Two variations of The Scrappy specific to Video Games and/or Tabletop Games.
The first, often seen in fighting games, concerns the best characters getting hated not out of a hatedom but for being overused and/or downright difficult to defeat due to their high power, gameplay-wise; understandably, those two points get on a lot of people's nerves and tend to be favored by other people. Characters who are Difficult, But Awesome tend to avoid this fate because they are hard to play well. A typical Tier Induced Scrappy is a high tier character with next to no learning curve.
The other, more common to RPGs, is a character who is widely hated because they just suck in gameplay terms. They might be the nicest person in the world, but if they're The Load in combat or gameplay, their fate is decided. A Low Tier Induced Scrappy has no Magikarp Power; they're bad from the start and there just doesn't seem to be any point in training them when there are other, more rewarding characters on hand.
Practically all characters you have to guard for an Escort Mission are like the second type.
Mario Kart Wii competitive play has a few choice characters being used above all others, namely Funky Kong, Rosalina, and Daisy. The average person not using any of these three generally loathes the sight of them, even if the argument could be made that they're cool characters in their own right.
To clarify, each character in the game has a few stats that they gain a boost in and differ from each character. This is not explained in the game or the manual, but once people found out about it, everyone chose the above characters all because they have slightly faster top speed than other people.
Mario Kart DS has tiers in the karts. Karts with high acceleration tend to have better steering and drifting, along with mini turbos that last longer, than karts that are more about top speed. This is what makes snaking very common in online play and why people only use Dry Bones' kart to go a lot faster than normal.
Metal Mario in Mario Kart 7 has become an eyesore to many non-competitive players. Metal Mario has a great boosts in speed and weight. Because of his stats, Metal Mario is used in almost every Time Trial record and many online races, despite the fact that Bowser gives the exact same stats. Like with the example in Mario Kart Wii, many consider Metal Mario to be a cool character, but it may fall on deaf ears for people who are just sick of seeing him.
Shadow the Hedgehog is this in Sonic and SEGA All-Stars Racing. He has quick air tricks, fast boosts and wheelies. If he is in first, he stays in first. It doesn't help that items fired backwards home in on opponents. On the other hand, if he is stuck in a crowd, he'll probably not get far. Expect to see a lot of Shadow players online. (Considering Shadow is already a Base Breaker outside of the game, it's hilariously fitting.)
Forza 3 has all-wheel-drive cars absolutely dominating every single online race. Going into a C-class online race, and 7/8 players would be in either an Audi A5 or an Audi A4. Go up to S-class and everyone will be driving Dodge Vipers with AWD drivetrain swaps. The problem stems from the game's Performance Index system (which rates how fast a car should go around an imaginary track) greatly exaggerating the weight gain from an all-wheel-drive drivetrain, causing the PI number to drop dramatically when you swap in AWD, with almost no real loss to acceleration, top speed, or handling.
Forza 4 has more diversity in what cars dominate, but almost all of them are rear wheel drive due to AWD getting a massive nerf. RWD Honda Civics dominate most of the lower classes, because a glitch causes their PI to drop when a race transmission is installed, and the PI drops again when they're converted from FWD to RWD.
Meta Knight getting hated for being the sole highest tier. He was eventually banned from tournaments under the Unity ruleset. However, shortly afterwards, the Unity Ruleset Committee was phased out. Now whether or not Meta Knight is banned varies with the tournament.
A slight variation: Many Wind Wakerhaters were shocked to find out that Toon Link was actually of a higher tier than regular Link, causing some of them to refuse to believe this to be true and others to suddenly become part of the "Tiers are for queers" movement. Many of those people, of course, get very angry when someone actually beats them using Toon Link, especially when they were using regular Link. In short: Toon Link was The Scrappy for those people anyway, but the fact that he's of a high tier made it even worse.
This actually happened in Melee with Young Link, due to Young Link being faster, having fire arrows instead of regular ones, and less frame time on his moves than Adult Link. Needless to say, fans of Link from the first game were not amused about this.
Also on the list of "Scrappy Final Smashes" is the Landmaster, used by Fox, Falco, and Wolf, mostly because it can airlift players riding on top of it off the stage (which counts as a KO). When parked under a player when they're still recovering from the last KO, you can airlift them again and again for almost unlimited KO's for as long as the Landmaster holds out. And even if they escape the airlift cycle, they still have to contend with you steamrolling them off the edge or hitting them with your BFG. One well-played Landmaster can win the whole round.
In Marvel Vs Capcom 2, it's Cable getting slacked for his beam-happiness and perceived scrubbiness, being the easiest to use out of the four god tier characters. To put it in perspective, Storm, Sentinel, and Magneto got on the list by pure accident, whereas Cable was built with the intention of being an above average character, enjoying ridiculous priority and speed on almost all of his moves.
For those who didn't catch that up, in the Marvel Universe, Cable is Cyclops's son.
In Tatsunoko Vs Capcom: Cross Generations of Heroes, Karas gets this due to his insane rushdown game and easy slide infinite making him not a Fragile Speedster, but a fast Glass Cannon. Needless to say, he got nerfed for Ultimate All Stars. This just happened, however, only In America though. Japan has pretty much gotten over it since SBO 2009.
Zero has taken the throne from Karas as the new Glass Cannon par excellence. It's gotten bad enough to the point that rookies can just spam hisSougenmu —> Z-Buster & Hadangeki combo, while the experts make him a nigh-untouchable combo fiend. Only time will tell if he can escape this fate with his reappearance in Marvel Vs Capcom 3.
Tekkaman Blade, being something of a pretty lethal Lightning Bruiser and another popular choice for teams, isn't exactly a slouch in this department either.
Sentinel. His super armor frustrates newer players, and he's also REALLY easy to pick up. It got so bad that he got a severe health nerf - and he was still hated. In Ultimate the hatred has died down quite a bit, being replaced by pity once most players realized how much Sentinel struggles against a wide variety of characters.
Wolverine used to be one of the best characters in the game. He's fast, nearly impossible to block, possesses a dive kick which starts a combo anywhere on hit, and does enough damage to kill an entire team in seconds. When Ultimate rolled around, many of his ridiculous stuff, such as his dive kick causing groundbounce while the opponent was on the ground was taken out, and he also got a new move to prevent mashing called Swiss Cheese, but he is still very powerful, and very much still despised.
Magneto retains this status from Marvel Vs Capcom 2. With his high mobility and priority, and especially powerful combos that involve loops which require high execution, it's no surprise that he is one of the best in the game. Ultimate made the timing on his loops stricter and even removed some, yet he is still very powerful. In a subversion, because of his high skill requirement, he isn't frowned upon too much.
Oddly, Amaterasu is getting this treatment from a small portion of the player base. Weapon SwitchCancels are difficult to master and necessary to use her to her full potential, but without it most of her damage output comes from spamming attacks with the Divine Retribution (the flaming mirror), and one of her hypers covers the entire screen. Her nerfs in Ultimate changed this, however.
None of these, except maybe Wolverine and Sentinel, can compare to the one character people have bitched about since day one, and still bitch about in Ultimate - Wesker. He has, to wit, some of the easiest combos in the game, some of the most high-priority normals in the game, a full-screen projectile normal (the Samurai Edge) that leads into his many, oft-annoying teleport shenanigans, an OTG version of said projectile normal that pops up the opponent for MORE easy combos, excellent speed, and excellent defense. Aside from Wolverine, Wesker is the perfect point character, and with the proper assists, he can easily obliterate many of his opponents' team members in about 10 seconds with just one combo. X-Factor makes him even worse because he is the only character post-patch with an infinite involving...you guessed it, his Samurai Edge. Wesker is so scrub-friendly that he is actually the number 3 ranked most used character online, 2nd place being Sentinel and 1st being Dante. The changes listed for Ultimate nerfed his health to that of Ryu's...but he still has almost all of the same easy shit he had before, and more. That's right, Wesker is actually being BUFFED for Ultimate. Prepare to rage even harder online, as Wesker is now probably the only decent point character. Most hated among any of the changes in Ultimate is the fact that when Wesker's sunglasses come off, his already high damage and speed increase. All he has to do to take them off is use his Phantom Dance hyper (or alternatively, get beaten up to low health). After that, he can do up to 750,000 damage in a combo with no hyper, and he essentially gets a level 4 X-Factor when he's the last character, making comebacks with him even easier than before. Recently, however, Wesker seems to have somewhat lost his reputation on account of Complacent Gaming Syndrome. EVERYBODY used Wesker, so people had to figure out how to beat him, and they did. Doesn't stop people from remembering the scars etched into their memories.
The new hated character of the month is Zero, who has already been proven to be far stronger and worse than Wesker. He has long range normals, quick mixups, and his infamous Lightning Loop attacks can drag combos on for way longer than intended, especially when he has an OTG assist like the aforementioned Wesker backing him up. What makes this worse is that even if Zero drops the lightning loops, he can continue attacking for an ambiguous mixup and start an even more damaging combo because it resets the damage scaling. Guess he didn't escape his fate.
Morrigan has been recieving this treatment, due to a new keepaway tactic developed with her. Basically, she can flight cancel her projectiles and fire a second projectile almost immediately after. Combined with her Astral Vision super, which creates a double of her on the other side of the screen that mimics her movements, this leads to insane keepaway. While this does take some skill to perform, it essentially fills the ENTIRE HORIZONTAL PLAYING FIELD with a truckload of projectiles in a span of a second. But you can just superjump over that right? WRONG. Combined with assists that cover the air like Doom's Hidden Missiles or Strider's Vajra and it becomes literally impossible to even get close to Morrigan. Many tournament watching players also hate it when this tactic is used in tournaments as they find it incredibly boring to watch.
Though people have a tendency to complain about zoning, especially in a super fast paced game like Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3. Doing that type of play takes a lot of skill, timing, and patience, and if the opponent gets in it's very hard to recover. That said it is a very effective tactic.
Averted in some parts, thanks to some Tournament showings, most notably ECT 2012, it is apparent that the real problem is the Hidden Missiles assist itself. It is an assist of Dr. Doom (a Tier Induced Scrappy in his own right thanks to his amazing combos and nice set of assists), and considered one of the more dangerous assists thanks to its ability to OTG, and combo breaking. While Morrigan is the central for the bullet hell tactics, it is Hidden Missiles that make the whole tactics work on a new level, while being an awesome assist in its own right.
Doom also comes with the unique ability to have insane pringles level combos when you hit a TAC. Unlike the other characters where they need to knock them down to the ground, Doom's attacks have the unique ability to bump them into the air, making it so that he can slowly combo them right back down to the ground. Along the way, both players get a ridiculous amount of meter, but by the end, Doom has 4 bars and the opponent can just be baited into a situation where they can be tagged. This has since become a staple of Doom players' repertoire, which is unusual because of how this is normally considered a styling combo. Of course the creator of the combo simply ups the ante by making up variations that can hit from any position that the TAC comes from. This alone was what launched Doom from being high tier to borderline god tier.
In a really weird take on this trope, Vergil is considered this, but is usually praised at tournaments. Vergil is what happens when you combine the complexity and stamina of Zero with the speed of Wesker and the attack range of Dante. He has extremely good priority on all of his attacks, can teleport, and can set up extremely damaging loops and combos with his Spiral Swords super. He can be used on pretty much any position of any team. To truly master him, though, you need to have the right assists and be able to do his Round Trip loops which lead into Spiral Swords.
BlazBlue's Jin Kisaragi◊ — a proud owner of shiny leather pants. Even when he's a total asshole, people still think of him as an interesting character and is welcomed warmly in the story. In casual matches? People DREAD him because these two words makes him quite the cheap "scrub" character: Ice Car. He only gets worse in the hands of someone who knows where the invincible frames in his other moves are... And to make matters worse, the console ports have an achievement for riding the Ice Car 20 times in a single round and then winning.
The hate also extends to Nu and Arakune, both of whom can hit you at ridiculous distances with little warning and have hugely damaging combos. However, you'll never see anyone rooting for Nu at a tournament, especially considering she's the final boss, and using bosses in ANY fighting game is generally frowned upon.
Cat Girl Taokaka is sometimes treated as this because of her ability to jump around really fast. Specially if whoever is playing her actually knows what to do with that ability. Particularly her *ahem* Taunt Loop.
As of Continuum Shift 2, best buds Makoto Nanaya and Noel Vermillion are vilified for their 5k-7k damage range and insane options and perks.
Before Continuum Shift 2, Litchi Faye-Ling was a dreaded character to face despite her status as Difficult, But Awesome, since the awesome takes form in 'overpowered beyond reason'. Add to the fact that in-story, she pulled a controversial Face Heel Turn, it only adds fuel to the fire for the haters. However, over time, with nerfs from Continuum Shit 2 (and probably further in the wake of Extend) and some further facts that softens her Face Heel Turn into something more of I Did What I Had to Do, she's recovering from this status (although there are still some extremely bitter at her high-tierness from the first CS previously).
Ultimately, as of Extend the game is balanced enough that nobody has been put into this category as of yet.
Kurtis Stryker from Mortal Kombat 3. At first, he was a regular Scrappy because he looks like Woody Harrelson, he's a cop in an era of "Fuck Tha Police", he has no backstory to speak of and he has a gun that he rarely uses. The developers eventually proved that they saw him as a Creator's Pet when they responded to the players by buffing him into a borderline Game Breaker, earning him a spot in this category as well. It took until Mortal Kombat Armageddon for Stryker to be Rescued from the Scrappy Heap.
Kung Lao's Mortal Kombat 9 incarnation left a bad taste in the competitive scene's mouths. With a multi-purpose projectile in the form of his hat, a range of very fast moves including a spin attack that easily sets up his fairly simple yet effective combos, he got nerfed HARD in subsequent patches.
There are quite a few of these in the Street Fighter series:
Guile in the original Street Fighter II had a near impenetrable defense between the Sonic Boom and the Flash Kick, combined with overall strong moves and excellent priority. It really says something when Guile hasn't gotten any new moves (barring supers) aside from the Sonic Boom and Flash Kick; they're the only two moves he ever needs.
Also Sagat. Most people like his character, but there's often a few groans going around whenever Old Sagat gets picked in Super Street Fighter II Turbo (the Japanese competitive scene does NOT want to see anyone pick O. Sagat, period), or if he's selected in Street Fighter IV. In the latter, he possesses two highly abusable fireballs, a vicious uppercut, an incredibly good standing roundhouse, and an array of highly damaging combos.
As is Yun, thanks to his Genei-Jin Super Art, which enables Yun to do twice as many hits and can easily be comboed into. If someone complains about SF3, Chun-Li or Yun are probably going to be on top of their things to gripe about.
In Street Fighter IV, Blanka is considered this, mainly due to his ease of use, his Ultra, and just his general playstyle, which infuriates people. Even after his nerfs in Super and Arcade Edition, people still tend to hate him even if he's low tier now. In Street Fighter II, his ridiculous reach and priority and his damn instantaneous Rolling Attack didn't made him any friends.
Zangief has historically had terrifying range on his command grabs, near infinite priority on his lariat, and his trademark heavy damage. He's so notorious for this that it's the reason he has a cameo as a "bad guy" in Wreck It Ralph—he caused the screenwriter that much grief in SFII. The cries of players were heard, though, for as of Super SFIV he's been significantly nerfed, but is still very playable and far from low tier.
Yun, Yang, and Fei Long in Super SFIV: Arcade Edition. Though Yun receives the most hate by far due to how easy to use he is. It probably doesn't help that Word Of God has stated that they were Purposefully Overpowered.
For some inexplicable reason, this has also been applied to, of all people, M. Bison. This is mainly due to the fact that he is now easier to use in Street Fighter IV due to system changes, has amazing zoning potential with only his normals, and amazing punish potential in the form of easy-to-use Scissor Kick combos. While people do have some reason to hate him, it's mainly because they don't know how to escape his pressure, which is designed to annoy and frustrate his opponents.
And now, in 2012, Seth has been hit with this because of Poongko's infamous perfect 4-0 against Daigo. Seth was actually at one point considered to be a skill character, someone who needed to be played very carefully. Then Poongko made his debut and completely shattered that image by showing just how strong Seth really was. Because of him, players found out that his Shoryuken is extremely safe against pretty much everything, he can apply stupidly easy pressure and mixup, and his combos are so long that they cause stupid damage and with the proper application can instantly dizzy the opponent.
