Useless Useful Spell / Video Games

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• Shin Megami Tensei
• Warcraft

Card Battle Games

• In Culdcept, the spell Haunt is an extremely annoying example. It puts the target under the control of an AI for two rounds, which will almost invariably do something infuratingly stupid if it is used on you, but if used on an opponent it just puts them under the control of the same AI that was controlling them before.
• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has its fair share of bad utility cards. This tends to pop up with a lot of weird, experimental cards introduced in every set, and the devs' insistence on not nerfing or buffing cards unless something is game-breaking. Tonnes of cool but weak cards are quickly relegated to the trash bin when they don't make the cut.
  • Sacrificial Pact is a 0 mana Warlock spell that destroys a demon and restores 5 health to your Hero. Before it was nerfed to only target friendly demons, it sounded pretty awesome, except that the only neutral demons in the game are weak and/or rarely played in constructed. That meant that unless you were up against another Warlock (which even then, don't use enough powerful demons to justify running it over regular removal), it was a completely dead card. While it can (still) be used to target your own cards (which considering it's called Sacrificial Pact is pretty obviously the entire point of the card- using it to destroy your opponent's demons was Not the Intended Use), it's not worth killing off one of your minions just to restore a measly 5 health.
    • The card has seen some meager play, usually to trigger the Deathrattles (on-death effects) of powerful demons before your opponent can react. Even then, it's pretty bad compared to Dark Pact, which has a similar effect but can target any friendly minion, giving it far more utility.
    • This card got attention in highlight reels because it could insta-kill your opponent if they became Lord Jaraxxus. (This is no longer the case since Jaraxxus became a hero card.)
    • Ashes of Outland subverted this, but that's because the new Demon Hunter class introduced to the game was so ridiculously Game Breaking^note Demon Hunters had a whopping 80% winrate on release before nerfs happened. and used demons a lot, that suddenly Sacrificial Pact became mandatory as a tech against Demon Hunters. It didn't take long for Demon Hunters to be nerfed and Sacrificial pact being changed to no longer destroy enemy demons.
  • The Warrior spell card Charge. The old version was a 3 mana spell that grants a friendly minion +2 attack and Charge. That means any minion can attack the turn you play it, with an attack boost to boot! However, the card does next to nothing unless you play it on a minion you just summoned. The problem with that is playing a card you'd like to give Charge to and still having enough mana left to cast a 3 mana spell and in most cases, it was better to just throw in a minion with Charge instead. The only time this card was useful was in one-turn-kill combo decks (featuring Raging Worgen and a bunch of cost-reduced buffs). The new version, which doesn't give extra attack and doesn't allow the minion to attack the hero but costs only 1 mana, is still hardly ever used, mainly for the same reason as its previous version where it's a dead card if you don't have a minion to play it on.^note Even then, if you really need a minion to trade into another, you can use Rocket Boots, which costs 2 and does the same thing but also allows you to draw a card to boot.
  • Related to the above is Warsong Commander. Her ability to grant Charge to any minions with 3 or less Attack became extremely exploitable, particularly in the infamous Patron Warrior deck, and was emergency nerfed into being virtually useless. She kept her crappy 3-mana 2/3 body, but now she gives +1 Attack to friendly minions with Charge. Compare her to Raid Leader, a 2/2 that grants all friendly minions +1 attack. You get 1 health in exchange for an effect so minor it may as well not affect anything. A few notes: Charge minions don't stay in play for very long, since they have low health on average, so you're not going to use the AoE part of her buff for anything. Charge itself has been phased out in favour of Rush, a similar but less problematic keyword. There are only 16 Charge cards available to Warrior, only 2 actually worth playing, and none worth playing Warsong Commander for. All in all, one of the most offensively useless cards in the game. With the Core deck rework, Warsong Commander was changed to giving minions Rush. While this doesn't make her viable in meta decks, she's now at least sometimes useful.
  • Bolster is a Warrior spell that gives all your minions with Taunt +2/+2 for 2 mana. For comparison, Druid has a spell that gives a single minion +2/+2 and Taunt, also for 2 mana. The issue was amassing enough Taunts to actually make the effect worthwhile. Taunts themselves tend be low impact since their utility is almost always just the Taunt ability, and there are practically no good cheap Taunts. You have to somehow stay ahead on the board using mostly only Taunt minions if you want the Bolster to be effective, because if you fall far behind, a few 2/2 buffs usually won't do much. That's if you even have lots of minions able to stick around. All that's if you even draw the Bolster and not just a bunch of bad Taunts. Bolster became a viable card in Wild format as Warriors received more Taunt synergies and cheap Taunt minions that the card desperately needed back then.
  • Shaman has The Mistcaller. It's a Legendary that gives all minions in your hand and deck +1/+1. That means everything you play from then on will be statted above the mana cost. The problem is The Mistcaller himself. He's a 6 mana 4/4 that does nothing the turn he's played. Unless you were already way ahead, that massive tempo loss is basically irrecoverable, even with 1/1 buffs. Your opponent will be able to amass enough threatening stuff on the board to just out-value you. If you were way ahead, the 1/1 buff won't mean anything since you were probably going to win anyway.
  • Joust and Inspire, the two major mechanics of The Grand Tournament set, are mostly this. Joust reveals a random minion in each player's deck, and if yours costs more, the Jouster gains a ludicrously powerful effect. The main problem is the randomness (even putting lots of big cost minions in your deck, you can't guarantee the outcome), the fact that its weighted in favour of your opponent (it has to cost more, so if the minions revealed are equal cost, it will still lose the joust), and the fact that the Joust cards themselves are well below par if they lose (Master Jouster for example, is a 6 mana 5/6 that gains Divine Shield and Taunt off the joust. If it loses, it's just a 5/6 for 6 mana). Inspire effects trigger when you use your Hero Power. The effects are usually pretty strong, but the fact that your Hero Power costs 2 mana is killer. It basically means that every Inspire card costs 2 more mana than it should, but is still statted like its original price. The effects themselves are also slow, needing at least two turns to become truly amazing (Except in two cases: in Arena where they were borderline broken due to its slower pace, or gimmicky Priest combo decks).
  • The Druid spell Tree of Life, which has the massive effect of restoring all characters to full health. The problem is that it's priced at a whopping 9 mana. In aggressive matches, you're usually dead before you reach that much mana, and in control mirrors, it's a totally dead draw. Even if you do cast it on the brink of death, at best it'll buy you one or two turns since you spent 9 mana doing basically nothing. Playing the 3 mana restore 8 Healing Touch and a 6 mana minion is usually far better, not to mention far more flexible.
  • Emeriss is a fairly impressive minion, as a 10 mana 8/8 Dragon that doubles the attack and health of all other minions in your hand. This can be used as a backbreaker card in Control matchups and is devastating to pull from random effects in Arena. Unfortunately, Emeriss happens to be a Hunter card, a class that simply cannot afford to give up pressure and play a low tempo 8/8 for 10.^note If you DO get Emeriss on a control deck like priests by playing Alextrasza, Dragon Queen, then the effect can potentially win you the match, which goes to show why it wasn't given to a control class.
  • In general, spells that mass duplicate cards are very weak. Cards like Ectomancy^note summons copies of all demons you control, Hunting Party^note doubles all Beasts in your hand, Echo of Medivh^note adds a copy of all friendly minions to your hand, and Sudden Genesis^note summons copies of your damaged minions have all failed to see play. Even though you can potentially put a huge amount of stats on the board, you need to have very specific board/hand setups, which usually requires cheating to get into that position. If you've done the cheating to get there, playing a card like that is only possible while ahead and often overkill. The only one to see any real play was Molten Reflection, and only as part of an OTK combo to get more than two Sorcerer's Apprentices on board (technically a two-turn kill since it involves taking an Extra Turn).
  • Deadly Arsenal is a Warrior spell that reveals a weapon from your deck and deals its attack damage to all minions. Sounds pretty useful, but Control Warrior, the deck that would use the card, doesn't usually run high-attack weapons. In fact, the weapons they do run are low-attack ones with powerful abilities like Supercollider and Blood Razor. Warping your deck around the effect is also pointless, since one thing Warrior isn't lacking is incredible board control (that's pretty much the class' hat). Finally, it's an utterly dead card if you draw your weapons before you draw Deadly Arsenal. It's a card that fills an absolutely bizarre niche of not being a possible design for any other class, but being totally worthless for the class it's in.
  • The Warrior's Hero Power gives you 2 armor (which basically translates to 2 extra health for your hero). While it's perfectly serviceable for the Stone Wall class Warrior is meant to be, Warrior did get their share of aggressive decks over the years which couldn't care less about the hero power since it didn't help you kill the opponent any faster. It's also not very useful in Arena, a format that's all about fighting tooth and nail for board control, since gaining armor doesn't affect the board state in and of itself and you might not be able to draft any cards that make use of your armor.

