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It's like this, except that the Nerf Maverick is still cool. A change to a game that weakens a particular item, ability or tactic. It's usually done to fix something perceived as a Game Breaker, and is almost always a subject of controversy in gaming communities. Occasionally, it's not a change in one game, but rather a change in an equivalent item, ability, or tactic between one game and its sequel.
In the past, Nerfs for console games were all but impossible due to lacking the ability to patch them. Modern consoles however provide this ability, so they now join computer games in this. Many games, especially MMORPGs and other online multiplayer games, are constantly adjusted to maintain balance. Sometimes, that requires taking something powerful down a peg or two. Of course, users of that item will not be amused, and will inevitably flock to the forums to complain, resulting in a Flame War about whether or not the nerf was justified. On the other hand, rants from poor players that something should be nerfed are just as common. Either way, the subject is a touchy one.
A Buff is a change for the better. These are as controversial as Nerfs; a Buff to one unit's Hit Points is effectively a Nerf to the damage of anything attacking it. A Flame War can even develop on whether a given change is a Buff or a Nerf, much less an impovement in the game as a whole.
"Nerf" is the brand name of a group of toys made from squishy foam. "Nerf Guns" that fire projectiles of the stuff are most famous, but the trope actually gets its name from another part of the toy line, squishy foam bats.
These days, the term has been expanded so that "Nerf" is any downward adjustment, not just an unduly crippling one; similarly, the "Nerf Bat" is no longer what the player is issued to take on The Evil Empire with, but what the developer whacks him with.
Games with Fake Balance often causes flame war due to nerfs and buff implemented.
Has no relationship to " Narf".
Examples:
- Ultima Online is the trope namer. Developers made a change early in the game's life that turned all melee weapons down to a bare fraction of their former strength. Players compared fighting with the end result to hitting the enemy with a Nerf bat and disdained them for years afterward, heralding the age of archer/mage PKs.
- Don't forget the tamer nerf! Way back when, tamers had no "control slots" - i.e., they could own and control an unlimited number of pets. This led to suitably determined players being absolutely invincible in battle; while a player character can defeat one tamed dragon, two are beyond most people, and it was possible for someone to sic ten or eleven onto an enemy, an attack that nobody could reasonably hope to counter unless they, too, had ten or eleven dragons. While the nerf was understandable in this case - "control slots" were introduced, wherein characters could only control a certain number of animals, valued up to five points; weak animals like horses took one point; dragons took three - it was sad that the days of polar bear armies were over.
- The Super Smash Bros series (and, indeed, fighting games in general) gets a bit of flak for this, since their preferred tactic for balancing characters is to weaken or strengthen the power/effectiveness of attacks, rather than balance the characters through speed, comboablility, or attack changes. Of course, in Brawl, while most of the characters who were "lower tier" were effectively balanced with attack improvements and actually effective balancing techniques, while Fox, generally considered to be the best in Melee, was nerfed instead, to the ire of Tourney players (a few of which decided not to play it at all), and the amusement of everyone else.
- The most infuriating nerf in the game however, is probably Captain Falcon. He was a great character in the first two games, with good power, great combos, and he was the fastest character in the game. Now, he has no priority, atrocious lag, and is virtually unplayable when pit against the likes of such hideously broken characters like Meta Knight.
- The funniest part is that Brawl Captain Falcon is almost identical to Melee Captain Falcon—his actual moves and abilities were pretty much left comparatively untouched. The nerfing comes from the complete change of the physics system and the lack of any real hitstun, which removed the one thing he absolutely excelled at—combos. This is pretty much the case with Fox as well, but he's had more obvious nerfs to his moves (not being able to cancel the Reflector is a big one).
- Pikachu, Kirby, and Ness were ridiculously strong in the original game on the Nintendo 64, and were nerfed into oblivion in Melee. Fox, Shiek, Captain Falcon, Ganondorf, and Peach were among Melee's best characters, and they've all been toned down for Brawl. Ironically, Kirby and Pikachu were improved.
- Jigglypuff's rest move could be seen as a victim of this effect, being nigh unstoppable in Smash 64, weaker, but still useful in Melee, and pretty much taken out back and shot in the head in Brawl. This was mitigated, however, by a better rounding out and tweaking of Jigglypuff's other moves to compensate (Wall of Pain is still quite viable for those who can pull it off), making her still somewhat competitive in the hands of a competent user, just less reliant on a single attack.
- Many Halo fans consider the changes from the pistol in Halo (which, having a scope, makes an adequate long-range weapon) to the magnum in Halo 2 (which, having no scope, doesn't) a Nerfing of the original weapon.
- Bungie then took things one step further in the first autoupdate: the Magnum went from a decent secondary weapon in a pinch (about seven shots to kill) to a laughable humiliation weapon (fourteen shots, or one full clip and then two more rounds, to kill). Needless to say, the community was quite upset.
- They also weakened the needler somewhat in Halo 2, decreasing its homing capacity and making it a close-range weapon.
