theoretically create a cloud of acid the size of the entire planet that lasted for a year or more at the cost of not getting to use his breath weapon for several years. The only problem is that anything that did survive (high-level wizards, earth elementals, etc.) would come looking for revenge slightly sooner than that.
• Eschew Materials, weak-ass feat or subtle game breaker? This feat will let you cast spells without having to worry about inexpensive material components, provided they cost less than 1 GP. This is mainly useful if you lose your spell component pouch, or don't have a hand free to reach it. But there are a few spells where you can squeeze a surprising amount out of a 1 gp budget:
  • Fabricate's material component is the raw materials to craft something, so you can create anything whose raw materials cost less than 1 gp out of thin air. This covers pretty much any mundane adventuring gear - food, rope, backpacks...
  • Visit the astral plane (or any plane that has the timeless trait - assuming you don't have any aging problems, this is a separate but solvable issue...) and cast fabricate as many times as you can to generate 1 silver piece each time, making you rich in no time when you come back to the material plane (if quite possibly insane from boredom and loneliness).
  • Another clever use is with the 0-level spell Launch Bolt, which lets you shoot a crossbow bolt without using a crossbow. Normally, this is useless - you could just carry a light crossbow instead. But a crossbow bolt sized for a Gargantuan crossbow (meant to be carried by creatures eight times your size, basically a ballista) is cheaper than 1 gp. So you can fire them with this spell, for 4d6 damage a shot. Not bad for a 0-level spell.
• The feat Divine Metamagic allowed Clerics to apply power-up modifiers to their spells, but at the cost of Turn Undead uses for a day. This would normally be fairly useful, but it became a Game Breaker when a magical rod was added to the game which grants an extra few Turn Undead attempts when used. Clerics could carry huge sacks of rods around and use them at the start of each day to cast multiple spells on themselves, extended to 24-hour duration.
• The spell Mind Rape, which can be basically summarized as "fail a save, and the caster gets to rewrite your personality". The first spellcaster to learn it and be evil enough to use it gets to take over the multiverse.
• The Teleport spell is generally seen as a game breaker when given to a sufficiently high-level wizard played by a sufficiently clever player. Entire campaigns' worth of notes are rendered irrelevant as the players, not the DM, suddenly set the pace for their movement and decide what parts of the campaign they will or will not participate in. Armed with the ability to scry out the Big Bad's lair, most parties at levels 9 and above could simply perform a Dungeon Bypass and Teleport themselves directly into the Big Bad's throne room and kill him using any number of pre-planned strategies and buffs, or simply Teleport away to safety if things went south, a tactic commonly known as "scry and die". The latter became so noticeable that Wizards of the Coast eventually created a spell solely for the purpose of allowing enemies to detect incoming teleports and prepare against them... A spell that, naturally, was also available to wizards.
• The Candle of Invocation is a famously broken item, thanks to its ability to summon an Outsider. Summon an Efreeti, and you get three wishes. Use just one of those wishes for another Candle, and voila: infinite wishes.
  • For that matter, you can just cast Gate directly. It's the same level as Wish and costs 1,000 XP, but that's a fifth the minimum XP cost, you get three wishes instead of one, and you can wish for magic items without paying their XP cost. What makes the Candle unique is merely that it puts Gate on the menu for every class, and for a price that an adventurer with proper wealth-by-level can afford as early as 5th level.
• The binder is generally seen as very well-balanced, with many good options but no Game-Breaker ones... with one big exception in the online vestige Zceryll. When binding Zceryll, you gain damage reduction, resistance to acid and electricity, the outsider type, an alternate form that provides a -1 to attack rolls against it, and True Strike. Sound good? That's just the first benefit, that being it making you pseudonatural. Next, it grants you immunity to confusion effects and a bonus against mental attacks. Nice? Not done. You can fire bolts that cause the target to take no actions if they fail a save. Very good? Still not done. You have telepathy out to a hundred feet, and the Mindsight feat, which lets you detect the location, types, and intellect of all creatures within your telepathy range. Amazing? One more: you gain a Summon Monster effect that scales to your level, has a good duration, sticks the pseudonatural template on everything you summon, and can be used every five rounds, letting you spam it endlessly. This one vestige is seen as bumping the binder from "powerful but balanced" Tier 3 to "more or less broken" Tier 2.
• White Raven Tactics is one of the few things from Tome of Battle that the entire fanbase can agree about being broken. It essentially amounts to giving one of your allies an extra turn right after you, even if they already acted that round, without even needing to give up yours. Giving someone two turns is as broken as it sounds, and it remains viable all the way to the endgame. It's seen as the martial counterpart to Celerity and 3.0 Haste, and a good reason to have a warblade cohort. And let's not even get into the question of whether you can use it on yourself...