Role-Playing Games

• In Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, fire and poison fall into this category. First of all, hitting an enemy with a fire or poison attack doesn't immediately start causing damage. Instead, enemies have a fire or poison meter that appears over their heads and you have to hit them repeatedly to fill it up before they actually get set on fire or poisoned. Beyond that, neither status effect lasts very long and the amount of damage they inflict is usually about equal to just hitting the enemy a couple of times. Even with all the skills and weapon buffs that improve the effectiveness, they simply don't inflict enough damage to make a noticable difference in a fight. If that weren't bad enough, enemies poison and set you on fire instantly and the damage you take is much more substantial.
• Avadon. Nearly all debuffing abilities(and there's a heck of a lot of debuffing abilities there) almost never work on bosses. Take stun, for example — sure, you can easily stun a grind mob with it (only why would you want to? it's faster to simply kill it), but when it comes to a boss (e.g. to a situation where you really needed) your chances are abysmal. You stun them occasionally, but it's totally not worth it. The same goes for the acid, poison, slows and other debuffs. Buffs are also not that useful since, once again, you don't need them versus common creeps and when it comes to bosses, tough ones, it is usually more efficient to use buffing scrolls/crystals/potions. Summons also don't do much to bosses, they can't even hope to tank them.
• Debuff spells in Avernum. Due to the number of enemies it's generally more efficient to use buff spells on your party members instead of debuff spells on enemies (i.e. bless instead of curse and haste instead of slow). The effects are roughly the same and you don't have to cast them on as many people to get the full benefit.
• Baldur's Gate and its sequel. Bosses were invariably immune, petrification and disintegration would destroy your enemy's loot as well, and silencing was particularly useless, as every enemy wizard would immediately cast the "Vocalize" counterspell. Of course, you had to make sure to be protected against all of this; helmets of Charm Protection were indispensable. However, there were exceptions; debuff spells like "Dispel Magic" were indispensable even in your hands, since many of the bosses and mini-bosses of the game were spellcasters with so many protective spells stacked on that they were literally invulnerable without their aid. Furthermore, in the first game many of the bosses can be Charmed and even forced to kill themselves with their own spells.
  • To counteract this, several spells exist solely for making enemies more vulnerable to magic, occasionally making the Useless Useful Spell, well, useful. If you're enough Crazy-Prepared with spells of "Lower Resistance" (Self-Explanatory) and "Greater Malison" (lower save rolls) then you can kill pretty much anything except the Big Bad and The Undead with a single "Finger Of Death" spell.
  • Very few bosses are in fact totally immune (as opposed to having ludicrous magic resistance or good saves) to every kind of status effect or instant-death attack. The trick is almost always to use the right one. It got even more ludicrous in Throne of Bhaal: One of the bosses' magic resistance can only be breached by a level 8 spell, but he ALSO casts a spell which protects against that particular kind of magic, so you need to use a separate level 7 spell to breach that one...
  • Most boss fights in Baldur's Gate II and Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal are almost puzzle-like in nature, in that you need to figure out precisely what protections the boss is using, combined with innate abilities, in order to neutralize them. When you add the fact that many bosses have hidden immunities, that some of them bend or outright ignore the game rules, and that none of this is explained in the manual or anywhere in the game, it all adds up to a massive headache. In the end, it's usually easier to rely on the universal "dispel magic" spell (or even better, Inquisitor ability), summon creatures, and just whack everything with a big sword until it dies, rather than try to figure out the spell-counterspell tangle. Thankfully, in later games the whole system was somewhat simplified.
  • The second game also introduced Power Words which induce a status effect (sleep, silence, stun, or death, depending on the spell) in a single target. However, they're ineffective against targets with too many hit points, and in this case "too many" generally means "enough to be worth using a spell slot on it". The best use of most Power Word spells is in conjunction with Spell Trap and Project Image to refill a wizard's spell slots, although even that can be done faster with Wish.
  • Depending on the situation, the Invisibility spell can be this in the sequel, as in fights against wizards they will always cast spells like True Sight because of The All-Seeing A.I., making you visible. In all other cases they it is pretty effective though. Defied by the rare anti-detection cloak.
  • The druid spell "call lightning" is powerful, but only works outdoors. While this still turns useful in many situations in the first games, in the sequel Shadows of Amn, unfortunately, most fights happen inside buildings or dungeons. The few outdoors fights are usually easy enough to not require such a spell - and for those fights that are hard enough to require, some have enemies that are immune to magic or electrical damage. Granted, if you prepare in advance by swapping memorized spells in your priest scroll and rest before each battle, you can still micromanage this into usefulness, but not all players bother to change everything everytime, preferring instead to have an all-around selection that works in most cases.
    • In the expansion Throne of Bhaal there are much more occasions where this spell turns useful, right from the Early-Bird Boss that is the very first battle in the campaign, to several Elite Mooks later.
  • Baldur's Gate and sequels use Vancian Magic: if you've got more Silence spells prepared than the enemy has Vocalize spells, you win. Of course, you've probably got better things to do with those spell slots, so...
  • Partially, Arrows of Slaying could fit in this trope. Although they are not technically a spell, they are enchanted with a magical property. Their magic effect is to instantly slay any ogre magi upon touch. Would maybe have come useful in a few encounters in the first game, when the party level was too low; but by the time you can get them, chances are that you already killed by yourself those ogre mages that would have required such an enchantment (and if there are others left, it's likely you are now strong enough to deal with them without these arrows). Still, besides their magical power, they have an insane -15 THAC0 that means virtually guaranteed hits, thus proving useful as normal arrows if you don't have better ammo. You can also sell them for quite a cash, although you might be swimming in gold anyway by this time. Arrows of Slaying also appear in the sequel, but at this point you might even one-hit kill ogre mages with your other gear... if there were any. There is only ONE encounter that starts with a neutral ogre mage you are not even supposed to fight unless you embrace the Lawful Stupid or the free murdering spree For the Evulz routes. These arrows are not even useful anymore for their THAC0, because they are too scarce to waste on common monsters (which could be easily dealt without anyway), but can't damage the most challenging foes for their lack of an attack enchantment, while the games throws at you tons of powerful other magical arrows. Gold is not a problem so you might even not bother selling them.
  • Right before the ultimate battle of Shadows of Amn your character gets immunity to all weapons of +1 enchantment and less (including all non-magical weapons). Which is pretty useless for the incoming confrontation against a powerful wizard and his demonic minions. Even in the expansion Throne of Bhaal you'll never find anyone without at least +2 weapons, mooks too wear magical equipment (and usually you can easily dispose of them anyway without the need of any immunity).
  • The abundance of wands and rods that replicate the effects of specific spells might induce this trope. Even if these tools have limited charges, you can sell them to a merchant to recharge them and then rebuy them - at some point gold won't be a problem anyway, and you could also steal them. Certain examples are common among the community: why waste the very few high level priest spell lots for Raise Dead or Resurrection spells, when you can get early on a free rod of resurrection (and buy another one)?
    • Jaheira is an egregious case: she has the unique level 5 spell Harper's Call, which acts as a Resurrection spell, except for druids which normally don't have access to them. This should give her an edge. The problem is that other level 5 spells are Insect Plague, which is a devastating offensive spells that you want to use to disrupt enemy spellcasters and perform some useful crowd control, Iron Skins, which is mandatory when tanking (which is something she excels in). Just use the rod.
  • Healing spells are extremely useful until you reach the point where the game throws at you healing potions as loot - you won't even need to buy them, unless you are very wasteful with consumables and careless with fights.
  • The spell Friends raises your charisma to 18. Having a high charisma can be useful in getting a progressive discount with merchants, which might be a nice aid during Early Game Hell. However, you can simply recruit characters with high charisma to deal with purchases such as Imoen, Ajantis or Keldorn. In Shadows of Amn you can even get very early a magical ring that raises your charisma to 18 for when you want to save 25% gold at the local vendor. For these reasons charisma is a Dump Stat for your protagonist.
  • Sleep is one of the most powerful spells... until about half of the first game, when the most dangerous enemies are strong enough to be immune to it, while the others are so weak that you can simply kill them without a worry. It becomes more useful with mods such as Sword Coast Stratagems that raise the difficulty, for example by adding many smart elite mooks that are vulnerable to many low level gimmicks but can hit hard and quickly swarm you if you don't pay attention.
• In Baten Kaitos Origins, you can get a variety of artifact magnus that do things such as ward damage off, display enemy health, or slow the opposing party down. However, most of those are too limited to be of any real use, and given how the battle system in this game works, it's much smarter to just pack weapons and armor.
• In Betrayal at Krondor, the "Touch of Lims-Kragma" spell causes instant death to almost all enemies. However, the casting cost is so high that only four enemies have enough hitpoints to justify using it rather than something cheaper like Flamecast, and two of those four are immune to it.
• Status ailments are fairly useless in Bravely Default. The game is designed so you can blitz random encounters in a single round and you get an experience bonus for doing so, so there's not much point in bothering with anything but raw damage there. Bosses have massive resistances to status ailments if they're not outright immune, to the point that you'll likely spend more time trying to inflict the status than they'll spend under it (and while poison doesn't wear off, bosses take heavily reduced damage from it). Now, debuffs, on the other hand, work just fine.
  • Though the Fear spell really is useless. Anything hit with Dread status will lose any accumulated BP and will not be able to Brave or Default. While things like Poison and Sleep can at least work decently on certain regular enemies, very few of them even use Brave or Default. Some bosses will make use of the BP system, but naturally, getting it to stick on bosses is nigh-impossible, so there is pretty much no reason to ever use Fear...ever. And it is, inexplicably, level 4 Black Magic instead of level 2 like the other three main status effect spells.
  • That said, Poison/Sleep + Exterminate/Twilight are pretty useful for level grinding when coupled with Group Cast All, since it generally ends fights against mooks in a single turn. Use that tactic in any Peninsula of Power Leveling, and you'll get your party's levels maxed out in no time at all. Poison + Exterminate is also a very good tactic against bosses that don't resist Poison or Dark damage...which is actually a fair number of them, since the vast majority of boss fights are humans, and the only humans who can't get poisoned are ones who are associated with poison, like Qada. Often the fastest way to kill bosses mid-to-late game is to poison them, then kill them with Exterminate.
  • Most attack spells are often useless as you get further and further on in the game. At the beginning, they're not too bad, but as physical attacks get better and better, they just get more and more outclassed. For a while, they still manage to be useful for hitting groups or exploiting weaknesses, but their MP cost makes this use prohibitive and there are alternatives that are often preferable. Once you get the Vampire class around the midgame, you all of a sudden get a variety of powerful spells that use your attack power to hit all enemies for elemental damage, and can drain MP to refuel. Combined with the fact that the games Speed stat increases physical damage and that the games Limit Breaks are all based on physical damage, and there is almost no reason to use all but a few magical attacks. The only reason you use those magical attacks is because you've already taken Time or White magic for their highly useful utility spells. Black Magic has become almost completely useless.
    • Aspir also deserves special mention, as it's a Mana Drain spell whose restoration effect depends on physical attack power, which works about as well as you'd expect on a magic user. Though it is quite useful when used as Sword Magic instead.
  • A fair number of the support spells also count, though probably the worst one is Regen. It restores a bit of HP every turn it's active, doesn't wear off, and can be set by a particular Time Magic spell or a particular item compound. Seems decent enough, but it follows reason 12 on the main page in spades: the amount of HP restored is absolutely pathetic, at 3% per turn, so if your character has, say, 2000 HP, their HP will get restored every turn by a whole...60. Of course, it works just fine when Qada uses it during his boss battle, but for your characters, even when group-cast, it's pretty much outclassed by every other healing spell and item in the game (except the Potion and maybe Hi-Potion).
• Nondamaging spells in Breath of Fire II are especially guilty of this, for all three of the listed reasons, but especially the third one. The one that was supposed to lower agility doesn't work on anything. Now the Death spell, on the other hand, works on almost everything.
• The learnable technique Influence in Breath of Fire III is generally useless. It's meant to order anyone influencable in the battle to attack a specified target every turn until they die. Of course, very few monsters listen to this, other than a handful of goblins. Use it when you send a specific one of your own characters into an increasingly berserk Weretiger form, however...
  • Another example is the Resist spell, which makes the caster immune to damage at the expense of his or her own turn. Useless in its own right, but it finds a purpose with the chain formation when your fastest (and defensively weakest) character is leading the team and taking most of the damage.
• Chrono Cross features 'sealing' elements, which shut off elements of a specific color. This will seem ridiculously useful, until you realize that these are only worth using against bosses, which are usually completely immune to sealing. Even more so for SealAll, which shuts off all elements on the battlefield; however, using it in a boss fight tends to result in it missing the boss but leaving your party sealed. There's a boss battle that exploits its immunity with SealAll and can get you offguard if you're not using an accessory that gives you immunity to an specific element color seal (hopefully White so you can then heal the others with Purify or Panacea).
• Very strongly averted in The Dark Spire. The sleep spell that magi can use at the start of the game is easily the strongest one they'll get for a while, and they'll get far more use out of instant death and ailment spells than straight damage ones until they've learned nearly every spell in the game, at which Law magi get one good damage spell to go with their ailments, and Chaos ones get two. Law priests also have the spell Angel of Death be one of the last ones that competes with a full party heal/ailment cure/revival for a reason — it's that reliable.
• Dragon Age: Origins: The Shapeshifter specialization for Mages allows the caster to transform into different animal forms with unique attacks, which sounds fun on paper, but there are a couple problems: A) the casting time takes ten seconds; you are completely vulnerable and likely to be interrupted before you pull it off, and B) the attacks go off the Strength stat, which most mage players will neglect in favor of Willpower and Intellect, otherwise the mage's other spells will suffer. The spec was most likely inspired by the Druid class from World of Warcraft, but the bear and cat forms in that game mimic the warrior and rogue classes respectively. The actual shapeshifting is instant and the forms give automatic boosts to the appropriate stats. None of that happens in Dragon Age, however. The spec is so useless that neither Morrigan (the resident Shapeshifter) nor any mage you teach the spec to will actually use its abilities in combat unless you program them to do so. Even the game's AI thinks it's worthless.
• Dragon Quest has this actually averted in most of its games. Nearly every spell has something going for it and inflicting status ailments on enemies is much more viable (it certainly helps that most bosses don't have immunities to debuffs like in other role-playing games). Nevertheless even in a franchise with so much useful magic there are still a few stinkers.
  • Dragon Quest: The Ax Knight, which guards your armor, tends to cast Sleep and constantly attack while you are sleeping. This alone shows that the status effect is very dangerous. If you get lucky with your own Sleep spell it becomes possible to Sequence Break the game by getting the Erdrick Armor almost right off the bat. The Dragonlord is also not immune to being sleep'd, as shown by the speedrun done at AGDQ 2019.
  • Dragon Quest II:
    • Played straight with Kamikazee, a spell that kills the user and all non-boss targets on the field, meaning it's the designated last-resort tactic. Problem is, the only playable character to learn this is the Prince of Cannock, and, barring remakes (where the Princess of Moonbroke can learn Revive), he's the only one that learns Revive. Even worse, you can only carry one Yggdrasil leaf at a time (a single-use revive item) and all revivals leave the revived character at really low HP, meaning spending more MP/items to heal back up. However, when used against you, Kamikazee is GUARANTEED to cause a Total Party Kill, since Kamikazee kills targets with perfect accuracy and to the enemy, 'all targets' means 'your entire party'.
    • Averted with your buffing/debuffing spells. If you don't utilize your arsenal of debuffs, you'll spend a lot of time dead. There's several brute force spells, but they are much more expensive to cast and aren't always a OHKO, meaning the enemy is still hitting you. Having both spellcasters repeatedly debuff while your hero kills the enemy party one by one is actually a pretty good tactic in the late game.
    • The Princess of Moonbrooke's Click/Open Spell spares you the trouble of lugging around four different keys, freeing precious inventory space. Unfortunately, she learns Click Spell at level 23 (NES/SNES/GB) or 36 (mobile/Switch). Unless you have been power-grinding, the odds are that you have no doors left to open by that point.
  • Dragon Quest IV: Thwack (instant death) was largely useless in the original NES game due to your party being controlled by an infamously stupid AI, which got Kyril to spam Thwack against Death-immune enemies over and again.
  • Dragon Quest V and Dragon Quest VI: Averted if an AI-controlled party member has certain status-inducing spells (notably Kathwack which can kill an entire group of enemies in a single turn), in which case they'll use them only against enemies weak to it. The player, on the other hand, is given no clue as to what status effects work well on what monsters, in a rare case of The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard working in their favor. Especially obvious in VI where you keep all spells learned across different vocations, so your party members will very likely have the right spell for every enemy.
  • Dragon Quest VII zig-zags this. Very few enemies are flat out immune to instant-death spells or debuffs, but there's pretty much no reason to waste your MP on Whack or Thwack or Death Dance, since you could just use no-cost abilities instead.
  • Dragon Quest VIII hits this trope hard in the second half of the game. Bosses start gaining the abilities like Chilling Chuckle and Disruptive Wave, which automatically dispells all harmful status effects on them and their allies while simultaneously dispelling all beneficial status effects on the party. This means that buff spells, debuff spells, and the game's Tension effect all become completely useless in boss fights (which are generally the only fights where the enemy is strong enough that you'd need to be buffing yourself or debuffing them). That said, the Tension shortcoming can be overcome with the item the Timbrel of Tension and, if you are playing the remake, the very handy Tension-related abilities of Morrie.
  • Dragon Quest IX has Treasure Eye Land as the ultimate Thief ability, which marks the location of red treasure chests on your map (including towns) and the stairs to the next level in grottoes. Sounds good, except that the only treasure chests in grottoes are blue, meaning you still have to look for them yourself. Depending on when you get it, it can range from a time saver to only useful on the first two floors (which have no chests). And that's assuming there's no walls between both stairs, since the ability doesn't reveal those...
• Elden Ring: Fia's Mist is an AOE spell that inflicts Deathblight. Problem is, Deathblight only works on players (not even player-model NPCs like invaders and Gideon's boss fight), and it's kinda hard to convince a real person to step in to the relatively small and completely unmoving danger zone. This also applies to the other sources of inflicting Deathblight, the Eclipse Shotel and the Death Lightning incantation. The buildup is so miniscule that you will certainly kill the other person via the direct damage inflicted by the weapon/incantation long before the Deathblight finally procs. Of course, one could argue that this is entirely intentional. Since Deathblight causes, well, instant death when it procs, if it was anything other than completely useless then it would be massively overpowered.
  • All of the Frenzied Flame spells cause the Madness status effects, which deals a good chunk of damage to both HP and FP when it procs, as well as putting the sufferer in a relatively lengthy stun animation. Problem is, they're almost useless in PVE, since most enemies are immune to Madness (only exception are NPC Invaders and bosses that use the player Tarnished models, but those are few and far between). While the spells also do direct damage, their damage output is considerably lower than most other offensive spells and also have the drawback of causing Madness buildup on the caster. They can be, however, very dangerous in PVP.
  • The Ash of War for "Through and Through" is only usable on greatbows, but there is only one greatbow in the game that can accept Ashes of War and it already comes with this skill by default. Non-melee weapons also cannot be given affinities other than Standard, making this Ash of War entirely redundant.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Daggerfall:
    • Becoming a Montalion bloodline vampire grants the Free Action spell, which removes paralysis from the caster. Vampires are by default immune to paralysis.
  • Morrowind:
    • Noise: 3-8% chance that an enemy spell fails, melee range, lasts 5 seconds. This is admittedly a low level spell, but all of the higher level ones have a very low minimum chance (2-60%??) and all of them last 5 seconds.
    • Blind: When cast on the Player Character, it darkens the screen by a percentage equal to the spell's power. When used on NPC enemies, it has no effect whatsoever.^note It's meant to decrease their melee accuracy, but thanks to good old bad programming it increases their accuracy instead.
    • Armor Eater: 10-30 points of durability damage to an equipped item. Given that each individual piece of armor has three figure durability and unique items often have thousands of it, and there are 9 armor pieces, good luck grinding away their items. It does have the minor use of, if turned combined with a non-hostile spell effect (healing, cure disease, etc.) into a custom spell, you can cast it on an NPC whose armor you want but who you can't or don't want to kill. Once the armor piece is completely broken, they'll unequip it, at which point you can attempt to pickpocket it.
    • Buoyancy: Swim 1% faster for 20 seconds. There's also a potion like it, which lasts 8 seconds. It does give you the spell effect for use in the spell maker, but Fortify Speed is twice as effective for the same magicka cost and also works on land.
    • Spite: Drain 5-20 points of Personality from the target. The only Personality stat that matters during conversation is your own, and casting it on your conversation partner counts as assault. The other Drain Attribute effects are equally dubious; it is neat that you can drain 5-20 points of Luck from the target and reduce their chance to hit by up to 2.5%, but you probably have better things to do with your time. Then there's a series of Damage Attribute spells that do the same thing but, permanently.
    • Resist Corprus Disease doesn't do anything because the only time this disease is inflicted on you is during a quest and this always succeeds. Also, Weakness to [any] Disease spells are useless because the player has no way to apply diseases to enemies.
    • Overlapping spells in general. You can slow enemies with Burden, Damage Strength, Damage Speed, Drain Strength, Drain Speed, Damage Fatigue, Drain Fatigue, Absorb Fatigue, Paralyze (or a 1 point Levitate due to a bug), or weaken their casting capabilities with Sound, Silence, Damage Intelligence, Damage Willpower, Damage Magicka, Drain Intelligence, Drain Willpower, Drain Magicka, Absorb Magicka; ...
  • Oblivion:
    • The spell/poison effect "Burden", which reduces the carrying capacity, potentially over-encumbering the victim, is only really useful for opponents to cast against the player, not the other way around, since the player is the only creature in the entire world who regularly (OK, always) carries enough stuff to almost max out their capacity. The player would have to inflict enormous amounts of the "Burden" effect on opponents to slow them down or stop them — and that only works on humanoid opponents who actually carry any equipment, unlike the numerous animals and monsters.
    • Until later in the game, the Chameleon spell is entirely worthless, because it lasts a short time for a high cost, and only makes you partially invisible. That is, until you infuse 5 pieces of armor with 20% Chameleon effect, making you 100% invisible, ALL THE TIME. It utterly destroys the enemy AI's response mechanics, allowing the player to hack down everything with impunity because nothing would even attempt to attack you.
    • Drain spells for the most part affect enemies in ways that they would never use anyway. Drain personality and drain luck, anybody? Yeah, that mudcrab isn't going to pass any persuade checks in the near future. On the other hand, Drain Health is a Disc-One Nuke at maximum potency, even with the minimum duration of 1 second. The victim gets their health back almost immediately unless it brought them down to zero, in which case Critical Existence Failure kicks in and the target stays dead. Drain strength/agility/speed are also useful.
  • Skyrim:
    • Dragonhide. This is one of two Master Alteration spells, requiring a quest that involves killing a dragon and retrieving an item. It is supposed to be the pinnacle of the line of alteration armor spells, and it delivers: it reduces physical damage taken by 80% and maxes out your armor rating. For 20 seconds (30 with the appropriate perk). Also, unlike every other armor spell in the game, its cast animation is not a quick 0.5 second one handed gesture but an elaborate 4 second ritual that takes up both hands and prevents you from moving. Any enemy deserving of 80% damage reduction is going to kill you before you can complete its casting.
    • The thu'um Elemental Fury ("Su Grah Dun") increases the speed of your weapon swings temporarily (i.e. you can attack more times in the same period). It has no effect on enchanted weapons, which is the only kind most players will use. Compare with the Slow Time ("Tiid Klo Ul") shout, which works just fine with enchanted weapons and helps with evasion, as well. (Elemental Fury has a limited use with pickaxes though: use the shout, whale away at a mine, and get ore much, much faster.)
    • Most poison, magic, and enchanted gear special effects that do anything to enemies more interesting than inflicting damage have a short duration and a very low, hard level cap that makes them do absolutely nothing against any enemy theoretically worth more than a brief wailing upon.
    • Despite the fact that it works on the vast, vast majority of the game's enemies, Mehrune's Razor falls under the category of "too low chance of success." Between its ≈2% chance to activate its effect of instant death and it being a dagger — a class of weapon best suited for stealth builds that ideally kill in as few attacks as possible — it's only useful because of its high base damage, and the instant kill effect may as well be a neat feature that maybe, might, perhaps, possibly, could have a chance to save you from the boss you just pissed off through panicked flailing before you die, divines willing.
• Played straight and subverted in Endless Frontier both cases, the snipe effect is very good in keeping mooks from attacking you while you gang up on another grunt yet it is totally worthless against bosses. In a game where even with high level equips your foes can finish you in two hits if the CPU felt like it.
• Completely averted with Epic Battle Fantasy. Most of bosses are not immune to all status effects, and if they are they are certainly not immune to all stat debuffs. This also includes Bonus Bosses. In fact, most of them require a strategy to use those status effects efficiently — for example, in the fifth game one Time-Limit Boss cannot be beaten in time on higher difficulties but by stacking Poison/Virus on it, and one constantly regenerating superboss must have its defense weakened by curse to outdamage the healing.
• Etrian Odyssey manages to mostly avoid this trope, but does display this pitfall from time to time.
  • Etrian Odyssey:
    • The Dark Hunters can learn a skill named Climax, which can instantly kill any enemy on low health. If an enemy is at low health, you can just kill it the conventional way, and bosses with mountains of health are immune to instant kills. FOEs, though, have both the health counts to warrant its use and aren't outright immune to instant kills. On the other hand, this last point is what turns Climax into a Game-Breaker in the second game, as it always instantly kills an enemy and, as a result, dramatically shortens an FOE fight.
    • The Ronin's poor Luck is not going to help with the One-Hit Kill factor of Beheading Cut, and there's very little reason investing in the Alchemists' Pain Formula series when it requires you to put your Squishy Wizard in the front line. This shows up more often in the Untold games where the player is encouraged to create Grimoire stones in order to pass those skills to classes which can make better use of them.
  • Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard:
    • The Beast class suffers from a severe case of this trope with their Loyalty skill, which makes a Beast take a blow for any other available party member. The problem? Loyalty makes Beasts take damage depending on the Defense stat of the character they're defending, as opposed to their own Defense (so if your Beast is defending, say, an Alchemist, they'll take more damage than if they were blocking a Protector from the same attack). The most damning thing is that Loyalty is a passive, causing the Beast to uncontrollably take damage defending party members that don't need it, and putting points into it raises the chance of this happening. This ends up damaging the Beast class as a whole, as some of the Beast skills require mastery of Loyalty to some degree.
    • The War Magi have various sword skills that have effects on their target, provided that the target is afflicted with a specific ailment. So not only are they very situational, they also demand the use of other ailment-inflicting classes to make the most out of these skills.
  • Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan: After the first three games having skills and combos to make TP sustainability a breeze, subsequent games from IV onward nerfed the potency of TP replenishment skills, making them a mixture of too expensive, too weak, and/or too situational to warrant the skill point investment.
  • The least useful buffs in the series are accuracy and critical rate buffs. The former is because a lot of attacking options have reasonable accuracy and won't benefit greatly from that skill, and eventually the player will start accessing ailments and binds that outright prevent dodging and obsolete the buff. The latter is because only normal attacks benefit from a critical chance, and though some classes have skills to allow their skills to land critical hits, they will also have a few other skills of their own to passively raise critical rate and minimize the need for a critical rate buff. Buffs that only reduce damage against specifically physical or elemental attacks often get glossed over in favour of more all-purpose defensive buffs due to the wide variety of attacks the player expects to face.
  • Owl-Eye and similar skills like Sight Formula, which are designed to reveal nearby FOEs, become this in the Untold games, due to the reworked mapping system having a sight range that lets you see nearby, actively moving FOEs even in uncharted areas, leaving their only use in discovering invisible FOEs which are easily tracked on return trips. Later games expand on the use of similar skills to be able to reveal additional elements like shortcuts and treasure chests to avert this trope.
  • The "curse" status effect, which makes the afflicted take damage equal to half of what they deal, works identically on enemies and player characters, but Health/Damage Asymmetry makes it far more dangerous to you — a party member may instantly cause their own death with just a single moderately powerful attack, whereas mooks rarely will and bosses can cause a one-turn party wipe without even losing one tenth of their health. While you do need to kill some enemies this way to get certain items, Curse remains inferior to basically every other status effects you can use.
• Fable:
  • Summon and Drain Life. The former does relatively little damage compared to you even when it takes the form of a Minion, tends to get in the way if you specialize in melee combat, and will cause you to get no experience from a monster if it lands the killing blow. The latter deals the least damage of any offensive spell^*Lightning does less damage per hit but deals damage much faster and can hit up to four enemies at once. and heals for much less than Heal or just using a health potion which are cheap and plentiful.
  • Like Summon, Ghost Sword deals scratch damage even when maxed out and have relatively low health and timed life.
  • Guile improved stealth, improved prices on buying and selling goods, and unlocked the "Steal" and "Lockpick" skills. However, stealth is only used twice in the game. The first time (the Bandit Camp quest) is completely optional^*Unless doing a Pacifist Run, it's easier to just shoot the guards from a distance and the second time (Bargate Prison), having maxed out stealth makes functionally no difference to having none at all. Renown improved prices more than Guile and by the time you got a decent level of either, you'd have enough gold to simply buy anything you wanted^*Players can buy and sell goods in mass to earn a reasonable profit and starting in Oakvale, can do it with gems, allowing players to amass hundreds of thousands of gold in a couple minutes. Finally, "Steal" had some use but only if you could trap the shopkeeper elsewhere or you'd be caught every time and since NPCs had a habit of standing right inside their doors at night, "Lockpick" offered no stealth advantages over just breaking the door down.
  • Lightning Augmentation increases damage against only a few enemy types, most of whom take extra damage from other, more generally useful Augmentations such as Flame or Piercing. The one enemy type that only takes extra damage from Lightning Augmentations is wasps which are so weak that even the strongest ones are oneshotted by basically any steel quality weapon^note The lowest quality that can still use augmentations or above.
  • Experience augmentations give 10% more experience per kill for each one you have equipped, adding up to a maximum of 70% more experience. However, except for one that can be earned early by exploiting the Hero Save function, it's impossible to get any until shortly before the final quest of the original game, by which point you're almost guaranteed to have every skill you want anyway and are better off using other augmentations.
• Dogmeat, the player's canine companion in Fallout 3, is extremely death-prone at high-level play due to his low hit points. Since death is permanent in Fallout, Dogmeat therefore became of extremely marginal use. To counteract this, the Puppies! perk was added in a DLC expansion; this perk allowed Dogmeat to respawn (replaced by one of his puppies) any time he died. Trouble is, that same DLC expansion also made Dogmeat level with the player; thanks to his explosive Hit Point growth, Dogmeat became just about invincible, almost completely obviating the need to have him respawn. At best, you'd use the perk once^note because the leveling-with-the-player feature doesn't kick in if you install the DLC after finding Dogmeat unless you use the perk to respawn him and then never take advantage of it again.
  • The perk's real value is for its unintended effect. Whenever Dogmeat (or a puppy) dies, your companion allowance resets to let you recruit another. However, Dogmeat and his descendants are unique among companions in that you're always able to recruit him no matter how many followers you already have. Combined, the result was that one could kill Dogmeat, recruit a companion, recruit a puppy, kill the puppy, recruit another companion, and so on until you picked up all 8 of the potential companions when you normally were stuck with one plus Dogmeat.
• Fallout: New Vegas has no shortage of these perks. In Shining Armor, according to the description, reduces the damage you take from energy weapons if you're wearing metal armour. In reality, it's glitched and does nothing at all due to the parameter that checks weapons skill types is set to "Energy" instead of "EnergyWeapons". Certified Tech says it gives you an extra 25% critical hit chance against robots, but it's also glitched and instead gives 0.25% chance... which is automatically rounded down to 0% and therefore has no benefit^note The only thing it actually does is give you a 85% chance that a robot will have more mechanical parts, not like it's hard to find them. The list goes on.
• Fallout 4: Maxing out your Melee perk tree allows you to hit everyone in front of you at once. Which doesn't help because battles usually involve good guys helping your character out. Or at least guys you don't want to kill... at the moment. The only weapons that really benefit from this are weapons that swing in big slow arcs... so only the sledgehammer, Super Sledge, and the baseball bat and even then only the Super Sledge in the base game as the other two are quickly rendered useless. The sledgehammer and baseball bat can be upgraded to be the best weapons in-game but only if you shell out the cash for Nuka-World and then grid for the perk requirements to get the best upgrades.
  • The Syringer is a modified gun which shoots psychotropic drugs at people... except when the people you inject from afar just happen to be too strong and just shrug it off. The Syringer ammo is rare and making more is difficult. Frustrating made more so when you realize it only benefits from Sniper 1 and 3 and nothing else so using it in stealth is pointless.