- That was because it was dual-wieldable (but even two of them were more or less useless). From Halo 1 to Halo 2, pretty much any weapon that was given the ability to be dual-weld experienced a Nerf (the handguns, needler, and plasma rifle). The needler was actually given something of an un-nerf in Halo 3, as it was single-wielded and had it's damage and homing increased.
- The plasma pistol went through a similar (but more obvious) nerfing in Halo 3, mostly due to how effective it was when combined with an armor-piercing weapon like the SMG or Battle Rifle (or even the aforementioned Magnum before it was nerfed). You would charge up the plasma pistol while walking around, then launch it to strip the opponent of their shields, then follow up with the other weapon for a quick kill, leading to these tactics being called the "n00b combo". It's still possible to do this in Halo 3, but charging the plasma pistol for too long drains it's energy, so you have to wait until you're right on top of someone before you can use the combo, or else you'll run out of ammo very quickly. It also doesn't home in on the nearest target anymore, so unless you get a perfect hit, your opponent will definitely kill you before you get a second chance. On the other hand, now the plasma pistol can stop vehicles EMP style, so Your Mileage May Vary on whether or not it's still a worthwhile weapon.
- And the shotgun too.
- The even went so far as to nerf physics, revamping the vehicle collision damage system and completely removing fall damage, in order to cater to "inexperienced players." Those changes, along with a few others, completely removed the risk factor of run & gun techniques, which in turn made the game play more like an Unreal clone than a semi-innovative (for consoles) shooter.
- The vehicle thing was understannable, since in the original getting so much as tapped with a vehicle killed you instantly. A Super Soldier wearing Powered Armor should really be able to survive a lot more than that.
- To be fair, Bungie had made several statements justifying their decision to "nerf" the original M6D pistol - that it was ridiculously overpowered in its original incarnation. They originally intended players to use the pistol as a backup, and that problems with weapon balancing led to it becoming a game breaking killing machine. The fact that some fans still bemoan the change, despite Halo 2 & 3's Battle Rifle having the same range, firing rate, damage and shots-per-magazine as the M6D, is another example of Halo's Unpleasable Fanbase.
- In an apparent move to please the fans, Halo: ODST will feature a scoped pistol.
- They also removed the Rocket Launcher's homing ability in Halo 3, presumably to prevent it from breaking the game in multiplayer.
- Whether the changes made to many facets of Dungeons And Dragons 3.5 by Wizards Of The Coast are just balancing acts or Nerfs is a subject of much debate.
- The primary source of argument is the haste spell, which was changed from being extremely useful to everyone to being mostly worthless to anyone who does not engage in conventional (melee or ranged weapon) combat — meaning most spellcasters have no reason ever to cast it on themselves. Of course, in this particular case, 3.0 was the only edition where haste was useful to spell casters in the first place. However, since it affected your caster-level worth of allies within a 30 feet radius, it made for a semi-decent group buff (albeit not nearly as good as it used to be) for the combat characters. Eventually, it was somewhat revived in the form of "Celerity" and its variants.
- Oddly enough, Wizards eventually made a spellcasting prestige class, the Swiftblade
 , that haste is good on.
- Wizards of the Coast also seems very, very afraid of polymorphing effects. They've reworked the rules so many times that this editor has completely given up on trying to keep track of them. Some of the changes were arguably good, such as changing the spells from Polymorph Self and Polymorph Other, the latter of which could be abused, to Polymorph and Baleful Polymorph. Other changes were to cover up such "abuses" as the possibility of parrots being able to pronounce command words for wands that the character could use in normal form. Despite all this, polymorph and similar effects (such as wildshape) are still really good.
- Which is why the last major update in 3rd edition was excising polymorph from the game altogether, radically rewriting polymorph-based abilities like Wildshape, and replacing polymorph with greatly nerfed spells like "Dragonshape" and "Trollshape".
- That was in AD&D 2ed. Forgotten Realms: Dragonshape spell giving target proper dragon's body with all powers instead of mere semblance. The same for Tyranteyes (guess who) and Fiendform (to a lesser degree).
- One word: Shapechange. Bar none, the most powerful nonepic spell in existence and vastly powerful even on an epic scale. The overpowered nature of that spell is, in part, what led to the massive nerf on polymorphing.
- For a buff example in Dungeons And Dragons, clerics were seen as boring in 2nd edition because they had to use up almost all their spells healing their allies. In 3rd edition, they ended up being one of the most powerful classes in the game.
- Wizards of the Coast definitively Nerfed Wizards and Druids from what they were before, where at certain levels, every other character was second fiddle to whatever scroll a Wizard had. Druids were healers, and Fighters, and Sneaky. The new versions in 4th edition are much lower in power
- Just remember, one man's nerf is another man's finally balanced the game...