Choi gets quite a bit of hate in some tourney matches. He's hard to hit (thus shutting down most strategies for 99% of the cast), is really quick, and has some of the most powerful supers in the games. Look up any tourney match on YouTube where a player wins with Choi, and chances are there will be several comments bashing him.
Goro Daimon was viewed as this by some in the original '98 because of his ridiculous priority with some moves. In the Ultimate Matchrerelease, he was toned down and had his OTG glitch removed.
In '98UM, Geese, Krauser, and Iori are currently considered three of the best characters in the game, so there's a large amount of tourney videos out there with this team, which can be annoying to some viewers. Even if a team has just ONE of those characters you'll find someone complaining about it.
Maximum Impact 2 contains a totally justified case with Armor Ralf. The developers tried as hard as possible to make the most overpoweredGame Breaker imaginable. Super armor, infinite priority, obscene damage, a taunt that damages, the inability to be thrown, and tank-like defense are just a handful of the traits that made Armor Ralf one of the most despised characters in the entire game. He was removed from the updated Regulation A version of the game... by bringing along Ash Crimson, who was already despised for story reasons, and made him one of the best characters in the game. Ash can handily beat the tar out of Alba effortlessly.
XIII gives us two scrappies: Raiden and K'. The former can obliterate an entire life bar with a combo that involves his fully-charged drop kick move - a bad boy that chips, hurts bad AND shaves off 70% of the guard gauge at the most. The latter is just too damn versatile with his projectiles and zoning, his damage and comboability and how brain-dead simple half of his crap can be.
Oddly enough, most of those issues stem from the arcade version(s) [XIII had two version of the arcade release, 1.1 was more or less a balance patch - with these two as it's major targets] of the game. In the case of Raiden, some very heavy changes to the drop kick and the mirror buffs in some notable area's where he had issues makes him much less of a Tier Induced Scrappy for the console. K', however... it's hard to say if the changes effected him at all (in some cases it gives him more versatility and damage potential in combos), so this trope may still apply to him.
People who play Dissidia: Final Fantasy often sigh whenever they find another player using Squall, as they know that the Squall will often do little more than use Beat Fang over and over again. While not top tier, his ability to make your Bravery disappear with little effort gets on the nerves of people who try to avoid such play. Also, Squall is one of the few characters who can overcome any and all of Exdeath counters (specially while in EX Mode). And when the game was released outside Japan, he got a new aerial attack that doesn't make sense with his abilities (from the original game) nor he needed more than Firion (whose abilities fitted more to that type of attack).
Exdeath is another one; mastering him means you can block almost any attack in the game and counter instantly for critical damage. He takes real skill to master though.
Since the release of the sequel, Duodecim, another such Scrappy has emerged: Sephiroth. Because of the general overhaul of the game and the addition of the assist system, he's suddenly emerged as a very powerful character, all because of Shadow Flare. It was a good move to start with—fast, pressuring, little lag, great range, so on and so forth. But with the assist system introduced, Shadow Flare now has all of those thing and will build assist gauge easily and quickly, even with whiffs! The practical upshot is that matches with Sephiroth tend to involve the Sephiroth spamming Shadow Flare until his assist gauge is full (if the opponent tries to rush or punish him, well—that's what the character was originally designed to deal with), and then Sephiroth uses that assist gauge to land a combo—rinse and repeat. Even if this strategy weren't so effective, it would still be scrappifying, as Shadow Flare is an extremely boring move.
Pet Shop in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is unanimously banned in tournaments for a number of reasons which imply that Capcom made him that way in purpose. First off, he's a small target and can fly, meaning he doesn't need to block low at all. Second, he also has insane recovery from supers, meaning you can combo the hell out of people before they even have a chance to attack. Third, all of his normals create icicles with stupidly-good range and priority that can utterly shut down an opponent. And here's the best part: combine the second and third bits and you have access to not only infinite combos, but blockstun infinites. You can keep the opponent trapped in blockstun until time is up. Let's just pray the HD port has an option to disable him...
At one tournament for Naruto: Ultimate Hero 2, Itachi was outright banned for having a game-breaker special move which slowed time down for the victim and made them take much more damage for about a minute.
Itachi was elevated to down right broken in Ultimate Hero 3. He's the second fastest character in the game, one of his jutsus creates a clone next to the opponent no matter where they are which then explodes, he still retains his time manipulation, and just to add a cherry on top, he has an infinite. If the opponent is out of chakra he can spam his air grab over and over again without the opponent being able to ever tech out of it. The Fourth Hokage, the fastest character in the game, also gets this for being down right untouchable in the hands of a good player.
90% of your online games will match you against Cervantes or Kilik, which are very effective even when pushing keys at random. Even if you know how to get by, it's still quite annoying to see 50% of your life go away because you slipped up and got hit by the same attack they've been effortlessly spamming the whole match. The best part? Give one of those characters to a skilled player. They're beasts.
You WILL hate Hilde on higher levels of gameplay. While she may have traces of Difficult, But Awesome syndrome, it only takes a combo or two to end a fight via ringout, AND fast. Here's an example at Evo2k9. As of this writing, the community decided to just outright ban her.
This time around, a majority of your online matches will be either against Natsu, Xiba, or Nightmare. Natsu is basically Taki, but 10 times better. Her combos and juggle ability do a ridiculous amount of damage: all reward and no risk. Nobody liked Kilik, so nobody likes Xiba either. When Nightmare players in IV grumbled that their character was terrible, he came back with a vengeance thanks to the Powers That Be. Now he can deal up to 50-70% of your lifebar's worth of damage with just one bar of meter, and his ring-out game became even better. Oh, and if he gets a Counter Hit off of a Critical Edge it takes down half your health.
One could make a case for Mitsurugi as well. Fast moves, good pokes, great mixups, and nice damage all in one package, and makes up one of the three most common characters online (Mitsurugi, Nightmare, Xiba).
Jin Kazama got to spend some time as the Tier Induced Scrappy when Tekken 4 was the current game. His Lazer Scraper mixup game just pushed him far ahead of the competition, to the point where he was the only top-tier character and "Jin vs. Jin" final matches at tournaments was a common sight. People were understandably tired of it (though ways were discovered to beat him, but they weren't consistent methods). It didn't stick with him as later installments put him more in the middle tiers and the hatedom he generated seems to have blown over.
In Tekken 6, it's Bob. He's fat and seems to actually be an unsubtle Take That at the fanbase, his moveset is fast and strong but repetitive and frankly uncool-looking, and he utterly swept Evo 2011.
In Tekken Tag Tournament 2, the entire Mishima clan now takes center stage as the top tier: Lars, Kazuya, Devil Jin, and Heihachi. With the Tag system, they have access to numerous touch of death combos and juggles.
Kratos is this. While he's meant to be easy to access and is wildly popular his moves are a little TOO easy to use. Kratos enjoys homing grabs, great range on his chains with excellent hitboxes that surround his entire body. He has great range, speed, and even a counter attack with many setups and some good supers. Due to his popularity, he's also very common which has caused countless players to beg for him to be nerfed to a reasonable level.
The biggest example in this game is without a doubt Sackboy considering that he gets a huge boost to his super meter with most of his attacks, and especially his throws. This was so bad that when people asked for him to be nerfed, Playstation immediately responded by forcing a patch onto Sackboy considerably reducing his super meter boost.
In Injustice Gods Among Us Aquaman is shaping up to be this, with his ease of use, excellent zoning tools, and fantastic normals. Conspiracy theories that Tom Brady, a tester for the game and a tournament player who recently bodied a tournament with Aquaman, deliberately molded him into this during testing don't help any.
Aside from that, Deathstroke is hated for how easy it is to abuse his gun specials, constantly pressuring the opponent from full screen, and for being one of the most overused characters by scrubs who do nothing but spam and then ragequit once the opponent does get past their zoning. In the hands of a good player Deathstroke is one of the best characters in the game. Recent patches have nerfed this, but it's still easy to abuse him.
Raven is building something of a hatedom for being too overpowered (like a full screen grab). Her new design doesn't help either.
First Person Shooter
The Call of Duty series is home to a few Equipment examples:
The grenade launcher in the Modern Warfare games, which is nicknamed the "noob tube".
Also, the most powerful (or at least fastest-firing) submachine gun in a given Call of Duty tends to fall under this, such as the P90 in Modern Warfare and the PPSh-41 in the WWII installments. And god forbid you decide to use akimbo shotguns in Modern Warfare 2...
The console version of World at War garners more hate for the MP-40 than the PPSh-41, since it deals 50 damage (read: half of your health) without Stopping Power, as opposed to the 40 it does on PC. It is the only non-sniper rifle capable of 1-hit kill headshots.
Call of Duty 4's Skorpion garnered similar hate early on, due to having the same damage without Stopping Power, plus no noticeable recoil and a bug where that damage was not affected by the silencer - in Hardcore mode where health is dropped by 70%, this equated to 20 free, totally-undetectable kills.
Modern Warfare 3 has akimbo FMG-9s, derisively nicknamed the "double FAGs." No skill involved, just hose your enemies down with a spray of bullets and watch as they die before they can even react.
While Team Fortress 2 doesn't have character tiers, in a competitive regular 6 vs. 6 match every class is limited to a maximum of two... except the Medic, the Heavy and, the Demoman, who are limited to a maximum of one. The Medic is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, but as for the other two:
The Demoman gets a lot of hate and is regarded as overpowered by many, due to the fact that both of his weapons can be spammed to hell and back. The sticky bomb launcher gets the most hate, due to the fact that its bombs can be detonated in midair and thus it can be used much like a rocket launcher with twice the capacity. Most Demomen use the sticky launcher exclusively and are basically playing a faster, more effective Soldier. The few that actually use and are good with the primary grenade launcher as well are absolute terrors.
What is even more hilarious is that even a Demoman equipped with the Chargin' Targe, which replaces the sticky launcher, gets a lot of hate. The shield grants the Demoman a significant resistance to fire and explosives, and has the ability to close the distance between himself and his opponent faster than a Scout where he can use his melee weapon which, by the way, also has a longer reach than every other melee weapon. No matter what kind of setup a Demo seems to use, everybody will complain about it.
The Demoman is vulnerable in close-combat, but the undisputed king of mid-range combat, a range that all other classes perform in lackluster to just passable quality. The classes best capable of exploiting the short-range vulnerability are Scouts and Soldiers. The problem here is that the most popular maps make it extremely difficult to get close to Demomen, along with most casual players' inability to play Scout or Soldier effectively.
The Heavy, in regular 24-player servers, is fairly okay by himself. Sure, he has the most close-range firepower in the game and is nigh-invulnerable when backed by a Medic, but he's very slow and can be taken down by overwhelming him or through othermethods. When the number of players on a server drop below 10, though, he basically becomes the most powerful class as there aren't enough players on the other team to take him down. This, along with various updates to the class itself, are largely the reason that the Heavy is one of the only classes limited to one in 6 vs. 6 competitive play.
Halo 4 has the Boltshot, a Forerunner pistol with a Charge Attack that has the firepower of a shotgun and a huge effective range. Because of the game's otherwise-balanced custom loadout system, players can spawn with a Boltshot as their secondary, making it a Game Breaker on small maps. It was so loathed that there were popular petitions to get it nerfed (such as the "Boltshot Revolution"); 343 eventually relented, halving the weapon's effective range.
Oddjob from Golden Eye 1997, whose short height makes him difficult to hit without aiming downward, which you can't do while moving.
MMORP Gs
In World of Warcraft, each expansion tends to start off with a single class being ridiculously overpowered. In early Wrath of the Lich King, this was the retribution paladin.
It should also be noted that in the 7 or so years World of Warcraft has existed, every single class has been this at least once.
One case of this put Hunters in an unusual bind balance-wise. They got nerfed several times due to complaints that they were overpowered in PvP play, which ended up making them all but useless in PvE raids while still getting complaints of being overpowered in PvP.
MapleStory has the Mercedes and Demon Slayer classes, both released in the Legends patch in December/January of 2011/2012. Both classes have skills which are significantly more powerful than those of older classes and special beginner skills that increase damage, restore health, and provide 10% extra EXP among others. It's at such a point where one of these classes can out-damage older classes 20-30 levels higher than them. Playing one of these characters will sometimes cause you to be ridiculed for taking the "easy" way out.
Real Time Strategy
Hearts of Iron 2, playing as the Soviet Union in multiplayer games is generally considered unfair unless certain house rules are followed. This is because: 1. The Soviet Union is almost completely self-sufficient and needs no trades to function. 2. It has a huge manpower reserve for creating an army. 3. Assuming the game starts in 1936, it has about five years to prepare for a historical war with Germany. 4. A smart USSR player will invade Germany when it tries to invade France, and most experienced players will reach Berlin no matter what the German player does. 5. The USSR's industry is spread out over a very wide area, meaning there's no way to cripple it by seizing its main factories right away. House rules generally include for Germany and the USSR to only go to war when they did historically, to limit the number of soldiers the USSR produces beforehand, and to force the USSR to trade with Germany (Germany needs a large amount of resources the USSR has that it can't easily get from other countries, so one strategy is for a USSR player to refuse to trade anything with Germany, crippling their industry). In contrast, an AI-controlled USSR is relatively easy to conquer for most experienced German players.
In Napoleon: Total War, French infantry have universally higher stats than other countries. You can find this out in-game, but it's not immediately clear. Particularly frustrating if you don't know this when you start playing multiplayer.
In Age of Mythology the Gastraphates (special archer until available to one of the nine factions) outranges everything else (Including defensive towers) and takes down buildings and ships easily with an upgrade every player gets. A player choosing Hades basically means any game that lasts until late-tier units goes to them. The only defense is an exercise in crippling overspecialization via an army of calvary - and if there's a wall to slow them down even that's sketchy.
Role Playing Game
Pokémon's most notable Tier Induced Scrappy is Blissey, which has earned the nickname of "Fat Pink Whore". It is widely reviled due to its absurdly high HP and Special Defense stats, which severely limits the viability of many Pokémon that rely on special attacks as opposed to physical attacks. Thankfully, Gen V makes it easier to handle and less hated in general.
Scizor regularly comes under the same fire. This is even though the only reason it's used that much is because it's extremely low-maintenance compared to other much more powerful Pokémon that are considerably harder to defend against and its absurd level of utility (in fact, it's so useful that several Uber teams use Scizor).
Gen V make Scizor even more of a scrappy, by giving it a partner in form of Rotom-W. Rotom-W is already a good teammate in Gen IV with Scizor, but gen V takes it further by changing its typing to make it more benefical to Scizor, and worst of all gives it Volt Switch, which was basically U-Turn with different typing. Both used in one team resulted in highly powerful offensive combo that is really safe thanks to the switching that covers each other perfectly.
Wobbuffet is a Joke Character that became lethal due in part to a move capable of being bred onto it in a later generation, and in part to the ability gained in that generation: Shadow Tag, which prevents the opponent switching out. However, compared to other examples, Wobbuffet has more potential counters than any other on this list (any special-based Dark type, any physical-based Ghost type, anything relying on status ailments, anything that can affect Wob's ability...). That said, Nintendo does ban the use of Leftovers on Wobbuffet in official tournaments*
which overcame Struggle damage and made Wobbuffet vs. Wobbuffet matches impossible to end
, showing that even they have a limit as to what they'll tolerate in their more general tiers. They also fixed the Shadow Tag ability in Gen IV, where two opposing Pokémon with Shadow Tag in a Single Battle have their abilities cancel out and can switch out. Finally, Nintendo has pretty much switched exclusively to Double Battles for tournaments, where Wobbuffet is significantly less useful (just repeatedly attack its partner until Wob's the only one left). Notably lighter in Gen V, thanks to several factors, but it's still hated because of the fact that you cant switch in a game where it is the biggest deciding factor.
Mewtwo, the original Game Breaker in the series. All Psychic-types were broken due to improperly balancing the types in the first generation of games, but Mewtwo had the most absurd stats and movepool of all (except for Secret Character Mew). The original tier list basically boiled down to Mewtwo and what could potentially stand up to Mewtwo; consequently, Mewtwo's mere existence resulted in a stagnant metagame that still gets some resentment to this day. Even with multiple Mewtwo counters in later games, everything that can beat Mewtwo can also be beaten by Mewtwo if the player had your particular counter in mind.