    • Its 9 different ammo types don't have it much better. The "Bleed Out" and "Radscorpion Venom" syringes do 30/40 points of damage over 10 seconds. "Berserk"^note frenzies target for 2 minutes, "Bloatfly larva"^note spawns a bloatfly from the corpse on death. Has a chance to be a Legendary, "Lock Joint"^note paralyzes for 10 seconds, "Pax"^note pacifies for 30 seconds, and "Yellow Belly"^note causes the target to flee on hit have a random chance to do their effects. As you can tell it's much easier to use a gun and muscle your way through targets instead of using expensive gimmicky ammo.
• Fate/Grand Order's early days were full of these.
  • The Clairvoyance and Intuition skills gave additional critical stars, but usually in such insignificant numbers as to be completely irrelevant. Many of the characters who had these skills also lacked the ability to use them well: a burst of stars would be nice on a character with high star absorption, like a Rider, and star generation would be good on a character with naturally good star generation, like an Assassin, but invariably, these skills found themselves on Sabers, Archers, and Berserkers, who were average-to-bad at those things. Nearly every character with Clairvoyance and Intuition has had some kind of Balance Buff to turn the skill into something more significant, whether by making the original effect a side benefit of a more significant buff, or by overtuning it to the point of the boost now being worthwhile.
  • Similarly, damage boost skills against certain enemy types were often not placed on characters with Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors against those enemy types. The most infamous examples are Siegfried, who gets boosts against dragon enemies (most of which are Riders, not Lancers, the class he gets advantage on) and Mysterious Heroine X, who gets boosts against Saber-class enemies and "Saberface" enemies (when her class has advantage on Riders, and Rider-class Saberfaces are almost nonexistent). Invariably, these boosts ended up being less significant than just taking advantage of Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors the old-fashioned way. Like the stargen skills, they were usually buffed to add secondary effects that made them actually helpful.
  • Damage Over Time effects like Burn, Curse, and Poison are held in rather low regard, owing to the game's massive amount of Health/Damage Asymmetry — many of these effects do something in the range of 500-1000 damage, when even a miniboss can often have around 100,000 HP and a strong boss can crack the low seven digits. Unless you build your whole team around stacking as many of them as possible, you'll rarely ever see an enemy die of Poison.
  • Certain status effects fall into this, with a notable one being Sleep. Sleep is effectively a stun effect that lasts two turns instead of one — only problem is, it deactivates if the enemy takes damage, in a game where you always have to end your turn with three attacks. This makes it completely useless against a single powerful enemy, which is the main place you would want to stun your opponent to begin with. Terror has similar problems: it lasts for a few turns, during which the enemy has a chance to be stunned, and when it triggers, the effect ends. Neat — but why would you want a chance to stun the enemy once at some random time in the next three turns, when you could just use a different stun effect to have a much higher chance to stun them whenever you want? Particularly an issue because stun effects need to be timed well, which Terror defies.
  • The king of them all is Aesthetic Appreciation E-, which reduces the damage of an enemy Noble Phantasm by 11% when fully upgraded. Due to Health/Damage Asymmetry, enemy Noble Phantasms of any kind of significant level tend to be strong enough to one-shot their targets with room to spare, so even at its maximum rank, it just means you go from "did 50,000 damage to a character with 12,000 health" to "did 45,000 damage."
• Nearly every Final Fantasy game has a few of these. There are some exceptions, of course — the Bio spell is occasionally the only way to deal steady damage to an opponent, and the final boss of Final Fantasy X practically requires Zombify (unless you took a short side trip to the Omega Ruins).
  • The Gravity/Demi spells in almost any Final Fantasy suffer from a similar, if not quite identical, problem. Gravity spells cannot traditionally kill your enemy — it deals a percentage of their current health as damage, usually in increments of 10% or 25%. Theoretically, this is very useful for bosses and strong enemies — however, both of these tend to be resistant or immune to gravity. When they're not, though, it's often quite effective. It was also one of the best spells in Kingdom Hearts since it can work on several enemies in close quarters and pulls them to the ground and immobilize them; in the sequel, however, it's replaced with the Magnet spell, one with somewhat more obvious uses.
    • The Demi series, surprisingly, works against Emerald WEAPON. Since Emerald has, literally, a million hit points, you'll do 9,999 damage with it on nearly every turn, and when it starts inflicting less than 9,999 it means you're almost there. Of course, 9,999 is but a scratch to that boss, so better couple it with W-magic and Quadra Magic. Then mimic it.
    • Earth based magic and techniques tend to fall to the wayside due to a good amount of bosses and large enemies hovering above the ground, which makes all earth based attacks miss. On the plus side, a number of flying monsters (including some sub-bosses!) are weak to Gravity instead of immune to it, meaning a 50% damage spell will either hit the Cap or just end it outright.
    • Several monsters in Final Fantasy VII absorb Gravity — using it on them restores a percentage of their HP instead! With the right combination of materia (Elemental paired with Gravity on your armor) and sufficient Level Grinding (you need 40,000 AP on an Elemental materia), you can do this to your party as well.
  • Instant kill spells are particularly prone to this. When you get the spell, you're too desperate for the MP to use it; but the readier you are to use it, the more likely the enemies are to be highly resistant. Naturally, bosses are immune. Occasionally a boss will be vulnerable to the insta-kill spells, just for variety. The classic example is Tiamat, Fiend of Air in Final Fantasy, who can be killed instantly with Scourge or Break (though it'll take you a few tries).
    • Averted with Level 5 Death from Final Fantasy V. This one bypasses normal death immunity, so even bosses with a level divisible by 5 can be affected. With Dark Spark, you can halve the Boss's level which, after rounding down, might make it divisible by 5.
    • Indeed, all the "Level X" spells (Level 2 Old, Level 3 Flare, Level 4 Graviga) were designed to be this trope. They're incredibly powerful spells, but they only work on enemies with levels divisible by their number, and the vast majority of enemies at the point in the game that you obtain them have prime numbers for levels. However, use Dark Spark on the enemy beforehand, and simple rounding means that unless their halved level is also a prime number, they'll almost certainly become vulnerable to at least one of the above.
  • Reflect, in most of the series, is usually more trouble than it's worth. Most enemies that cast a spell that are either elemental and can absorb that element so you wind up healing them if the spell is bounced back or the spell they use is immune to being reflected. In some of the games, the computer says "screw it", and can use Piercing spells that ignore your Reflect status completely. Using Reflect also means more micro-managing, since beneficial magic like Cure and Esuna are also reflected, making you use items instead. Of course, you could always cast Reflect on the boss yourself and then bounce your healing spells off of it. Certain boss fights do make Reflect mandatory and some setups can make Reflect quite potent, but most can get away with not using the spell.
  • On a similar note, the confusion status is rarely helpful since the confused enemy may attack itself, snapping itself out of confusion. For the Final Fantasy Tactics series, Immobilize is useful at the start, but it quickly loses usefulness when you encounter enemies that have ranged attacks or have abilities that can hit you no matter where you run to.
  • Final Fantasy has more useless spells than any other game. Vox reverses the effect of silence spells, except there are only four enemies in the entire game that use Silence and your chances of ever seeing said enemies use it are slim. Death, Warp, Quake, and Kill are all useless instant death spells because by the time you can learn them... all enemies are invulnerable to it, except those that a White Mage can kill in a single punch. Even useful spells like Heal, Thundara, Fira, and others can be replicated by specific weapons and armors used as items during battles (Thor's Hammer for instance can cast Thundara).
    • Due to programming mistakes in the game, many spells actually do nothing...unless they're used on you, in which case they are absolutely devastating.
    • A notable exception is Marilith, who is actually quite vulnerable to several useless-useful status spells. Possibly the most hilarious way to deal with her is Confusing her into attacking herself for several rounds. So much for the legendary Fiend of Fire.
  • Final Fantasy II requires spells to be ground up from Level 1, and a low-level spell is about as worthwhile as throwing a rock at enemies. Some spells simply never become worthwhile—debuffs are inaccurate and often resisted, Protect is worthless compared to Blink, and the Aura and Wall spells require extreme amounts of grinding in order to bestow their maximum benefits. Basuna is a glaring offender, as it only removes ailments that wear off after battle anyway and has to be at least Level 6 to potentially cure all temporary ailments. The Death spell is the only spell with the Death element, and as such is resisted by almost every enemy worth using it on (unlike the Game-Breaking Matter-element instant-death spells). The Ultima spell grows stronger based on the level of the user's weapon skills and other spells, but even in the post-Famicom versions where this function actually works, the average player won't level up enough spells to make Ultima a particularly powerful attack.
  • Final Fantasy IV:
    • Pig. It does exactly that, and turns your opponent into a pig. Sure this stops them from casting magic, but that's about it: most enemies that are any real threat are either immune to pig, use enemy abilities which can be used in spite of the status, or have a solid physical attack which is unaffected by it. Even if it was a guaranteed hit it wouldn't be worth using, and it has only a 10% chance of success meaning it is practically guaranteed to fail. Furthermore, even if you found a worthwhile time to cast it, you're better off casting Silence which does more or less the same thing, and has a 90% success rate on vulnerable enemies.
    • Teleport warps you out of the current dungeon. Sounds useful, were it not for the game it's in. IV was the first entry in the series to have mid-dungeon save points, and they're often placed at midpoints and before bosses, so there isn't much fear of losing your progress. But IV is also a very story-driven game, and nearly all its required dungeons either automatically teleport you out on completion, or bar Teleport from working to make sure you view a plot-vital cutscene on the way out. Likely the only time it's useful is in the optional Lair of the Father/Bahamut's Cave, the only dungeon that is both optional and lacks a warp point at the end.
    • Edward's Sing command. It has a 1/4 chance of inflicting Sleep, Confuse, Silence, or nothing. Sure it's free to cast, but Edward's weapon also will either inflict Sleep or Confuse (depending on if you have the Dream Harp or Lamia Harp equipped) in addition to inflicting damage, and tends to have a much higher success rate in inflicting said status ailment. There are very few scenarios where you're better off gambling on a damage-free chance of inflicting a status ailment you could inflict along with some damage.
    • Asura. Ask yourself why on Earth you would want to blow 50 MP for a summon that targets the whole party and casts, at random, Curaga, Raise, or Protect, when you could pick which one you wanted and cast a party-wide Curaga for 18 MP, a party-wide Protect for 9 MP, or Raise for 8 MP. It seems its only benefit is being able to cast a party-wide Raise, which makes it a desperate last move at absolute best since it only has a 33% chance of activating, since if you wanted to just heal the party with Rydia you are much better off casting Sylph for only 20 MP (or for free if you know of a certain Good Bad Bug) which always heals the party and inflicts damage on an enemy to boot. Even the benefit of an all party raise has the issue where the character that is summoning Asura also has horrible defense and the worst HP growth of the party. This means that if you are in a situation where you need Asura to revive half your party, odds are very likely that Rydia is one of those party members already face down in the dirt, if not THE first one.
  • Calca in Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is basically a discount blue mage with his Jive ability. He can cast various special enemy attacks for free. The major downsides is that the spell selection is completely random and the majority of spells are status ailments that do a pittance of damage, while the few offensive spells left are weak elemental attacks. By the final chapters of the game when you can use him in the party again, monsters are either immune to the status effects or strong against his offensive spells, or BOTH. A special mention has to go for his Petrify attack. It turns the target to stone, killing it.  But unlike the Black Magic spell Break which is an instant kill if the target is susceptible to the status, his is a gradual petrification, meaning that the spell has to hit the same target three times before it kills them. Considering the number of targets in a battle, the large spell pool he has and the random nature of casting, it is a miracle if this move ever defeats an enemy. Brina is only marginally better as her Dance command let's her cast all party beneficial but randomized White Magic for free. However, even casting a weak Cure on the party will offer better assistance than Calca's Jive.
  • Final Fantasy VII has the summon Materia of Kujata. On paper, it sounds fantastic: it's a summon which targets fire, ice and lightning elements all at once, meaning it's inevitably going to hit a weakness. There's only one problem... Due to how damage calculation is handled in VII, absorption or immunity overrides weaknesses, and you'd be surprised just how many enemies absorb or block at least one of those elements, meaning that Kujata is going to ignore or heal your enemies nine times out of ten.
  • Final Fantasy VIII has an option that lets one circumvent this to some degree: junctioning. Casting the spell is about as useless as usual, not to mention it depletes your stock of stored spells, but you can junction a status spell to your attack, giving your physical strikes its effect. If it worked, great, but if not, at least you didn't waste a spell and a turn trying.
  • Final Fantasy IX turns the normally useful Status Buff spells such as Protect, Shell, and Haste into this by having them wear off after a short period in real time. Because most enemy attacks in the game are Overly Long Fighting Animations, they will usually expire before making any impact. Fortunately, their corresponding Auto- abilities (especially Auto-Regen) learned from equipment are permanent and thus far more useful.
    • In a similar fashion to Final Fantasy I, Steiner's Thunder Slash skill in IX is supposed to cause lightning damage to an enemy, but it almost always fails because a programming oversight means it has a base accuracy of 0. When you fight Beatrix (and later when she joins as a guest member), her version of the skill never fails because her skill isn't under the same programming as Steiner's. If Vivi is in the active roster with Steiner, you can get a similar effect to how Thunder Slash is supposed to work, without the screwed up success rate, by having Steiner use Thunder/Thundara/Thundaga Sword attack.
  • Kimahri picks up quite a few of these in Final Fantasy X if you find his Blue Mage-like ability to be interesting. For example, Stone Breath petrifies all enemies... except bosses are immune and it's generally not worth using on random encounters.
    • It and its sequel have a few status effects that work on almost anything, including anything that inflicts Eject and -strike skills on weapons, including Stonestrike, which could be acquired early and caused instant petrification and shattering if Stonestrike activated, which it did so at a surprisingly high rate for an OHKO skill.
    • FFX allows the creation of customized weapons, so you can create them with the status effect you wanted. If it doesn't work, you'll still deal physical damage, though in that case you'd be better off with a legendary weapon with Break Damage Limit.
  • Any OHKO effect in Final Fantasy XII. They actually do have a good chance of success against most enemies, but you don't get any XP or loot for enemies you defeat this way. Not useful when you're trying to grind out stuff to sell in town for more potions or weapons.
  • While Final Fantasy XIII averts most of the usual useless useful spells of the franchise, it still has one in the form of Quake. Quake is a technique, not a spell, so it runs off of Tech Points, which can only be recharged by doing well in battle, by using a particular accessory, or using a ludicrously rare Ethersol. You can have a maximum of five tech points, and Quake uses one. Yes, it hits everything on the field, but you're not going to waste a tech point on a rather weak spell when you could use it for offensive boons like Dispelga, Renew, or summoning your Eidolon.
    • It has one use: If you get a preemptive strike on a large group of enemies, Quake will instantly stagger everything on the field.
    • Quake's major benefit is the 26.67 seconds it adds to chain duration. Opening with Quake is an excellent way to enable simultaneous chain-building on multiple targets.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2
    • The Wound spell. Wounding reduces the max HP of the victim. On your characters, getting severely wounded was a grave concern, and a serious impetus to finish battles against enemies capable of Wounding quickly. Since enemies tend to have high HP and don't usually heal much, it's much less useful in player hands unless you have a monster with the Bloodthirsty ability.
    • The Jungle Law passive ability certain monsters have. It increases the strength and magic of the monster against enemies with less HP than they have, but decreases it against enemies with more HP. This is a game where your average mook has five digit HP, and since only a handful of monsters break five digits, it generally reduces them to infusion fodder or permanent benchwarmers.
    • Buffing and debuffing in general aren't much use outside of specific boss battles. It's usually quicker to beat Mooks by hammering them with magical and physical attacks, and the final boss can also be beaten the same way if you have a high level party.
  • In Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII the various debuff spells are usually pretty useful since many enemies are not immune and most of the rest can have their resistances removed by staggering them. However, just about every spell and ability in the game has a useless multi-target variant. These are harder to acquire and more expensive to cast but most of the game's challenges come from bosses and tough individual monsters on whom area of effect attacks are wasted. Encounters with more than two enemies at a time are rare and anything that does attack in a pack tends to be pathetically weak anyway.
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles has the Curaga spell, which heals players in a wide radius. While the spell is quite helpful in multiplayer, you don't get access to the spell in single player until the Final Battle and even then, it's quite useless since you're only healing yourself and have no one else playing with you.
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time gives this status to Haste and Slow, which are fiddly to pull off — requiring stacking spell target rings in combat — and have a duration so short that you can miss your entire buffed period by blinking at the wrong time.
• In the Steven Universe fangame Flawed Crystals, every character except Stevonnie has a useful-sounding joke ability. They potentially have some use, but tend to have severe downsides.
  • Jasper can try to recall one of her memories. You may think this would result in a powerful attack, but it instead results in a nervous breakdown, stunning her for the next round and resetting all aggression against her. Since she's your tank, this is generally not a good idea. After Jasper regains her memories, this changes to intentionally crying it out to vent her emotions. This averts the stun, making it potentially more useful if Jasper is in a bind and you really need to take heat off of her.
  • Peridot can insult a monster to gain a ton of aggression. She is also The Medic and has the worst defense of any gem, so this is almost always a terrible idea.
  • Garnet can unfuse to attack twice. This does result in a stronger attack... if both hits land. Ruby and Sapphire each have a 50% chance of being too distracted by the other to fight, giving the attack poor performance on average.
  • Amethyst can shapeshift to attract monsters' attention... but in doing so, she'll overexert herself, sustaining a defense debuff. Oops.
  • Pearl can guard a specific gem, taking all hits that would otherwise strike them... but she has so little concern for her own well-being that her defense stat goes to zero, making this effectively a suicide ability.
  • Bismuth can forge "the perfect weapon", providing an immensely powerful attack buff that outperforms any other item... but it takes her five turns to make it, during which she can't do anything else.
• Golden Sun on any number of counts. That Infinity +1 Sword you picked up? You'll only be using it on Mooks you could easily kill anyway. Likewise, Bosses are functionally immune to most status effects, so the one case in which it would be worth your time to try for some strategy, it simply won't work. In GS2, by the time you pick up the best Summon Magic in the game, there is exactly one creature left worth using it on, and the cost of doing so is very high; depending on your class setup, it can cost you your best healing for several rounds.
  • However, this is often averted in at least the first game, as bosses can be afflicted with various useful status effects (Like Sleep which, as you might guess, makes the target completely inactive for several rounds) reasonably often, sometimes even multiple times per fight. Sadly the same cannot be said for the summons of the second game, as mentioned above.
    • The first game's Tempest Lizard, especially. An optional boss that could be fought repeatedly, gives out loads of EXP, always dropped a potion when it was beaten, and could easily be effected by the Curse Psyenergy, which would make it go down after attacking a certain number of times? And it attacks twice per turn, speeding it up that much? Sign me up!
  • Heck, nearly all of the Psynergy you learn in all three of the games quickly get outclassed by the more exotic weapons with fancy unleash abilities. Aside from using the fancy and strong weapons to deal damage faster, it is usually faster to attack one enemy at a time instead of trying to hit all enemies at once every time and waste PP with Psynergy doing so. Most of the time, the only Psynergy you will use are healing/revive types, Psynergy that boosts your stats, or Psynergy that factors in your weapon strength, such as Ragnarok and Plume Edge.
  • In a less combat-oriented sense, Insight Psynergy in Dark Dawn. In theory, it's supposed to be an at-will hint-dropper for the game's myriad puzzles. In practice, all it does is make you want to yell at Amiti, with relatively minor exceptions (Djinn in hard-to-reach places sometimes have to be knocked down with Fireball or Slap, and the goat puzzle can be solved by using Insight to map out a path for each goat).
• Granblue Fantasy: Aside from the gimmicky and situational spells that specific characters have, this trope is easily noticeable on three Arcarum summons. Whether they be in the summon's call effect, main aura, or sub aura:
  • Temperance's Call Effect casts a debuff on both the enemy and your team which prevents the affected unit from using charge attacks.
  • Death's Aura reduces your HP by 30%, and its call effect kills one of your party members in exchange for a massive triple attack boost to the other characters. This could be useful if you were able to choose who dies, but you can't. It was since buffed to always kill the fourth party member and found a niche in allowing Oracles (who gain a buff if they join the frontlines by an ally's death) a free pass to cause havoc. While the aura is still bad, it's always been best as a sub summon for its sub aura anyway.
  • Justice's Call Effect forces your individual members' HP equal to the average HP of the team, either by healing or damaging them. It may be very beneficial on Stamina or Enmity grids for keeping your entire party alive, or for helping characters who don't have Stamina/Enmity boosting skills. But for other grids and weapons not utilizing these two mechanics, a self-damaging ability can put your team in a bad position.
• Harvest Moon SNES: The restaurant in town sells cakes, which can either be given to girls for a reliably high affection boost, or eaten to recover a large portion of your stamina. However, the 500G price makes them completely impractical for a new farmer, and a well-developed farm will have plenty of vastly cheaper alternative gifts, in the form of eggs, milk, and crops, that will usually have just as much effect. The difference in effectiveness is more noticeable after you're married, but at that point your wife is on the farm, so it's both faster and cheaper to just give her multiple items. The stamina boost is particularly useless since there's nowhere in town that you need to use stamina.
• Icewind Dale
  • The first game had Contact Other Plane, added in the Heart of Winter expansion. The only thing this spell was actually useful for was finding out the true name of a demon so that you could get the best version of the suit of armor he can give you. Other than that, it can be cast in different locations around the game to provide you with some trivial knowledge or otherwise fail to do anything besides waste a 5th level spell slot.
  • The second game turned all elemental damage protection spells into this, as they went from granting percentage-based resistances (like between 50-100% of damage of that type) to numeric resistance that could, at *best* block a measly 7 points of damage, an amount that was barely noticeable most of the time.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Kingdom Hearts has Vortex, which is a gap-closer that is bad at gap-closing thanks to its short range and slow animation, and is learned at a very late level. The Final Mix version even adds Sliding Dash, which is better at gap-closing in every way, making Vortex even more outclassed.
  • The Standard Status Effects sleights in Chain of Memories aren't worth the time and cards spent. Bind prevents enemy movement (but not their attacks), while Terror and Confuse make enemies attack less often - however, due to the nature of the battle system, the player can prevent attacks from Mooks just by using a high-value sleight, while bosses that actually use sleights are immune to them. Terror even makes enemies run away, making them harder to hit.
  • Kingdom Hearts II:
    • Dodge Slash seems to be the successor to the first game's Vortex, and is equally useless. It replaces a standard attack in your combo with three short-ranged slashes that only mainly serve to slow down your combo and even have a tendency to whiff against smaller targets. To make matters worse, Combo Boost counts the number of inputs in a combo rather than the number of hits, so it doesn't actually increase your damage all that much in the long term.
    • The Auto abilities can replace your Reaction Command with a prompt for a Summon or Drive Form when you're in a pinch. Seems like a useful emergency tool, but it also replaces any other Reaction Command prompts from enemies when it does this. If you're at the HP level where one of these pops up, this can be a very bad thing. And if you use a Drive prompt and get Anti Form...
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep:
    • Esuna and its counterpart Panacea heal status effects...which are easily avoided, short-lived, and don't do anything that can't be healed with a Cure spell, making them a waste of a slot.
    • Any status effect that isn't Magnet is inferior to Magnet, since Magnet does everything the others do, but better. However, the worst spells in the game (and possibly the entire series) are ironically the Orb Magnet commands unique to Aqua. Instead of damaging or pulling in enemies, these spells allow Aqua to stand helplessly for several seconds, all for a chance to get a small amount of HP/D-link/Munny orbs. They don't even work on most enemies! And for what it's worth, there are much better ways to heal/restore Aqua that won't probably kill her.
• Knights of the Old Republic:
  • Jedi Sentinels, and Canderous Ordo, have passive abilities that grant them immunity from Mind Rape Force attacks. The thing is, you can count on one hand the number of enemies that actually use these attacks...
  • Jedi in your party have access to two abilities that remove force power buffs (absorbing damage, attacking faster etc) from enemies. Well, most of those buffs are Light Side powers, while you only ever fight Dark Sided Force users, who rarely use the neutral buff powers either. The only enemy that reliably buffs himself is the final boss, who uses force immunity on himself.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords:
  • The "Regenerate Vitality Points" feat allows the player or their companions to regenerate health faster. It sounds very useful... except that all characters already regenerate health after battle, making the feat nigh-useless because it has miniscule effects in battle situations. Its effect is laughably low (one hit point recovered per turn), while you can get up to three with armor upgrades, which can be pretty powerful early on.
  • You face far fewer Force users across the game compared to the prequel, so Force Suppression, Force Breach, Force Resistance and Force Immunity are incredibly situational. Immunity to Fear and Horror become situational perks for this reason as well.
  • Force Affinity, a Force form learned by the Consular Exile, increases their Force regen rate, even in the middle of combat. As it turns out, Force Channel, a form which all Jedi can learn by just leveling up, can do the same and more, so there's little reason to use it.
  • G0-T0's personal perks are a personal cloaking device, and the ability to hack or convert enemy droids. HK, Mira and Mandalore easily outclass him in the ranged combat department and Atton or even Bao-Dur is likely far better-specialized at Stealth; the one remaining niche for G0-T0 has very limited use especially since at that point you've cleared Goto's Yacht, which is one of the most droid-dense levels in the game.
• The Legend of Dragoon has status effects. Every boss in the game is immune to them and everything else is too weak to waste them on^note To be fair, most status effects would be ludicrously overpowered if they worked on bosses, such as Fear halving their attack and defense or Poison sapping ten percent of their health every turn.
  • Rose's level three Dragoon spell, Demon's Gate, instantly kills all enemies. Naturally, all enemies actually worth using a spell on are immune to it, making it the one spell that is never used.
    • Rose's first two spells are relatively worthless as well. Astral Drain damages one enemy and heals the party by an amount equal to the damage done, split between all members. Death Dimension damages all enemies and inflicts them with Fear status. All bosses are immune to status effects, using a Healing Breeze/Rain heals the entire party for far more (as do Meru's and Shana's healing spells) and both spells deal too little damage to bother with for just inflicting damage.
  • Dart's fifth Addition, Madness Hero, deals very low damage but grants lots of spirit points which are needed both to turn into a dragoon and to level up as a dragoon. Unfortunately, he gets it in Disc 3 where half the bosses will destroy anyone foolish enough to transform into a dragoon against them. While it is useful for leveling up his dragoon form, by the time Dart unlocks his next Addition, he'll be doing more damage in base form most of the time.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky: Sylphen Wing, a stat buff that grants a 1-point increase to movement range and costs 30 EP. Increased movement range is useful, right? Well, not enough so to cast a single-target ability that doesn't last all that long and costs 30 EP, which is enough to cast Earth Wall (which is a Useful Useful Spell, maybe even an outright Game-Breaker) or Clock Up EX. Or, you know, any number of attack spells. Sylphen Wing isn't the worst thing out there as "useless spells" in RPGs go, but there are much, much better uses for 30 EP in the game, even if you're not using it to deal damage.
  • Trails in the Sky SC reduces its EP cost to 10, and it still sucks. At least there is also a multi-target version now.
• In Legend of Legaia, one of the Seru whose powers you can absorb is Nighto, and when used by one of your characters, has the power to either confuse or kill a single enemy. Sounds pretty good, right? Well...the chances of confusion actually working are fairly low (compounded by the fact that confusion, although doing exactly what one would expect in that it causes monsters to attack fellow monsters, tends to last only one turn on stronger beasts, much like other status changes in this game), and the chances of actually killing an opponent are almost nil. But, there's one glorious exception, and that's the very difficult mid-game boss Berserker, where Nighto's chances of instantly killing Berserker are actually quite good.
  • Legaia's fairly bad about this, actually — the majority of your Seru (essentially your magic spells and main means of dealing out huge damage to bosses) will reduce enemy stats or have other such effects at higher levels... but typically kill normal enemies in one hit, and of course bosses are immune to these effects. Even if someone does bother to fight normal enemies, magic doesn't regenerate and boss fights are generally wars of attrition that involve healing spells every turn... hope you stored a lot of mana poti— I mean, mana leaves.
• Both played straight and averted Lost Odyssey. Enemies tend to inflict lots of nasty status effects on the PCs that they themselves cannot cast as effectively at that point, but any status effects enemies aren't outright immune to tend to be equally easy to inflict upon them, and in fact it's a necessary part of several boss battles. Annoyingly, the programmers decided to signify status immunity with a "miss" (instead of "immune", like in Final Fantasy X for example) for some weird reason, and not showing anything when the enemy isn't immune to a status but the status doesn't connect.
  • Also amusingly inverted in that by the end of the game, your entire party can also be immune to all status effects (except Instant Death, only enemies can be immune to that), but of course the Artificial Stupidity never catches on and the enemies will cast them at you constantly.
• Lufia & The Fortress of Doom has the Statue spell. It is meant to be used on your own party members. While enemies do sometimes attack a petrified party member (for no damage), that's a party member that you couldn't otherwise be attacking or healing with.
  • The Cooking IP ability in Lufia: The Legend Returns turns enemies into items if it kills the target. Not only does this rarely obtain useful items that you wouldn't have dozens of from thorough dungeon delving, the Cooking attack itself inflicts so little damage that it's extremely difficult to actually kill an enemy with it.
  • Several job abilities in Lufia: The Ruins of Lore are of questionable usage. The most glaring is Blunt Hit, the first ability of the Knight job, which is used to instantly knock out your own party members and have them revive at 1 HP after battle.
• Nash's status-inflicting spells from Lunar: The Silver Star remakes work so infrequently that they're never worth spending your limited supply of MP on. You're always better off using his godlike Speed Stat for more practical purposes, like healing a teammate with an item, using a wand or casting one of his attack spells (which are all useful throughout the game).
  • Averted in Lunar: Eternal Blue remakes as enemies are colored different colors to indicate whether the spells work or not.
• Most status effect skills in Mass Effect 2 fall into this trope at higher difficulty levels. This is due to everyone (players and enemies) being immune to them if they have shields/barrier/armor remaining. On higher difficulty levels, every enemy outside the tutorial segment in the beginning has at least one of these. By the time you get through these defenses, killing your target only takes a couple more shots. Thane's loyalty skill, Shredder Ammo, is particularly useless. It gives huge bonuses to damage, but only against the health of living enemies. Incendiary Ammo or Garrus's Armor Piercing ammo give nearly as good of bonuses to damage, and work on non-living targets and armor to boot. On high difficulty levels it can't affect most enemies until they're almost dead, and on low difficulty levels the damage bonus isn't necessary.
  • Though, it is worth mentioning that on lower difficulty levels, skills like Dominate and Hacking, which are nearly useless in the higher difficulty levels are basically Game Breakers.
• Master of the Monster Lair: Magic Barrier. It stops a single magic attack and hits the caster for 1/3 of the damage it would've done. The problem is that 90% of enemies don't use magic and when they do they're usually highly resistant to the element they use. The spell is useful for dealing with a few boss fights, but that's about it.
• Might and Magic series:
  • In general: the success rate for non-damage spells is a function of both the relevant resistance and the victim's Level, so the deeper you get into the game the less effective spells like Turn to Stone from the Sixth game become.
  • Might and Magic VI:
    • All non-damage-dealing spells are resisted using "Magic" resistance (there are six or so spells out of ninety-nine that deal "Magic" damage). Most late-game enemies have an immunity to this specific damage type, meaning that they will also have the lowest possible status rate.
    • The "Stoned" condition, caused by the aforementioned Turn to Stone spell, also rendered the victim perfectly safe for the duration... which means you have to wait out the timer in order to get any rewards for killing said monster.
    • Finger of Death has to pass both the generic success check as well as its own skill-based success check; while the description suggests that you'll have a guaranteed kill after a developing your skill with Dark Magic far enough, because the target's level is part of the generic success check it's impossible to actually reach 100% success rate.
    • Dispel Magic removes non-permanent spell effects from monsters. This includes debuffs like "Cursed" or "Paralyzed". This would be an excellent spell to cast against monsters that buffed themselves... except no monster is able to buff themselves, so casting Dispel Magic just ends up reversing what you've already done. This leaves its principle use as removing the Stoned condition... except Dispel Magic can fail just like every other non-damage-dealing spell.
    • Dark Containment applies random debuffs to its principle victim, and deals damage in an area of effect like the more conventional Fireball spell. However, one of those random debuffs is "Stoned", which renders the victim immune to the damage that Dark Containment was supposed to deal.
  • VII mostly follows the pattern set by VI while ditching some examples of this trope. VIII on the other hand introduces three new skills that essentially work like a magic and some of those push some classic spells into uselessness. For example Levitate from Vampire school makes Water Walk totally useless, as it allows you to levitate over traps and lava. Dragon Breath learned by dragon is, unlike Dark-magic Dragon Breath, a fire-magic attack that essentially negates any use for Fireball. Dragon's Fly is also easier to access, given that all teachers of that skill are in the same cave as the first recruitable dragon you're likely to get in your party.
  • X ditches all self-schools, skills from VIII and keeps only elemental, dark and light magic while also adding primordial. Dark magic gets the short end of the stick this time, since it contains mainly status effects that don't work on bosses, and even the Whispering Shadows spell, which reveals hidden treasures, is made redundant by one hireling and one permanent buff you can acquire later. Other spells that don't deal direct damage such as poison are also useless (bosses are immune to it), unless they are inflicted by weapon and with the exception of Poison Cloud which forces ranged units to close distance. Crushing Weight, the spiritual successor of Mass Distortion, is not very useful as it deals a low percentage of the target's current HP, but there are two bosses with astronomical HP where it will deal much more damage than anything else.