- In Final Fantasy XI, which emphasizes cooperative play more than the average MMORPG, any perceived "nerf" of a job class can grossly affect that class's invitation rates for years to come, often far out of proportion to the actual impact of the change. The most infamous was the "Dragoon nerf", actually a nerfing of multi-hit weaponskills in general that prevented them from being spammed, which happened to hit the Dragoon's most famous weaponskill particularly hard. For years, despite the introduction of enemies that a Dragoon would work well against and some shoring up of the job's most glaring weaknesses, Dragoons had a very hard time getting invited to experience point parties; this state of affairs only changed with a controversially large Buff to all two-handed weapons.
- Now there recently has been a change to the game that "fixed an issue" where Beastmaster pets would be able to benefit from a Dancer's Samba effects. The players, oddly enough, were unanimously not amused. The actual problem people had with this is simply because the Samba effect would, at best, heal a monster pet's HP by maybe a couple hundered or so at the highest levels... out of thousands. True, it was a glitch, but the players had no problem with it.
- The ranger class was ridiculously overpowered to the point where even the most pathetic ranger could out damage the best equipped of another offensive class. All bosses and big monsters essentially only used rangers for their damage since they were by far the best damage for any situation. They got nerfed with, of course, much whining from players who now say that rangers were now one of the weakest damage dealing classes even though they still remain one of the most expensive and one of the biggest hate magnets (due the fact that even though they do weaker damage overall, they do a lot of spike damage). There is, arguably, much truth to these complaints.
- The aforementioned controversially large buff proceeded like this: two-handed weapon users experienced an upgrade followed by a downgrade (though overall it was still an upgrade). The upgrade was supposed to bring two-handed weapon users on par with one-handed weapon users, who had a significant advantage in offense due the fact that most of them capitalized on dual-wielding via the Ninja subjob and the fact that missing with a one-handed weapon meant less time, damage, and TP lost than missing with a two-handed weapon. The upgrade not only increased the damage and accuracy of two-handed users, but increased them to the point that accuracy gear (usually coveted in FFXI) was unneeded and the defenses of enemies mattered little. Even a poorly equipped two-hander could still beat a better-equipped one-hander, much as was once the case with the Ranger. Two-handed weapons that were supposed to be balanced by low damage output became ridiculously overpowered. The most overpowered class that came out of this was the Samurai, which was the only two-handed job that was balanced before the update and has one of the most famous offensive-tradeoff weapons. The Dragoon class also benefited greatly since they can heal themselves and popular enemies were already weak to their weapon type. This caused a big surge of "Samurai parties" and "Dragoon parties". This upgrade was nerfed, though there wasn't much complaint since they were still given a significant upgrade. The Samurai is still ahead.
- City Of Heroes veterans will remember "Enhancement Diversification" ("ED"). Pre-ED, you could enhance a given characteristic (damage, accuracy, etc.) of a superpower up to six times for the same cumulative boost (Totaling a tripling of the power's statistic in some areas, doubling with defensive powers). With ED, players started seeing a loss of returns at around the third enhancement (doubled effect for most offensive effects, about a 60% boost for defensive effects), in order to encourage players to spread the wealth around and enhance different characteristics. Naturally, a lot of strategies that relied on powers being pushed to their limits or breaking the game no longer worked.
- More recently, Invention Enhancements have been introduced; they can circumvent the limitations of ED in a variety of interesting ways, often resulting in characters much more highly customized and/or powerful than they were before ED with clever slotting. The Devs claim this was the point behind previous nerfs; they needed to make the absurdly powerful heroes weaker to enable them to do neat things to power them up again.
- Prior to ED, the Regeneration powerset had been significantly reduced in effectiveness at least once every update. This reduced it from ridiculous, allowing the DPSer to absorb more damage than the tank, to merely very good.
- And not too long before ED, there was a rather more straightforward nerf to nearly all defensive powers, officially described as a Global Defense Reduction. The lone upside of all this was almost all the defensive powers were reworked so that they stacked.
- At around the same time, agro limits and AoE target caps were introduced. Before, one could herd/damage every enemy on a map, provided they stayed in range. Now, you cannot damage, mez, or affect more than 16 foes with the most massive AE power (caps usually range from 5-12 on most powers, though), and a single player cannot have more than 16 AI trained on him/her. (This can actually be an advantage in extraordinarily large fights).
- Akuma has been nerfed repeatedly since his first appearance in Super Street Fighter II Turbo, but this was beneficial, as he was brought down from a nigh-invincible boss character to a powerful regular character.
- In Star Wars: Dark Forces the Imperial Repeater Rifle is arguably the game's best weapon, shooting very accurate blasts machine-gun style and pushing enemies back farther than any other weapon. Did we mention you can fire three barrels at once? The only drawback is you'll get so addicted to it you'll wonder where the heck your ammo went. The version seen in Jedi Outcast, though, is utterly useless: accuracy is lost, and the shots it fires are much, much weaker than they once were. The secondary trigger fires stronger blasts from a sort of underslung grenade launcher, but they're nigh impossible to aim. It even changed the Repeater from an Energy Weapon to a slugthrower (projectile weapon).