Garchomp, the pseudo-legendary of Generation IV, is a major offender for this trope. In the generation it debuted in, Garchomp's excellent Attack and Speed, brilliant offensive typing, and surprisingly high defenses made it a virtually invincible sweeper that completely dominated the metagame, becoming one of the only "ordinary" Pokémon to be Kicked Upstairs to the Uber tier, alongside Wobbuffet (and later Salamence). After Generation V brought in a general increase in power and Speed for OU play as well as several more solid counters for Garchomp, Garchomp was lowered to OU play...only to immediately become a Tier Induced Scrappyagain because it's the only pseudo-legendary that is also a weather abuser, gaining a 20% evasion boost in sandstorms in a metagame dominated by rain and sandstorm teams. There's been a long, long, long argument on Smogon whether to ban Sand Veil because Garchomp can use it to turn games into a Luck-Based Mission or to just get Garchomp Kicked Upstairs again.
Because of Smogon's resistance to complex bans (banning only certain move/Pokémon combinations instead of the entire move or the entire Pokémon; in this case, banning Sand Veil with Garchomp) banning Sand Veil itself would neuter a lot of other Pokémon such as Cacturne who are hardly overpowered. Furthermore, banning Sand Veil would also be tied with banning Snow Cloak, a similar ability that works in Hail, and would again destroy the viability of certain Pokémon; most notably Froslass.
Random user on Smogon: Sand Veil is like playing the lottery, only losing results in a dragon punching you in the face.
The "Extreme Killer" variant of Arceus is this in the Ubers tier. Its boosted ExtremeSpeed attack can One-Hit KO most Pokémon in the game except for a few such as Giratina and Lugia. And Arceus can dispose of those Pokémon easily because it's quite a bit faster than them and usually carries super-effective moves with its counters in mind. The worst part? The Ubers tier itself is a banlist, meaning that nothing can be banned from the tier!
Even the moves themselves are subject to this:
Giving any Pokémon the move Stealth Rock and using it the right way will win you plenty of battles, but not without garnering rage and hate from your opponent. A lot of it has to do with how the move is a detriment to the viability of several Pokémon, capable to taking 50% health off of certain type combinations, including the Fire / Flying type of fan favorite Charizard. Game Freak has taken notice of this. Stealth Rock is no longer a TM in Pokemon Black And White, and few Pokémon learn the move naturally. This won't stop anyone from importing Pokémon with the move into the game, except that most Pokémon from previous generations have been given powerful new abilities in the game, something you would miss out on importing Stealth Rock-equipped Pokémon into the game.
The first moves placed in this category were Double Team and Minimize, which improve evasion to the extent that moves used against them have 1/3 their normal chance of connecting, should they be used to their maximum efficiency. Add in the ability to heal, and the only hope of taking down someone using the moves in Generation I was either a great stroke of luck or hope that you could use the one move with always 100% accuracy, Swift. While subsequent games have made this strategy less effective than before (there are now ten such moves, plus moves and abilities to make others temporarily always hit and more moves to decrease evasion and improve accuracy), it's still so hated that declaring Double Team and Minimize off-limits (the "evasion clause," sometimes including things like Acupressure and the Moody ability that might improve evasion) is one of the most frequently-included rules in battles in the fandom, and even in some sanctioned contests.
Different problem, actually. Of the "sure-hit" moves, many of them are resisted by Steel types. One exception is Fighting attacks, but Vital Throw is never usable (especially since, unlike other moves in the sure hit category, this one requires the user to go second) and Aura Sphere is only going to be seen on Togekiss and Ubers as Lucario is bound to be running physically offensive stats. Double Team is banned to keep Steel types in check, as Jirachi, Bronzong, and Metagross would be absurdly difficult to beat and would've stagnated the metagame to circle around which Fire type can take out one of these three Pokemon before they can set up Double Team.
Drizzle/Swift Swim is the current Scrappy of the metagame, at least on Smogon. To clarify: Rain boosts Water attacks by 50% and Swift Swim also doubles Speed in the rain (which is generally enough to make a Swift Swim Pokémon outspeed everything in the metagame). Drizzle is an ability causing permanent Rain that is initiated when a Pokemon with that ability (ex. Politoed) is sent out. Three Swift Swim Pokémon (Kingdra, Ludicolo, and Kabutops) could decimate teams thanks to super boosted attacks, great coverage, and blistering Speed; and the only counter was more weather (the Fire equivalent of Drought isn't nearly as bad because it increases Fire damage but only Grass types get access to Chlorophyll, the Swift Swim equivalent, and since Grass is weak to Fire, it's not overpowered). Many people are very unhappy with the game turning into weather wars and arguments about how to proceed with bans have lasted for months; banning Swift Swim neuters a lot more Pokémon than just Kingdra, Ludicolo, and Kabutops, banning those three is over the top because they're only powerful in rain and sending them to Ubers is unfair, banning DrizzleToed limits the rain playstyle even more by not only destroying Swift Swim, but also destroying Hydration, Rain Dish, and many other viable Rain tactics, and the current complex ban of Swift Swim and Drizzle on the same team is often considered to be the start of a slippery slope of other complex bans (e.g. the aforementioned VeilChomp). In short, Drizzle/Swift Swim is by far the biggest point of contention in Generation V.
Drizzle itself has been getting this a lot too, thanks to the changes of Black & White 2 heavily slanting the metagame in favour of rain. And that's even after its worst abusers (Swift Swimmers, Tornadus-T and Thundurus-I) were banned.
From the game's launch, the default Human Vanguard has been hated by a huge section of the fandom. Its unique combination of Biotic Charge and Nova, which are designed to work together, mean a Vanguard with low power cooldown can constantly spam Charge-Nova-Charge-Nova and wipe out whole troops of enemies singlehandedly; with good dodging, they can even solo kill most heavy units (Banshees and Praetorians excluded). It's a very low maintenence character class, and extremely effective in the hands of a master, but that same ease of use makes it the object of scorn for players who deem it too noob-friendly.
The Geth Infiltrator, prior to being heavily nerfed, was the epitome of this trope. By using Hunter Mode to turn itself into a Glass Cannon, Geth Infiltrators could abuse Tactical Cloak and the weapon damage bonuses of their passive class power to nearly triple the damage output of any geth-designed weapon (including the most powerful sniper rifle in the game) without gear bonuses factored in. Their damage output was so tremendous that it became common to get kicked from random Gold matches if you didn't play as a Geth Infiltrator. As mentioned, Hunter Mode and Tactical Cloak have both been nerfed since then, but the class is still one of the strongest.
After the Earth expansion, the N7 Shadow Infiltrator and Slayer Vanguard started getting the hate because of Electric Slash and Biotic Slash, respectively. These two powers are high damage, low cooldown, have a huge range and radius, and are oh so spammable. Furthermore, they actually harm other members of the team by shaking around allies' sniper scopes. Combine that with the Shadow's signature move, Shadow Strike, the Slayer's ability to Charge and teleport short distances and even through walls, and their mutual access to extremely powerful sword-based melee attacks, and it wasn't long before they started getting the hate of Scrubs everywhere. The one thing that keeps the higher-level players from hating them is that fact that they've got a bit of a learning curve. Like the other examples, the slash attacks were later given a longer cooldown and they do not garner as much hate.
In the Reckoning expansion, the new GethJuggernaut has become one within the first week of its release. The reason being, is that it's the only character who cannot be Synch Killed due to its size, its incredible weapon damage output and ammo bonus, being the most durable character in the entire game, and on top of all that, a melee attack that heals itself! Literally, the only downside is that it can't run and moves at a snail's pace, but that doesn't matter when it pumps out 300+ rounds from its signature weapons, the Geth Spitfire, and the three-hit killer Siege Pulse.
Chaos Space Marines with Daemon Princes and Obliterators. Obliterators are overused, extremely versatile, heavy weapon platforms armed with a wide range of weapons that allow them to take on just about anything. Daemon Princes are better than any other HQ choice with a fairly small increase in cost. Slaanesh Princes with Lash Of Submission are especially hated as they can move enemy units 2d6 inches, pulling them out of cover, into charge range or under templates. Add to the fact that the Chaos codex has very limited options when it comes to good builds, and you get a situation where 90% of tournament armies consist of 2 Lash Princes, 9 Oblits and as many Plague Marines you can get with the remaining points.
For the marginalized part of the fanbase who didn't play Space Marine or Marine Equivalent armies, Landraiders acting as dedicated transports for Thunderhammer/Stormshield Assault Terminators were nearly impossible to break and filled with melee troops just as hard to crack and pulverized most units in 1-2 melee turns. This is much less the case in the current edition.
All discussions of Tiers in Warhammer, whether Fantasy or 40k, probably should mention the edition and time when they were written. For example, the Orkz of Warhammer 40k were briefly a Game Breaker with the infamous Nob Bikerz, but within months a new Imperial Guard codex took them right down. As of early 2012, the Grey Knights are a high tier scrappy with some awful fluff as far as a large section of the fanbase goes. However, this could change with just one codex rattling the metagame. Likewise, Vampire Counts and Daemons of Chaos lost a lot when Psychology (and their key rules, Fear and Terror) were nerfed in 8th Edition. The Counts are about to get a new Army Book; how this changes their status has yet to be seen.
One problem with Warhammer and 40k is that there simply isn't time to update every Codex within the lifetime of one edition, so, general Army Books and Codexes designed for that particular edition will outperform those that were not. The fairly rigid release schedules also mean that several armies (notably Dark Angels and Bretonnians) end up getting shafted because they are released near the tail-end of an edition.
Magic: The Gathering has had a number of cards that were both annoying to play against and high-tier (which translated to seeing them a lot, which made them even more annoying). Morphling could attack and block in the same turn, protect himself from kill spells and fly over your blockers, and generally appeared in decks that could Counterspell the few things that would try to stop him. Disciple of the Vault caused a lot of unstoppable life loss. Psychatog was part of a two-card kill with Upheaval and could make himself almost arbitrarily large for cheap (this one was given a nod in the next block's art). Ironically, Psychatog was based on Atog, a creature that was a Tier Induced Scrappy in the other direction until Mirrodin and the affinity deck.
Jace, the Mind Sculptor's unprecedented price tag (about $100 at its peak), combined with his status as a staple in multiple formats, has earned him a lot of unpopularity among some segments of the player base. The anti-Jace sentiment got to such a point that Wizards was forced to ban the Mind Sculptor from Standard tournament play. He is still allowed in Legacy and Vintage, as the power level of these formats are a little higher than that of Standard.
Another example of an entire element being a scrappy for doing too well was the M11-M12 "Titan" cycle, creating a 6/6 for 6 mythic giant for each color with a color-appropriate ability and another one that activated whenever they entered the battlefield or attacked. The worst of them by a long shot, Frost Titan, was considered above curve for Blue, given its size and relative protection from targeted removal, while the best of them, Primeval and Sun Titan were considered borderline broken in Standard play. Part of the general hate for the cycle in general is the "Titan effect" that has taken over Standard, where just about any large creature must be compared to the color-relevant titan while being assessed, and regularly found wanting in comparison. Wizards admitted they considered printing the Titans a second time in a core set a mistake, as they tended to crowd out most of the big creatures in the surrounding blocks.
Primeval Titan was a key card in the Valakut Ramp (and to a lesser extent, Eldrazi Ramp) decks. The sheer card advantage it gives (a 6/6 trampler for 4GG— a good card if there ever was one— and two lands every turn) led to calls for the banning of the Titan and Valakut (and the Eldrazi). Jace and Caw-Blade eventually overshadowed the Titan, though... until Caw-Blade rotated out of Standard and the Kessig Wolf Run Ramp deck came to prominence, bringing the Titan yet another round of heat.
As for Valakut, it got banned in the new Modern format— not for its interaction with Primeval Titan, but for the way it combos with Prismatic Omen and Scapeshift to whip out a massive amount of damage that can one-shot most opponents.
This has been a feature/problem of Magic Tournament Play since Channel-Fireball. The larger tournament scene is very well tracked and documented, and people want to play the "best" decks, leading to obnoxious levels of Follow the Leader in local tournaments which inspires most of the hate.
As for whole elements, we have Blue. Blue gets the ability to put the kibosh on anything. Blue also gets the best or second-best card advantage: Blue has more cards to draw cards, whereas Black has Necropotence and its clones. Blue also tends to use abilities to lock down decks, which combos nicely with Blue's ability to lock down the game. If that weren't enough, blue tends to get the ability to take extra turns and has what some players call combo cracking. While a novice blue control player will shoot down the first spell in your combo with a counterspell, a skilled player who recognizes the combo coming will often let 90% of the combo go off (costing you mana as well as your instant and sorcery cards) before cheerfully tossing in a tiny, inexpensive counter that prevents you from driving the last nail in the proverbial coffin. Blue's hatedom comes mostly because of how it plays, rather then how well it does. Playing against a better deck, you'll lose, but playing a better deck which happens to be blue, and not only will you lose, but you will lose without any of your spells having any effect.
The Ferrett's summary of PT: New Orleans in 2003: "Pro Tour: Tinker is held in Tinker Orleans. Tinker Mindslaver Tinker, Rickard Osterberg, Tinker Tinker ban that f**king card Grim Monolith Tinker." It's still arguably the second most broken card in Vintage, a format that never bans cards.
The "Delver" decks are tempo-control aggro decks that run the blue creature Delver of Secrets, a card that starts out weak but turns into an aggressive flying beater upon meeting a simple condition. Not surprisingly, the result was yet another dominating blue deck.
Thragtusk became this for the first few months of Innistrad/Return to Ravnica standard for being an auto-include 4-of in every deck that wasn't aggressive, being the best midrange value creature, the best control finisher, and the best reanimator target. Further contributing to its status was that it was impossible to remove without a loss in card advantage, could be made uncounterable very easily, and comboed very well with already good creatures with blink effects. Eventually, decks accepted the fact that a Thragtusk would hit the table at some point and resorted to gaining control of it and simply flying over it with equivalent power.
Rescue Cat in the Yu Gi Oh: Trading Card Game. The reason? Its insane synergy with Synchros. Synchros, in and of themselves, are considered this due to their insane power-to-cost ratio (doing everything from whittling the opponent's hand down to drawing cards to destroying the entire field on a whim while only needing a few token nondescript monsters to summon), but Rescue Cat pushes that over the top, letting you get out any two monsters needed to bring out the most powerful low-level Synchros with just the effort of summoning and then tributing itself. It's pretty sad when the unbanning of two Game Breaker revival cards and a field-clearer that's been banned ever since the list was first created is considered a fair trade-off to the feline's dismissal from the game. Oh, and dont ever speak of X Saber/Rescue Cat in the western metagame where X-Sabers have even bigger synergy with this evil thing.
Rescue Rabbit, his Nerfed brother, gets even more hate nowadays. Decks based on this little guy work by Summoning him, getting 2 Dinosaur-Types and using them to Summon Evolzar Laggia. Laggia is absolutely brutal - it can negate almost anything, but it's balanced out by the fact that this can only be done once and it's quite hard to Summon - except that this deck does it with only one card. Oh, and there's Leviair the Sea Dragon, which is Summoned just as easily and allows you to get back the Rabbit once you use his effect. Twice. So, the whole "can only be used once"? It won't matter when your opponent has three Laggias. Have fun not being able to play anything at all because of two cards! Another reason why Rabbit is even more of a Scrappy than the cat is because unlike cat, Rabbit is far more expensive thanks to be TCG rarity bump from Rare in Japan to Secret Rare which make Rabbit from a possible keycard of a pseudo budget deck to an extremely expensive deck.
Currently, the worst offenders are Legendary Six Samurai - Shi En and Reborn Tengu, neither of which are on the banlist as of this writing. Shi En is one of the aforementioned Synchro Monsters, meaning he's easy and cheap to summon, but requires a Six Samurai deck to do so. Such decks are Lightning Bruisers, capable of spamming monsters with 2000 or more attack very easily and can often destroy another samurai in place of themselves. Shi En can do that, on top of being able to negate one of your opponent's spell ot trap cards every turn, meaning the best ways to deal with him often require you to spend a card to lure out his effect. Don't get me started on how ridiculous it gets when your opponent has 2 out.
Reborn Tengu has, again, insane synergy with synchros. When it's removed from the field, whether by being attacked and destroyed, returned to your hand, being banished or sent to the grave for a synchro summon, you grab another from your deck. Combine this with the fact that the other requirement for the synchro summon, a tuner monster, can be laughably easy to summon and T.G. Hyper Librarian (another tier induced scrappy) who lets you draw for each synchro summon you make (and can be made with a tengu and the most spammable tuners in the game) and you have yourself a deck that can explode into victory if you draw a tengu.