• The online RPG Murkon's Refuge has many high-level spells that attempt to paralyze, silence, or even instantly kill entire monster groups. Naturally, the highest dungeon levels are rife with monsters immune to these spells, especially the undead and the ones capable of paralyzing your front-row characters in a single hit. In a semi-subversion, you can actually retrain your characters into Assassins who can deliver similar instant-paralysis hits (without having to use MP!) and even instant-death critical hits (at least on the non-immune monsters). Plus, you can make your own characters immune to paralysis if you boost their armor class enough.
• In Odin Sphere, one potion leaves behind a toxic cloud that kills anything after a short delay, regardless of how much HP it has left. Unfortunately, this has a tendency not to work on boss enemies, but always on you. Sure, it kills slimes, but you've always got Napalm for doing that cheaper.
• The Mario RPGs has these examples as well:
  • In Super Mario RPG:
    • Bowser's special moves are mostly worthless due to Bowser's magic power being the lowest out of everyone in the party.
    • Princess Toadstool's final special move, "Psych Bomb" is also a waste. The Princess' greatest skill is healing — there are very few situations where it's worth wasting her FP on an offensive move.
  • In Paper Mario:
    • Rescuing the Star Spirit Kalmar grants Mario the power Up and Away, which transforms every non-boss enemy on the screen into a tiny star that flies, well, up and away. Unfortunately, this means that the party doesn't gain any experience points. Furthermore, Kalmar is the last Star Spirit you save; by that point in the game, you'll either be facing enemies that you'll want to battle for their EXP or foes so weak that a single hit will take them out—and the Bump Attack Badge can outright eliminate those enemies with a single blow without entering a battle at all, granting the same effect without wasting two bars of Star Power. As such, Kalmar's probably the least-used Star Spirit in the game.
    • Parakarry's Air Lift move is widely considered one of the worst in the game. Like Up and Away, it can defeat an enemy instantly but won't gain you any experience points—and given how valuable each EXP is in Paper Mario, it's undesirable for that alone. But it also can only target a single enemy (Up and Away and Lakilester's Hurricane at least target the whole field), and it's a contact move, so enemies with spikes on top or covered in flames are totally immune. So a huge number of enemies are immune to it (in fact, they'll hurt and disable Parakarry if he tries to use the move on them), when it wasn't even that good to begin with.
    • Lakilester's Hurricane functions very similarly to Up and Away—it can blow away all enemies in exchange for not receiving Star Points—and while it isn't as poor as Air Lift, the lack of EXP means, again, that it's rare for a player to want to use it.
    • The reputation of these three moves is so bad that it affected the perception of a move in the sequel: In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Flurrie's Gale Force move has the potential to blow all enemies out of battle. Many players assumed that, like the moves in the previous games, it didn't grant Star Points on use—not helped by Gale Force sharing its Japanese name with Lakilester's Hurricane move, adding to the confusion—and thus considered it useless. However, it does grant Star Points on use, and aerial enemies are especially weak to it—up to, and including, some of the strongest foes in the Bonus Dungeon. It's only in the late 2010's/early 2020's that this has become much more commonly known and helped the move become more strategically popular, as older guides and posts from around the game's release still lump the skill in with the useless ones.
• Phantasy Star:
  • In Phantasy Star II, most status-inducing techniques tend to be useless unless they induced paralysis, and even those had low success rates. Shinb, a technique learned by Hugh and replicated by using the Green Sleeves in battle, is bugged and doesn't do anything.
  • Virtually every technique outside of Gires and the Melee set is fairly useless in Phantasy Star III thanks to the Equivalent Exchange used with them.
  • Phantasy Star IV finally mitagated the usefulness of techs by only having useful ones and leaning towards having them target everyone available when affecting status, but Hahn learns Gelun and Doran which probably won't see much practical use.
    • Gelun can come in handy in the early game, particularly in the cellar of Tonoe, where enemies hit like trucks. Turns a severely dangerous group of mobs into a bunch of easy targets who hit for single digit damage. Tends to fall by the wayside once Deban becomes available though, as buffing your party's defense is a better (and more reliable) option than weakening enemies.
• Pokémon:
  • The typical case of Status Infliction Attacks being useless is averted for the most part, since Contractual Boss Immunity is absent^note powerful Mons can still be immune to status effects, but that's down to typing or ability, which can be changed and can affect all Pokémon equally if they have or gain that type or ability themselves and various status effects are all helpful in the competitive battling realm, either for whittling that one opponent that just won't go down (burn, poison, confusion, Leech Seed) or just getting in that extra hit before your opponent does (sleep, freeze, paralysis, confusion, infatuation).
  • Pokémon Diamond and Pearl introduced the physical/special split, wherein individual moves could now be physical or special attacks. Before this, the typing of the move determined if it was either physical or special, regardless of the attack's own description. This lead to several Pokémon having their own type's moves being among the weakest in their moveset (Dark-types got this the worst, as most had better attack than special attack, but all Dark-type moves were special; Ghost-types also suffered, because Ghost-type moves were physical despite most Ghost-types having better special attack) or unable to take advantage of their movesets in general (Hitmonchan can learn the Fire, Ice, Lightning punches to give it perfect neutral coverage, but its pathetic special attack stat rendered them completely worthless in Generation I to III. Contrastingly, Alakazam and Gengar could learn those same punch attacks and thrived with them in Generation I to III but the physical/special split made those attacks almost useless for them).
  • Entry Hazards are things created by certain moves which cause various negative effects to the opponent's Pokémon on switching in such as damage, inflicting poison status, or a reduction in speed. These moves are almost useless during normal play, since AI trainers pretty much never switch out their Pokémon and they typically don't have additional effects other than making entry hazards. However, in multiplayer these types of moves are extremely powerful, to the point where entire mons are made or broken competitively by how they interact with them. Stealth Rock in particular is notorious for being a Game-Breaker, with otherwise perfectly viable mons like Charizard and Articuno being relegated to being low-tier trash purely because of their Stealth Rock weakness.
  • Certain moves and abilities can become this, depending on if they are given to a Pokémon that can't make good use of it. In other words, moves and abilities that will be very useful to one Pokémon may be a very poor match for another Pokémon that has them.
    • Electrode can learn Gyro Ball by leveling up, which makes sense, as it is known as the Ball Pokémon. However, Gyro Ball is a physical move that does more damage the slower the user is compared to its opponent. Not only is Electrode one of the fastest Pokémon in the game, but its Attack stat is terrible, making it the exact wrong kind of Pokémon to learn it.
    • Weavile is a Glass Cannon whose role on any given team is to take out opponents as fast as possible with its incredibly high Attack and Speed. It also has the hidden ability Pickpocket, which steals held items from opponents who use moves that make direct contact. But considering Weavile's pitiful Defense and wide range of weaknesses on top of that, it would probably faint from that physical move before getting a chance to make any real use of that stolen item. Meanwhile, its regular ability, Pressure, forces the opponent to use two PP for every move instead of one while fighting them... but once again, fairly low Defense means little use for that ability in single and rotation battles. In double and triple battles, however, Weavile can potentially have a partner that can significantly extend its longevity, making the ability far more effective.
    • Cryogonal, Minior, Dhelmise and Mew (as well as Staryu and Starmie in Pokémon Gold and Silver) are capable of learning Attract, which afflicts opponents of the opposite gender with Infatuation. However, since they are genderless species, they can't affect any targets.
    • Skitty and Delcatty can have the ability Normalize, which turns all of their moves into Normal-type ones. While this means they get same-type attack bonus on everything, it also means they can't hit anything for super-effective damage, are completely useless against Ghost Pokémon, and also easily walled by Rock and Steel Pokémon. It pales in comparison to its Generation VI counterparts Refrigerate, Aerilate and Pixilate which not only turns Normal-type moves to Ice, Flying and Fairy respectively, but also gives a 30% boost in damage too and still allows the user to use attacks of other typing too. While Generation VII gave Normalize an additional effect of a 20% increase in all attacking moves strength, its main use is still paralyzing Ground-types with Thunder Wave.
    • Petal Blizzard is one of the strongest physical Grass-type moves in the series, and is able to hit every Pokémon adjacent to the user. Unfortunately, every Pokémon that learns the move is built towards Special Attack (Lurantis being the exception) and only a few of said group have a respectable Attack stat.
    • During Gen V, Genesect's Secret Art Techno Blast was largely useless since Flamethrower, Ice Beam and Thunderbolt were more powerful, had more PP, could easily be replaced on the field thanks to infinite-use TMs and didn't require Genesect to hold an item to use a Fire/Ice/Electric attack. Genesect couldn't even get STAB for it, as the Drives don't change Genesect's own type. Gen VI buffed its power to 120, making it an always accurate Hydro Pump/Blizzard/Thunder/Fire Blast,^*Which were all nerfed in power to 110, making it even stronger than them. but using the different types still takes up Genesect's valuable item slot with an otherwise useless item.
    • The move Final Gambit sacrifices all of the user's remaining health to do that exact amount of damage to the target. While most of the species that can learn it aren't exactly known for their high HP stats, one potential user takes the cake: Shedinja, which can only ever have 1 HP. This move was likely put in its moveset as a self-aware joke.
    • The move Rest puts the user to sleep and fully restores its HP. It cannot be used if the user is already at full HP, or if the user cannot go to sleep. Shedinja is a One-Hit-Point Wonder and is able to learn Rest, but can never use it since it can only be either at full health or knocked out. Some Pokémon can learn Rest and have an ability which makes them unable to sleep; in which case, the move is useless for them as well.
    • Shedinja can also learn Substitute, which creates a substitute to take attacks for a Pokémon in exchange for a quarter of its HP. Since Shedinja only has 1 HP, the move always fails when used by it.
    • The Gothita line can learn Mean Look, a move which prevents the target from escaping. They can also have the Hidden Ability Shadow Tag, which does the same time automatically, making Mean Look redundant (except in the rare circumstances that their Ability is removed, or when they are facing another Pokémon with Shadow Tag, which cancels itself out).
    • The move Magnet Rise makes the user float, thereby making it immune to Ground-type moves. Vikavolt, Minior, Celesteela and the Tynamo line are all capable of learning Magnet Rise, despite already having a Ground immunity through either the abilitiy Levitate or a secondary Flying typing.
    • When Pokémon Platinum came out, it introduced five new forms for Rotom. At the time, they all kept the main form's Electric/Ghost type combination and its Ability, Levitate, which grants immunity to Ground-type moves. When Pokémon Black and White rolled around, the alternate forms got their type combinations altered to match their new forms (the Fridge is now part-Ice, for example), but they all kept Levitate, since the Ground immunity was still very useful for the Electric type they also kept. Unfortunately, Fan Rotom got changed to Electric/Flying, with the secondary typing naturally carrying an immunity to Ground moves anyway, making Levitate completely redundant. Pokémon X and Y did make it marginally more useful with the introduction of Inverse Battles, where type matchups are reversed, but said battles are exceedingly rare.
    • The ability Run Away allows guaranteed escape from wild battles, but is completely useless in trainer battles, having no effect on moves and abilities that prevent switching out. Even foregoing that, the success rate of fleeing battle is based on speed, and most Pokémon that have the ability are already bound to be faster than the opponent if they're around the same level. In Generation VI onwards, all Ghost-type Pokémon are guaranteed to escape from wild battles and are immune to trainers' trapping moves and abilities while having a more versatile ability. Gimmighoul's Roaming Form is the biggest offender of this ability, both having Run Away and being a Ghost-type, making the ability redundant unless it gets its type or ability changed by an opponent.
    • Both Salandit and Salazzle are Poison/Fire and can have the "Corrosion" ability, which allows them to poison Poison- and Steel- typed Pokémon with poison-inducing status moves. It is actually less beneficial than it sounds, since the key words here are "status moves"; damaging Poison-type attacks still won't work on Steel-types, and since they're both Fragile Speedsters, a Damage Over Time strategy isn't ideal for them. Plus, Salazzle's Special Attack is high enough that she's better off just using a powerful Fire-type special attack to melt most Steel-types not named Heatran in her way instead of badly poisoning them with Toxic. It has a situational but effective use in competitive play where Salandit and Salazzle's poison-typing allows Toxic to be a guaranteed hit which, topped with naturally high speed, will make inflicting the badly poisoned status very easy to do. This will whittle down bulky opponents normally immune to poison such as Galarian Slowbro and Slowking, Alolan Muk, and Dragalge, the aforementioned examples having high Special Defense which is an issue for the Special Attack-based Salazzle to deal with.
    • Solid Rock reduces super-effective hits by 1/4, making it a useful Ability... if every Pokémon that knew it didn't have at least one 4x weakness to a common type and (excluding Camerupt) very poor Special Defense that is, meaning a Surf or Energy Ball will still OHKO it.
    • Synchronoise is very situational in most cases, since it's a Psychic-type move that can only hit enemies that have the same type as the user. But Eevee can know it as an egg move and evolve into Umbreon, a Dark-type, meaning the only enemies that could be hit by this spell are the ones that are already completely immune to Psychic-type attacks. In addition, most of the Pokémon that learn Synchronoise by level-up are of the Psychic-type (chain breeding is a different story), and Psychic-types take half damage from Psychic attacks.
    • Iron Valiant learns Skill Swap by TM, a move which switches the user's ability with the target. However, Iron Valiant's only ability, Quark Drive, is one of the abilities that cannot be swapped, meaning the move always fails if Iron Valiant uses it.
    • The worst offenders of this trope, however, might have been Frillish and Jellicent's Hidden Ability: Damp. This ability prevents the use of moves Self-Destruct and Explosion in battle, which would be okay if it wasn't for the fact that Frillish and Jellicent are already immune to those moves thanks to their Ghost-type! Still, Damp can save someone's allies in a double or triple battle. Frillish and Jellicent can finally use Damp as of Generation VIII in single battles where they can defend themselves from the Fairy-type equivalent, Misty Explosion. Even then, however, not only is the move rare, Misty Explosion is only base power 100 (150 when under Misty Terrain) and considered very weak compared to Self-Destruct and Explosion which has a base power of 200 and 250 respectively.
    • Stunfisk suffers a worse fate in Generation VI, when game mechanics changed to have all Electric-type Pokémon be immune to paralysis, making its Limber Ability useless, unless it for some reason changes its own type (which is just fine for explaining how a Ground-type lives in water but usually a waste of time for the player) or an enemy forcibly changes its type (Stunfisk is a slow Stone Wall, so it's rare when an opponent would benefit enough from paralyzing it to go to the effort). Downplayed as of Generation IX where the new Terastal phenomenon mechanic would allow Stunfisk to utilize Limber..... If Stunfisk was available in Scarlet and Violet.
    • Yellow- and White-colored Squawkabilly have Sheer Force as a Hidden Ability. This is normally a fantastic ability, powering up moves with added effects at the cost of removing the effects. The problem is, Sqwakabilly hardly gets any moves with added effects, with the strongest of such moves (Hurricane and Heat Wave) running off its awful 45 Special Attack, while its only physical move with an effect is Pounce, a non-STAB Bug-type move with a paltry 50 power, meaning all of these moves will be weak even when boosted.
    • Water Pledge, Fire Pledge and Grass Pledge are special combo moves with unique effects when used together, and can only be learnt via Move Tutor for the Water, Fire and Grass starters (and the Pan monkeys from Generation V). Unfortunately, roughly half of all possible users don't have a good enough Special Attack to dedicate a move slot to this, making its limited application potential even more limited instantly.
    • Toedscruel as of Generation IX is the fastest user of the move Spore, a status move that puts the opponent to sleep and the only sleep-inducing move with 100% accuracy. This would be extremely useful... if not for the fact that Toedscruel has Mycelium Might as their ability which makes the user go dead last in its priority bracket if it uses a status move. Slightly downplayed as Mycelium Might also allows the user to use status moves on targets which are immune to said status move via their ability... except most abilities which grant status effect immunity also cure the Pokémon if it is somehow given the relevant effect.
  • One-Hit KO moves are limited to 5PP, auto-fail against faster (Pokémon Red and Blue) or higher-leveled enemies, and their accuracy is an absolutely puny 30% plus your level difference from Pokémon Gold and Silver onward... Which means to even have a 50% chance of hitting the opponent with them, you need to be twenty levels above them, at which point regular attack moves are much better. The only way to get any mileage of such moves is by comboing them with a move that grants 100% accuracy for the next attack. Due to how overpowered this would be, only three Pokémon can do this: Smeargle (who can learn any move by its unique attack Sketch), Poliwrath (only in Generation II, if taught Fissure in a Generation I game and traded over), and Articuno (the only one who can naturally learn both halves of this combo from Generation III onwards). It was even worse in Gen I, where they would always fail if the opponent was faster. Despite this, Bruno's Machamp tends to use Fissure often despite its low Speed, one of many things making him fairly anticlimactic.
  • Other abilities can fall into this trope due to being designed to counter very specific skills or moves.
    • Unnerve is an ability that prevents the opposing Pokémon from eating berries. A lot of Pokémon with this ability also have alternatives that are much more useful — for instance, Compound Eyes on Galvantula, or Mold Breaker on Haxorus. It's also largely useless against NPC trainers or wild Pokémon, who often aren't even carrying an item, and when they are, usually aren't holding a berry.
    • Sturdy is an ability that originally only protected against the aforementioned One-Hit KO moves. Because those moves already fall into this trope, this ability would, too. Generation V averted this trope by also allowing Sturdy to grant a Last Chance Hit Point, functioning like a very useful Focus Sash without consuming an item slot.
    • Oblivious started with protecting against infatuation, a status effect that had very specific triggers (opposite gender to the target) and is inflicted by only one move. It got buffed in Gen IV to also protect against Captivate, which is a debuff skill that also falls into this trope (see below), keeping the ability stuck here as well. Only in Gen VI did it break out of this trope, as it now protects against Taunt, a very popular move used to disrupt defensive movesets, and Gen VIII makes the user immune to Intimidate, a very popular debuff-on-switch ability.
    • Magma Armor prevents freezing, but the problem is that the freeze ailment has been nerfed such that it cannot be reliably inflicted. On top of that, the Pokémon that have this Ability are Fire Pokémon which can immediately thaw themselves out anyway by using a fire move. The one saving grace is its application outside battle — it speeds up the rate at which eggs hatch.
    • Keen Eye protects the user against accuracy-reducing moves. Problem is, such moves are rarely seen outside the early game, rendering this Ability moot later on. In Gen VI onward, it also allows the Pokémon to ignore evasion boosts on its target, at least giving it a use against the occasional opponent who tries to spam evasion-raising skills.
    • Rivalry boosts damage against other Pokémon of the same gender, but reduces damage against Pokémon of a different gender. Not only is it difficult to exploit, it can be turned against its user based on a factor which most players gloss over. Not to mention most Pokémon with access to Rivalry also have much better alternative Abilities.
  • Mud Sport and Water Sport both reduce the power of Electric and Fire moves respectively. The problem is that most of Mud Sport's users are Ground types (which have an immunity to Electric already), and most of Water Sport's users are Water types (which already resist Fire). For a long time, those moves were near useless outside of double battles. Generation VI made them slightly more useful, by making them work even after the user switched out.
  • Bestow, which gives the enemy your item, but fails if the opponent has an item themselves. Given that competitive battles almost always require items, it never works. Not unless the opponent has used a move that removes their own item like Fling or has used a perishable item like a consumable berry or type gem. Or if you use it in conjunction with an item removal move like Thief or Knockoff. Even then, it’s completely outclassed by Trick and Switcheroo, as those moves have the same effect on top of giving you your opponent’s (likely very useful) item.
  • Focus Energy is usually useful, being able to boost your critical hit rate and potentially give you an edge; especially if you're using attacks that have high crit rates already. In the main Generation I games, however, a programming bug places the move firmly in this trope. Instead of multiplying your critical hit rate, it divides it, so choosing that move causes you to not only waste a turn but end up worse off than you were before. At least Splash doesn't actively sabotage you when you select it.
  • Also in Gen I, Roar and Whirlwind could only cause wild Pokémon battles to end early and had no effect in Trainer battles. Unless your current Pokémon was slower than the enemy, the Run command was a more worthwhile option. Later games redeemed the two moves by allowing them to also force out an enemy Trainer's Pokémon and drag out another at random, which can save the user from a bad matchup and screw with an opponent's strategy.
  • The move Frustration becomes more powerful the less the Pokémon likes its trainer. The problem is, most Pokémon start off with a fairly neutral friendship rating with the trainer and it's much easier to raise this stat than to lower it, to the point that even just walking around with a Pokémon will make it like you more, meaning you essentially need to actively abuse your Pokémon for Frustration to be of any real use. The final nail in its coffin is its counterpart Return, which increases in damage with the Pokémon's friendship and is otherwise identical, to the point where any Pokémon that can learn one can also learn the other. Frustration does see more use in competitive, however, thanks to Ditto: because you can choose your Pokémon's friendship value manually in some formats, you can easily get a 'mon with a move they can use effectively, but a Ditto with max friendship can't. (Of course, the opponent could have chosen a Ditto with minimum friendship themself for this very eventuality, so in practice, movesets use Frustration 50% of the time and Return the other 50%.)
  • Imprison prevents opponents from using any moves that the user also knows until the user switches out or faints. This sounds great, until you realize that you have to give up a move slot for it, so unless your opponent also knows Imprison, you're only disabling at most three of their moves. Furthermore, depending on which Pokémon you and your opponent are using, the chances of having any overlapping moves at all may be slim to none, so you're probably better off picking a different move entirely. It's a lot better in Double Battles though, as it affects both opponents. Given that 99% of Pokémon in competitive Doubles use Protect, and that shutting out Protect is a really big deal...
  • The move Rototiller is a buffing move for Attack and Special Attack. The problem is, not only does it only work on Grass-types and a Pokémon can't use it to buff its own stats (only three Grass-type families learn it anyway), but it affects the whole field, meaning it would buff opposing Grass-types if there are any. Growth already does the same thing much more practically and also doubles the stat buffs if used in sunny weather.
  • The Secret Art of the Tapus, Nature's Madness, halves the target's current HP. It sounds useful, but given how most of them have high offensive stats, any other move will likely deal far more damage than Nature's Madness will. Only the defense-oriented Tapu Fini gets any real mileage from the move.
  • Zygarde's Secret Art, Land's Wrath, is a weaker Earthquake that has the advantage of not hurting allies in Double Battles. Unfortunately for it, Zygarde can also learn Thousand Waves and Thousand Arrows, which are exactly like Land's Wrath in power, accuracy and PP, but also have added effects that render it obsolete. Core Enforcer also falls victim to this; a powerful Dragon-type special attack that nullifies Abilities... but only if the target is faster than it, and Zygarde has a higher Attack stat than Special Attack.
  • Deoxys' Normal Forme has no advantage over its other formes. The Attack Forme is a Glass Cannon, the Defense Forme is a Stone Wall, and the Speed Forme has balanced stats but is lightning fast. However, the Normal Forme is also a Glass Cannon, but compared to the Attack Forme, it's completely outclassed as the latter has higher attack power, while the former's marginally higher defenses still aren't enough to stop it keeling over after one or two hits.
  • Any stat-reducing moves can be this — damage could be done in the turn spent using said move, which usually ends the battle faster. Also, in PVP, the opponent can simply ruin all stat-debuffing efforts by switching out their Pokémon, which resets any stat changes. This does have some use, as more potent stat-reducing moves can almost force a switch. Averted with accuracy reducing moves as they force the opponent to essentially skip turns much like sleep and paralysis while also wasting the PP of the move they try to use — a great asset against low PP moves.
    • The spent turn makes almost all the difference here. Compare Growl with Intimidate: both reduce the attack of the opponent, but Intimidate is an ability that happens the moment the Pokémon enters battle, giving the user some additional survivability without needing to spend an extra turn to set up. This is why Intimidate is so popular while things like Growl get sidelined.
  • On paper, Z-Splash sounds fantastic: it gives a +3 bonus to Attack with no apparent drawbacks, and since many Pokémon which get Splash evolve into things with high Attack stats, this turns an infamous joke move into a Lethal Joke Attack. The problem is that it's a Z-Move, meaning that you use up your sole Z-Move for that battle on it. That 'mon also has to dedicate their item slot to the Z-Crystal, which forsakes more useful items like a Life Orb or resistance Berry. Splash on its own is also completely useless, meaning that if you don't use Z-Splash, that's one move slot that is totally wasted. It can be useful for the early game in the hands of things like Bounsweet or Magikarp, but Swords Dance outclasses it in practical terms.
  • Spite is designed for opponents to use to annoy you, as PP is less of an immediate concern and more of a resource to manage in long dungeons or caves. Since enemy Trainers all use set teams and only use PP to fight you, and Spite only drains 4 PP when many moves have more than 10, Spite is largely ineffective in your hands aside from the handful of dangerous attacks with 5 PP. Grudge is similar in an Awesome, but Impractical sense. It drains all PP from the last move to hit the user, but it requires the user to faint or it will fail, and even after the user faints, the target still has three other moves to use.
  • A number of moves and abilities in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series are virtually useless in the hands of the player, and exist mostly for the purpose of letting enemies make your life miserable. Some examples include Embargo, which denies the usage of items (enemies are almost never holding items and even fewer actually use them), Bug Bite/Pluck/Incinerate, which are weak and use or destroy an edible item in the target's possession (pointless for the same reason as the previous move), and Heal Block, which prevents any HP recovery for its duration (enemies go down too quickly for it to be worth using on them).
    • Mystery Dungeon has rivers and waterways in a lot of dungeons, which only Water and Flying types can cross (Fire types can cross magma, but it comes up much less often). If you're playing as a Water type, great! You have a whole bunch of paths around the dungeon you can use... but your non-Water or Flying allies can't. Given that your partner at the start of the game is guaranteed to be a different type to you, this means leaving at least one teammate behind. Depending on installment, the consequences of splitting the party vary from inconvenient to catastrophic.
• Nearly every offensive spell in Rune Factory is completely pointless, as the player character only has 100 RP per day to work with (for the most part) and the spells have a fixed RP cost. Life Absorber manages to be awful even by this standard, as its damage (and therefore its healing) is utterly pitiful, and its animation lock leaves the player defenseless for way too long. The future games polished the magic system and made magic actually useful.
• In Sailor Moon: Another Story, using a Holy Grail to transform Moon or Chibimoon to their Super states gave them increased attack powers. It also took away their healing powers and kept them from using Team attacks with the other Senshi (besides one team attack with each other). Not to mention the attack boost didn't put them that much above Saturn or Uranus (The game's designated tanks)
• Skies of Arcadia plays this straight with the silver-magic "Instant Death" spells. Bosses use these (with such high levels of success) so often that you must use Aika's magic-nullifying Delta Shield every single turn... which renders all your other spells useless! You're better off just using items, since they can replicate magic effects, cost no SP to use, bypass the Delta Shield and are piss-easy to acquire.
  • The reason that the instant death spells have such high levels of success is because they were built that way. Eternum has a 100% chance of instant killing anything not totally immune to instant death, and does a pretty decent amount of damage to anything that is. While this may sound like an aversion, it also costs a fairly large amount of SP.
• Grotius' frost shield in Telepath RPG Chapter 2 gives cold resistance (makes cold attacks do half damage) to any allies he use it on, the problem is: the only enemies in the game who deal cold damage are frost spriggats and you only fight them in one mission (you do fight a trio of frost spiggats earlier in the game, but Grotius isn't in your party at this time). To make it worst, the frost shield doesn't even work on characters who already have a passive elemental resistance so if your shadowlings have shadow resistance they won't benefit of the frost shield and because they are flying characters they are very usefull on this mission since most battles takes place on a boat surrounded by water so your non-flying units' movements are very limited.
• The Death Spell in Trials of Mana deals 999 damage (the damage cap) and can be used on bosses, but it only works on enemies that are at a lower level than the caster. The only character class that learns the spell can already OHKO most regular enemies with cheaper elemental spells, and if you're ever at a higher level than a boss, you've probably level grinded enough to not even need the Death Spell.
• Valkyrie Profile 2 often had useful status effects against bosses 0- paralysis, Frailty (which stopped enemies from healing themselves) and some are even susceptible to Stone.
  • The same happens in other Valkyrie Profile games. In the first, Might Reinforce and Sap Guard are two of the best spells in the game. There are very few spells that afflict just status, but they are capable of damaging so they are not entirely worthless. In Covenant Of The Plume, moves such as Suspend Motion are very useful (just not on bosses), and it's possible to Sap Guard or Sap Power the bosses.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has the Dementation discipline "Vision of Death" and the Dominate disciplines "Suicide" and "Mass Suicide", all of which kill human and lesser Sabbat mooks instantaneously. They do not, however, have the same effect on tougher foes, although they can do a lot of damage to them.
  • Although one boss-level opponent (Chastity, a Slayer type, can be one-shotted with Vision of Death, if you catch her before she's braced for combat (and a Malkavian can). If you're not putting points towards guns, don't have Bedlam yet, and are still feeling violent, there are also ambushes where it's a solid alternative to trying for stealth kills.
• The Way (RPG Maker): Not every X-LIFE ability is useful. Some abilities will likely never see use unless you intentionally go out of your way to set them up.
  • Early on, Traziun's Rejuvenate is pathetic. It only has a 70% chance of working, and when it does, only restores 8 HP to himself. Other healing spells have a much higher success rate, restore several times this amount, and most of them can also be used on any other character.
  • Most of the abilities that only heal Status Effects (or worse, only one specific one). While some ailments can be pretty nasty, specific statuses are rare enough that you'll almost never use the ability to heal them. One particularly notable example of this is the Fire Edge's Thaw ability, which does nothing but remove the Frozen ailment. At the time you can first get it, you won't encounter a single enemy capable of causing this effect for several more episodes.
  • Kloe's Mistreated and Revenge of One abilities. Their effects could be good: Mistreated deals damage equal to Kloe's maximum HP minus her current HP (making it stronger the less health she has), and Revenge of One greatly increases her attack, but can only be used while her health is below 50%. The problem is that they cost a huge amount of XL, meaning that nearly every fight she's in will end long before she can use them.
  • Slade's Outer Darkness. It costs a ridiculously massive 12 XL, when he only gains 1 per turn (2 if he spends the turn absorbing XL), meaning that most fights will be over long before you get enough to use it. Then, to make matters worse, the ability only works if Slade is at full HP; otherwise, it does nothing and half the XL cost is wasted. And as if that wasn't useless enough, the first time Slade is in your party, the only other party member is main character Rhue, who doesn't have a healing ability yet, meaning that if Slade took even a single hit in the entire fight, the only way he can heal himself is by wasting even more of his own XL on self-healing and hope that he doesn't take any more damage that turn or while recharging the XL he spent on that heal. Thankfully, he's strong in most other categories, so it's just this specific ability that will probably never be used.
  • Dirk's Earth Whisper is supposed to be a Random Effect Spell which summons a random creature to attack the enemies, but its chance of actually doing anything is pathetically tiny. At 4 XL a pop, when he only gains 1 per turn (2 or 3 if he spends the turn absorbing XL), it'll probably take you forever to get a useful effect out of it, and you'd be better off spending the time using his other skills, which aren't the best, but at least do something.
  • The bizarre fighting style used by Red Zero/Lexus and Cesta ensures that you'll almost never use any of their X-LIFEs. Most of them have nasty drawbacks, like damaging allies, being Cast from Hit Points, or immobilizing the user for two turns, and to make things worse, these characters don't passively gain XL each turns like most other characters: they have to use the XL Loan ability, which not only wastes a turn, but also steals XL points from other party members. This means that you'll have to waste several turns and a lot of XL just to even be able to use most of them. Thankfully, these characters also have good basic stats, so they're spared from the Low-Tier Letdown category thanks to being naturally tanky and doing decent damage simply by spamming normal attacks.
• The Wizardry series is a notable aversion to this. In the early games (1 to 5), status spells are often more useful than damage spells, since it prevents the random encounters from using their own debilitating status spells and instant-death skills on you. Low level status spells often remain useful for the whole game, long beyond the point where the damage spells of the same level can't keep up.
  • In Wizardy 8, again status spells will usually help the tide of battle more than damage spells simply because of how dangerous random encounters are, and being able to shut down a group of enemies for even one turn can save a lot of healing later. Party buff spells are another important factor that can turn a terrifying fight into a manageable one, though it's usually better to cast them out of combat, before entering a dangerous area, so you don't waste precious turns on them.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Directional attacks are generally discouraged. Unlike the previous two games, you can't use auto attacks when moving, and your movement in battle is slowed to a crawl. It's difficult to make the most out of arts such as Sword Bash when you have to go out of your way to move to the enemy's backside, all the while making your connection with your blade, a tag-team partner for the driver you control, weaker.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: A classic example; debuffs are nearly useless because battles against weaker enemies don't last long enough to need them, and stronger enemies have such high resistances that they're basically immune. There are ways around the second problem, but they're generally considered more trouble than they're worth. This renders Taion's Tactician class and Ouruboros form largely useless, and Segiri's Machine Assassin class is even worse. Taion's Ouroboros form deserves special mention because it is a Game-Breaker when set up properly... but since Eunie's Ouroboros form does the same thing with buffs, which are far easier to set up, he's ignored.
• Most ether effects in the first two Xenosaga games were virtually useless, with the notable exception of spells to change a character's attack element that were available in Episode 2. Episode 3 largely.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games