- In addition, Dark Forces' Concussion Rifle was so powerful it was almost too strong—so powerful you could hurt yourself if you weren't careful. It was powered down for Jedi Knight, unable to trigger its concussion effect on multiple spread-out enemies, being more like an instant-hit rocket launcher but was still powerful enough to be useful—it even gained a secondary fire that used less energy, was more accurate, and targeted only a single enemy. It was one of a few weapons that couldn't be blocked by a lightsaber, though it could be Force pulled. About the only way this could be called a nerf is if the Dark Forces version wasn't broken. The gun was taken out of Jedi Outcast entirely. Jedi Academy brought it back, and while it still did hideous amounts of damage, the gun was very nearly nerfed. Rather than being instantaneous damage, it fired a projectile that, like rockets, could be Force pushed away—but it was much, much quicker, requiring split-second timing. Unless, of course, you try to use it on a computer Jedi... i.e., Welcome to Nerftown, population: Concussion Rifle.
- Many cards in the Yu-Gi-Oh Trading Card Game suffer through this every once in a while. Usually it comes in two flavors: either the card itself or the rulings for its use are changed to make it more situational and less powerful. It's become even more of a problem post-Invasion of Chaos, as Konami attempts to prevent another Envoy incident.
- Most cards were just banned instead of nerfed though. The only time cards are genuinely nerfed is when the cards are mistranslated, like with "Bazoo the Soul-Eater", "Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer", and "Skull Lair." Their very powerful effects were very easy to activate, kinda similar to the two Chaos envoys though not as powerful. However, the envoys were banned whereas these two cards were changed. Ironically, many people did not use "Skull Lair" despite it being broken since it was only a common card.
- The Psychic type was horribly broken in the original Pokemon games, on account of their huge Special stats and the fact that the types that were strong against them had no decent attacks at all. Pokemon Gold and Silver introduced two new types (one immune to Psychic and the other resistant to it), buffed the Bug and Ghost types (Psychic's original weaknesses), and split the Special stat into Sp. Attack and Sp. Defense.
- From a less-egregious example: the Ground-type move Dig had a base power of 100 in the original Red, Blue, and Yellow versions, but in later games, its base power was decreased to 60. Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum then buffed it to a respectable 80, the average of 100 and 60.
- While Psychic types are most famous for being nerfed in sequels, it is far from unique. Water types have long been the most plentiful type in the game, and the ones who were strong against them were originally possessing pitiful damage potential (Grass) or a bit rare to actually use (Electric). Subsequent games have both increased the usefulness and number of Grass moves and increased the availability of both types of moves.
- It's probably little surprise that Starmie, which is both Water and Psychic type, has been since the beginning among the highest of the Character Tiers. It helps that each nerfing comes with a subsequent buff (like increasing its already-impressive potential movepool).
- Baldur's Gate had Charm and Dominate spells (which allow you to control enemies) last as long as the original D&D equivalents (ages in game time). Combined with an item that gave you infinite uses of Charm and an exploit that allowed you to use the item while invisible, a player could charm every enemy in the area, and use them to kill each other. Baldur's Gate 2 addressed this not just by removing the item and the exploit, but also by changing the charm and domination spells so that the choice of targets was highly limited, the spells became easier to resist, and the time they lasted was miniscule.
- Summon wands in BG1 could spam massive hordes of weak monsters to help the player. Enough of those could either kill any major opponent, or distract them long enough for the player to kill them. BG2 not only removed summon wands from the game, but also restricted the number of possible summoned monsters in game to five. Whether or not that was a good nerf is up to the individual player.
- Except for the fine detail that you can actually get a summoning wand in the opening dungeon and then (if you have the cash) sell it to a merchant and then buy it back with a massive increase in charges...
- World of Warcraft has had plenty of both kinds of changes since the launch. In particular, physical classes tend to receive nerfs fairly often, although it's arguably the wrong way to address the balance issue — the real problem is that physical stats scale far better than magical stats.
- The prime example is Agility versus Intelligence. Agility improves damage for rogues and hunters, critical hit chance, and pretty much every physical defensive attribute. Intelligence only increases mana and spell critical hit chance (at a much lower rate). Strength also being a strong attribute for Death Knights' parry also doesn't help matters.
- Individual Cycles tend to be seen too. Spell functionality changes are common as one class becomes too dominate or one style becomes the one true style to play. It gets very strange when spells get nerfed for being too powerful but come back at a higher level. Sleep becomes a huge example as in Beta it was the end all be all Mez before being removed for being too powerful and was put back in the game a few years later.
- In the Battlefield series, at least one character class or vehicle per game tends to be overpowered at release. In Battlefield: Vietnam, it was an American character that spawned with an M60 and a LAW, giving it the best anti-infantry and anti-tank weapon at the same time. In Battlefield 2, it was the Blackhawk helicopter, which had crazy powerful miniguns and captured points in seconds when fully loaded with soldiers. Both were toned down in subsequent patches.