  • Iron Heart Surge is the other one. It's meant to simply represent a character throwing off a disease or an enchantment or a debuff with Heroic Willpower, but the way it's worded is absurdly loose. It lets you select "an effect" with a duration of one or more rounds that is currently affecting you, and then end it. When used as intended, it's quite handy, but there are so many things that can qualify as "an effect with a duration of one or more rounds", and it doesn't say its effect on you ends, just the effect as a whole. As written, that means if you use it while in the vicinity of a poison gas cloud, it's not that you don't take damage—the cloud just instantly disperses. In theory, one could use Iron Heart Surge to end things like planar traits, states of existence, or gravity. No sane DM will let you use it this way, but if you find an insane one, feel free to go to town..
• Epic Spellcasting, on top of being a Scrappy Mechanic, is totally broken when used with any degree of cleverness, due to how easy it is to toy with mitigating factors. The idea's pretty simple: you have a bunch of basic effects, you can cast them if you make a Spellcraft check, and you can raise the DC to make the effects more powerful or lower it to make them worse or add more qualifiers onto it. One mitigating factor is "other casters have to donate spells, and each one can only donate one spell." But if you have the Leadership feat and an easily-obtained score of 25, all your cohorts and followers are casters and all of them donate their best spell, then you hit a -218 on the Spellcraft DC, a number that can skyrocket even higher if you throw Epic Leadership or Legendary Commander into the mix. Alternatively, you can use the above Genesis/Fast Time method, and take a -220 while working on a spell for 100 days that last five minutes for everyone else. Or you can take advantage of the fact that the Fortify seed allows you to add SR to a creature, with a -2 for every point of it below 25, to add it to a spell and give the target an SR of -500 (which has basically no ingame effect) in exchange for the abilities you actually wanted. Even games that play at epic levels tend to ban epic spellcasting for how absurd it can be.
  • Which is not to mention that the Fortify seed is itself an endless loop. The Spellcraft check required to cast an Epic spell is just that: a skill check, one governed by Intelligence. There is nothing stopping a character from using the Fortify seed to create a spell that increases their Intelligence, letting them roll a higher Spellcraft craft for another Epic spell that increases their Intelligence higher, and so on, with the last 5 casts bringing their other stats up to match. Since everything in 3.X is governed by a primary stat, this allows characters with Epic Spellcasting and the Fortify seed to have an arbitrarily large modifier on any given roll.
• Leadership itself is banned incredibly commonly. The low-level followers you pick up are just gravy; the real advantage is being able to pick up a cohort who's only a few levels lower than you. An entire spare character that doesn't use up XP is just so bluntly useful that it's considered mandatory if you have a DM who's dumb enough to allow it.
• The combination of Leap Attack (increases the multiplier of Power Attack's damage bonus if you charge and jump) and Shock Trooper (allows a character to take Power Attack's penalty away from AC instead of attack when charging) resulted in the ridiculously powerful "ubercharger" build, capable of dealing hundreds of points of damage in a single rush with the proper items. Being that it played on the already effective Power Attack feat, it was almost universally taken among any character that planned to fight in melee and could afford the feats. There are commoner builds that can one-shot dragons with this fighting style.
• The "flaws" variant in Unearthed Arcana may be a variant, but it seems intended to be balanced. And if that's the case, they failed miserably. Flaws are a Min Maxers Delight, as it's laughably easy to just take a flaw in something you're either already incredibly good at (a -1 to AC when you wear full plate armor) or incredibly bad at (a -3 to Reflex saves when you're as slow as a slug), and the potential to triple your number of bonus feats at 1st level is well worth it, especially since the feats can be used to patch the "hole" the flaw just made at a net profit.
• Races of the Dragon turned kobolds into a Lethal Joke Character par excellence. They can take the Draconic Rite of Passage, netting them a free Sorcerer spell for almost nothing, which can then be upgraded into the Greater Draconic Rite and give them a free Sorcerer level for almost nothing. Being dragonblooded opens up a whole lot of avenues for insane stuff, including specialized spells. And then there's the Dragonwrought feat, which prevents you from taking ability score penalties from aging, meaning you can choose to be Venerable at character creation and gain +3 to all mental stats with no downside. Just as importantly, however, it lets you be treated as a dragon at 1st level. This may sound innocuous, but it opens up a mess of rules normally meant to apply only to dragons. Dragons of Old age or greater can take Epic feats, so Dragonwrought Kobolds can take them at virtually any level. And if your DM is stupid enough to allow Loredrake^explanation adds two levels of Sorcerer spellcasting, and its drawback is irrelevant for Dragonwrought Kobolds, Spellhoarding^explanation converts all Sorcerer spellcasting to the generally superior wizard spellcasting, or many other things exclusive to the type... well, suffice to say Sorcerer is no longer Tier 2.