• CABAL Online:
  • "Regeneration", a skill learned by all class early on, heals around 6 health and mana per second for 223 seconds at max level, which is a negligible amount that a medium potion can cover in an instant. Useful in early levels where HP is less than a hundred but loses its usefulness around level 20 or when players can acquire items with HP/MP steal.
  • Melee Classes can actually learn some magic spells, but it only deals a fraction of damage compared to their caster counterparts as their INT stat is usually low. Some low-level players use one or two in order to use it to lure monsters and quickly replace them with better skills once unlocked.
  • Wizards has a debuff skill called "Weaken" used to weaken enemy defense to make them easier to kill. The problem is that it only targets a single enemy and Wizards prefer to attack groups of mobs thanks to their large AOE attacks so debuffing one enemy when there are hundreds surrounding it is useless. It has some use in PVP to debuff enemy players, but only decreases attack by 21 points, which is negligible when end-game players have stats reaching a thousand points.
• City of Heroes shows why designers tend to put these limitations in place. Archvillains and Heroes (not PCs) sport the standard immunity (most of the time) and are always highly credible threats. Anything below that level of resistance will be sleeping, frozen, confused, blinded, suspended from the ceiling and have its accuracy, resistance, defense, damage, regeneration and anything else floored to minimum values before it can say, "these are support effects any other MMO would kill for!" As a result, Player Versus Environment gameplay tends to end up being rather easy.
  • This leads to a very rewarding experience if you play the Dominator class. Dominators rely on status ailments to disable foes while dealing decent damage and even get a Super Mode to make their status effects harder to resist. When properly built, Dominators are the only class that can overcome an Archvillain's status protection by themselves (Controllers can also achieve this feat, but it usually takes 2 or 3 of them).
  • City of Heroes support effects are very powerful indeed, however, their power is mitigated by the sheer number of opponents you face. It's ludicrously easy to debuff a Mook into oblivion, then again, your average solo mission pits you against groups of 3 to 10 bad guys at the same time (depending on the faction you're fighting). Numbers are exponentially larger for group endeavors and boss battles. Note also that direct damage is equally over the top — any class (properly built) can pretty much turn a roomfull of Minions into chunky goop in a flash. The real challenge of any mission is always the boss fight, not the slosh through the hordes of faceless goons. Par for the course in a superhero game, innit ?
  • Technically, Hero/Archvillain/Giant Monster types aren't completely immune to status effects, they just have really high protection against them and cause them to wear off faster.
    • It's much easier to actually mezz a boss in a raid situation, which are only possible in the field. Since all Mezz effects stack, enough Controllers or Dominators (Or Warshades, or Fortunatas, Or...) could hold the Hamidon, if not for very long. (Indeed, prior to its revamp, this was a requirement in order to keep the raid from wiping).
  • Played straight with some powers that are of questionable utility. In particular the powers that make enemies intangible (Dimension Shift, Black Hole and detention Field). While they did render enemies unable to attack they also made it impossible for players to damage them which meant the team had to pause until the power wore off.
    • Time Bomb from Devices and Traps was another example. The damage wasn't bad but it took a total of 24 seconds to deal damage in which time you could kill the enemies more efficiently with other powers.
• Defender missiles in EVE Online. One race's ships are heavily reliant on missiles, and another race's make moderate use of them, so anti-missile missiles would seemingly be quite advantageous. However, many missile types can take two or three hits before being shot down, Defenders must be manually fired, and -critically- defenders cannot intercept missiles fired at friendly vessels. In all but a few niche circumstances, it's just easier to load offensive missiles and shoot the bastard.
• Everquest: The game has a couple big ones:
  • When the first expansion Ruins Of Kunark came out and the Level Cap was raised to 60, several classes got a varation of a spell at 60. For wizards, it was called disintegrate and automatically killed the target if the failed to resist, whereas druids and magicians got "banishment, and clerics and necromancers got "banishment of shadows", which were basically the same but only worked on summoned and undead creatures respectively. Sounds awesome, right. Well... no. For once, they cost an expensive gem every time you cast them, which is used up even if the target resists. For another, it only works on targets level 52 or under. Worst of all, even if it works the target gives no xp or loot, which would be pretty much the only reason to actually use it (as due to monsters getting a lot harder relative to players at high levels, a level 52 monster could well be a pretty hard fight for a level 60 player.)
  • A second one was actually pretty useful when it came out. Called "dire charm", it was technically not a spell but an Alternate Advancement (AA) ability that was first added with the Shadows of Luclin expansion. It was basically a infinite duration Mind Control spell (it lasted until it was dispelled, the caster died, or the logged out or zoned) that turned the target into your pet as long as it was on. The Enchanter version worked on all creature types, where as the druid and necromancer version worked only on animals or undead respectively. The downside was it only worked on creatures of level 46 or lower. While this wasn't so bad when the maximum level was 60 (as, for the reasons listed above, a monster around level 46 could be a reasonably good pet for a level 60), after numerous level increases and, even worse, the addition of mercs, made it nearly useless. Thankfully, it was eventually Rescued from the Scrappy Heap when they made it so after a certain level, it instead automatically charmed a creature of a certain level or lower with a fixed duration (most charm spells have a chance of breaking prematurely.)
• Final Fantasy XIV has several:
  • Zig-zagged with "Role Actions". These are abilities that are tied to role (not your class) and are primarily utility. While some see regular use (Most notably Rampart, Esuna, Peloton, Swiftcast, and Lucid Dreaming) plenty of players make it all the way to level 90 without even knowing they're there since they are extremely situational.
    • Arm's Length (previously a Paladin ability) has the ability to negate any knockback or draw in effects. Problem is most abilities that inflict either of these things are either a) cast instantly, so you don't have a chance to use this ability in preparation, or b) cause a bunch of damage (if not outright death by knocking you off a ledge) and thus are much better off being dodged entirely. When it was given to all tanks and physical DPS as a role action (at the same time Surecast was given the draw in/knockback immunity and changed to a healer and magical DPS role action,) bosses compensated by having more telegraphed raidwide knockback effects, and oftentimes there were ways around it just in case. (Meaning it was mostly a panic button) Arm's Length was also given an effect that slows the attack speed of any enemy that hits the user, making it a powerful mitigation tool in dungeons.
    • True North for melee DPS nullifies all direction requirements. This sounds extremely minor - but when you consider a lot of classes used abilities that would deal more damage if hit from a certain area (the flank and the rear) this was manna from heaven. Especially for monks pre Endwalker who absolutely needed to be able to alternate between hitting the flank and the rear. And even during Endwalker, if you're facing a stationary boss or just cannot move to the "rear" or "Flank" for whatever reason, Popping True North is a good way to keep unloading the damage.
    • Head Graze for ranged DPS sounds useful on paper, as it can interrupt abilities and you can use it from long-range. The problem is very few enemy abilities can be interrupted, and even the ones that can usually aren't worth the trouble. Players can make it all the way until the final battle of their role quest in Endwalker - which can only be done at level 90 - before they ever actually use it.
    • Addle, Repose, and Feint reduce the target's damage. This works on everyone - not enough that it's noticeable (outside of a few times), but clever timing actually can keep it almost permanently on enemies.
  • Black Mages have three abilities with very dubious uses. Freeze causes AOE damage and inflicts Bind, but the spell has to be aimed and can miss if your targets decide to move out of the way. Not only that, but Bind wears off if the target takes any damage afterwards. Blizzard II works the same way as Freeze, but the spell requires the user to be in melee range, which puts the player at risk of being attacked. Surecast has the next spell cast without being interrupted, but this gets outclassed by Swiftcast, which has the next spell cast instantly. Surecast was reworked to prevent draw in/knockback effects as well as keeping the original "uninterrupted spellcasting" effect, giving it a bit more use. Freeze was eventually reworked as well to be an on-enemy cast instead of a marker, and gives an Umbral Heart (without getting into it too much, this is a very important resource for them) making it much, much more useful as an AoE rotation. However, the buffs to Freeze ended up turning Fire II (the Black Mage's main AOE spell) into this, as now a Black Mage can spam the much more powerful Flare.
    • Scathe sounds, at first, like it would be useful, as it's an instant-cast spell that does damage and takes relatively little MP... except that unlike a bunch of other 'instant cast free damage' attacks other Jobs have, Scathe is on the GCD and thus it actually takes just as much time as an actual casted spell to use ^note  The Global Cooldown starts the moment a spell starts casting, not when it actually goes off. So if the GCD is 2.5 seconds and the spell has a 1.5 second cast time, then by the time it's casted you have 1 second left before you can attack again. Meanwhile, if you use Scathe you instantly activate the spell...and then have to wait for 2.5 seconds anyway. . Due to the fact the majority of Black Mage spells synergize with one another (which Scathe does not) and deal significantly more damage in the same amount of time, Scathe has practically no point.
  • Scholars are a healing class that are accompanied by a small fairy that helps them heal. One of their spells, Dissipation, dismisses the fairy to boost their own healing by 20% and refill their class resource, called Aetherflow. Sounds good on paper, not so much in practice. For starters, the primary ability that refills Aetherflow is only on a 60-second cooldown. Second, the 20% increase in healing is just about what the fairy provides, which can be boosted further with the use of a skill. But thirdly and fatally, the fairy doesn't return after the spell ends, which means you have to expend a decent amount of both time and mana to return her to battle. Since Scholars have slightly weaker healing spells to balance out the automatic healing their fairy provides, this is crippling in the long run. Dissipation was made less useless after it was changed to automatically resummon the fairy at the end of the spell's duration.
  • The Monk's One Ilm Punch removes a buff from the target, but the attack itself is weak and has a hefty TP cost to use. Most enemies either don't buff themselves or said buffs can't be removed.
    • On the other hand, One Ilm Punch is fantastic in PvP as it can remove a wide number of buffs that spike damage or are just flat out essential to a class's damage rotation. Developers agreed as this ability had been removed.
  • Repose and Sleep, which puts the target to sleep. Great for early game content, but it quickly becomes useless by level 50 due to nearly every single enemy being resistant to the Sleep status.
  • The Conjurer/White Mage Fluid Aura ability causes knockback, which is helpful in solo content, but mostly useless in group content and it only annoys other players who have to rely on enemy position to do the most damage. Stormblood removed Fluid Aura's damage entirely, making it a purely pushback ability that now gets used far less often. Shadowbringers nerfed Fluid Aura further by removing the knockback ability and changed the ability to be a ranged binding spell. The Machinist's Blank Shot ability had similar properties and the skill itself was eventually removed.
  • The Bind status effect. It roots the target in place until they take damage. The main issue is damage is a constant thing done by everyone, so Bind will never be used fully.
  • During Shadowbringers, Bards became this way in PvE. Their regeneration songs were removed, so they were changed to be more towards buffing party members' damage via increasing critical or direct hit rate, or just giving a one percent damage increase to everyone. The problem came from competition with the Dancer. Similar to the Bard, the Dancer was, in practice, supposed to sacrifice some of their damage potential for buffing other party members' damage. In comparison to the bard, they couldn't use as wide a variety and only put it on one person... except this gives a flat damage increase that's even greater than anything the Bard could do. Thus, most people would rather have a Dancer - because even if the Bard can give everyone a one percent damage increase or an increase to critical and direct hit rate, a dancer can just buff one person to deal way more damage than can be increased by the Bard - and they had a direct & critical hit buff (Devilment) that was stronger but lasted less than the Bard's songs. Fortunately Bards got Rescued from the Scrappy Heap in Endwalker.
• Mesmers in Guild Wars are dangerous in PvP due to their ability to drain their opponent's energy and disable their skills. In PvE, however, enemies rarely show detrimental effects from energy denial (making such skills typically used for their secondary effects if at all) while powerful bosses are typically immune to skill disabling (as they would be too easily rendered helpless otherwise). They were far from useless, just more focused on degen and using abilities that take advantage of Artificial Stupidity.
• Guild Wars 2, the sequel, gave racial skills that could alternate between stances, nukes, Summon Magic, as well as self-heals. However, they were Nerfed into this specifically to avoid Complacent Gaming Syndrome from kicking in.
• World of Warcraft: Over its history, many abilities have been found lacking by players, and starting from the Cataclysm expansion, the developers have been cutting back on them to clear keyboard space. Like the druid spell Thorns, which gave a damage reflect so weak that it was often neglected. Hunter's Mark, an iconic debuff applied by hunters, was made to be applied automatically when attacking a target, and in Warlords of Draenor it was removed completely as it was little other than a passive damage increase. Other spells that suffered from limited utility were given other effects, sometimes supplanting the original entirely, as with Feint, which went from reducing threat to protection from area-of-effect damage.
  • Control spells like fear, polymorph, stuns, slows, are crucial in PvP, but little used against mobs, as the weak ones are usually better burned down quickly and bosses are almost always immune. From the first expansion onwards, there have been raid fights made to test these abilities, usually by having "adds" pour in during a boss fight that might overwhelm the raid if not kept controlled. The highest-level outdoor zone of the Mists of Pandaria expansion, Timeless Isle, also made these useful while soloing as the mobs have powerful, predictable attack patterns (instead of just autoattacks) that had to be shut down; Warlords of Draenor followed this up with similar zones.
  • In Vanilla WoW, a lot of bosses were immune to a certain school of magic, or to bleed attacks. This was especially frustrating to mages, whose best spec (Fire) was unusable in the first two fire-themed raid tiers.
  • Warlock's Infernal and Doomguard were like this for a long time. Infernal summons a powerful demon, but the spell keeping it in control broke after 5 minutes, causing it to attack the user. It also replaced the Warlock's normal minion (which has to be resummoned with a long cast time) and could only be used outdoors. Doomguard was even more useless: The ritual required to summon it killed one party member at random, it had to be enslaved by the warlock and wasn't really much stronger than the normal minions. In the Cataclysm expansion, these were replaced with regular spells that summoned the demon for a short while with no restrictions but timers. They're still situational, but no longer completely useless.
  • The warlock spell Detect Invisibility was next to useless at first. It suffered from Crippling Overspecialization, as only helped against invisibility, not stealth. Only a few mobs in the game use invisibility, and on the player side it's only the succubus pet and a mage skill added in the first expansion. It was removed in Cataclysm.
  • Unending Breath was once useful for underwater quests, but the expansions have cut back on those and provided players with consumables for the same effect. The time a player can breathe underwater unaided was also tripled. Unending Breath was later buffed to also grant faster swimming.
  • Shadow Ward, Fire Ward, and Frost Ward were also useless, or at least hard to use outside rigidly preset fights. They absorbed shadow, fire or frost damage, but you had to know when that specific type of damage would happen or you were wasting mana. They also absorbed a set amount of damage, so they didn't scale with gear. They were retooled in Cataclysm, being expanded to absorb more types of damage and scaling properly, and later removed entirely.
  • World of Warcraft also had a useless useful weapon skill: Unarmed and fist weapons. It should be rather obvious why people don't even bother to level Unarmed unless they're looking for an achievement or the occasional "naked duels". Fist weapons, on the other hand, use the same skill as unarmed but had another drawback: Lack of selection. You could actually count on one hand the fist weapons in the classic game, and even in later expansions, they were usually the least common weapon type. The same could be said of the polearms skill, the next least common. Weapon skill was removed anyway because it was not only easy to do, but incredibly tedious.
  • Many talents (a character's specialization options) were hardly ever taken in the classic game because they were outclassed by others, and changing talents was expensive (with an escalating, uncapped cost). Lacerate, supposed to be the apex of the hunter's Survival tree, was reckoned to be the worst talent in the game (a damage-over-time that required a ranged class to be in melee and did negligible damage). Successive iterations pruned out the most useless ones, but the problem persisted at least until Mists of Pandaria when the talent system was changed to have fewer, more meaningful options.
  • Fear should have been an effective way of stopping a mob from beating down on you for a while, but is usually dangerous to use because it makes them run away, with the risk that it will aggro other mobs it runs into. Cataclysm added a glyph to make enemies cower instead of running.
  • The First Aid skill originally had anti-venoms, that could cure poison effects. Which should be useful, but 1) very few enemies other than players use poisons, 2) PvP is so fast that you don't want to fumble for an item you rarely use, 3) any mob or player that applies poison keeps re-applying it, 4) they only last a few seconds so it's not worth clearing after the fight. On top of that, the materials to make them were incredibly rare. Warlords of Draenor brought in updated versions that also covered diseases and applied a protective effect, but they were now unusable in PvP and again hardly any mobs used them.
    • First Aid as a whole was widely considered this for years, which led to its removal in Battle for Azeroth and its recipes being moved into Tailoring and Alchemy.
  • In Cataclysm, warriors got a wonderful new ability: Heroic Leap. You can select where you want to go and you soar through the air to reach your destination, dealing damage as you land. This sounds incredibly awesome... until you inevitably discover that it won't work uphill, won't cross gaps, you need a perfectly straight line between you and your destination, you can't jump over objects no matter their size ("Whoops, blade of grass no leap 4 u!") and half the time, it just refuses to work (Blizzard did a great job at fixing that though). No wonder people at the start of the expansion called it "Heroic Fail" and "Heroic No Path Available" (The error message that appears when either Heroic Leap or Charge cannot reach a target due to pathing issues.) However, it does prove to be an excellent gap-closer when it works, can be used to instantly get out of dangerous ground effects or can simply let you move around faster.
  • Thrown weapons were only usable by three classes: warriors, hunters, and rogues. Warriors and rogues (melee classes) only ever used them for the stats bonuses or to occasionally pull a mob they didn't want to approach, while for hunters, they were useless since they didn't work with most of their spells. Blizzard eventually acknowledged this, as the itemization system in Mists of Pandaria removed the third weapon slot entirely and all thrown weapons became Better Off Sold.
    • The removal of the third slot and hunters now carrying their ranged weapon in their main hand also made their ability to carry a melee weapon at all unnecessary, until Legion reinvented Survival as a melee specialization. (The same still applies to warriors and rogues wielding ranged weapons.)
    • There's also mages, warlocks, and priests' ability to shoot with wands; back in vanilla, they had to carry a wand for the purpose of managing mana while dealing damage, and with the third weapon slot removed, wands were also turned into main hand weapons. As mana regeneration rates were ramped up to the point that the only DPS specs left that had mana management as a gameplay mechanic were some iterations of Arcane mage and Affliction warlock, the shooting function was rendered useless as the bolts fired are pathetically weak compared to just doing your normal rotation.
  • Glyphs were introduced to tweak player characters, and the developers intended these to suit playstyles rather than increase damage/healing/survivability. However, there were some that marginally increased power, so many players felt they could not afford the slots for those that affected utility. Others were very situational and only used before specific fights, to be changed out of straight afterwards. They were retooled to have only cosmetic effects.
  • Warlords of Draenor introduced hundreds of treasures hidden throughout Draenor and later implemented treasure maps that can be bought after finishing each zone to show where all the treasures in said zone are. However by then most players had the Handynotes addon which shows them where the treasure are already. As a result, the treasure maps were instantly demoted to Better Off Sold.
  • One of the possible upgrades in the Legion class halls allowed players to instantly complete a world quest using an item that had a low cost and low research time. The problem was that it only worked for non-elite world quests (almost all of which can be completed in a few minutes) and it could only be used once every three days. The cooldown was later reduced to eighteen hours but players are still advised to take the other research option, regardless of what it is.
  • Some of the artifact traits were so weak, it's like they were added as an afterthought. For example, Frost death knights got one that doubled the range of one of their melee abilities. However, they're still very much a melee class and thus should never be outside melee range.
  • As for the Arms warrior artifact, it came with a built-in ability to scare every troll within a certain range. While it sounds interesting on paper, there's not a single application for it in-game. There are no troll enemies in the Legion content, the weapon itself is a poor choice when compared to even the questing greens from later expansions and any NPC from previous expansions is a slight annoyance at most. It also doesn't affect troll players in PvP, for obvious reasons. If the player wants to complete earlier content, this ability might even become harmful, since one of the achievements in Throne of Thunder requires defeating a Wolfpack Boss while all of its members stay within a small area.
  • Death knights have three unique weapon enchantments called Runeforging. One of them, Stoneskin Gargoyle, increases armor and stats by five percent and was intended to be used by tanks. However, in almost every situation, it's outclassed by Fallen Crusader, which has a high chance to boost strength (which increases armor) and heal the player.
• For all the classes, spells, and abilities in the game, Final Fantasy XI has relatively few:
  • Instead of Avatars, Summoners can call Elemental Spirits, which do have good spells... but are completely uncontrollable and generally weaker than Avatars. On the other hand, they can be consumed to restore the Summoner's MP, usually well in excess of what it cost to summon them in the first place.
  • Red Mages can put Merit Points into learning Phalanx II, Blind II, and Bio III... except Blind II and Bio III don't inflict significant enough penalties to the Accuracy or Attack (respectively) of any enemy strong enough to bother debuffing, and Phalanx II — while it can be cast on party members — always provides less damage reduction than regular Phalanx...and regular Phalanx can be cast on the entire party at once by using Accession with Scholar as a support job.
  • White Mages' ultimate spell, Full Cure, consumes all MP to...provide a single-target version of exactly the same thing their Benediction ability does, while probably still getting them killed by the massive enmity spike that results — and by the time it's unlocked, not only is Benediction's cooldown reduced to 45 minutes — short enough to use more than once in a Dynamis-Divergence run or Omen marathon — but any White Mage worth bringing should be experienced enough and geared well enough never to need it.
  • Blue Mages have more spells than any other casting job in the game...and not only are most of them never worth actually using, but they're not even worth setting just for the Job Traits they can enable. Firespit deserves special mention, because it's not only a weak nuke that costs way too much MP and doesn't even have an ecosystem advantage over any other monster type, but it got removed from the list of spells that can cause Voidwatch procs — which was the only reason anybody ever used it.
  • Black Mages, in a subversion of this trope, get the only version of Death worth using in the entire series — although this is for the massive Darkness damage it deals, especially on Magic Bursts, to enemies that don't die instantly. Nobody uses it for the instant-death effect.
  • Nearly all of the songs Bards can learn are at least situationally useful except Maiden's Virelai. Temporarily Charming an enemy for an uncertain amount of time — while, on top of that, being unable to control it the way a Beastmaster would be able to — is even less useful than it sounds.
  • Speaking of Beastmasters and their signature Charm ability — it's worthless. Jug pets scale to their master's level, and are typically stronger relative to their level than the local mobs anyway. At level 23, BSTs also unlock the Bestial Loyalty ability, which lets them call a jug pet without consuming the jug. The only BST JA more worthless than Charm is Tame, which, aside from theoretically causing a mob to lose aggro, makes the target less likely to resist Charm — and can also miss.