In the earlier eras of the game, two major Tier Induced Scrappy winners were Goat Control, which used Scapegoat to create easy walls of defenders and then morph one into the normally Awesome, but Impractical Thousand-Eyes Restrict, paralyzing the enemy from attacking, stealing their monsters, and basically rendering monster-based strategies moot. Chaos was even worse, consisting of three powerful creatures with the ridiculously easy summoning cost of removing one light and one dark monster from the graveyard. Chaos Sorcerer, the least powerful of the three, was hated because it was an easy summon with a body bigger than beatdown staple Cyber Dragon and guaranteed to remove an enemy creature from play if the opponent had any face-up monsters. Black Luster Soldier- Envoy Of the Beginning was loathed for having a more powerful version of Chaos Sorcerer's effect, 3000 attack to make it basically untouchable in battle, and the additional ability to gain a second attack whenever it killed something, meaning fending it off without losing nearly half your life points was remarkably difficult. Finally, Chaos Emperor Dragon- Envoy Of the End was and still is considered the most broken card ever printed; in addition to being just as strong as the Blue-Eyes White Dragon despite being easier to summon than most 4-star monsters, it also had an effect that let it nuke both players' field and hands for a minor lifepoint payment, completely hosing any strategy because of the wording of its effect and generally leaving the opponent at a massive life point and card disadvantage. All three cards saw time on the banlist, but recent announcements that the Envoy of the Beginning will be unbanned in September 2011 has already caused an enormous Internet Backdraft.
Tour Guide From the Underworld. It's a level 3 fiend that can summon another level 3 fiend from the deck when normal summoned at the cost of negated effect and cant be used as Synchro material. Doesn't matter when you summoned Sangan, which activates in the graveyard resulted in searching your keycard. The second restriction? Use it for Xyz summon instead. The fact that it is so rare and expensive crank this Up to Eleven
Hell, pretty much any current meta deck has its Hatedom.
The original one is Yata-Garasu. Despite only having 200 attack points, it possesses the ability to make your opponent skip their draw phase when it does damage. But its low attack makes it easy to destroy right? Wrong. It also possesses the spirit characteristic with means it returns to its owner's hand at the end phase. It's no wonder it was among the first cards banned.
Not entirely true, Yata-Garasu was only hate when combined with two other cards, the first having a Love/Hate relationship with most true fans (who were there since the first deck releases, ChaosEmperorDragon, who destroys the whole field and both handsat the cost of 1000 LP and Sangan or Witch of the Black Forest, who add a monster to the hand, special summoning Chaos and blowing him up with the field and hand would result in you getting a monster to the hand who was the mentioned Yata-Garasu, making it impossible for the enemy to draw cards unless you didnt summon him and attack. There was even a 5 card combo that let you win in the first turn summoning Dragon and 2 of Dragons Chaos friends Knight and Sorcerer, but it required way more luck, since the chance of getting all 3 cards needed for the first combo in a duel was 7.5%, not to mention at the right time. Synchro monsters on the other hand being in the Extra Deck...
The Tome of Battle for Dungeons & Dragons introduced fighter type classes with powers. They're very powerful classes, attributed to the fact that this 3.5 class book gives the most obvious preview of what would eventually be 4.0 game mechanics, but the two systems are very different and don't mix well. It's a very popular book, but it has become a Base Breaker due to a vocal minority who believe the book is overpowered. For those not in the know, the Character Tiers for DnD are divided into 6 groups (Tier1 being the strongest, filled with classes able to end the entire campaign solo unless the DM actively screws them, and Tier 6 being classes that are deemed largely unplayable as written). The classes of the Book of Nine Swords (Swordsage, Crusader, Warblade) are sitting pretty in Tier 3 (considered the most balanced classes in the entire system). They are sometimes considered overpowered because they are much more powerful then the classic fighter, monk or ranger, while still being flavoured similarly (they're big guys with swords that hit stuff); essentially making these classes obsolete. Not very powerful when compared to the big 3 of the original books (wizard, cleric, druid), but still high for their numbered tier and better than the classics of that tier.
As for the big 3, Wizards are Monte Cook's favorite class, and the incredibly overpowered Clerics and Druids gained the Fan NicknameCoDzilla (Cleric or Druid zilla).
Marcus, Marcus, Marcus, a level three paladin (the cavalry class promoted, mind) that serves as a starting unit alongside Eliwood, has access to most of the game's best spears and swords off the bat (which won't be for ten more chapters, as he's introduced right at the start of Eliwood's story), and can one-shot every enemy, including the first few bosses. There's a reason why fandom calls him an EXP whore. To add to the rage, since he's a promoted unit, he gets very little EXP for his kills during a point in the game that all of your other units desperately need them.
Marcus is a special case of High Tiered Scrappy. Character Tiers based on Hector Hard Mode Ranked runs put him at near the top of the list, while those that are based on non ranked runs outright put him into a tier of his own in God Tier. In short, Marcus is EXTREMELY well liked by these group of fanbase, while being hated by those that cares only for stats.
The three Sacaean characters (Guy, Rath, and Lyndis, who is also one of the game's three Lords), when used frequently, can rack up an absurdly high Critical Hit percentage when leveled properly. Five chapters into Eliwood's quest, if you're using Lyn, she can garner a Critical Hit ratio of around 25%, while most of your other units are often stuck in the single digits, even at the end of the game. Not only that, but the RNG tends to favor her speed, which allows her to hit twice, even with heavier weapons.
There are several elemental affiliations that affect character growth; using several characters of the same affiliation within the same tile range rakes in more EXP, which increases if you have a good support level with them. The element being innate the most is the wind unit (and guess what two of the three aforementioned Sacaean characters are affiliated with!), with fire being second, so if you use a lot of wind innate and stick them close together, they will probably be favored by the RNG more than those who are, for example, ice innate (two ice innate characters are non-combat units, even.)
Vieras are downright game breaking with their ability to doublecast summon spells. Assassins/Snipers can get Concentrate plus Last Breath, which is basically a guaranteed kill every turn.
Humans are the most balanced race, and have access to such jobs as ninja, which gives enough of a boost to speed (and dual-wield) that you've effectively won every fight if you level it up enough.
Moogles can get both sides of this as they are the weakest of the five races, but have a number of abilities that break the game in half if used right. Gunners can hit you with Charm, Stop, Confusion, Silence, or ULTIMA from 8 or 9 panels away with an almost guaranteed hit rate, Gadgeteers with Dream Rings can basically sleep and doom your whole party unless you gear for fighting them, removing good accessories for situational ones, and the range and free cast cost of Smile which gives another character a free turn can move your entire army anywhere on the map in one turn by having everyone Smile everyone else.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance also has Ninjas, Thieves, and Assassins at the high tier because they get a massive boost to their speed stat at each level up and they all have a high move stat, allowing them to traverse across the battlefield quickly. This means that in most battles, you will go first and should you cast Haste on them, their turns will come up so frequently that you can curbstomb the entire enemy party before they know what hit them.
Thieves are also high tier for having naturally high evasion. Combine this by having the thief wear every possible equipment that boosts evasion and it is entirely possible to have an evasion stat of 100, effectively making enemy attacks miss half the time or more! If that wasn't powerful enough, have a thief use Concentrate as their support ability and watch them successfully steal weapons, armor, accessories, shields, gil, judge points, and even experience points!
Ninjas are high tier not just for their speed, but for also having the ability to learn Dual Wield, which is a passive ability that lets the user wield two one handed weapons at the same time and lets them learn two different abilities at once or one ability at double the normal rate if both weapons are identical. Not only dual wielding lets you attack enemies twice, but if you do a combo attack, you will hit them twice as well for even more damage!
The balancing factor on Ninjas is that katanas, while nothing to scoff at, do considerably less damage than human tank classes like fighter or paladin, meaning that even with dual wielding ninjas do significantly less damage than fighters. However, since support abilities can be transferred between classes once mastered, it's possible to create a dual wielding fighter capable of dealing more damage than any other class in the game, with 1 hit K Os being common even against similar leveled characters.
In League of Legends, this only really happens in the unranked scene, as the game is balanced around the competitive scene (most of the time, notable exceptions are pre-rework Xin Zhao, Eve, Twitch, and Tryndamere) and as such no champion stays overpowered for long. However this also means that there characters who aren't good in competitive but utterly stomps in the unranked one. Current reigning king of this is Darius, the Hand of Noxus. While insanely powerful with outrageous DPS, a strong Do T and the ability to deal hundreds of true damage (damage that cannot be reduced in any way, shape or form) serves to make him a force to be reckoned with. However his lack of good crowd control and escape means that he is easily shut down by a coordinated team.
Ezreal has been the most frequently picked champion for several months, with his 'popularity' peaking since he received his premium Pulsefire Ezreal skin. In a game with 106 champions and 10 champions to a match, Ezreal is the most frequently picked, being played in over half of the matches, nearly half-again as frequently as the next most popular champions. And, if that's not enough, he's banned in a little over 40% of the matches. All too often, when watching a stream of a match (particularly the stream of a player who primarily plays AD champions), one will see people groan when Ezreal is picked. His power stems from his high range, high damage, versatile skills, low mana costs on his abilities, a strong ability to harass, a non-ultimate short range teleport for escaping gank attempts and an ultimate that flies across the map while potentially hitting whole teams.
Jax was an in-universe example, being totally unbeatable. This threatened the very existence of the League, and led to increasing sanctions being placed on him. To mock these sanctions he started fighting with a lamppost and kept on winning anyway.
Madden NFL at least one team a year is lambasted by the fanbase for being the "cheese" team - basically, whichever team runs the Game Breaker play of that year most effectively. Common candidates are teams with a fast, mobile QB and a monster defense that doesn't require much strategy to run well. This is doubly annoying to fans of that team, who are excited to play as their guys online, only to be mocked for it.
Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 had Brazil and (to a lesser extent) Manchester United as the upper-tier scrappy teams. Those two teams were among the best overall AND had a player with all dribbling stats on the 95 to 100 range, coupled with the fact dribbling was overpowered in that version. Most players let out a sigh of frustration when their opponent picked Brazil, mainly because they were certain said opponent would just pass the ball to Ronaldinho and run circles around their defence for the whole game.
Pretty much all sports games have one (or more) of these overpowered "cheese" teams/players/whatever. Although one could argue this is justified, as some teams actually ARE that dominant in real life.
Non-character example in Gears of War 2, where both of the starting rifles to choose from are a Tier Induced Scrappy to at least one section of its very, very Broken Base. You have the Lancer users who think that the Hammerburst is the overpowered noob weapon because of its incredibly powerful and accurate semi-automatic fire (with almost no recoil with actives). You have the Hammerburst defenders who say that the Lancer is the overpowered noob weapon because of it's one-hit-kill chainsaw bayonet (which tends to either let you tank bullets without flinching and suck people in with a vacuum or not work at all and get you killed), and then the third group who agree that the Lancer is underpowered and use the Hammerburst anyway.
Meteos featured a few of these in the form of gimmicky or otherwise overpowered planets.
The most obvious was Hevendor, a planet that completely bypassed the gravity and stack comboing elements of the game by teleporting stacks instead of launching them. It managed to be both ridiculously overpowered at lower levels and next to useless at very high levels of play, as the total lack of strategic depth made its weaknesses easily exploitable. The CPU on the other hand gets completely annihilated by any halfway decent Hevendor player every time.
Brabbit on the original DS version is like this, as the wonky gravity physics on the planet meant that a player could hold a single screen wide stack in the middle of the screen for minutes on end while launching an endless rain of black meteos on the enemy. It's near impossible for anyone but another Brabbit player to survive such an onslaught. The Xbox 360 version attempts to provide a counter to this with combo breaking powerups, but the planet is still incredibly powerful in the hands of a skilled player.
The OTAS Boreas and Terran Osaka destroyers in X3: Terran Conflict get some hate for being functionally indestructible under a particular set of circumstances, i.e. when flown personally by the player against the AI. They're so tough and well-armed* In particular, the Osaka has better shields than any other ship in the game, and has enough weapons energy to continuously fire its entire complement of 48 guns simultaneously for 75 seconds. that the AI just plain can't counter them. Albion Prelude fixes this as a byproduct of making AI missile frigates actually use their weapons the way they're meant to be used.
The Spitfire Mk.XVI, La-7, and P-51 Mustang often attract this in Aces High. The Spitfire is extremely easy to fly, has a good gun package, accelerates and climbs at will, is highly maneuverable, and has few real vices. The La-7 has a three-cannon armament option that was very rare historically but is almost ubiquitous in the game and is one of the fastest aircraft at typical engagement altitudes, with excellent acceleration and rate of climb. The P-51 lacks this armament, but is just about as fast with the additional advantage of excellent high-altitude performance leading to high Mustangs picking through low and mid-altitude furballs a common sight. All three aircraft are extremely easy for poor or inexperienced pilots to rack up large numbers of kills in, and thus take a lot of heat on the forums. If there's a "Perk the X!" thread, chances are one of these three aircraft are the subject.
Low Tiers
Driving Games
The Aero Glider/Jetsetter in Mario Kart Wii. A heavy kart with perfect top speed, it has literally useless stats for everything else, including handling, drift, off road, acceleration and mini turbo. In simpler terms, it can't take corners at all, barely sticks to road, can't get back up to speed quickly and as it's a kart, can't do wheelies. The Torpedo/Spear has the benefit of being a bike and having inward drifting (it's got the same stats as the Aero Glider), but since the Aero Glider drifts outwards, trying to use it will literally end in hitting every single wall in the track. Oh, and it's the final kart unlocked, for getting one star on all Mirror Mode cups.
In Need for Speed: Carbon, the best cars are American muscle cars for the first stage, tied between muscle and exotics in the second and third stages, and European exotics for the last stage. Notice how Japanese tuners are never mentioned here...
Initial D Arcade Stage has the AE85 Levin, which in the anime and manga is the car of Itsuki. As someone in the anime said, comparing the AE86 Trueno/Levin and the AE85 Trueno/Levin is "like comparing chocolate and shit": as of Initial D 4, the Trueno is at the top of the tier list (not just on Akina, but overall), and the 85 at the bottom ever since its first appearance in IDAS.
F-Zero GX offers a lot of freedom in creating custom machines, and many of them are great. Slash Emperor -V2 (Big Tyrant + Windy Shark + Scorpion -V2), however, is not; while its speed is great, acceleration is awful, deceleration is awful, and its turning radius is on par with that of the Earth's orbit. Even the game's best players will absolutely refuse to give it a try.
Fighting Games
Despite being an obvious Joke Character (and sometimes a lethal one), poor Dan Hibiki still catches a lot of hate from some fans. He is sometimes called a "waste of space" that could be given to another character, especially in crossover games and Street Fighter 4. Poor guy just can't catch a break. Ironically, he's actually a competent fighter in Street Fighter 4 despite still being treated as a joke character by the game.
Link in every game counts as this due to his weak recovery and not so great attack damage or speed, along with having not one but two younger counterparts in the series (Young Link for Melee, Toon Link for Brawl) who are considerably better than him. Hopefully the next game will rectify this.
Mewtwo got a lot of hate for being such an awful character, to the point where people signed a petition to keep him out of Brawl. Ironically, when he didn't make it into Brawl, people started considering Lucario a Replacement Scrappy.
He isn't as hated anymore though, since people have found several tricks to make him viable competitively.
Oddly, Smash Back Room has another character tied with Pichu for bottom place in tournament situations: Kirby. Likely because his modus operandi consists of copying other players' moves with a side order of Rock-Turtling. Great in all out brawls of 4 where you have 3 opponents; terrible in one-on-one duels, which is what some tourneys consist of.
Although this is completely dependent on who your opponent is, if the tournaments are one-on-one or four players (which is the most common), and if you depend on transforming, due to there being plenty of Kirby users who don't use transformation to do heavy damage.
Pretty much everybody on the Capcom side in Marvel Vs Capcom 2, especially Roll and Servbot. Some of the most beloved characters in video game history... and nobody wants to play as them because the Marvel side has all the most dominant fighters, except for Captain Commando, Tron Bonne, and Strider Hiryu.
Marvel Vs Capcom 3 has some very strong contenders for Low-Tier Scrappydom.