- One of the more noticeable nerfs in Battlefield2142 was the steady decrease in the power of "podding," which is the practice of launching a player out of a tube in a pod, which is intended to be a way of getting players from one place to another. Aside from the pod-surfing debate (which was more of an Obvious Rule Patch closing a physics exploit), the damage of podding vehicles was severely reduced. In early versions, you could destroy APCs, damage tanks, and even kill aircraft, if you could manage the funky pod controls well enough to hit them. In later versions, trying to pod ground vehicles will usually kill the infantryman doing the podding, without hurting the vehicle much, and even the relatively weak aircraft can survive being podded.
- In the more recent Castlevania games, the accessory that got you "infinite" MP has been brought down from "The MP bar doesn't go down" to "The MP bar fills up extremely fast" to "The MP bar fills up pretty fast", so that people cannot use obscene amounts of MP to become invincible, which was the case in some games that had seemingly game-breaking abilities such as healing on the spot.
- The game engine in Order of Ecclesia debuffs it again, since MP is used to fuel all of your attacks.
- Magic The Gathering goes through this from time to time, with Wizards of the Coast banning or limiting cards that prove unbalancingly powerful.
- In times past, Wizards would sometimes nerf overpowered cards by issuing errata. Most of them have since been changed back. The current policy is to make all cards function as originally designed (though they'll still issue errata to fix genuine errors, or to bring cards in line with new rules). There are a few different "formats" distinguished by which cards are banned, allowing players to choose what level of nerfage they want to deal with.
- Occasionally, a de-nerfed card will immediately be banned thanks to their newfound power level. One short-lived tournament environment featured a newly-de-nerfed card that allowed very quick wins. With the right four cards in one's opening hand, the card could be used to win the game at the beginning of the first turn of the game - even if that turn was the opponent's.
- Magic, because of its rotating set formats, can Nerf a card simply by replacing it with a new one. If Lightning Bolt is too powerful, wait for it to rotate out of the main format and then print Shock, which is the same cost for one less damage. Ditto Counterspell, which was replaced with Cancel - the same thing, but with a mana added to the cost. Lightning Bolt and Counterspell still see vintage and casual formats, but since a lot of things are in Vintage, they fit in the end.
- It is more common for a strategy to be nerfed, rather than an individual card. This is often accomplished by releasing a card which is devastatingly effective against the currently dominant deck type, but of limited usefulness against other decks.
- This also happens sometimes with Legend of The Five Rings via similar methods to M:TG.
- Several spells in Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords were drastically nerfed in the port from consoles to the PC. In particular the Knight's Stun and the Wizard's Fireball, which were both give two-turn recharge times and slightly reduced damage.
- Team Fortress 2 is an interesting example in that Valve seems to be afraid of touching the damage and health values. Hence, the complaints about Soldiers and Demomen being too powerful were adressed by severely reducing their ammo (which doesn't do anything if said classes are camping near a dispenser). The Pyro on the other hand was buffed by means of a new alt-fire function for their flamethrower to deflect rockets and grenades. The alternative weapon did boost the health of the user, but that was removed shortly after.
- And the Demoman just got a severe Nerf that took them down from Game Breaker status: Their sticky mines can be broken by a single bullet. This is important, as the sticky mines (a) do more damage than any other weapon, (b) were indestructible and easily spammable, (c) could be detonated at any time (except during taunting) and (d) you could have eight of them out at a time.
- Followed by a new update on February 16 2009 that reduced the damage on stickybombs for the first five seconds when the Demoman is less than 512 units away. Finally.
- The change in Demomen from QTF to the sequel Team Fortress 2 was even more drastic than any of the TF2 changes so far. In QTF, Demos could detonate their pipebombs (which were remote-detonate like stickybombs) at any time after they were fired. This allowed them to detonate pipebombs on top of or immediately beside enemies at any range from close to medium. TF2 demos can do this to an extent, but the tactic was more effective in QTF, as TF2 demos have to wait a second or so after firing before a sticky bomb will arm. This gives the enemy at least a chance of escaping the blast.
- The most polarizing nerf in the game was the Dead Ringer. As originally implemented, the Dead Ringer could be exploited to live forever at the cost of doing absolutely nothing useful. Obviously this was a glaring problem (i.e. Stop Having Fun Guys complained loud enough), so Valve quickly nerfed it. The nerf was simple: When you uncloaked from the Dead Ringer, regardless of how much charge it had remaining, it would completely decharge, and require recharge from scratch. Unlike the other cloak watches, the Dead Ringer cannot be used unless it's fully charged; also, it cannot recharge from ammo packs like the vanilla watch can. It only lasts for eight seconds on a full charge, and requires 24 seconds to fully recharge from empty. In short: totally worthless. Thankfully, Valve has since reached a compromise: when you decloak with the Dead Ringer, it either remains at its current charge level, or reduces to 60% charge, whichever is less. (It can also now be recharged with ammo packs, although this is less significant).