Real-Time Strategy Games

• Command & Conquer: airstrikes can deal heavy damage to buildings and totally obliterate infantry... except you are granted them only after you destroy all hostile SAM sites, including those inside the enemy base. That is, if you progressed to the point of destroying them, you are already wreaking havoc to their base and you do not really need airstrikes (except maybe for mopping up faster what remains).
• In Command & Conquer: Red Alert, a few missions from the end the allies acquire the ability to use the Chronosphere, a teleportation device. However, in game (more powerful in Cutscene Power to the Max), you can only teleport a single tank at once, and cannot teleport air units or APCs with people, with the given reason that the people in the APCs will die, which really doesn't make sense because the tanks have to have people in them (and a known cheat can disable it). This is largely corrected in Red Alert 2, where the Chronosphere has the power to teleport up to 9 small tanks, including vehicles with people in them, as well as some air units. In fact, you're able to teleport land units into the sea and sea units onto the land, making it somewhat of an offensive weapon too. Unshielded infantry still die in Chronoshifting.
  • Also in Command & Conquer: Red Alert, the Soviet Iron Curtain is somewhat useless, as it can only make a single tank or building invincible for a short period of time. Also corrected in Red Alert 2, the Iron Curtain then has the ability to protect up to 9 tanks, flak tracks, or terror drones.
    • The Iron Curtain can protect a valuable building that is in imminent danger of being destroyed, such as a Construction Yard, which can buy you time to kill off the invading force or repair it. Another (more fun) strategy is to send a M.A.D. tank towards an enemy base or attack force, and just as it reaches firing range, use the Iron Curtain to keep it from being prematurely destroyed since it's too slow to reach a target on its own armor. Place it in the prime center of devastation and deploy it — if it's still under the Curtain, it won't actually explode and damage everything until right after the effect fades, giving the enemy no chance to actually counter it.
  • In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge, the Genetic Mutator (Yuri's secondary superweapon) sounds good on paper, turning all infantry on a large area into Brutes at your command, but since it's rare your enemy will ever have a large collection of infantry in one spot, players will almost only go for the Not the Intended Use route - turning dozens of Slaves, which spawn for free, into Brutes, which can be sent to a Grinder to get $250 per unit, giving you a source of free money even if the map has no more ore in it. This actually makes the Genetic Mutator overpowered in multiplayer, to the point plenty of Game Mods try to either nerf it or give other factions a comparable support power to not lag behind.
  • In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, the Nanosphere's uses are more limited compared to the Chronosphere and the Iron Curtain. It deploys a large barrier around the area, shielding it from attacks and movement; nothing can go in or out of the barrier for as long as it's deployed. Given its esoteric application, it's safe to say that it falls behind the teleportation tactics of the Chronosphere and the Invulnerability of the Iron Curtain (the latter being notable as it can now be used to negate the Cast from Hit Points downside of the Dreadnoughts' ability).
• Command & Conquer: Generals features the Leaflet Drop support power for USA generals, which consists of a plane dropping leaflets on enemy units that disables them for a while. It's fairly rare to see massive blobs of units that stay still long enough to get caught in the leaflet drop, and it doesn't actually kill them, meaning it's a waste of a general point that could go towards another power like the Fuel Air Bomb.
  • The Chinese Nuclear Missile from the same game is the worst superpower when it comes to taking out GLA structures, since their special gimmick is that, when the structure is reduced to zero HP, it turns into a "GLA hole" which, if not destroyed, will eventually spawn a worker to come rebuild the building. The Nuclear Missile just causes a lot of damage at once and the lingering radiation it leaves doesn't harm the structures, nor the worker that is rebuilding it.
• StarCraft (Including Brood War)
  • Terrans have the ability Optical Flare that can be researched for their Medics. Even at first glance, its ability to reduce a single unit to one sight range unit and disable their ability detect seems very marginal, as if you're in a possition to blind a key unit of the enemy, you're probably also in a position to just kill it with conventional firepower. It does have one niche, namely, it can be used against Protoss Observers to disable their detection and reduce their sight radius without alerting the opponent to their Observer being under attack, but this won't work quite as well if the observer is patrolling or parked over the spot where you'd like to set up a structure such an expansion Command Center.
  • The Protoss have Hallucination that can be researched for their High Templar. It costs a moderate amount of energy to cast (100/250 possible energy points) to create a phony duplicate of a unit that receives double damage. The trouble is it usually competes with the powerful Psionic Storm spell that is usually more desirable to cast. One subversion however is that it can be cast upon an Arbiter to create duplicates to screen the real one against taking damage while flying in enemy territory so it has a greater chance of success recalling a significant number of your units into their base; this is especially helpful if there is overwhelming anti-air emplacements protecting the base.

Third-Person Shooters

• Scramble Overdrive (S.O.D.) for most of the playable characters of Bullet Girls Phantasia is an excellent way to wipe out hordes of enemies or create much-needed breathing room with an AoE attack, but some character suffer from having useless effects. For example, Yurina's automated howitzer turrets have pitiful damage output, fire their explosive rounds slowly and at an arc, and mostly spread enemies around, making it take longer for you to finish them off yourself. The smoke also tends to obscure enemies, making it more difficult to do so.

Turn-Based Strategy Games

• Advance Wars gives us Colin's Power of Money^note Boosts attack power by 3.33% for every 1000 money in reserve, Sasha's War Bonds^note 50% of the damage you inflict is converted into money, and Kindle's High Society^note Boosts the attack power of units on properties by 140% and grants an extra 3% attack power for every property under her control. It's not that these are bad powers (save for War Bonds, which is terrible) but that these are their Super CO Powers — their regular CO Powers, Colin's Gold Rush^note Multiplies your funds by 1.5x, and is so cheap it makes Colin an outright Game-Breaker, Sasha's Market Crash^note Reduces the enemy's CO Power Meter by 10% for every 5000 money in reserve, which is the go-to way to prevent enemy Dual Strikes, and Kindle's Urban Blight^note Inflicts 3 HP damage to all enemy units on properties, which devastates their newly produced units, drains their funds for repairs, interrupts captures, and forces them to keep units off of properties and their high defense stars, are just so much better that you'd have to be insane to use their gimmicky supers rather than their regulars. In fact, in competitive PVP, using any of these supers is a meme akin to saying "check" in Chess: it's a way of signaling to your opponent that they really should yield as you have them so outmaneuvered that you are essentially throwing away your power meter.
• Civilization IV has several Civics that are of varying usefulness. Probably the most notorious for this trope, however, was Environmentalism. In its original form, it gave your cities a small Health boost, plus one Happiness for each forest and jungle within your culture's borders. The problem is that you got a production bonus for clearing jungles and forest, and you can't use Environmentalism until very late in the game, so by the time you can access it, it gives you almost nothing. Fortunately, Firaxis retooled this with the Beyond The Sword expansion — in it, Environmentalism gave a substantially larger Health bonus, another one for building Public Transportation, and a money bonus for Windmills (which are useful anyway) and Forest Preserves (which give Happiness on their own). This made Environmentalism a very useable late-game Civic.
• Fire Emblem
  • Sleep and Silence staves are guaranteed a 100% hit in the SNES game provided the user's magic is higher than the target's magic defense, but are severely downgraded in the GBA installments: their accuracy now depends on the target's Resistance, and anything higher than single-digit Res is likely to result in hit rates too low to even bother with. Silence is even worse, since it's obviously only useful against magic users and even the weakest Mage will probably have enough Res to be totally immune to it.
  • In Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, the Sleep Staff is a definite aversion: You're given one in an Info Conversation on Chapter 3-13... given the boss of that chapter is the strongest unit in the game, and he gets much stronger back up on turn 10, you pretty much have to take him out, before he kills you horribly, but has a very low RES stat, meaning he can be hit by the staff... it's pretty much your only hope.
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War has the "Berserk Sword" — a sword with a chance to inflict the Berserk Status upon foes. Seems useful, right? Well, it's only got a range of 1. Which means: Either the enemy is still going to attack you on their turn or, have already used it. So it's kinda pointless. However, the Staff has a 100% chance to hit if the enemy's MDEF is lower than the caster's MAG stat... which is an aversion. Hilarity ensues when that hits the right target, like say, That One Boss, when she's next to the Final Boss or in the final chapter, an Elite Mook with an HP to One weapon while he's next to the Final Boss.
  • Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 has the Beo Sword, which has in-built Vantage and Wrath skills. In any other game, this would be an absolutely insane combo, as Wrath simply works by guaranteeing or at least greatly increasing the chances of getting a critical hit when the unit who has it is at low HP, which pairs well with Vantage's ability to allow a unit to attack first even on the enemy phase. However, in this game, Wrath instead guarantees a critical hit to a unit that is counterattacking, which means it'll only ever proc when attacking an enemy with Vantage.
  • The series also loves giving skills that increase the Skl stat to archers/snipers, classes that already have absurdly high levels in that stat. Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones even gave them a skill that allowed a guaranteed hit when activated, despite their chance of hitting probably never dropping below 100 due to the aforemented Skl stat.
  • The Corrosion skill also tends to fall into this. It depletes the durability of an enemy's weapon when it triggers—awesome! Except most enemy weapons will take at least two triggerings of Corrosion to deplete, and it only activates on about one in every three hits, meaning an enemy will probably die long before Corrosion manages to break their weapon. Also, plenty of enemies carry more than one weapon, so they'll just switch to their backup. Also also, it can trigger on valuable items that you would want to steal or loot.
  • Lifetaker in Fire Emblem: Awakening seems like a good idea, healing you if you kill an enemy. Only works on your turn though, so it's useless if you want to restore the hitpoints to survive an onslaught of enemies, and overshadowed completely by Sol or Aether (which has Sol embedded), both of which have a chance to restore HP on each hit and even works on enemy turns.
  • Defiant Skills in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, gained usually from mastering a Master Class (save for Defiant Strength which is from mastering the Advanced Class Hero), significantly raise a certain stat when the unit is at 25% of their HP or lower. While usually an Awesome, but Impractical, Defiant Defense/Resistance are the most useless of them because getting a unit's HP low just to raise their defense or resistance is very pointless and they'd probably fall over anyway on enemy phase.
    • Ferdinand is capable of gaining the Defiant skills^note  any unit can as long as they meet the class requirements., as well as Vantage and Desperation, two Intermediate Class skills that he can gain quite easily as they use his proficiencies (Desperation especially given that his natural class progression is the Cavalier route.) However, as those require to be at lower than 50% HP (or 25% for the Defiant Skills), these skills are in direct conflict of his personal skill Confidence, which boosts his Hit and Avoid by 15 at full health, far more than what the Defiant Skills could offer. While Vantage allows the unit to attack first on enemy phase and Desperation allows for follow-up attacks, the latter is redundant as Ferdinand gets the Combat Art Swift Strikes, which also guarantees follow-up attacks, and you'd be much better off keeping Ferdinand at full health to dodge tank with Confidence.
• Heroes of Might and Magic
  • The majority of the View spells were useless in first and second games. They let you view a specific object (artifacts, mines, monsters, ect.) through Fog of War, which is way too minor to care about. The view spells were consolidated in two in the third game, and those two were actually useful (even if they were situational).
  • Destroy Undead/Holy Word. In every game that it appears, the spell is underwhelming, as it only ever works on undead, and is not even that strong. Exceptions are in the first game (where, while it only works on a single creature, said creature definitely belongs among Demonic Spiders, and the spell just oneshots the entire stack it's aimed at, no questions asked) and fifth (where it works not only on undead, but also on demons and orcs).
  • Protection From Element spells in the third game, but especially Protection From Water. All the spells do is reduce the amount of damage you take from offensive spells of that element, and the only offensive Water spells are Ice Bolt and Frost Ring, neither of which are particularly powerful.
  • Scuttle Boat from third game. It destroys a boat within a certain range with a fairly high chance to fail. While it's possible to do shenanigans with it on island maps, for the most part it's useless.
  • Disguise is already underwhelming (it simply obscures the size of your army to your opponents), but it's completely pointless in single player because of The All-Seeing A.I., or in multiplayer if you're going last since it works until the next day, not until your next turn.
  • Land Mine and Quicksand are this in the third game, since they randomly plop up to 8 mines/quicksand puddles all over the map, and it's all but guaranteed that the mines/puddles will not appear where you need them to. Both spells are better in later games — ability to place Quicksand where you want it to makes the spell into a borderline Game-Breaker in the fourth game, and Fire Trap (renamed Land Mine) in the fifth game places mines within a 5x5 area that you target, making the spell much more controllable.
  • Fortune and Misfortune in the third game, especially the latter. Spending a turn boosting your luck is a dubious plan in the first place, but lowering enemy luck is even worse, since there is no "unlucky strikes" from having negative luck.
  • Hypnotize in the third game requires the target to have less hit points than the amount determined depending on spell power. However, if you have enough spell power to Hypnotize the enemy, you have enough spellpower to just kill them with, say, Meteor Shower or Chain Lightning. The spell was buffed massively in the fourth game, becoming an absolute Game-Breaker against anything not immune to mind magic, while in the fifth it's still strong, but is now much more balanced (with the hypnotized squad taking a huge initiative penalty).
  • Magic Mirror, since it's so unreliable and completely outclassed by a lower level spell. Why waste mana casting Magic Mirror, which only has a 40% chance to reflect a spell, when you can cast Anti-Magic instead, and make a stack completely immune to magic instead?
  • Sacrifice is almost completely inferior to Resurrection, a lower level spell. It sacrifices a friendly stack in order to resurrect another stack based on the amount sacrificed, while Resurrection has no downside and is even in a much better spell school. The only advantages Sacrifice has is that it can resurrect Gold Dragons, which are immune to all but Level 5 spells, and it lets you keep the resurrected creatures after the battle by default while Resurrection requires at least Advanced Earth Magic to do that.
  • Cleansing in the fifth game is basically renamed Dispel Magic from earlier games, except with a caveat that it has a pretty big chance to fail to remove anything if the enemy has greater level than the remover, even more so if the caster is not trained in Light magic.
  • Summon Hive in fifth game, for a very simple reason that every time the summoned hive casts Wasp Swarm, it pushes the hero back the unit order, essentially making it all but impossible for the hero to ever get another turn if the hive remains intact.
• Shining Series:
  • Shining Force II gives you the "death" spell, at a late point in the game where most of the enemies you'll be fighting are undead or demons, both immune to that. Of course, it does work perfectly well on the player party.
  • Desoul (the aforementioned instant death spell) shows up in the original Shining Force, and is a fair bit more effective on enemies. Instead, the spell Muddle literally does nothing in the original game, but in the second is a style of confusion spell that can be at times quite amusing. Not that it's any more accurate than it was before.
  • The remake averts this — well, partially. Status infliction spells are still worthless; but as for status buffs, especially Narsha's? These easily veer into Game-Breaker-level of usefulness. Heck; one of the best ones is one that buffs your movement. In a strategy game where you're limited by how much you can move at once? That's really useful!