The Low end is populated by Thor of all people, who has slow attacks that are difficult to chain, and doesn't move too quickly compared to the amount of damage he dishes out; and Viewtiful Joe, on the grounds of his poor reach alone.
In Ultimate, things aren't looking well for Rocket Raccoon. His pitiful range and lack of decent zoning options made the claims of people yelling "Waste of space" (for being a Unexpected Character) look like justified. Not to mention most of his arsenals require precise inputs and timings, and his health is also amongst the lowest of the whole roster.
Hsien-Ko, Shuma Gorath, and Phoenix Wright (some details about him on the depending on the circumstances example), all of which are considered Bottom tier characters, try to go into a boards and post about a team with all three, and you will get a rather beautiful result.
The Onion Knight gets a lot of flack. He's a textbook Fragile Speedster who has the smallest movepool in the game, having only two Bravery attacks for air and ground, one each melee and ranged, making him very predictable. Said attacks also have a long recovery time so it's easy to counterattack if you dodge them, all of his Bravery attacks can be blocked, and they don't do much damage when they hit forcing you to fight with a Death of a Thousand Cuts strategy.
Shantotto has a fighting style entirely reliant on HP attacks. Her Bravery game is virtually non-existent, and they're meant to act as support to set the opponent up for her HP attacks, which are slow to start with long recovery time and poor hitboxes. About all she had going for her was her EX Mode ability Manafont, which let her keep her Bravery after using HP attacks so she could spam them as much as she wanted (normally, Bravery depletes after using HP attacks). Dissidia 012 buffed her HP attacks, increasing their execution speed, decreasing recovery time, and letting them power up at lower Bravery amounts. Unfortunately 012 also changed Manafont's effect, thereby removing Shantotto's greatest strength. In the end, her Bravery game is still horrible, and unless you're good at mind games with Bind and Stun, her HP attacks are still difficult to hit with.
Rachel Alucard in BlazBlue: Continuum Shift. Her damage was drastically decreased, turning her from a top-tier character to someone who struggled against everyone.
Caster in the Fate/stay night fan game Crucis/Fatal Fake. She has the lowest HP of any Servant in the game, has the slowest frame rate for her melee attacks and as a kiter, she is generally inferior to Gilgamesh, who has more HP and can combo into Enkidu purely through kiting.
In Injustice Gods Among Us, Lobo is considered by many to be one of the worst characters in the game. It wouldn't be so bad if he wasn't a popular DLC character that everyone was so excited for before release.
First Person Shooter
Jones from Clive Barker's Clive Barkers Jericho (by Clive Barker). In spite of his fairly decent weaponry, his lack of combat-worthy supernatural abilities (they're mainly used to pass through areas, and as a plot point) means that he tends to get ignored a lot by those who play the game.
The missions where you play as Billy in Call of Juarez were rather reviled. The Prequel replaces him with his stepfather Thomas, who fulfills a bit of Billy's Fragile Speedster properties with a more Sharpshooter-based gameplay than Ray.
The Flea from Mechwarrior 4 Mercs is incredibly weak and with only 5 weapon slots, none of which can carry missiles. It is fast, but there are other, better mechs that are fast and still stronger, such as the Osiris.
Each weight class has its respective scrappies: the Flea and the Owens for light 'Mechs, the Chimera for mediums, the Argus for the heavies, and the Mauler for assaults. Most of these designs in their stock form have glaring targetable weaknesses, poor loadout options, some kind of maneuverability problem, or relatively low armor (or for the Mauler, all four.)
MMORP Gs
While mesmers in Guild Wars are quite good in Player Versus Player where shutting down a single character very potent, they are generally unpopular in Player Versus Environment where it's much more usefull to kill entire groups while the tanks keep them busy. A recent change to the skill Panic that turned it into an area affect spell that shuts down whole groups by interupting all their abilities whenever one of them finishes an ability has somewhat fixed this.
Brawlers in general. They don't tank as well as warriors or crusaders and they can't DPS as well as Shadowknights (evil crusader). Bruisers (evil brawler) are favored slightly over Monks (good brawler) because their DPS is a bit better.
Druids in general, due to being frailer than clerics and shaman. Most raid forces stock one Fury (evil druid) for its buffs, but Wardens (good druid) are just out of luck.
As shown above, character classes come in "sub-classes" (originally a Good version and an Evil version). Frequently one of the subclasses is highly favored over the other. A relevant example: Berserkers specialize in being able to tank multiple targets. Guardians can get hit by a truck and live through it. The latter is much more useful than the former in most situations, and Guardians are much more likely than Berserkers to find a raiding guild.
City of Heroes had Defenders sit in this seat for a while. Their poor damage and ally-focused abilities made them virtually impossible to solo. Their array of supportive and debuffing abilities made them useful in groups, but Controllers had access to the same powers (just as slightly later levels when early level powers tend to be the most often used) and in most cases they were just as effective. Most archetypes had two useful powersets, whereas Defenders damaging powers were considered dead weight. The Vigilance ability made them somewhat more soloable, the secondary disabling effects on their offensive powers were increased above the Blaster's, and the numbers on their powers were tweaked to make some of them better than the Controller's, but in general there's still not a whole lot of reason to pick a Defender over a well-built Controller. Several individual powersets also held this seat at one time or another. Some notable examples include:
Electrical Blast, due to it not really being very good at much of anything and its secondary effect of draining endurance wasn't any good unless you drained an enemy's endurance completely, which you needed enhancements to accomplish most of the time, which in turn took up slots that could have been applied to accuracy or damage.
Storm Summoning, because its high number of knockback and scatter effects were unfriendly towards groups, in a power set revolved around supporting teammates. They have one of the best debuffs in the game, Freezing Rain, but it causes enemies to run away from the center of the effect...in a game where Ao E damage is king, this is a bad thing. Oh, and the later added Cold Domination took Storm Summoning's debuffs, so Storm Summoning lost its good powers to a vastly easier set.
War Mace and Axe for Tankers, until it got a long awaited buff.
The M3 Lee in World Of Tanks. It's a medium tank that plays like a tank destroyer, meaning it has no turret (gun can only turn a few degrees). While the gun is good and the armour reasonable, it's slow and not very manouverable (combined with the lack of turret it's easy to run rings round) and a big target (with a non-functional turret that sticks up over cover inviting shots). Most people hate playing as it.
Part of the trouble with the Lee is that World of Tanks only models one weapon per vehicle, even if the historical tank (and the in-game model) had more than one. The designers chose to model the 75mm casemated gun in the bow of the tank (which, historically, is the only reason this model of tank existed, as Britain was desperate for a vehicle that could carry their best antitank cannon in Africa, so the US designers modified an existing design to rapidly incorporate it in some form) rather than the 37mm turret gun, which is too weak to be of much use, but would at least provide some way to handle flanking light tanks. Additionally, since the turret is physically present, it can be shot at, and raises the visibility and vulnerability of the tank by a large amount.
The French counterpart of the M3 is the B1 heavy tank. Like the M3, it has a large cannon in the bow, and a small one in the turret. Unlike the M3, the small turret gun is modeled, and the large bow gun is not. This gun is so weak that it has trouble penetrating pretty much any equal-tier tank reliably, and can't damage another B1 at all unless hitting a weak spot (sometimes, not even then). It's also so slow that it can take most of the match to drive from one base to the other. The tank's sole saving grace is that it appears a full tier lower than any other heavy tank, and nothing in it's tier can do all that much damage to one, making it a Mighty Glacier.
Role Playing Games
Chu-Chu in Xenogears is weak, weak, WEAK. It's sort of funny, though, given that the sequence that reveals that Chu-Chu can go super sized has her utterly devastating a C-list villain. However, one thing that's interesting about Chu-Chu is that she is the only one that can directly heal the other Gears. Too bad it's for marginal amounts and certainly not worth sacrificing a ton of damage in the process. And then you notice that if you feed it enough Drives,the stat increases carry over to its Gear-sized version...
Front Mission III had the character of Linny Barilar. He might count as a joke character, though, since his introduction specifically shows him as pretty weak and even the other characters view him as dead weight.
In Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army, the demon AI is pretty good - if they try an attack and it doesn't work, they'll remember that particular attack type does not work on that particular enemy, and they won't do it again. There is one exception: Throne, average stat-wise, will not learn. The final boss is immune to Mind, but Throne will keep casting Mind-based spells until you tell him to stop, yourself. Though, the game might not have enough fans to warrant hatred of the demon.
In the Final Fantasy series: the Geomancer class. While they have been nice as a secondary ability in most games*
Edward from Final Fantasy IV, the Trope Namer for Spoony Bard, fits right in here. Though his character is interesting and plot-critical, he's very underpowered in combat due to his low strength and reliance on Useless Useful Spells. Even in the GBA remake, where he can get a lot more levels and more powerful songs, he is still the least useful character to have along in any given situation. Does not apply to the DS or PSP remakes, however.
Three characters had excellent magic power and could use spells, but most wouldn't know it due to other factors:
Relm is often put into this category in Final Fantasy VI, just because her ability can glitch the game, and isn't all that effective when it works. She can actually outdamage Terra with magic.
Cait Sith has the highest magic stat in your party from Disc 2 on and could be your most powerful character if your strategy relies heavily on magic. Additionally, his high HP score makes him decent at defense as well. However, a lot of players dislike him too much for being a comic relief character to even bother using him. Also, Aerith was better (and gotten earlier) in Disc 1. It doesn't help that he has only two Limit Breaks (compared to most characters' eventual seven.)
Quina can be your most important character - if you build his/herBlue Magic right. S/he gets White Wind, Night (field wide sleep that affects your party too, but is much more helpful if you give everyone the Insomnia ability), Mighty Guard, Bad Breath, Angel's Snack, and the incredibly useful Auto-Life. Why the all the hate, then? Well, in order to teach Quina Blue Magic, you'll need to carefully weaken various enemies down to less than 1/8th of their health so s/he can eat them. Then there's his/her ultimate damage ability, Frog Drop, which has to be charged up by playing an annoying minigame over and over. Compare that to, say, Freya's equivalent ability, which you charge by murdering dragons. And of course, like Cait Sith, Quina is a bizarre comic relief character.
Four of Relm's compatriots are in the same position:
Gau, not because Rage sucks but because it can be frustrating to figure out. The process of learning new rages is the ultimate in both Fake Longevity and Luck-Based Mission, where you go to fight in the Veldt and have Gau use Leap on a monster, leaving the party and returning a few battles later knowing its Rage. You then open the menu, scroll down a loooong list of Rages, and select one. Gau then becomes The Berserker and will spend the rest of the battle either using a normal attack or a single special attack. Even if you know what Rages do what (something that the game doesn't tell you), most of the time the majority of them are useless compared to the Boring, but Practical Stray Cat (special attack Cat Scratch is just a super-strong physical attack). Gau is a Disk One Nuke if you train him properly, since his Rages let him use magic before you can teach it to other party members, but once the rest of the party starts to catch up to him, his usefulness drops somewhat. That said, he still gets some of the game's best equipment, and still has access to a handful of game breaking rages such as Nightshade/Rafflesia and Magic Urn, not to mention that he's the only way to learn some of Strago's better lores. TL:DR: Gau is an incredibly versatile and powerful character when trained properly, but building him up can be very time-consuming, which puts off some players.
Cyan is slow as molasses, has the worst magic stats in the game, and his charge-able Bushido techniques require you to sit and wait several seconds while you charge up the meter, during which time the fight is still ongoing and your party can't enter commands*
does not apply to Umaro (below), a dancing Mog, or a Raging Gau
. Also, the only Bushido moves that are useful against bosses are Fang (Level 1), Sky (Level 2), Flurry (Level 4), and Tempest (Level 7). The others being various status effects and a low-power Life Drain. Psycho Cyan aside, he's mostly useless. He can be made more useful if you save his turns until you've selected moves for the other characters in the party, and charge Bushido while the animations happen. Or just spam Fang.
Umaro's the ultimate Tier Induced Scrappy, because his only strategy is Attack! Attack! Attack!. As he's set in permanent Berserk status, Umaro has exactly four moves—attack, run full speed into the enemy, throw a party member for a stronger attack, or use an ice attack that hits all enemies. You also can't teach him magic and can't adjust his equipment except for Relics. And those last two attacks? Each one needs a specific Relic in order for Umaro to use it, and he can only equip 2 Relics at a time.
Gogo can't equip Espers. In FF6, having a certain Esper equipped can cause a certain stat to gain an additional bonus on leveling up - a bonus that Gogo can't take advantage of. His stat growth will fall further behind the rest of the party as their levels increase. Although this doesn't bother casual players, many of whom enjoy Gogo for his versatility, players interested in optimizing stats tend to hate him.
Kimahri from Final Fantasy X usually falls into this trap. He doesn't have bad stats, but every other party member is highly specialized, and the fact that the game's combat system takes this specialization into account makes poor Kimahri a Master of None.
So remember, boys and girls: nobody likes Blue Mages.
Llewelyn and Badrach in Valkyrie Profile. Badrach is seen as being the worst of all the einherjar for his attacks' lousy accuracy, and Llewelyn isn't far behind. The fact that Badrach is a total Jerkass and Llewelyn is kind of a whiner who keeps reminding you how much he doesn't want to fight doesn't help matters either. Their main martial strength—attacks thathit multiple times—can only really be useful on very large enemies because of the way their projectiles spread out as they attack. Since they spread out in the same set pattern every time regardless of the target, the bulk of their attacks will simply miss all but the largest of enemies. As they're two of the three dedicated archers in the first game (though Lenneth can be used as one as well), they've given the class a bit of a bad rap.
Badrach takes it one step further by having the lowest Hero Value in the game, at negative 111 points, which makes it difficult to potentially send him up to Valhalla and win Odin's graces (to add to that, an archer is recommended for sending up in Chapter 5, and you can only get Badrach in either that chapter or Chapter 4). Notably, the only other two characters in the negative-hundreds (Argrim and Gandar) can't be sent up at all!
Sorcerers can be utterly devastating in terms of attacks. However, you really only need one, and a large slew of them comes around the second half of the game. At this point, most players either pick Mystina (who's important plot-wise) or just pick someone else. Also, sorcerers partially defy the Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards trope in that no spell is unique to one person; they can all learn the same spells. And again, some don't realize that the order you get them in is in ascending order of their base magical power, with Jelanda being the weakest and Lyseria and Gandar being the strongest.
Kashell the heavy swordsman has the weakest Purify Weird Soul in the game and few combos, while Grey is weak and can rack up few hits, with his saving grace being high defense.
The bow weapons themselves are horrible in the original game, with low attack output. The other two archers that are good (Lenneth and Janus) are only helped by their good attack stat and filling up the Soul Purification gauge.
Beating bows are, of all things, katanas. The two samurai you can get are better off equipping western swords.
The useful(/less)ness of Archers in the series is lampshaded in Covenant of the Plume - your first additional party member is an archer, who the protagonist tries to ditch. Another character points out she'll make a decent sacrifice if nothing else. She does end up being useful, however, since the Strategy RPG format makes range a more significant factor than in previous games.
Marle from Chrono Trigger is a great example of a YMMV tier-induced scrappy. She has the drawback of being a healer with no multi-target heals, and late in the game her offensive capability falls way behind everyone else's. Many players prefer to farm for Magic Tabs and pump Frog and/or Robo full of them so they have the magic power to heal effectively, and there's no corresponding way to raise Marle's offense. However, Marle has Haste and Life2, casts half of Antipode 3 (one of the best dual techs in the game), has tremendous natural magic defense and can wear the Prism Dress, which bumps her magical defense so high she can take a Dreamreaver to the face and keep smiling.
In the DS rerelease, her new weapon is a bow that always does 777 damage. While not exactly a high number, especially compared to offensive powerhouses like Chrono and Lucca, it always does 777 damage, under all circumstances, even against enemies with massively high physical defense. In some cases, Marle will be regularly outdamaging the more offense-oriented members of the party, specifically because said boss or enemy has a brick wall for a defense. This makes her a lot more useful to have in your party, since offensive capability was one of her low points in the original.
Hahn from Phantasy Star IV before he learns Astral and Vol. Gryz is pretty useless and Kyra is a more mediocre version of Rune/Alys if it wasn't for Medice. Also, Demi despite having Medical Pwr and Phonon. All of those characters are temporary guests in your party until they come back for the final battle. Granted, while they're actually in your party, they're entirely well-suited for those fights, but at the end of the game you're just going to pick Raja anyway.