- The Sandman has also been subject to a lot of this. When it started out it could stun anyone, even people who were Ubercharged, and the penalty was that you couldn't double jump while holding it. It was then nerfed slightly in the Classless Update where the penalty was changed to 30 less HP, and Ubers couldn't be stunned anymore. It was then nerfed again in the War Update, where only the longest possible range would cause a stun.
- Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 nerfed several classes that were overpowered in the prequel by a variety of means:
- Mana starts out at 0 every fight, limiting the higher level spells such as summons.
- Standard Status Effects are much less powerful or much less likely to hit, prevent Mezzer classes from locking down enemies with ease (they are far from useless though).
- Perhaps most importantly, Judges were nerfed. Only one law per battle, and breaking it only forfeits a few advantages, rewards and the ability to revive teammates during battle.
- Thieves were toned down significantly. All it took in the first game was to inflict Stop on an opponent, and a Thief could steal every piece of equipment they had, significantly weakening them. Now they can only steal loot and one accessory, and even then they can only steal up to 4 things from one person.
- There is another nerf that is actually a bit helpful. Most abilities from the previous game now use less MP in the sequel.
- The stats themselves seemed to be nerfed as well. Offensive and Defensive stats could hit 400-500 points in Advance, but in A2, they don't go any higher than the 300 range. Damage is also nerfed, making a 999 damage hit impossible unless you use an ability of some sort.
- The reaction ability Damage > MP from FFTA was broken where even if you had 1 MP left, all damage would be dealt to the MP and would not rollover to the HP. In the sequel (ability now called MP Shield), the reaction ability uses MP to reduce damage and remaining damage transfers to the user's HP.
- The infamous snaking technique in Mario Kart. In the DS version, players snaked by quickly drifting left to right on straight roads and doing mini turbos. Only certain characters could drift this way effectively without losing control and the mini turbos they got were almost like a mushroom. Naturally, flame wars broke out over whether this technique was fair. The Wii version changes the drifting and mini turbo mechanic, making snaking near impossible to do. Naturally, many people complained, but they found something else to use that was a lot easier than snaking.
- The game also nerfed the vehicles that did best in the last games by changing said mini turbo system, meaning that instead of light karts with high acceleration and handling being the top tier, the heavy karts with high top speed and drift became the top tier. Although that's more like completely inverting the meta game.
- The Red Shells are also tweaked from Mario Kart DS. In the DS game, Red Shells were smart and attacked drivers from the side instead of behind, making the "hold item behind you for a shield" strategy almost useless. In the Wii version, the shells go back to the old "follow directly behind the target" behavior.
- Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow lets you use Big Freaking Swords with ease, but by Portrait of Ruin, big weapons have become slower and riskier to use than, say, whips or fists.
- An interesting variation: The particular glitch that made weapons like the Claimh Solais so overwhelmingly incredible (the fact that the weapon animation canceled if Soma landed during it) was fixed for the BFS category and other high-attack, low-speed weapons in Dawn of Sorrow, but deliberately not fixed for katanas, for their specialty was decided to be speed and combo potential. The Claimh Solais' high damage and holy attribute still make it the accepted best weapon in the game, but not by such a crushing margin as on the GBA.
- Holy Water in the original Castlevania and Castlevania III made for an amazing subweapon against ground enemies, not only dealing continuous damage but also freezing enemies. Combined with triple shots, it might as well replace the whip as the Belmonts' main weapon. It was weakened in future installments; it lost its enemy-freezing capbility and, in later titles, had its flame crawl forward a short distance to prevent it from lingering on an enemy.
- Kingdom Of Loathing has had nerfings, as with any game of its type, but it also makes fun of the concept with the "foam dart" item, which can be used on any player to give them the "Nerf'd" condition. The condition prints messages that makes it sound like you're doing less damage and getting less item drops, but it doesn't in fact actually do anything.
- Because of its highly competative and balanced Pv P, skills in Guild Wars are almost constantly being tweaked, adjusted, buffed and nerfed to keep things balanced; some skills were even split into Pv P and Pv E versions to make them balanced in 2 totally different game modes. However, a recent controversial change saw the balance team blatantly destroy the Pv P version of one skill (Smiter's Boon) by nerfing it as absolutely as is physically possible (maximum energy cost possible which is 5 times the previous cost, duration nerfed to 1/6th of its previous length and recharge changed to a ridiculous 45 times its duration). They openly admitted their intention was simply to stop people from using the skill in Pv P at all and they suceeded since it is now completely and utterly unuseable under any circumstances whatsoever. There was much rage.
- Between Bleach: Blade of Fate and Bleach: Dark Souls for the DS, several characters had a radical toning-down. Byakuya Kuchiki now uses up a Spirit Power bar for each Senbonzakura, preventing him from sitting on one side of the screen and spamming it until victory, and Aizen's moves were juggled to prevent him from being an MK Walker, among others. Sadly, in the crossfire several balanced characters took hits as well (sorry, Orihime).
- Each Mega Man Battle Network game Nerfed something that had been overpowered before (while introducing new Game Breakers). A few examples:
- Some chips and Program Advances did less damage in later games. GutsShoot did a whopping 500 in the first game; it dropped to 400 in the second and 300 in the third.