First-Person Shooters

• The Borderlands series:
  • In Borderlands the entire shock element is useless as it's only useful for removing shields that only appear on a select number of human enemies and are easily dealt with without shock weapons. Furthermore the Hunter class gets a late game ability to bypass shields all together. Their only real use is against a few enemies that spawn is a very specific location and the hardest boss in the game.
  • Borderlands 2: Krieg has the ability to change his last stand move from kneeling down and firing guns to running around throwing dynamite. On the surface, it sounds useful — running around gives you a better chance, and at start the dynamite is more powerful than most weapons. Come a few levels, however, and the guns start outpacing the dynamite by far, and since the only times you'll need to use the last stand is when you're likely next to enemies, you don't need to run around finding someone to use the dynamite on.
  • Trespass is also an example. It lets you bypass shields, but outside one type of enemy, shields are meaningless defenses. It is further hurt by being the cap skill on Sniping, which is inferior to Gunslinger, the pistol tree, even in terms of boosting sniper rifle damage.
• The Scrambler perk in Call If Duty Modern Warfare 2. In theory, it lets you jam enemy radars, so that they won't know where you and your teammates are. In practice, it tells them exactly how close you are, because the scrambling effect is dependent on how far away you are from your opponent; the closer you are, the greater the effect. An enemy can still read their radar perfectly fine until you're practically breathing down their neck. There's a killstreak reward called the Counter-UAV, which does it much better and with no drawbacks.
• In Deep Rock Galactic: Almost all of the equipment players can take which crowd-controls the monsters of Hoxxes IV falls into this category: while you can electrocute monsters to slow them down, or poison them to slow them down, or freeze them to slow them down, or set them on fire to make them take damage-over-time, the ordinary swarm of Glyphids and Mactera are sufficiently vulnerable to simply by shot (crushed with a pickaxe, blown up, et cetera), that you never need to do these things to them; by contrast, the big monsters (Oppressors, Dreadnoughts, Bulk Detonators, Korlok Tyrant-Weeds and even Q'ronor Shellbacks) tend to be either outright immune, or so resistant to building-up these effects and shake them off so fast once affected that taking any perk upgrades towards these ends feels like pissing into the wind.
• The Morph Ovum from Heretic changes creatures into harmless chickens with a handful of HP for a short time., while the Porkelator from Hexen is basically the same but pigs instead of chickens. Unfortunately, they aren't nearly as good as they seem, mainly due to Contractual Boss Immunity being in full effect (and applying even to Degraded Boss monsters), and most of the Mooks having low enough hp that shooting them is usually faster and easier any way. The only time they are really that great is when a bunch of fairly powerful Mooks (such as ophidians from Heretic or Slaughtaurs from Hexen) are gathered in an enclosed area (as the items shoot a total of five projectiles, but the spread is so great it's hard to hit more than one or two unless they are bunched up.) Curiously, in Hexen II the Seal Of The Ovinomancer (which turned enemies into sheep) was a lot more useful, due to their being no Degraded Bosses and several of the normal mooks being quite nasty, with Shadow Wizards and Fallen Angel Lords being the best targets.
• Shotguns in Rainbow Six: Vegas have a fair chance of instantly killing enemies and (at higher difficulties) players with one shot at shorter ranges. A second or so of sustained automatic weapons fire is sure too. The net result is that enemies with shotguns are unholy terrors as they can kill you before you can drop them with automatic fire. But using shotguns yourself is Russian roulette, because the enemy might survive and kill you before your pump-action shotgun gets a second shot. Your chances of a One-Hit Kill are probably higher than the enemy's, but that doesn't matter since the Mooks are expendable, while they only need to get lucky once to send you back to the last checkpoint.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • The Sandman was subject to a lot of complaints and balance changes. Eventually, Valve made a drastic change by removing the full stun (except at the maximum range) and replacing it with a "scared" animation that disabled weaponry and reduced movement speed. Due to a bug, however, the 'stunned' players could still fire their weapon. Once that was fixed, however, it became a pretty balanced sidegrade.
  • Depending on the play level, the Razorback alternates between subverting the trope and playing it straight. It replaces your secondary weapon with the ability to absorb one backstab from an Enemy Spy - if a Spy tries to backstab you, they get stunned for a few seconds, a loud noise plays, and you're unscoped from your primary sniper rifle. The Razorback is also always visible on a Sniper, much like the Demoman's Shield secondary weapons. At lower levels of play, the item is almost completely useless, since in most cases a Spy can just shoot you with their revolver. There's also no guarantee that there's a Spy on the enemy team, and if there isn't, you're giving up your secondary slot for nothing. However, at higher levels of play, the item is almost broken in how useful it is - it directly counters one of the two hard-counters that a good Sniper has in the entire game (the other counter is another Sniper killing them first). Snipers at higher levels of play are usually playing around teammates, who can and will turn on the Spy that gave himself away. This makes it almost impossible to deal with those kind of Snipers, who already dominate players of lower skill levels due to just how powerful headshots tend to be.

Simulation Game

• RollerCoaster Tycoon
  • Both the original game and the sequel have several prebuilt designs for roller coasters that are quite easy to plop down and have a new ride in a matter of in-game days, including queue, but a few strategic problems occur with most of them. First, outside of the Steel/Looping coaster "Shuttle Loop" and the Corkscrew's "Boomerang" design, most of these are behemoths that cost a fair amount, and the added tracks for OpenRCT2 seem rather more built for the metagame rather than standard scenario play. The designs being large also contributes to another problem: either they just won't fit in all but the largest scenarios or the terrain will force you to lift them up above the ground, further increasing the costs. Third is that larger designs either need more trains on the track or need to be ridiculously fast in order to get a decent amount of guests through, the first of which is inefficient compared to small tracks that only need one or two trains while the second will rack up the intensity to where guests are more likely to turn away than ride it. Finally, unless you're aiming for realistic parks, a large coaster attracts as many guests to the park as a smaller coaster without having a huge boost to the Excitement/Intensity/Nausea ratings, and thus the ride's ticket price and value. Meaning you could spend your starting $10,000 on either one game-prebuilt design or build 2 to 3 different smaller custom designs and get triple the guests without losing much in park value or ticket price. Most of the time, the better way to game the system and earn ridiculous amounts of money is going to be with the smaller designs; the Shuttle Loop design with an On-Ride Photo piece can earn $15k-$18k a year by itself between tickets and photos, all for a cost of less than $1000.
  • Certain scenarios come with amazing ride selections but give trouble for certain things like ride height or guest intensity preferences. Unless you are playing Gentle Glen, gentle rides usually get the worst treatment: while being cheap and efficient as well as general park staples, most restrictions will counter gentle rides and certain thrill rides like the Pirate Ship or Twist. Either they won't get many riders at all unless under certain conditions (few guests will ride things like the Observation Tower unless it's raining), will suffer height limitations (the Haunted House and Ferris Wheel are available in most every scenario that restricts building heights and are too tall to build), or will have problems that factor into satisfying guests ("harder guest generation" requires building large and exciting coasters, while a higher intensity preference means even a happy guest will not ride a single gentle ride outside of the Monster Trucks).
  • The Cash Machine from 2 originally seemed like a solution to a vital problem: guests running out of money every time you charge for rides or as soon as you charge a substantial entrance fee. While it is true that the Cash Machine can keep guests in the park longer by allowing them to access money, there's two major problems. With most ride ticket scenarios, the Cash Machine comes in almost too late to really make it effective considering the more difficult starting conditions and you'll already have tons of money without it. In entrance fee scenarios, it's actually more effective to let the guests run out of money, leave to reset the soft guest cap, and cycle in new guests to pilfer their cash from the entry. It's also not retroactively applied to scenarios once you get OpenRCT2, so you can't use it on prior scenarios where it may have been effective without cheating it in.
• In Shepherd's Crossing, several of the defensive and counterattack skills learned by dogs are not nearly as useful for the player as they are when used by foes. This is because the most dangerous and hard-to-take-down hunts in the game are dangerous because they use counterattacks, which only trigger when they're attacked directly. Foes that directly attack your dogs are rare, and due to the unpredictable nature of who those foes will even attack, defensive and counter skills end up being less useful.
• SimCity 4:
  • The Carpool Incentive Program ordinance is bugged and doesn't do anything. It's supposed to reduce traffic.
  • The Nuclear Free Zone ordinance is just useless. It prevents you from building nuclear power plants, but the game is a Command & Conquer Economy so you can simply not build any if you hate them so much. It gives a small boost to agricultural demand, but agricultural demand is ridiculously easy to generate anyway, and it also boosts Mayor Rating a bit, but Mayor Rating can be raised in other ways, like playing the game correctly. On the downside it hurts High-Tech industrial demand, which is incredibly more useful.