Salsa from MOTHER 3 has attacks that are quite weak and he relies on the NPC Party member with him to do most of the damage (and the NPC's attacks are completely random), his special abilities are not really that great,note although knowing about Monkey Mimic can make the Pork Tank a bit easier and he has the misfortune of being placed in what is essentially a full chapter of grinding due to the fact he's so underpowered. He is playable briefly later on, but by that time he is tragically underleveled to the point of being useless. However, Itoi makes him such a tragic character that most players end up rooting for him anyway, making Salsa something of a deconstruction.
Rainer Hofstedt's only role in Albion is his ability to provide useful advice during the first part of the game, but he's almost completely useless in combat. He's later replaced by Harriet, who has the same stats, and the ability to cast healing spells, and a spell that can wipe every single opponent off the battlefield There are exactly three other things Rainer is good for. The first is that he's good at picking locks, though not as good as Khunag. The second is that he's harder to hit than Tom and wears better armor than Drirr, so until you get Siobhan he's the closest thing you have to a blink tank. The third is that until you get Joe in the final dungeon only he and Tom can use the pistol, which has an attack power of 30 and can be found when you'd have to Money Grind excessively just to afford a spear with a power of 18. Incidentally, have you noticed that all of these traits are redundant?
Xigbar in Kingdom Hearts 358 Days Over 2, despite being a great character in the story mode of the game (both in terms of both usefulness and entertainment value), is considered quite weak in the multiplayer aspect of it. The main problem with Xigbar is that a lot of people solo the mission mode— and Xigbar isn't meant for soloing. He's meant to be standing back providing back-up damage while someone tanks the enemies. Having to reload does hinder him, though.
Can be overcome by a creative player directly controlling her
, and Regal because his controls are odd - while most of the characters control like Super Smash Bros characters, Regal's controls are more like classic fighting game combos. This frustrates a lot of players into hating a character who is otherwise quite likable.
Cheria is this along with being a regular Scrappy and a Damsel Scrappy. Her physical attack stat is the lowest among all playable characters, her defense is low, her magic attack is sub-par for a mage, and Sophie is arguably the better healer initially due to her high defense and short casting time, and doesn't become the better mage until much higher levels where she learns moves like "Nurse" and "Indignation".
Even though a lot of people actually use her for solos because she's very flexible on the other hand - if anything she suffers more from being a jack of all trades type of character. A lot of people use her because she has multi-target heals (Always good in Tales Series games) and the AI often has her heal while Sophie attacks, or they both heal and you recover quite a lot of damage. (Sophie in contrast has single-target heals.)
Malik got a lot of people disliking him for the fact that he was hard to control. However; F helped balance him out better.
Asbel is seen this way to some people, due to being the only playable character who has no magical abilities.
Hubert also got a lot of flak for being slow, and having the worst evasion in the game.
Even Sophie later on treads into this territory as she becomes more of a Jack Of All Trades character.
And then, there's Richard, who is generally mediocre compared to everyone else due to his lack of strengths.
Pascal can veer into this as a ranged damage dealer as well as a mage who has to be in melee range to use some of her magic. But this also improves in F.
Jubilee: Unlike other energy users, she doesn't have any melee-boosting passive and her powers are pretty lackluster. She disappeared in the sequel.
Emma Frost: Her powers are never quite as strong as Jean Grey's and she lacks a team boost. It doesn't help that you're forced to use her in a few levels.
Sentinels are fought frequently throughout the game, especially in the last levels. Unfortunately, all of them are either resistant or immune to psionic attacks, making your psychics less than valuable later in the game, even the game-breaking Jean Grey. This isn't as big of an issue in the sequel.
Blade in the first game, despite being a Badass spike-throwing, katana-wielding, gunslinging, vampire hunter: He suffers from horrible energy management issues and never really gains any worthwhile attacks.
Daredevil in the sequel: never gets any good powers and a mediocre fighter
Penance pre-Patch: supposed to be a Glass Cannon, but a bug makes his powers stay the same as he takes more damage and he has horrid defense.*
post-patch, he's a high tier in the PS2/Wii versions and average otherwise.
Venom in the sequel: powers deal low damage and has low defense.
Cielo in Digital Devil Saga. It's not that he's poor in attack strength and average in everything else. It's that his weakness is "Ailment". This includes attacks that have ailments as a secondary effect, which nearly every end-game enemy will be using. (Ironically, this weakness makes him an ideal character for fighting the Nintendo HardBonus Boss.) He was Rescued from the Scrappy Heap in Digital Devil Saga 2, where his weakness was restricted to only three specific types of ailment attacks. This- coupled with decent stats, no elemental weaknesses and a period in the game where you have to use him- brings him up to par with the rest of the party... if you can stand his bizarre Jamaican accent, frequent Friendship Speeches and the fact that he was barely involved in the events leading up to the first game.
In general, pregen characters in Freedom Force are built around what makes thematic sense rather than what avoids giving characters glaring weaknesses. This doesn't work out too bad for characters like Bullet, who even when nerfed for the sequel just gets a "fast metabolism" that makes him weak to acid and radiation. However, it absolutely screwsLiberty Lad, who has both the melee focus you'd expect from a kid with something to prove and the pathetically low HP you'd expect from, well, a kid. The sad thing is that, rather than making him a Glass Cannon or giving him a high dodge rate, the designers decided to let him use grenades as well as punches—and then they gave him a horrible hit rate that usually meant those grenades exploded harmlessly against a wall thirty feet behind the target. It's not surprising that, despite being a fairly interesting character, he went from being plot-important in several missions in the first game to being the first, easiest-to-get, and admitted weakest of the optional characters in the second game.
The Disciple in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, who joins your party if you play as a woman. He's a pretty unspectacular fighter, his "special ability" is making medpacs on request (which is more or less guaranteed to be obsolete by the time you get him, because you will already have access to the Heal power), and the reward for gaining influence with him is 500 XP and training him as a Jedi. By contrast, if you had played through the game as a man, you would have gotten the Handmaiden, who is, bar none, the single best hand-to-hand fighter in the game and who can train you to apply your Wisdom bonus to your Armor Class (manna from heaven if you are playing as a Jedi Consular). Oh, and you can also train her as a Jedi, too. Consequently, the Handmaiden has become so popular that later works have established that the game's Player Character traveled with the Handmaiden, even though the PC is canonically female.
This is partly a result of the rushed release of the game: the Disciple was going to have a proper counterpart to the Handmaiden's granting of the Wisdom bonus to Armor Class perk, but the accompanying quest ended up being unfinished by the time the game was released (and not fully voiced, either, so very few of the cut content restoration projects brought it back in).
Pokémon also has many Low-Tier Scrappies, such as Spinda and Farfetch'd, who are in the NU (Never-Used) Tier because of their relative uselessness in competitive battling.
Albeit more of a Tier Induced Woobie, Flareon is this of the Eeveelutions. Unlike its bretheren, whom all have designated roles to fulfill, Flareon has trouble finding one with its bizarre stat distribution combined with its bad movepool. It has high Attack and Special Defense, but poor general defenses and poor Speed, meaning it can't tank nor sweep. In addition, it has a sparse physical movepool to work with, being forced to work off its lesser Special Attack, or even support moves, both which the other Eeveelutions do better. To add insult to injury, it can't even learn Flare Blitz*
, a move that would make sense on Flareon, but is denied for arbitrary reasons.
Charizard counts too, for similar reasons (mostly due to the stark contrast between its major Ensemble Darkhorse status and its ridiculously low tier ranking). From Generation IV onwards, the move Stealth Rock has made it nigh-useless competitively due to its double Rock weakness, even after getting a Status Buff in Pokemon Black And White - this is one reason why Stealth Rock is so hated (see the "high tier" section above).
Charizard is mostly hated by the Ubers players (you know, the highest-tier metagame consisting of Game BreakerOlympus Mons), to near Memetic Mutation levels. Not only is it in the lowest tier, but it's completely inferior to Reshiram in every way. This wouldn't be a problem if there weren't legions ofScrubsusing Charizard in their Uber teams! The fact that most people run Blaze over Solar Power (Solar Power is better because Charizard won't take a hit anyway) makes it even worse. To add insult to injury, Charizard is actually more common than some genuinely good Ubers. Notably, when someone actually made a concerted effort to make a good Ubers team with Charizard, the reaction was far less vitriolic.
Electivire is a cross beetwen this and high tier. The hate mainly comes from Hype Backlash, its movepool gives it insane super effective coverage, good offensive stats and ability that make it a good offensive partner to Gyarados make it seems to be a powerful threat. And then, its found that Super Effective is not the same as One-Hit Kill, combined with its lackluster STAB move, lack of good stats boosting move and its Glass Cannon status spread including its so-so natural speed makes its performance rather underwhelming. Sadly, it is used enough that it stayed OU during the course of gen 4, despite the fact that some Pokémon are demoted from OU despite being considered better than Electivire. This get so bad that at Gen V, people still hated Electivire and commonly bring up the fact it is an OU that is incapable of performing well in OU, despite the fact that it was given a new and more powerful STAB move (via the Wild Charge TM) and it is no longer OU.
Dodrio has been suffering this problem since Generation 4. Thanks to Stealth Rock and the Nerf to Hidden Power becoming a special attack (instead of the type dictating whether it'll be physical or special), it has no way of plowing through Steel-types. It plummeted to the NU tier from the OU tier it was in a generation before. In Generation V's Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, there was hope it would have learned Low Kick to finally get through Steel-types as a move tutor move. Sadly, it didn't.
Of the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, Grass. This type has so many problems it's a wonder it can survive in the metagame:
Offensively: By far the most types resist Grass, with a whopping seven resistors (Grass, Fire, Poison, Bug, Flying, Dragon, and Steel). Right behind it is Bug, with six. In addition, some Pokemon have the "Sap Sipper" ability, which neutralizes Grass-type attacks and boosts Attack to go along with it. Said possessors aren't exactly obvious about this Ability, which mostly includes Normal-types, as well as Marill and Azumarill, who are normally weak to Grass. And speaking of that, while it is strong against Water and the only type strong against the Water/Ground type combination, that is often rendered irrelevant since there's a lot of type combinations that neutralize Grass's strength. Grass-types also tend to have terrible movepools, where you'd be lucky if a Grass-type could learn anything outside of Grass and Normal; while many Fire-types can learn Grass-type attacks like SolarBeam (and, logically, Sunny Day) or rarely Electric-type attacks to take out Water-types, and all but four Water-types note Magikarp and the Tympole evolutionary line can learn Ice-type attacks to take out Grass-types, it's lucky if a Grass-type can even learn any Rock-type moves at all outside of Hidden Power (to take out Ice, Fire, Bug, and Flying-types).
Defensively: Grass has one of the worst defensive type combinations, only beaten by Ice. It has an incredible five weaknesses (Fire, Bug, Flying, Ice, and Poison), and Fire and Ice are incredibly common move types. Out of the type combinations with seven weaknesses, Grass-types are part of two of them. note Grass/Ice, Grass/Psychic, and Rock/Psychic In addition, Grass-types don't really have very good stats other than their attack stats or speed. While they do have the useful properties of resisting Water and Ground, there are still easy ways around that (especially how all but four Water-types can learn Ice-type attacks).
Lastly, in terms of weather, they also suffer since they work best in intense sunlight... which also powers up Fire-type moves. They do get an ability (Leaf Guard) that nullifies status ailments, like Hydration... but even possessing it prevents the user from using Rest; unlike Hydration, which allows it anyways for the effects of an instant Full Restore. They still have SolarBeam, but it's a bit Awesome, but Impractical and more intended for Fire-type usage. While there are a few other Grass-types designed for weather use (Cacturne with Sand Veil, Abomasnow for its hailstorm-summoning ability, and Ludicolo for speed-doubling Swift Swim and HP-restoring Rain Dish), most of them have to struggle a bit with sunlight.
Grass-types are getting a lot more use in the Gen. V metagame as a defensive type, though. Mostly because rain teams (which rely on Water-type attacks) are the dominant playstyle, because one Grass-type in particular (Ferrothorn, also a Steel-type) is such a good Stone Wall, and because they are very skilled at spreading status ailments (being immune to Leech Seed themselves) and/or being annoying (especially Whimsicott).
The Golden Sun series is known for its Djinn and Class system, which allows the player to toy with the attributes and abilities of the characters by allocating the Djinn set to the character. The same holds true in Dark Dawn, but not everyone freely utilizes it, which makes two characters stand out.
Rief is capable of learning Ply and Wish, just like Mia, as well as combat Psynergy to round out your options. Sadly, attack Psynergy loses its effectiveness mid-game, which is a recurring problem, but Rief doesn't last that long before he's benched due to [A] Karis being able to use the Fresh Breeze group from the word go at the time he arrives and [B] physically-oriented Amiti showing up just an hour or two later. Due to most players not having the patience to play with the aforementioned system, Amiti's arrival usualy means Rief is permanently benched. And the sink for those Dijinn that don't make it onto the main party, causing him to be a bit of a mongrel if he does have to save the others' tails...
Himi does bring things to the table that Matthew doesn't (like an attack buff and some summon abilities), but she's very likely not to get any field time unless she's needed to revive Matthew due to her being much weaker. And not having enough time to make up the difference. Coupled with her being a Flat Character even by Golden Sun standards, her falling in this trope is especially tragic.
Nina and Garr are often considered the weakest characters in Breath Of Fire 3, mostly because the other four characters are just that much better. The Hero Ryuu has powerful dragon transformations and excellent all-around stats. Rei has simply insane speed and decent attack stats and can turn into a weretiger whose damage output rivals other characters spamming their best attacks with no AP cost and his main weakness in this form (increasing chance to attack party members instead of enemies) can be countered with an Useless Useful Spell. Momo is extremely versatile and can be easily set up as a powerful physical attacker AND support mage. Peco is Nigh Invulnerable due to having the highest HP and defense and an innate HP regeneration, plus he has respectable attack power and an insane counterattack rate, making him the ultimate tank. This leaves the other two characters in the dust. Nina's specialty is attack magic, which is nearly useless against bosses in the second half of the game, due to their high magic defense and elemental resistance as well as the fact that all attack magic has a set damage range and never gets any stronger, and she's also the frailest character in the game. Garr has the highest base attack power in the team, but he also has almost no AP to work with; the other members of the team can more than make up for their lower strength by using powerful skills like Shadowwalk and Aura to hit much harder than Garr can with normal attacks. He's also the slowest character in the game, which translates both to never getting any extra turns and missing annoyingly often, although the former can be remedied to a degree with the Chain formation.
Kaidan Alenko from Mass Effect 1, due to being a Sentinel, falls head first into the Master of None trap. He can handle crowd-control and tech-based debuffing, but there is nothing he can do that someone else can't do better. Ashley, Garrus, Wrex, and even Tali are better with weapons. Tali is much better with tech-based debuffs and even Garrus has a valuable one that Kaidan is missing. Liara has access to every crowd-control ability and, along with Wrex, has an extremely useful biotic debuff that Kaidan lacks. The end result is Kaidan frequently getting benched after the first mission in favor of the more specialized teammates.
Sentinel was so terrible in Mass Effect 1 that Bioware boosted it into a near Game Breaker status in the sequel.
Jacob Taylor in Mass Effect 2 has been criticized for this. Pull loses much of its usefulness on higher difficulties, his AI uses Barrier all the time even if there aren't any enemies around, his ammo power is shared with Grunt and Soldier / Vanguard Shepard, and he's generally less good at being a Stone Wall or Magic Knight than Grunt and Samara, respectively.
Some of Mass Effect 3's multiplayer classes fall into this:
The starting Human Infiltrator is virtually never seen. This may have something to with the fact that it is Overshadowed by Awesome in more ways than should be physically possible; most players will agree that every other Infiltrator and every other default human character is better than it. Not having powers that synergize particularly well together, sharing two of its powers with the sturdier and Sabotage-toting Quarian Infiltrator, and having Cryo Blast without a power that pairs well with it are particularly damning.
The Drell Vanguard have excellent mobility and a passive race power that gives higher damage bonuses than any other race. It's also quite fragile and have powers that don't really work together all that well, and does not have any specialized buildups such as the Krogan Battlemaster, Project Phoenix Ex-Cerberus, and N7 Slayer.