- Program Advances were the backbone of many a strong folder until BN5, when a new rule was imposed: any given Advance could be used only once per battle. The hardcore PvPers were ticked.
- You could have ten copies of a single chip in your folder in the first game. This was reduced to five, then four. Tougher restrictions were placed on summon chips too.
- Many of the popular NaviCust parts became more awkward and harder to combine. BN4 had a particularly obnoxious HubBatch that took up the whole Command Line.
The big exception to this trend was the final game, BN6, which was extremely generous — some even found it too generous. (180 damage from an M-Cannon! Everything in * code!)
- Speaking of Mega Man, the Shadow Blade in Mega Man 3 is often considered the nerfed version of the game breaking Metal Blade from Mega Man 2 due to their similar appearances and capabilities, with the differences being that the Shadow Blade consumes more energy and only travels so far before flying back to Mega a la a boomerang.
- The Boktai series has one of the worst Nerfings in gaming history. The Gun Del Sol is your only weapon in the first game, but it's incredibly versatile, capable of blasting solar energy in all sorts of ways (as well as launching grenades and storing tons of backup energy). In the second game, you lose this weapon early on — and when you finally get it back, it's a shadow of its former self. It can't fire spreads, lacks all the extras, and consumes so much energy you can only use it a few times before refilling.
- Though it is stated in game that it was damaged and that there was only enough time for a sloppy repair job, explaining it's poor performance. By the third game, it was back to full strength.
- In a Truth In Television Inversion of this trope that can only be described as brilliant, people who play competitive battles using Nerf guns will actually modify the standard models so that they'll work better: putting in better springs, using custom darts (paint-filled tips, etc.), and other variations. The Irony is delicious.
- Madden 2006 added the QB Vision Cone, which Nerfed the players who overly relied on the mobile Michael Vick (because his Awareness stat was so low, he had one of the smallest cones in the game).
- Note that this backfired spectacularly - after enough practice, with a normal or small vision cone you could effectively deke a defensive back into covering the wrong player; players with large vision cones such as Tom Brady or Peyton Manning could not, effectively nerfing the best pocket passers in the league. The vision cone was removed two years later.
- Mortal Kombat 2 featured the then-new Kitana, whose telekinetic "fan lift" maneuver led to one of the most devastating and one-sided attacks in any fighting game — corner opponent, lift, then punch or kick the living crap out of said opponent. Most of the game cabinets were eventually revved with a fix that caused a player delivering an attack on the end of the fight screen to bounce back just out of range of the attack; the fan lift, while still crippling to an opponent, was no longer a gamebreaker.
- Left 4 Dead got a few nerfs for the VS mode. People who play as the survivors would usually huddle together and spam their melee attack if they got mobbed by the infected. This prevented players using Hunters from being able to pounce on them without being shoved off. A patch now adds a fatigue effect to the survivor's melee attacks; survivors have to wait at least 1 or 2 seconds before being able to melee again. Another patch also reduced the damage done by the special infected in VS in order to keep the game balanced. Another changed the Hunter doing much more damage when on fire in VS to reducing the increased damage and only applying it to fire created by the Survivors.
- When Survival mode was released, people started to get insane times, thus earning medals too easily, by using exploits (such as hiding in the corner of a wall or the like). To counter this, Valve released updates that corrected the problems by placing a random object like a soda machine in spots where people were abusing the exploits.
- Additionally, in the sequel, getting to a place that was impossible for the Infected to get to in Survival would cause the director to fill the entire floor with Spitter acid.
- While Valve does nerf things in VS and Survival to make things balanced, they also avert the trope by not touching the campaign mode so that people could exploit all they want. Most likely because it is a co-op game with zombies running after you and the players are not fighting against other players.
- The sequel applies the melee cooldown to all modes for the sequel (except for melee weapons) and max ammo capacity for the shotgun is half from the first game.
- Additionally, three new Infected were introduced into the sequel with the stated purpose of making the defensive tactics developed by players in the first game less effective, along with staged events that demanded forward movement, as opposed to the "hit the button and hold out for 45 seconds" events of the first game.
- The sequel also nerfed the damage Witches do to you. In the first game, a Witch can kill you in about 3-5 seconds while the sequel has her take about 10 seconds to kill. This is assuming you are not playing on Expert or Realism, where the Witch will just kill you in one strike instead.
- A big one in EVE Online was the HAC speed nerf. This eliminated a tactic use by many 0.0 alliance to essentially be invulnerable to damage yet completely dominate targets.
- Gundam Vs Gundam NEXT was not kind to Gundam F 91 at all, no new suits or stages and the F91 lost some bite with his signature's move having to be charged.
- Between Morrowind and Oblivion, many changes were made to rein in the insanity. The biggest one was the Alchemy skill; In Morrowind, it was possible to use intelligence-boosting potions to give your character godlike intelligence, and since intelligence affected your alchemy skill, each subsequent potion only got stronger. But since all skills are affected the same way by their base stats, this could get ridiculous quickly. The changes in Oblivion are obvious from the start; You can only have four potion effects active at a time, skill boosts past 100 (the set maximum,) have no effect, and stats don't affect skills nearly as directly as in Morrowind, the sole exception being Speed.