Live A Live has Akira, very likely the worst character in the final chapter. Stat-wise, he's a Master of None, but that's just where the problem starts. His attacks cover huge areas and inflict status ailments, but they're also far too weak for the area of effect to matter and status ailments don't matter in an RPG like this. Worse, those area of effect spells are some of the slowest in the game and his melee attacks do barely anything. Almost no one uses him for anything but his personal dungeon and his mind-reading power to find some extra info.
Koromaru, despite being overwhelmingly loveable, has a low-level skillset that doesn't bring anything new to your party. By the time he joins your team, both the protagonist and Junpei will be capable of dealing fire attacks, and Koromaru's Mudo skills are also available to the protagonist — and the protagonist can equip a persona that also nullifies light, which many enemies use to take out Koromaru in a single shot. On top of that, his weapon of choice does slash damage, making him even more useless, since the majority of the cast also inflicts slash damage.
Mitsuru is capable of inflicting high-level ice attacks (and is, in fact, the only person other than the protagonist to learn ice skills) and begins with some charm and healing skills, but unlike Yukari, she doesn't learn multi-target healing spells. Since you can just as easily fill her role by having the protagonist inflict ice damage and wield a sword, she rarely sees combat.
Aigis is this throughout the majority of The Journey. Her accuracy is naturally low, she has no magical powers (instead, she casts attacks from her hit points), and her skillset stays complete until the plot demands a level up. Since the level up hits during the last month of gameplay, she's already fallen behind the rest of the cast, and even with her new skillset finished, she's still difficult to fit into a party.
Tabletop Games
The Monk Class in Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e is widely considered to be the weakest of the Core Classes. They have low hit points, restricted skill points, rely heavily on multiple stats, nearly all of their abilities can be replicated by a caster of a much lower level, their abilities have terrible synergy (eg. increased movement speed combined with special attacks which can only be used while standing still), and an unarmed Swordsage (Tome of Battle) can pull off Wuxia-style martial arts while still being effective.
Outside of the core classes, the biggest scrappy class is the Truenamer from Tome of Magic. The Truenamer is great in concept: Someone who uses the language of creation itself to rewrite reality. That is until you realize that not only are their powers rather limited, they also become less effective as they level up: the DC of a Truenaming effect equals a constant + double the target's level. This includes allies. A Truenamer in combat spends most of his time shouting in Truespeech only for it to not do anything.
Rivaling the Truenamer in sheer player hatred is the Complete Warrior Samurai, essentially a Nerfed and more restricted version of the already average Fighter. While the Truenamer is mechanically unplayable, the Samurai is just useless. He has weak features, a poor skill list, bonus feats which mainly border on detrimental, and very little versatility. His Eleventh Hour Superpower, Frightful Presence, is virtually useless from the start and only gets weaker from there. Just about the only good thing about him is he helped bring about the much more well-liked Ronin prestige class, which he's not really needed for. One of the most well-known tier lists places him on the same level as the Warrior and Aristocrat, noncombatant classes not meant for actual player use. Ouch.
Another class that's looked down upon for lack of power is the Healer from Miniatures Handbook. It heals better than a Clericnote by way of adding their Charisma modifier to damage healed by spells... but that's all it can do. No offensive abilities whatsoever (unless fighting The Undead, because Revive Kills Zombie). Just slinging healing spells to patch up allies (in a game where in-battle healing is completely useless). To add insult to injury, the game contained several much loved "focused casters" (who know their entire spell list, and can cast any of them as long as they have the spell slots), which would have been the perfect system for a support class (limited, single purpose spell list), but it casts exactlylike a Cleric instead, except it can't convert other spells to raw healing if needed. They do get a Unicorn, though, whichaside fromUnfortunate Implications, provides permanent immunity to Mind Control for the entire party.
The Soulknife occupies the position of being one of the most well-liked and most-hated classes in 3.5e. The idea of creating a weapon out of psychic energy and going to town on your foes earned fans for its cool factor, but mechanically the Soulknife's main class feature was owning a magic weapon that upgraded later than weapons you craft yourself and didn't even have the decency to be a Laser Blade. The class was a worse combatant than an ordinary fighter and didn't have much else going for it, dooming it to be an ineffective novelty combatant. But its sheer coolness meant that players would continually try to come up with House Rules to fix the class and make it more like the awesome warrior they envisioned.
In the Magic: The Gathering corner, we have the colors Green and, to a lesser extent, White.
Green's main problem is that it's the creature-focused color, and for many years, creatures sucked- you'd run out a horde of Elves, only to walk right into a Wrath of God (which forbids regeneration, just in case you thought you had an out.) The only time green saw any tournament play was for its other defining characteristic (fast mana) and then only to fuel the red, black, or blue kill spell. The recent rise in creature quality has lead to green having more prominence in the tournament scene.
With the shift to move some card drawing into Green (Garruk, Primal Hunter; Hunter's Instinct; Lead the Stampede), some creature kill (in the form of the Fight keyword and Ambush Viper), and some particularly powerful keyword abilities (Hexproof, Undying), Green is starting to make a turn out of this. Of course, when cards like Primeval Titan around, Green might be heading in the other direction...
White had its own time being lousy. White is pretty much the Jack of All Stats of colors, meaning that it does almost everything, but it does nothing particularly well. It occasionally interacts with the stack, but not to the crushing level that Blue does, and it's creatures don't have green's quality or red's breakneck speed. White, like green, has started to improve with the focus on creatures.
Note that both of these colors, despite sucking overall for many years, have had game breaking cards associated with them: Balance, Oath of Druids, and Survival of the Fittest are all ridiculously overpowered. However, these cards are in no way representative of the colors power level on the whole.
In Warhammer 40000, the Sisters of Battle have received a White Dwarf codex as of late 2011. They are simply terrible, with almost no useful options. Faith - their signature power - has been nerfed to useless and fails to scale with the game's point size. The Sisters have also been Worf in a Worf Barrage for many factions and been massacred to be used as holy oil in an infamous section of the 5th Edition Grey Knight codex. However, if and when they get a new codex, the Sisters could quickly find themselves pulled out of this status. Their codex is so bad now it's unlikely any metagame changes are likely to save them.
Turn Based Strategy
The High Priest class in Fire Emblem Seisen no Keifu isn't too well-loved for fighting already, but go to any forum and mention wanting to make Sylvia's son Corple an offense fighter and prepare to get lectured on why he sucks, you shouldn't bother, all the good magic is wasted on a lowly High Priest and both Corple and his older sister Leen suck anyway, you should leave Sylvia alone or dead and just get the replacements Laylea and Sharlow, THEY HAVE CHARISMA AND ELITE OMG, etc.
Corpul tends to be a special case (read: HATE it or DESPISE it,orelse!) with the entire fanbase, actually. Being a unit that's recruited in the 4th chapter out of 6 in the game's second half, starting out as a Priest at Level 1. Though he has decent starting stats and high growths regardless of who his father is, and his two most common fathers are both powerful offensive magic users (Levin and Claude), Corpul ends up outclassed by those two fathers' other potential children. Claude can end up giving his high magic stats to Sety to make him still powerful even without Holsety (with which he's even MORE powerful than Levin), it also pairs up with giving Holsety to Arthur when he's not running a Glass Cannon set. Also, Sharlow's exclusive Berserk Staff is usually praised because of what it does and how the players react. All in all, Sylvia is killed and Corpul is dropped for the opportunity to laugh at your enemies killing each other, AND LITTLE ELSE. For an example of what happens to those who try and go up against the status quo, have a look atthe resultsof thischaracterpoll.
The replacement children, except for Laylea and Sharlow (and arguably, Linda and Amid) fall almost inevitably into this. The hardest cases are Cute Bruiser Radney, who not only "replaces" the ultra super loved Lakche but promotes in a different class (Hero, instead of Swordsmaster) and thus is a stupid and useless bitch for fans, and White Mage Janne who is completely trashed for not having Pursuit and Charisma like the girl she replaces, Nanna.
Arden from the same game actually has quite a bit to offer as a unit (good defensive capabilities) and a father (Ayra and Edain's children benefit from said capabilities and if you promote him he can pass down a Killer Bow for Lester or any A-rank sword for Skasaha), plus he can get the only Pursuit Ring in the game. But most guides bash his mediocre stats and low movement range, adamantly advising players never to bother with him except for the ring, which should be sold to "someone who can truly use it". (Which isn't bad in and of itself because a few other characters could benefit from it, but they make it sound like it'd be flat-out wasted on Arden)
The Interquel (Thracia 776) has its own problem children:
Ronan is the biggest scrappy, thanks to his growth favoring in Magic with a really low Strength and rather below average in everything else. Even worse, Ronan is an Archer, which is one of the Tier Induced Scrappy classes in the entire series.
Marty gets railed on for not having Skills, when gameplay-wise he is the poster boy for Capturing. Plus he's ugly.
Cyas. The man is a genuinely good guy despite being Alvis's Heroic Bastard. He also helped Mareeta break free of the Darkness Sword and made sure she made it own personalized weapon, and he's a brilliant tactician. However, he makes life hell for you in two chapters due to his absurd amount of leadership stars (not to mention he loses most of them when he joins your side). So people never keep Cyas because keeping Cyas means losing Sety, the resident Game Breaker. For all the trouble he gives you, in-game he doesn't even help you out at all.
Zealot from Fire Emblem 6, who is a Nice Guy all around (and a good, working husband at that, not to mention he becomes the first King of Illia), but gamers tend to avoid him or blatantly tell "HE SUXXX!!!" due to being worse than the token Crutch Character in the game (Marcus)*
A shift in the Metagame has rescued him to Upper-Middle, however
. And this also goes into his Hot Mom wife Yuuno, who is a nice Action Mom all around, but since she has rather bad stats and growth, people avoid her, telling that Zealot's suckiness in combat (as far as game stats go) is hereditary.
Yuno's biggest problem is that unlike Zealot, she joins pretty late so unlike Zealot who can take the advantage of the Metagame shift of protecting weaker units early in the game, Yuno joins when your units are probably already strong enough to take care of themselves, making her overall useless. Yuno is available only on a specific route split, if you don't take her route, you get Sue's grandfather Dayan, a Nomadic Trooper who's... pretty much the same as Yuno.
Also, Sophia and Wendy. Sophia is a shaman who starts at level 1 in the midgame and dies in one hit and never has acceptable durability. Raising her is a pain due to her horrid accuracy and her lack of speed, so even with training, she's seen as a poor man's Lilina. Wendy is even worse, joining in a chapter that comes right before ones that are dominated by axe users. Wendy is notorious for her poor movement, bad attack, horrible accuracy and despite being a in a Mighty Glacier class, she gets killed very, very easily. And for many, the payoff isn't even worth it since she just becomes interchangeable with her older brother Bors, who comes earlier and who isn't that good anyway.
Princess Lilina from the same game borders on this. She joins later than the other Mage, Lugh, and with about the same bases he had to begin with. While Lugh ends up being a balanced magic user, Lilina isn't. Her astronomical Magic growth (75%, in a game where 40% is considered good) is tempered by her poor Skill (20%), mediocre Speed (35%), and sub-par defenses. The fandom is pretty evenly split between "She's the greatest magic user in the series" and "She's utterly worthless". Her tiering tends to reflect this split, falling below average but still arguably in the "worth using" category.
Roy gets a lot of hate for being "weaksauce", doubly so because he's the protagonist whom you're required to use. The fact that he automatically promotes so late in the game doesn't help his cause with the stat hounds, either.
Renault in Fire Emblem 7 has the most interesting back story and depth, but is widely maligned for joining late*
," baring a potential extra stage and having a God-awful magic stat. Of course, it makes the final battle easier to have him spam his fortify staff, but people just see his low mag and res and are like "FAIL!" Players who care more about characterization than stats are thus likely to pass him over for their favorites as he's an optional character with very little dialog as he joins and little time to learn anything about him via support conversations. It doesn't help that you have to intentionally seek support conversations with Renault, as it takes a minimum of 42 turns to unlock one (where the rest of the game can be completed in under 15).
Nino gets the same deal as Ewan below, except Ewan can do Level Grinding and she CAN'T (She does get strong, though, just not worth the effort for many).
Eliwood. Compared to Bad Ass Hector and Action Girl Lyn, he's somewhat average and his growth is a bit slower. And like Roy, the stat-hate for him is doubled based on the fact that he's a main character.
Marcus was considered and derided as this in the earlier days thanks to veterans pointing out that he is of the Jeigan archetype and new players getting tipped of by aforementioned veterans or using him and discover, much to their dismay, that his growth potential was mediocre. This led almost everyone to consider him complete and utter crap... until it turned out that he was one of the better units to use if you wanted that Hector Hard Mode A-rank almost reaching Oifaye levels in overall usefulness. He has had a more positive reception ever since. Ironically, this shift in opinion may have been because of the popularity of his successors, Seth and Titania who are much better than him statistically, causing people to give him another chance and thereby discovering that he wasn't as useless as they thought he was. It could also be because the Metagame shifted from "overall unit growth potential" to "overall positive contribution to the Tactics rankings" which determine the Rank you get at the ending.
Fans of Fire Emblem The Sacred Stones often lump Knoll together with this trope. This is due to the fact that most of the later enemies in the game are monsters, and when Bishops have an ability that makes a guaranteed one-hit-KO against monsters, his Luck Stat is among the worst in the game, and given that the dark legendary weapon (Gleipnir) isn't super-effective against monsters and is the heaviest weapon in the game (which equals lot less evade and no double-attacks, and when coupled with the above-mentioned low Luck, he gets NO dodge at all), most players abandon him or just throw him on the back lines as a Summoner (surprisingly, he's the best Summoner in the game— not that there's a lot of competition). Knoll can be pretty useful against walls of magical enemies, though they aren't that common.
Most people also considers Ewan this due to him joining really late, massively underleveled and not even becoming all that strong even when fully trained.
Other characters considered Scrappies are Garcia who despite being a "Legendary Warrior" joins at level 4 due to his defense and speed levels, Syrene due to her poor offense and defense especially when compared to other riders, and Dozla due to his almost pathetic dodge.
The Trial Map Characters, which are clearly much bigger examples than the ones listed above. Other than (arguably) Glen, Lyon, Riev, and Ismaire all of these characters have terrible stats, terrible growths, or characters in the party who are far superior to them (i.e. Gerik to Caellach), or have poor pontential due to their high levels.
Most mage characters fell victim to this in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, the exception being Soren (and even then, he's pretty average). Pretty much all of the non-royal laguz did as well.
Micaiah is a light mage (lowest damage spell type), is the main character (until Ike overtakes the plot) and is truly at the mercy of the Random Number God. Most Radiant Dawn fans label her a Mary Sue and give her a heal staff. Micaiah is a very odd example of this trope, considering she's actually considered the most useful magic user in the game... the girl's problem is that Ike is a borderline Game Breaker and magic is very sub-par in this game.
To be more specific, FE 10 decided to heavily Nerf magic classes by giving them much lower speed growths and caps, to the level that they're almost as slow as armored classes, as well as basing speed calculations on strength and not constitution, which mages will have horrible growths on. Before this, they were regarded as GlassCannons, but now, Squishy Wizard is in full effect. This also carries over to the games afterwards. Micaiah became a Squishy Wizard as a result, with magic stats so high she becomes a Stone Wall against mages, but physical stats so low she can be ORKO'd by just about any other enemy that attacks her. Another thing to note is that the Mage class Mastery Skills (Corona for Micaiah and Bishops, Flare for the others) are the only ones that don't have a damage multiplier associated with them, instead merely a Res negation effect. Mathematically, the Mastery skill of the Dragon Laguz, Ire, given to a White Dragon (whose breath attack works off the Mag stat unlike other Laguz) has a better Mag-based damage output compared to this, since Ire is just a generic three times boost to damage when it triggers.
Micaiah's group, the Dawn Brigade, has several units in this category too. They range from units whose growths are not efficient for their class*
Meg having high speed and poor strength and defense in a Mighty Glacier class, Leonardo having poor skill and speed when being the group's only archer
to units who come at unreasonably low levels or are otherwise hard to train note Laura starts at level one and can only level by healing, Fiona comes at level 7 when the rest of the army is probably more than twice her level to units who would actually be useful if it wasn't for certain attributes that weaken them considerably note Ilyana being forced to use the badly-nerfed Thunder tomes until she promotes, Volug being stuck in half-shift for all of Part 1. A few other units have these problems as well, but it's not quite as pronounced for them because they tend to show up in far more balanced armies and they aren't starved for experience like the Dawn Brigade.