- And a minor example from Oblivion; Due to a glitch in the original game, paint brushes aren't affected by physics, and thus don't fall. They also have surface area to them, albeit a very small surface area. It is entirely possible for a player with a sufficient supply of paintbrushes and good hand-eye coordination to create a stairway made of paintbrushes, or to create the perfect sniper's nest for archers and spellcasters. Needless to say, this was patched up with the first wave of downloadable content.
- In RayStorm, the R-Gray 2 is the better ship to use for scoring, as it can achieve 16 lock-on shots and a x256 point multiplier (in contrast to R-Gray 1's 8 lock-on shots and x128 multiplier). In RayCrisis, R-G1's counterpart Wave Rider 01R has the same number of lock-ons as WR 01R, but now the shot multipliers go up to x256 at the maximum of 8 lock-ons, making it a more effective scoring ship than 02R (R-G2's counterpart).
- Gunstar Heroes: Set difficulty on Hard or Expert. Pick up Chaser and Lightning. Now, try to own any of the bosses with it.
- In Tetris DS, as well as some other "Tetris Guideline" games, offers a "T-Spin Triple" bonus for using a twist to clear 3 lines with a T piece. Said bonus came out to be more than for a Tetris. Tetris Zone and some other newer official Tetris games attempt to nerf this problem by simply not recognizing T-Spin Triples, counting them as normal Triples instead.
- Droidekas were nerfed from Star Wars: Battlefront to the sequel game, especially in shield strength and duration.
- When Naruto: Clash Of Ninja Revolution was released, the characters very much had the balance of a normal Clash of Ninja game (IE, too powerful or too weak), when the sequel was released, most characters were more balanced, but there were still problems with some of the characters, when the third game was released, it apparently achieved the most balance of the three, as well as including characters after the Rescue Gaara Arc. The Japanese Wii games, unfortunately, avert this.
- Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires nerfs Lu Bu, heretofore the most fearsome badass in the game. There is nothing quite like the emotional roller coaster of having Lu Bu defect to join your side ("HELL YEAH! Let the rampage begin!") only to see him get spanked by some generic NPC officer.
- The West Indies Cricket team complained that the "One bouncer per over" rule was designed to nerf their bowlers when it was introduced.
- Descent II's Fusion Cannon was significantly nerfed, only dealing half the damage of its D1 counterpart. The Plasma Cannon was also weakened somewhat.
- In the third game, the Vulcan and Gauss cannons were combined into the somewhat inferior Vauss cannon.
- Thunder Force VI nerfs the game-breaking Free Range weapon from Thunder Force V, decreasing its range and damage output. It also nerfs Over Weapons by reducing your speed to 25% while one is active, making you a Glacial Glass Cannon.
- Time Crisis 3 introduces secondary weapons such as the machinegun and shotgun. The machinegun inflicts more damage per shot and can be fired continuously, while the shotgun fires seven pellets while maintaining the same firing rate as the handgun. Time Crisis 4 nerfs these weapons; the machinegun and the shotgun now inflict less damage unless used on specific enemies, and the shotgun has a reduced firing rate.
- Merlin's Revenge 3 nerfed the Energy Beam and Monster Summon spells from the previous game, renaming them Energy Pulse and Army Summon. Energy Beam was widely regarded as a game breaker(which it was not. It was the only way to defeat the Scarlet Wizard), but the creator never gave a reason as to why Monster Summon was changed. Firstly, Energy Pulse was pathetic mostly due to the fact that as the number of enemies approached 25, a rather limiting maximum, its hit chance would approach zero. It was in fact, nerfed again, halfing its firerate. Army Summon, was, on the other hand, useful during the beta version as it seemed to be pretty much exactly the same with a different choice of units to create, until it was toned down AGAIN when the final beta map was released by only allowing you to summon friendly units that you had collected from other screens. Apart from the spells, the blue potion was nerfed next, followed by the swamp region, allied dwarves, the levelling system, enemy spawners, and finally the map itself, which was changed to a 16x4 map, as opposed the the 15x9 map of the previous game and the 18x12 map of the beta(I don't know if the exact numbers are right, but you get the idea). The map removed the scrub and desert regions, replacing them with a larger Magical Alliance area.
- In DoDonPachi Dai-Fukkatsu, there is a special shot type called Strong Style that gives your ship broken firepower. In Dai-Fukkatsu Black Label, picking Strong Style will turn up the game to 2nd-loop difficulty to balance out your immense firepower.
- In Nexon's free shooter Combat Arms, the M590 shotgun was epic pwnage at a two-shot kill at medium range, and instant-death any closer than that. Then, in a patch, its power was drastically reduced down to a two-shot kill, even at close range. Suddenly it was almost worthless...
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