Rafa and Malak in Final Fantasy Tactics (or "Rapha and Marach" in the Video Game Remake for the PSP) have unique class skills that hit 4 squares out of 5 at random (possibly including doubles) and normally do pretty lousy damage even when they hit: Rafa's multiply with the target's "Faith" stat (which is essentially Magic Vulnerability) but not enough to be impressive; Malak does increased damage to athiests with low FA, but are aren't a whole lot of those in the game. Rafa is also infamous for an Escort Mission in which she can get herself killed before you've been allowed to take a turn. Their redeeming qualities come in their natural Brave and Faith stats: Rafa has low BR, making her good at being a white mage or using Move: Find Item; and Marach's low FA means he takes almost no damage from magical attacks, making it that much easier to turn him into an invincible steamroller. That said, it's a lot of work for marginal reward, compared to other characters (even Player Mooks). And their unique class skills are still the absolute worst in the game.
The power of their attacks is quadratic in their magic power, instead of linear like everyone else. It only gets to be impressive when you optimize the build totally for this, using their class ability out-of-class as a black mage, equipped for raw +magic power.
One thing that severely reduces the usefulness of their attacks is the fact that their attacks have the same vertical tolerance as most other magic spells, meaning that you can't restrict the possible target area of their randomized spells to isolated enemies standing on high tiles: however, the Hydra/Tiamat line of monsters have attacks that not only work in the same way as Rafa's and Malak's, but they also have less vertical tolerance which allows you to restrict the target area better, have a larger minimum number of attacks than either of them for all of their attacks, and the best skill of this type they have also inflicts status effects on top of doing damage.
Archers, while sometimes being the only characters capable of long range attacks, are usually shunned for their low defense, poor movement, and mediocre damage. May in 2 is exempt.
Kiwi. His HP growth is horrible, which doesn't matter much if you only have him engage in melee battles since he has high defense, but in a game where magic attacks bypass defense, you'll expect to see him die often. His promotion adds the ability to fly over water tiles as well as a random chance of a flame breath attack (an obvious homage to Gamera), but what's the point if he'll rarely get to use them.
Sister Miriam's faction in Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri. There are four ways to win the game: control enough money to buy every other faction, gain enough votes from each faction to be elected the Supreme Ruler, advance so far in technology that you ascend to another plane of existence, or you can just conquer the entire world. While some factions are more tuned to attempt one victory condition over another (CEO Morgan has the best chance of buying the world, Commissioner Pravin Lal has a bonus to being elected world leader, etc.) Sister Miriam's faction only has one viable strategy: devote all resources to conquering everyone else as fast as you can. This is because Sister Miriam's faction has a technology research penalty that means all other factions will eventually out-pace you in weapons technology, and achieving the "ascend to another plane of existence" victory condition is very hard if not completely unattainable. Their only hope for winning is to conquer everyone else while the playing-field is still relatively even, and hope they get enough technologies from conquering to make up any deficit. Most human players make it a goal to destroy her faction as quickly as possible, especially if another human is playing as her. Compounding the scrappy-factor is that two other factions (the Spartan Federation and the Human Hive) already fulfill the role of being 'warlike' while still being varied in their possible strategy options.
Montblanc in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is considered a low tier because he starts off as a Black Mage and his magic power pales in comparison to the Nu Mou who are a race of people that excel greatly in magic and have better magic stats than everyone else. Since Montblanc is level 5 when you first get him, several of his levels are wasted in the Black Mage job and even trying to raise him purely as a mage won't get the same damage output as the other races who use magic. Because of this and how he is considered useless in the story, many players choose to kill him off so that they can replace him with a better fighter since the game doesn't allow you to boot him out of the clan.
Several basic job classes in the game are quickly discarded once the player has access to higher tier classes:
Soldiers can only lower the stats of the enemy, which quickly gets useless once you learn abilities that can do high damage or other effects. Soldiers can use some of the best swords in the game, but by the time you get them, you won't even be using the Soldier class. The Warrior class is basically the Bangaa version of the Soldier; stronger but equally useless in abilities.
The Animist class used by Moogles have below average stat growth and the majority of their abilities cause status effects, which are more likely to miss than hit if the computer decides it doesn't want you to win.
Archers are useful in the start of the game, but they mostly focus in abilities that cause status effects and are quickly outclassed by the more useful and powerful Hunter and Sniper classes. The Archer's saving grace is learning the Concentrate passive ability, which boosts your accuracy.
Beastmasters for the Nu Mou tend to be useless when there are no monsters around and many predetermined battles will have no monsters. The Beastmaster class is useful if you are using a Blue Mage to learn monster skills since you can control the monster and use the ability on the mage, but outside of that, any Nu Mou in this class will only gain better physical stats, despite the fact that 99% of the job classes for the Nu Mou race are purely based on magic. The class gets even lower in Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 due to being nerfed; the Beastmaster can only force the monster to execute an attack on that unit's turn rather than when the monster's turn comes up.
Miu and Painkiller in Super Robot Wars UX. Compared to other Linebarrel characters and Machinas, Miu has weak Spirit Command pool and Painkiller has bad Full Upgrade Bonuses and Ace Bonuses. You can only make use of her for doubling experience and funds for somebody else.
Every character besides yourself in King Arthur & the Knights of Justice on SNES. They were the definition of dead weight and could barely kill a bottom level rat.
League of Legends has Evelynn, who while having some nice tricks, relies upon your opponents being buffoons to be of any use. Her main trick is stealthing - becoming invisible fr a short amount of time. While other stealth characters use this as an added ability, Evelynn relies upon it. Any player who knows what they're doing simply buys the potion that reveals stealthing characters in the vicinity, and Evelynn is a sitting duck.
However, a remake was made for Twitch and Evelynn in July 2012.
Alchemist in Dota 2 originally was subpar to other playable characters, but he Took a Level in Badass in the 6.75 balance patch which, among other things, made it much more difficult for the enemy to tell how powerful your Unstable Concoction is. The spell is a Stun + Damage bomb that got more powerful as a timer counted down, and would explode on Alchemist himself if cooked for too long. Beforehand the timer that counted down was visible to everyone, not just allies, and one well timed stun screwed Alchemist over every time. And even if they do get a lucky stun or kill Alchemist, the UC will now explode in an area around Alchemist.
Rospark in Mega Man ZX Advent is the least useful of the eight boss forms Grey and Ashe can take. He's slow and has a low jump— two fatal flaws in a game where speed and jump height count the most. His only use is in traversing certain vines in several stages.
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 has three playable characters with all the expansion packs. Jazz had a super jump that would let him reach high areas. The same command for Spaz was a flying kick, so Jazz's helicopter ears were replaced with a double-jump to compensate. Lori had Jazz's helicopter ears and Spaz's flying kick...meaning she had no way to bypass certain areas where a normal jump wasn't quite high enough. Players were not pleased.
Oddly, Sonic the Hedgehog himself is sometimes considered the scrappy amongst his woodland friends, if only because he doesn't have any truly unique abilities like the others. This is particularly prominent in the Sonic Advance series, where the levels are really designed to take advantage of the other characters' abilities, and Sonic's ability to grind rails feels mostly tacked on.
To give an example, in Sonic 3 & Knuckles we have Knuckles' ability to glide and climb walls, Tails' ability to fly/swim, and Sonic has the ability to use extra shield abilities. The elec shield's double jump and bubble shield's bounce jump give you more height but are inferior to Tails' flight, the fire shield's air dash is inferior to Knuckles' glide, and Hyper Sonic isn't any better than Super Sonic. And in case you think this might at least make Sonic the jack-of-all-trades of the game, the fire and elec shields instantly break when you touch water and Knuckles can also go Hyper... so have fun with that.
Reco-Abnormal in Mushihime-sama Futari. Her shots have a difficult learning curve, and in a defiance of usual Bullet Hell conventions, her speed when using her focus shot is faster than her normal speed (it's also the weakest if you haven't locked-on with any of the beetles which requires going in close-range, 2nd strongest if you have). Palm Normal also suffers from this to a lesser extent; his rapid shot's fairly reliable, but his focused shot is quite weak in version 1.5, especially compared to Reco Normal or Palm Abnormal.
Hawk in Pilotwings 64 is sluggish and had crappy maneuverability with the only "benefit" being that he is largely unaffected by the wind.
The Teladi Vulture freighter in the X-Universe series. It's slow, weakly shielded, and has average cargo space. About the only thing it has going for it is that it's dirt cheap. To a lesser extent the Boron Dolphin freighter, because it's slow.
Examples of both depending on the circumstances
Fighting Games
In Marvel Vs Capcom 3, Phoenix (of the X-Men, not the lawyer) is an example of both a High- and Low-Tier Scrappy, due to her Glass Cannon traits. Her vitality is the lowest out of anyone's in the game, so a handful of hits and she's down for the count. Unless, she has 5 full bars on her Hyper Combo meter. Then she becomes Dark Phoenix... and then the fight is pretty well decided.
Then you have Phoenix (yes, the lawyer). He's low because his attacks have pitiful range, and the fact that he has to gather evidence before being able to do anything noteworthy. But if he gathers enough evidence and lands his OBJECTION!, then he enters Turnabout mode, which is every bit as overpowered as Dark Phoenix, and gains access to his level 3 hyper combo, which is like the aforementioned Magneto's, but significantly more powerful.
In games where he's low tier, such as Street Fighter Alpha2, Zangief is this. His priority may be terrible, and he may be slow, but his damage output and throw range can still strike fear into the hearts of players.
Iron Tager of BlazBlue is similar. He isn't usually a high tier character (and in his earlier appearances is on the lower tiers) due to his overall slow speed and the fact that he's a big target, but he can still give players nightmares with his Gigantic Tager Driver, his excellent range, and his insane damage output. And God help you if you get magnetized.
His Genesic Emerald Tager Buster is so infamous the move is a scrappy of it's own. It's difficult to pull off but when timed right and the opponent is magnetized, Tager can suck them in across the stage. On the lower-health characters this is usually guaranteed to finish them off if they're close to half at their health so players usually opt to go for this instead of Tager's Astral Heat.
First Person Shooter
Every class in Team Fortress 2 gets this one way or another, but two stand out:
Pyro, due to the fact that Pyro is overpowered in casual play, but underpowered in competitive play - sadly, the very definition of a Scrub class. Recent updates have turned Pyro into less of a close-range beast and given it more of a support role, at least without the Backburner. This wentabout as wellas can be expected.
The Spy gets it for being the very definition of Difficult, But Awesome: Either he's one of the 1% of players who can play a spy well (and he's on the other side, terrorizing your team) or the player is one of the other 99% who should have the class disabled from their character select screen. Naturally, this sort will always be on your team.
Tribes: Ascend has the Sentinel class. With the game putting most of its focus on speed and splash damage weapons, a sniping class is easily the hardest class to play especially considering sniper weapons have very little zoom. Once players manage to land more shots than they miss, expect accusations of aimbot use. The playerbase can't seem to decide whether or not the Sentinel needs a buff or a nerf.
MMOPR Gs
In World of Warcraft, retribution paladins, enhancement shamans, beast mastery hunters (as previously mentioned), and fire magi (among others) have all been Tier Induced Scrappies at some point or another. Then you've got warlocks, who've been juggling forth between the two types of Tier Induced Scrappy ever since the game was released. On the release they were extremely weak and generally considered free kills in pvp. Later on itemisation (warlocks had easier time getting gear with lots of stamina and damage due to their pve gear also having stamina) and buffs to the class made them extremely powerful, allowing them to "drain tank" most other players. In the next expansion increased burs damage and survivability of all classes made drain tanking less viable, while the warlock's primary crowd control suffered several nerfs, making them sub-par in pvp. They were buffed again later on, and currently they are not horrible but not especially powerful either.
Warlock mechanics make it very difficult for the developers to find a good balance for that class.
When it comes to Shamans, as of Sentinel's Fate, Defilers were often preferred over Mystics because Defilers have stronger base heals and can regenerate their own power. But when Destiny of Velious came out, a combination of new alternate advancement lines and rearranging stats made Mystics a very good damage per second (DPS) class in the hands of a skilled player without losing any of their healing ability, which reversed their Tier Induced Scrappy state from low tier to high tier.
In The Shadow Odyssey, Shadowknights were overpowered, allegedly because one of the developers played a shadowknight. As of Destiny of Velious, Shadowknights were nerfed and are the squishiest of the four plate tank classes.
Role Playing Games
The volus characters in Mass Effect 3. Being the Mass Effect universe's designated Butt Monkey is bad enough. Then they become playable in multiplayer and are incapable of taking cover, have no damaging melee attack, and are far and away the most fragile race in the game, with their maximum durability being slightly less than a baseline geth's! Anyone trying to use a volus like a traditional class is asking to get killed horribly and repeatedly, and they come off like a total Joke Character. However, volus characters are meant to be used as dedicated support units, not as offensive juggernauts, and their Shield Boost power is arguably the best defensive and supporting power in the game. On higher difficulties they can be a godsend...provided the rest of your squad is fine with having a unit around that isn't designed around actively killing things.
Tabletop Games
In Warhammer 40000 the Imperial Guard. Compared to the rest of the playable armies, rank-and-file Imperial Guardsmen are usually random guys in t-shirts with flashlights. Some game-types were even considered unwinnable for Guard players. However if you put them, for example, into the underlevels of a Hive City, then the guardsman will be one of the strongest, if not THE strongest thing around. And as of the new Guard Codex, the Imperial Guard are now considered one of the strongest armies in the 40K metagame. People still love them though.
Most armies zig-zag all over the tiers on a long enough timeline. When Fifth Edition was released, it was feared vanilla Codex Space Marines would be this due to their spammed Missile Launchers. Right now, Codex Marines are an "average" army. The Grey Knights went from barely-played low-tier army to overused insanely powerful army with their 2011 codex. Dark Eldar couldn't get an update for twelve years, making them incredibly hard to play as they were woefully underpowered, but as their 2011 codex they are at least respectable. The Orkz got an insanely powerful codex stomped down just months later by the changing metagame with the new Imperial Guard codex mentioned above, though ask any fan about the damned Nob Bikerz. Necrons have been rescued from the low tier scrappy heap by their new 2012 codex, but before that were something of a laughing stock of the game. The 2011 White Dwarf Codex for the Sisters of Battle took them from low tier to downright horrible.
Turn Based Strategy
Seth from Fire Emblem The Sacred Stones. There are so many debates of his useless/useful status that there is no such thing as going in between.
Marcus from Fire Emblem Elibe is a perfect example of a varying type of Tier Induced Scrappy. In Blazing Sword, Marcus essentialy kickstarted the trend of early joining Palladins that is considered "broken" in the tier list. However, Marcus is a bit special in which he has a growth rate that while not bad, but is still below average, while his sucessor Seth and Titania has some of the best stats growth in the game. To make the matter worse, Marcus also appeared in the Sword of Seals as a straightforward Crutch Character.
Donnel from Fire Emblem: Awakening can be one of the best units in the game or one of the worst, depending on the criteria in which he's being judged. A classic case of Magikarp Power, he joins in the terrible villager class with pitifully low base stats, but his growths are among the best in the game and once you get him out of villager he'll quickly become one of your most powerful units. However, his personal stat caps are relatively lackluster and he doesn't have access to certain skills such as Galeforce, which can leave him outclassed by some of the other characters you get later in the game. The result is that if the player Min Maxes, Donnel will probably be surpassed, but in a low-grinding run can be one of your most solid units. Difficulty can also be a factor here, as getting him out of Villager is harder on the higher difficulty levels where enemies are stronger and experience gains are lower.
Blue Mages in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Their stats and equipment are average or below average so leveling up as a Blue Mage won't get you far, but the abilities they can learn from monsters can be borderline Game Breaking.
Though, you can learn blue mage abilities without actually being a blue mage so there's nothing stopping you from mastering "Learning" (the ability that lets you gain more blue magic) then swapping to a job with good stats and equipment.
Fan Works
Fanworks? Yes in fact. The MachinimaSmash King, or more specifically the prequel series Racconto, is set in the world of Super Smash Bros Melee. The Tiers in game are very serious and are treated like social status, with higher tiers praised and lower tiers discriminated. It was considered such an undisputed fact of life that when Mewtwo (the worst) beat Fox (the best) in a fair exhibition match, to say it was controversial would be an understatement.
at the EVO 2010. He would later get defeated by an Adon-using GamerBee and then go on to use Adon himself.