Unsorted

• Age Of Pirates 2: City of Abandoned Ships contains a particularly egregious example. In one of the most involved and lengthy quests you can eventually gain a special item that allows you to resurrect any of your companions who get killed in combat (and who, given the game's relatively realistic setting, would otherwise be gone for good). Sounds great, except for the fact that raising them makes all items in their inventory disappear, which means that, assuming you can even carry all that additional weight, you have to loot the corpse first before you resurrect your companion, and afterwards give all the stuff back to the crewman in question, and all that in one of the worst inventory systems ever conceived in a computer game. In short, rather than actually use the ability it's easier to choose the lesser of two annoyances and simply load a saved game, hoping the bugger won't die this time.
• Thrown rocks in Ancient Domains of Mystery are an inversion of this: even to low-level player characters, they are usually just a nuisance, while they remain a very useful weapon for player characters of every level. The latter is because missile damage in ADOM is primarily dependent on the fixed damage bonus that grows with experience, with negligible hit dice (1d4 for rocks) from the missile itself.
• BlazBlue: Yuuki Terumi's Venomous Bite super is a counterattack that does a lot of damage, is active for a very long time and has less positioning issues that most counters because Terumi walks forwards while using it. However, it ends in a long period of vulnerability and it doesn't counter lows, throws, aerial attacks, crossups or rising attacks like Inferno Divider. If that sounds like the majority of most character's movesets, that's because it is. The real kicker is that it consumes super meter whether you land it or not, and Terumi has five other super moves so there's always likely to be a better use for that resource.
• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has the Healing power. Even maxed out, it will drain all your MP to only heal you for a few hundred health at best. It's outright useless in an actual combat situation and generally not worth it anywhere else unless you don't mind waiting around for ten minutes use it repeatedly. Even then it's often easier to just find a save room.
• The pocket watch in the Castlevania games is largely a Useless Useful Item. Paying 5 hearts to stop time for 5 seconds sounds like a good deal — until you realize that almost all the bosses, and even some of the stronger normal enemies, are still able to move during the watch's use. The watch is occasionally useful in some of the game's more Nintendo Hard segments (such as some difficult platforming sections with flying enemies around), and does quite well against Medusa, the second level boss in the first game (one of the few bosses in the entire series who is vulnerable to its effect), but it's largely useless, and hardly ever more useful than any other weapon you can carry. Its only real use is to be able to catch certain superfast enemies (such as the Tsuchinoko in Aria) so you can get their rare drops.
  • This is averted in Haunted Castle however, as it makes the watch cost only two hearts, making it actually efficient, and it can affect bosses in the game.
  • The watch in Castlevania: Circle of the Moon ordinarily only stops regular enemies, slows down larger ones, and doesn't do a thing at all to bosses. There is an item crash spell available later in the game that enhances the watch to make it stop all enemies and even slow down bosses (including Dracula himself), but at this point you have much better spells that actually do damage. There is one enemy in an obscure location that only shows up near the end of the game, the Mimic Candle, that almost mandates using the stopwatch Item Crash to beat it due to having high HP for something that disappears in an instant, and it drops the best luck boosting accessory in the game, but the time spent grinding for a slight chance of slightly improving drop rates could be better spent grinding for the actual items you want.
  • Again in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, we've got Dark Metamorphosis, which allows our vampeal hero to heal with the blood shed by enemies... of course, most things, exploding into flames on death and dying in one hit, or being animated armor or skeletons or whatever else, don't bleed; the most powerful early-game weapons (Jewel Knuckles and spells) won't draw blood from any enemy; and the late game most powerful weapons (Crissaegrim, Alucard Shield, spells) are such complete game breakers you'll almost or entirely never will need to heal.
  • Similarly, an early-acquired weapon, the Red Rust, will curse enemies (preventing them from attacking). Of course, it's slower and weaker than punching with fists, has a random chance of failing to swing on Alucard's part, and only affects the two Doppelganger boss enemies in the game.
  • The Venus+Griffin card combo in Castlevania: Circle of the Moon increases your intelligence stat by 25% while active. The problem is, Intelligence only affects your MP recovery rate, and it costs 4 MP/sec to use, so you're unlikely to have high enough base intelligence to make it worth using outside of Magician Mode. You're also only able to to equip one spell at a time, so even if it's useful to you, you have to go through a menu to equip it, then go through that menu again to switch to another spell to use the extra MP.
  • Also, from Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, there's Scutum. It's the first shield spell you get, and is entirely useless against attacks that aren't directly above you. Guess where the hardest-to-dodge attack of the end boss comes from?
  • Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin has one for each character. Jonathan's Taunt skill is next to useless, as he's either the only one on screen anyway, or using it as a partner just starves Charlotte of MP. Charlotte's Sanctuary spell, which clears all abnormal status effects from everyone in range sounds good, but status affects are rare enough, and the spell has a punitive MP cost and a charge time rivalling the duration of Poison in the first place. However, incomplete vampirism is an abnormal status, and Taunt is amazing for keeping the Climax Boss away from Charlotte while she casts.
• In Crop Rotation, there's a random chance for crops to have a mutation, or a secondary powerup at the cost of extra water needed to plant them^note except for the Root mutation, which reduced the water cost instead. However, there's a small chance that the mutation is exactly the same as the crop's basic powerup, making it redundant and only adding more to the crop's water cost.
• Inverted in The Dark Spire. At lower levels, damage spells are almost worthless, but the sleep and armour spells for the Mage and Priest, respectively, practically trivialize encounters. This is also inverted at higher levels in spite of having good damaging spells because all ailment spells have a very good chance of activating and crippling an enemy group (if not every enemy in the battle). The instant death spells? They're high level because they work.
• In earlier early access builds in Darkest Dungeon, this was a problem. Attacks that only applied Bleed/Blight were not worth using because straight-up damage killed things more effectively, and in a game where every turn counts, this was important. Many non-defensive self-buffs were also a problem for the same reasons: except for boss fights, it wasn't worth wasting a turn and get hit to gain a slight damage boost. An update fixed this issue by adding PROT (which damage over time effects ignore) to some enemies and lower their HP in return and either make self-buff skills even better or add more utility to them (Example: the Highwayman's "Take Aim" was changed to a "Tracking Shot" which added some damage with the same buffs). The inclusion of corpses also indirectly buffed Bleed/Blight since enemies that died from them don't leave one.
• In Deus Ex: Human Revolution several of the augmentations really aren't worth wasting your precious Praxis Points on.
  • The Analyze augment lets you see how likely you are to be detected hacking a distant node and what its contents are. Fortify lets you make your captured nodes more resistant to the computer kicking you out. In both cases it's more practical to just focus on the Hacking Stealth augment, which ups the odds of you being able to completely hack the computer and get everything you want without the computer ever realizing what's going on.
  • The Stealth Enhancer lets you see a guard's cone of vision, how much noise you're making as you travel and where the guards are. The Cooldown Timer lets you know how long it'll be before a guard will stop looking for you and return to their patrol. In both cases it's less expensive and does the same thing if you just remain in hiding until they give up, watch their actions on your radar and remain crouched so you don't make noise anyway.
• Diablo II used to be chock-full of these — before synergies were introduced, characters would spend their early levels not wasting skill points on any low-level spell because it would be supremely ineffective even before the end of Normal, much less Nightmare and Hell difficulty. But even after synergies this trope persists, with several spells per character falling victim to Useless Usefulness:
  • Necromancers: The Weaken curse has never been useful; despite cutting monsters' physical damage by a third and having a wide area of effect, it is unnecessary in Normal and doesn't do nearly enough mitigation in Nightmare and Hell. It is also outclassed completely by Decrepify, which cuts monster offense in HALF, along with the monster's defense AND speed. Talk about obsolete!
  • Amazons:
    • The Magic Arrow spell lets 'zons fire arrows/bolts without worrying about ammunition. Yet arrows are so cheap, so many monsters drop them and they stack to such huge amounts that this never matters.
    • Ice Arrow. Completely outclassed by Freezing Arrow aside, it doesn't even synergy well with FA, only providing a measly 0.2 extra second of freezing per hard point.
  • Paladins:
    • Conversion is one of the worst attacks in the game. While it does have a chance of converting monsters, doing so usually takes much longer than just killing them. Even worse, after they change back, they retain your beneficial aura (or are immune to your offensive aura) for a short period of time. So the demon charging at you has your own Fanaticism...
    • Spells like Conversion that turned the enemies' strength against themselves were the cornerstones of the only viable character builds (Conversion/Thorns, Revive/Iron Maiden/Corpse Explosion, Static Field spam) in the initial release version of the game, due to a lack of high powered weapons and absence of spell scaling. As the game evolved towards escalating player damage and enemy health in updates and the Lord of Destruction expansion pack, they became largely useless.
    • The healing aura, Prayer, heals far too little to be any use in combat, even at the beginning of the game when you get it, and out of combat you can just portal home to heal. Making matters worse, it has the distinction of being the only aura to cost mana. Thanks to synergies, even if you think it's worth the skill points, the actual Prayer aura is still worthless because its synergy with two other auras gives them the entire healing effect without the mana cost. Their Blessed Aim and Might Auras are also outclassed (by Fanaticism and Concentration), plus the former two can be obtained on a mercenary.
  • Barbarians:
    • Two words: Increased Stamina. More words: You never really have trouble with stamina, and even if you do, there are always better places to spend your skill points.
    • Leap is almost totally outclassed by Leap Attack, which lacks the limited range of Leap. The only function left for Leap is if you want to knockback a group of mobs for some reason.
  • Assassins: Psychic Hammer, a hilariously low-damage skill that really can't do anything other than maybe knocking people out of desync.
  • Sorceress: Blaze left a trail of fire behind you as you ran and damaged any enemies who crossed it but did so little damage that it was functionally cosmetic by Act IV (of 15).
• Diablo (1997):
  • Magic (as in the elemental type 'Magic', separate from 'Fire' and 'Lightning'). It was represented by three spells, including the high level Bone Spirit which removed 1/3 of an enemy's current health. Because of this spell, almost every single enemy in the higher difficulties was magic immune, making it and the other two magic spells useless — ironically even if it did work on everything, it would be far weaker than your elemental spells which could kill any non-immune monster in one hit or all monsters on the screen in two.
  • The unofficial expansion Hellfire attempted to take care of the Magic immunity problem by implementing a few monsters vulnerable to magic but not to fire or lightning. Unfortunately Bone Spirit couldn't actually kill the monsters because it did fractional damage and the other two magic spells were so weak that players simply treated them like triple immunes in the regular game: Stone Curse and bash them.
• Dicey Dungeons:
  • Items such as Nightstick and Spark fall under this category. Being able to inflict as much Shock as you like sounds useful, until you realize that funneling your dice into your Dagger would do even more damage up front.
  • Inverted with the Jester. Their first level-up reward grants them two of these items, along with an item which is powered up if the enemy has a certain status effect. For example, Ice Shatter deals the same damage as a Sword, but deals 3 more if the enemy is Frozen.
• Disgaea and healing spells. They are useful for much of the game (the entire story mode, for example), but as soon as you start getting into the post-game, battles tend to be an offense only affair. Eventually both you and the enemies will be so powerful that any attack will kill in one hit (advantage yours, since you go first), and in-combat healing is meaningless.
  • For the same reason, defensive buff spells. Shield is useless late-game, since no matter how high you get your DEF you still can't take hits. Magic Wall is likewise unnecessary, since RES acts like DEF for magic spells (and boosts healing magic, which as stated above is useless). Speed Boost gets a pass, since SPD is a damage dealing stat for Fist and Gun users, and enemies who miss you entirely are still a possibility. Offensive buffs in general remain handy.
• Fever mode in DJMAX Technika 2 and 3. Activating it converts all green MAX hits during its activation period to rainbow MAX hits, and a rainbow MAX is higher than a green MAX...by 1 point...out of 300,000. Therefore Fever is only ever useful if you are capable of getting a Perfect Play (all MAX hits in the chart, rainbow or otherwise). To add insult to injury, activating Fever requires tapping a button in the top right corner of the screen, which can distract you, causing you to get a COOL or worse in the process, thereby rendering Fever useless for the remainder of the song.
• Eternal Darkness has a few spells that have little use, even in the right situations:
  • Bind is a spell that forces an enemy to turn against other monsters. Whole cool in theory, it is unlikely that the monster you manipulated will actually kill anything due to how slow enemies attack in general. The spell is found at the very end of the second to last chapter (though you can cast the spell much earlier if you know how) and it's only used to cause two Horrors to fight each other so the barrier they make disappears.
  • Reveal Invisible reveals things that are invisible. The spell is only used for a handful of hidden doors and other items, but if you cast it with the Mantorok rune, it makes you invisible instead.
  • The summon spells (Trapper, Zombie, and Horror) can be used to summon creatures and use them under your control to fight other enemies. Controlling the monsters is somewhat clunky and it's simply faster for you to kill enemies yourself. The summons spells of each flavor are only needed a few times to solve puzzles.
• Certain idea groups in single-player in Europa Universalis IV, particularly considering that you can unlock them only once every several years (thus what you choose matters a lot depending on the situation), and that you have to invest precious monarch points:
  • Naval Ideas are definitely the epitome of uselessness against the AI due to the impressive incompetence of the latter in maritime warfare. You can easily deal with any navy you face even without boosts, particularly if you already have bonuses through traditions and national ideas (which can be considered useless too for the same reasons), or you hire naval advisors (which you can dismiss whenever you don't need them anymore).
  • Espionage too has long been completely useless, since whatever useful perks it could grant could be obtained through other idea groups, and the remaining was basically just if you wanted to role-play. You never really needed to smear a nation's reputation, nor inciting revolts was ever successful unless the rebels were going to win anyway. In later updates Espionage was buffed, now giving some more capabilities, but moreover being useful against the AI spamming spies in your country which have become really annoying.
  • Zig-Zagged with Administrative, since its main perks reduce mercenary costs and core-creation costs. Usually, if you field the expensive mercenaries it's because you have the money but not the manpower, i.e. you depleted it through a massive war or you are a small country not bent to expansion. If the latter is the case, you often won't need the core-reduction cost, which instead can be really useful to warmongering kingdoms that quickly expand and would have access anyway to a huge pool of manpower unless the player triggers a coalition. Particularly if you already have unlocked Quantity, which gives you tons of cheap manpower.
  • After some threshold, the otherwise almost mandatory Quantity can become this, since you can become so large and prosper that your base manpower pool is enough to deal with everything, you swim in money so you don't mind reducing your armies cost, and the only thing you would notice are annoyingly larger rebel stacks. It depends on your nation and starting position.
  • It should be noted however that these things are totally averted in multi-player games, where Naval is mandatory if you want to confront an intelligent human that is as competent as you in naval warfare, espionage can often be useful to disrupt your human adversaries, and you will never cease to need more manpower.
  • Some national ideas can appear to be highly useful, only to become useless because of other factors such as your government, position or tech level. For example, Venice has a bonus to republican tradition which becomes totally useless if you end up becoming a dictatorship and then a monarchy. France has a −50% Native uprising chance paired with a +50% Native assimilation, which come online if you decide to actively colonize on your own, otherwise are just a waste of a slot (the intended solution is: if you choose France first or later you should do colonize). France also gets a +2 Tolerance of heretics paired with a +2 Tolerance of heathens, which are later really useful if you end up controlling a large multi-religious empire, but become quite useless if for strategic reasons you decided to keep a single-faith or the Protestant reform got stomped early by other countries, it depends on how the situation evolves. The Ottomans on the contrary have a +3 Tolerance of heathens which is immediately useful since they are a Muslim country starting in a region with many Christian provinces and with the concrete possibility of expanding into Fetishist provinces in Africa and Hindi/Buddhist provinces in South Asia, but it becomes useless for certain achievements that require to convert all provinces to Islam or if you pursue a religious conversion path for its strategic bonuses.
• Used in Fate/stay night in the form of the "Projection" magecraft, which allows users to create objects out of their own Mana. However, since it relies on the user's own image of the object, the result is always degraded from the original and disappears eventually. Basically, "if you know everything about the object and its material composition, why not just get the resources and physically make it?" However, it is also from this "useless" spell that the protagonist gains his powers. Technically, he's cheating because he's not even using "Projection" magecraft in the first place, as he's actually using an application of a Reality Marble.
• In Holy Diver, the Blizzard spell is most useful for temporarily freezing Lava Pits, but it also freezes some types of enemies. Most later enemies, let alone bosses, are immune to this secondary effect.
• Elemental spells and weapons become less useful as your reach higher levels in Infinity Blade since most enemies will have some elemental resistances. The God King will become immune to everything after beating him once making Healing the only magic worth using against him. Appropriately enough, this means that the eponymous Infinity Blade, which deals more non-elemental damage than any other weapon in the game, is the best weapon to use against him.
• Jak 3: Wastelander:
  • Dark Jak's Dark Strike creates two orbs connected by lightning that are thrown at distance. They're intended for breaking roadblocks ... and that's pretty much they're good for. While they deal okay damage, you need to be in Dark Jak form to use them, their aim is hard to control, Jak cannot move while throwing them and the orbs move painfully slow. They are obtained quite late into the game, so just use Beam Reflexor that will deal with enemies much quicker than this fancy move.
  • Light Jak's shield creates an impenetrable barrier around Jak as long as you hold associated button. This makes it already annoying to use when you have to keep shield and shoot enemies as well, but it also consumes light eco. It is much better to just use that eco with another Light Jak move, Light Regeneration, to just recover lost health, especially since it also stops the time until Jak's healed and regeneration is obtained sooner than shield anyway.
  • The last weapon, Supernova, is obtained six missions before the game's end. While it does destroy all enemies within large radius (seen or not), it consumes 10 (8 with ammo efficiency upgrade) shots of rare Dark Eco ammunition, which you can have 20 of at most. It also destroys all vehicles, so this weapon is a no-no during missions that require them or when you don't want to trek afoot or on JetBoard.
• Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier has several upgrades that allow your non-combat Eco powers to do damage (in the case of Eco Construct's upgrades, they improve its damage). The thing is that even with all of these upgrades, these powers are less practical than your guns, melee attacks or Eco Amplifier (the power that is intended for combat). Eco Shield requires you to ram into enemies with your shield, which is difficult since the shield makes you move like a hamster ball and the shield takes damage in the process. Eco Construct requires you to stand still when you use it, becoming a sitting duck for enemy attacks. Eco Rocket Jump only affects nearby enemies.
• Kamen Rider Chronicle: if you've got the required immunity and a Buggle Driver Zwei, you can use your KRC gashat to become Kamen Rider Cronus. As Cronus, you can stop time. Cronus is necessary in order to face Gamedeus, the Final Boss. You might expect that Pause would work on Gamedeus, but nope! It doesn't work in the slightest. Plus you need ten years to build up that immunity. Oh yeah, and the current Cronus is a megalomaniac CEO with a massive god complex who is working to extend the game forever. You are screwed.
• Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver has glyph spells. They're only attainable by completing increasingly complicated side-levels (some of which would be nigh-impossible without a strategy guide). Since the bosses are all puzzle-fights (figure out their one weakness, which always involves environmental weapons), the glyphs are useless against them. In addition, the "magic points" necessary to use them are limited and hidden. On top of that, only two of the 6 glyphs could consistently kill normal enemies. The only reasons to actually use them are laziness (they restrain/kill enemies in a large area), gratification for completing the ridiculous puzzles necessary to find them, and because they look cool.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In the first The Legend of Zelda:
    • Part of what makes the second quest so difficult is that certain "useless" items get a lot more mileage on their next go around, as they become essential to finding many helpful power-ups. The only indication you receive of this is finding said items much earlier in the game than before.
    • The Red Candle. Unlike the Blue Candle, you can use it as many times as you like in an area without having to leave and come back. However, you get it so late in the game that you've likely already found everything hidden by that point anyway. Just one dungeon after you find it, you'll find the Magic Book which allows you to get unlimited fires by using your wand anyway.
  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: The Thunder spell can instantly kill all enemies on screen, but the cost is so expensive that most players won't ever use it save for the Thunderbird boss which is invincible until you cast Thunder on it. The "Spell" spell, which turns most enemies into Bots, is more useful in areas with many strong Mooks, as the much lower magic cost is worth the loss of EXP.
  • Bombchus in the Game Boy Color Zelda games. In the N64 games they could sometimes be useful to hit far-off bomb sites that a normal bomb can't reach, and The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass made their use essential, but The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games? You'll never need them. Ever. They're completely pointless. Worse, you can only get them by completing ALL of one game and at least a significant portion of the other. By the time you get them, you don't need them.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
    • Farore's Wind. Pretty easy to find some time before the Time Skip occurs, and its purpose is something of a save point in dungeons that let you teleport to almost any room you set it up in (almost like Ooccoo in Twilight Princess about 8 or 9 years later), but it eats up a decent amount of magic, and it isn't very helpful in contrast to sheer patience or soft resetting. Worse, every single dungeon in Ocarina of Time is designed so that the boss's lair is near the entrance; only the Shadow Temple has any real resistance in between once you've solved all the puzzles. Thus, it largely fails to even save much time if you're trying to restock just before a boss. However, it can be useful in cases where you need to get to a specific room quickly (like the room with the switch controlling the twisted corridor in the Forest Temple), or where you're prone to falling long distances or getting caught by a Wallmaster. It can also function as a puzzle Reset Button if cast twice in succesion. Sure, it's not useful in its most obvious purpose, but there are ways to put it to work.
    • Nayru's Love makes Link invincible for a good solid minute, but it eats up a huge chunk of your magic meter. While the barrier is active, you can't use any item that requires magic such as the elemental arrows, the Lens of Truth, and other magic spells. Even Link's spin attack won't get the shockwave effect while the barrier is up. Since you get Nayru's Love near the Spirit Temple (which is the second to last dungeon in the game), you'll have very few, if any, uses for it and you can easily save magic power by simply farming for hearts or drinking potions to recover from damage, both which are loads cheaper compared to the expensive spell. The only times it's potentially useful are against Iron Knuckles, which do three hearts of damage per attack, and in the escape sequence from the Collapsing Lair after beating Ganondorf, when you've got flaming rocks raining down on your head nonstop.
    • To complete the trinity, Din's Fire! Murder on your magic meter, check. Half the enemies in the game are immune to it, check. The Keese catch fire and aren't harmed, and can now roast you? Check. It's an awesome giant explosion of flame... that you'll never, ever bother wasting time and magic power to use. (Okay, there's this one place where you need it to light all the torches at once...)
    • As for the Magic Arrows, the Ice Arrows are an optional item from the Gerudo Training Grounds Bonus Dungeon near the very end of the game, and as such nothing in the game requires them. While there are some tricks you can do with them (like freezing Bongo Bongo's hands in the Shadow Temple, although you'll usually have beat him before getting them) you obtain them so late in normal gameplay that they are usually never used. This was one of the reason they were given a major utility upgrade in Majora's Mask.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
    • The Bomblings work like Bombchus from the N64 games, and are even less useful. What they work best for (hitting far away or otherwise hard to reach targets) could be handled much more easily and quickly by just combining regular bombs with arrows for exploding arrows.
    • The Dominion Rod is the most useless of the dungeon items. It is only used in the Temple of Time and is used for exactly one more thing afterwards (after going through a long quest to get the thing working outside the Temple of Time). However, when it is used, it can pack some serious damage to enemies thanks to the living Armos, but it only really works inside the Temple of Time because the statues outside of it cannot attack.
• Mario Party 5: The miracle capsules. If the requirements are fulfilled, it takes away all of the stars of whoever's in first place and gives them to whoever's in last place. Unfortunately, meeting these requirements are almost impossible. The miracle capsule itself is a very rare capsule to get, and to activate its effect, a player will need three of them, taking up their entire capsule space, so odds are, the game will be done before you collect enough of them. To make matters worse, since it gives the stars to the last place player regardless of who collects the capsules, there's no guarantee that collecting them will help you. More often than not, it's just wasting space.
• Mega Man:
  • In most games, the player may obtain a shield weapon which supposedly offers protection. But there were problems with many of them. Basically they would either disappear after anything hit it or were limiting in some way (such as if Mega Man moved, the shield would be "shot" in that direction). Later shields tend to be more durable or more damaging, though. The Rolling Shield in Mega Man X is a slight aversion, but the only enemies that don't cause the shield to disappear are Goddamned Bats.
  • From Mega Man:
    • The Super Arm is a rather powerful weapon, but its usefulness is restricted since it relies on external blocks to pick up and throw, which are absent from a majority of stages. Said blocks also don't respawn if you die. What's more, most minor enemies that die to the Super Arm in one hit die to most other weapons in one hit.
    • The Hyper Bomb throws a cartoon bomb that bounces a short distance and explodes after a delay. This delay is long enough for most would-be targets to get out of its explosion radius, and enemies that would take large damage from it are more quickly dispatched with other weapons like the Fire Storm.
  • Flash Man's power, the Time Stopper, is rather useless for 95% of Mega Man 2. It does exactly what you'd expect, but at the cost of disabling Mega Man's Mega Buster for the duration of its effect. It can't be turned on and off at will, doesn't damage enemies, and it burns through energy at a fast clip. Its only real use comes against Quick Man, where it can be used to help with the long sequence of insta-death beams in his stage, or knock off a major chunk of the boss's life bar (but generally not both).^*That being said, a creative player can use it to blaze past obstacles that otherwise slow them down (such as preventing the Goblins in Air Man's stage from using their horns/sending out Petit Goblins, and skipping some Frienders in Wood Man's stage by freezing time before they have a chance to spawn in the next room). Funnily, it was basically given a Suspiciously Similar Substitute in Mega Man 4, the Flash Stopper, which has much more reasonable consumption, can be turned on and off, and allows you to shoot while it's active.
  • Mega Man 3 has a few, but an argument can be made that the game has an arsenal of these:
    • The Top Spin, disregarding the fact its weapon consumption is problematic due to how it registers hits^*Long story short, it counts every frame of contact with an enemy as a use. Even invincibility frames., has an issue that it requires touching the enemy. In a game with Collision Damage. You're not even invincible while using it. Result: anything not one-shotted by it will hurt you.
    • The Spark Shock stuns enemies. Cool right? But it doesn't actually do any damage, you can only have two enemies stunned at any time, you can't switch weapons while the "stun field" it generates is on screen, and if another enemy collides with a stunned enemy, they swap places.
    • The Gemini Laser may sound cool because it bounces off walls, but unless you're a geometry master, good luck hitting something on the rebound. Plus it's a Painfully Slow Projectile. The one biggest problem it suffers from, however, is that if any bit of the laser is still bouncing around, you can't fire another one.
    • The Search Snake has two uses: defeating Gemini Man and the Holograph Mega Mans (technically three if you can't/don't want to use the Top Spin on Gamma's second form). There's no level with fake floors where the Bubble Lead (which it acts as a faster version of) would've been handy and it does so-so damage. Not to mention a lot of enemies in this game are either on platforms (which the snakes can't reach), are shielded, or are flying.
  • Mega Man 4: The Skull Barrier is generally seen as the one real dud among its weapon roster. While it does let you move with it, unlike the Leaf Shield, and has a reasonable amount of uses, it takes a massive hit in durability due to breaking after taking any damage at all, and it also can't be used as a projectile like the Leaf Shield could. Thus its poor offensive capabilities make it difficult to use in its designated boss battle — Dive Man can be caught in a pattern fairly easily by keeping your distance and out-shooting him, but the Skull Barrier requires you to get up in his face, at which he tries to ram you. Even against environmental hazards like the falling rocks in Drill Man's stage, the Pharaoh Shot's charged-up sun orb that hovers above Mega Man can do this job better as it won't disappear after one hit.
  • Mega Man 5 has a large number of dud weapons:
    • The Gravity Hold sends all foes on-screen flying into the air. Sounds cool... except that it actually does very little damage (everything only takes one point!), it uses up a hefty amount of energy per-use, and while it's neat seeing your foes fly into the stratosphere, it also means you're not getting any powerups from them.
    • The Water Wave sents three water spouts charging ahead, and they can block shots, but each spout disappears with one shot, it can't be fired if you're not on solid ground (not even moving platforms will cut it), and its energy usage makes it deceptively easy to run low on it.
    • The Power Stone sends three large stones spiraling outwards. Assuming you can manage to hit anything with it, they deal so little damage to foes it's generally not worth using such an inaccurate weapon. In addition, it takes a while for the stones to go offscreen (and therefore it takes a while before you can fire again).
    • The Charge Kick, like the Top Spin, is a move that requires making contact with the foe in order to use. However, it can only be used by sliding, making it even more hard to use. Fortunately, you're invincible while using it... mostly (Wave Man's Water Wave will still hurt if you Charge Kick into it).
  • The Sakugarne in Mega Man II, obstensively an 11th-Hour Superpower, is a weapon that requires Mega Man to Goomba Stomp foes. Besides the fact that it comes so late in the game to be of any real use against enemies, like the Top Spin it doesn't make him invincible, meaning damage will ensue. It also drains energy constantly, as if that wasn't enough.
  • Mega Man X3 has the Gravity Well, which is a One-Hit Kill that affects the entire screen... if the enemies are small, easily-killed enemies. Any larger enemy (i.e. the ones you'd want it to kill) is completely immune to its effects. It's also useless against any boss that isn't Blast Hornet, who does take a good bit of damage from it. Parasitic Bomb downplays this — it's a One-Hit Kill on enemies it can latch onto and deals measly damage to those it can't, but the range of enemies vulnerable to it is wider than Gravity Well's.
  • Mega Man X: Command Mission suffers from this greatly, although spells are relegated to items. Unless they are attack or healing items, none of them will ever work... EVER.
  • From Mega Man Legends we have a myriad of the special weapons: both grenades, both mines, the blade arm, the shield arm, and both the powered and spread busters. While they're useful if sufficiently upgraded and mastered, you'll never touch them since you can only carry one weapon at a time and that one weapon will be something effective like the machine arm (obtained very early in the game and deadly if upgraded), active buster (homing missiles. 'Nuff said), or the vacuum arm for farming zenny.
• Power Bombs in Metroid Fusion had their usefulness reduced. While still incredibly powerful against enemies, you don't need them to progress like in other Metroid games — their sole use in exploration is to find more power bombs. Metroid: Zero Mission doesn't make them much better, as the one obstacle they seem necessary to pass (blocks in the path to the Final Boss) can be skipped entirely through a hidden tunnel; once again, their only other real use is finding more items.
• Monster Hunter:
  • The series has Armor skills that fall under this. Increasing your max HP or stamina is pretty much useless as not only are there easily acquired items to do just that and possibly more, eating food before heading out on a hunt can also do this. You're gonna eat before every hunt, and unlike every other food effect, getting HP or Stamina doesn't depend on the combination of food but rather the level of food (for stamina) and the stars that appear on the menu (for health). If you levelled up the canteen a few times, you'll rarely even have use for the items that do these, let alone ever present armor skills.
  • Mind's Eye prevents your weapon from bouncing off an enemy regardless of sharpness. It may be useful earlier on if you don't have access to higher sharpness weapons or sharpness increasing skills, eventually it'd be better to just increase the weapon's sharpness level as there are very few monsters, and of these monsters only a few certain body parts that deflect weapons regardless of sharpness. You're gonna sharpen your weapon once it decreases anyway due to the lower damage output as well as the fact that a deflected weapon strike does not actually decrease the damage you do with the attack, only preventing you from comboing (unless you're using a hammer in which case it actually lets you combo faster than if your attack went through completely) and leaving you more open than a non-deflected attack (which is less of a problem once you learn a monster's patterns). The only real problem that results from deflected attacks is that they cause weapon sharpness to decrease faster, but giving your weapon another level of sharpness means you can let the weapon drop more levels before sharpening, which in the end means you'll end up sharpening your weapon LESS than if you didn't deal any deflected attacks at all. Plus, the required sharpness to attack a body part without the attack deflecting decreases to the point that you probably won't worry about deflected attacks once that part is broken, which will happen if you're attacking the deflecting body part enough to worry about your attacks being deflected.
  • There are quite a few food effects that help out on quests that don't do with hunting a monster, such as helping when carrying something or climbing a wall. These quests are few and far between as the focus of the game is hunting. Thankfully, as food effects, you can choose them with those quests and then just forget about it.
• Noita is full of these. As well as completely useless wands. Most, at least, try to be Not Completely Useless. But the deercoy? The dropper bolt? And that's to say nothing of any wands with Shuffle on, which might contain a bevy of very excellent spells, but be completely unusable, because who wants to put their survival up to the RNG? Touch of Spirits is also almost useless, but as it's an Easter Egg it doesn't quite fit. Still, turning everything to booze? At least it's flammable.
• Palworld:
  • The game lets you capture humans in the Pal Spheres. Aside from laughs, there's really no reason to do so given that they only have one attack (a simple punch), even if they were armed before capture; poor stats; can't be taught additional attacks via skill fruits; lack Pal abilities; and have only the handiwork skill (at level 1). The only ones that are halfway decent are the Merchants/Black Marketeers, who can still buy and sell items/pals from you if assigned to a base, and Syndicate Elites, whose punches somehow hit as hard as rocket launcher explosions.
  • Depresso's Partner Skill is Caffeine Innoculation, which makes it go into hyperspeed movement for a while. This does not decrease its attack cooldowns or increase its work speed, so all you get is a fast-moving Depresso who still attacks and works at the normal rate. That and Depresso isn't a ridable Pal, so its boosted speed isn't even all that useful.
• PAYDAY 2 has several class skills that are either too situational or worthless to be of any use:
  • The Mastermind's Stockholm Syndrome lets you use civilians to revive you if you go down and acing the skill has civilians give you ammo when they revive you. The skill becomes completely useless in levels that do not have civilians in them and if you do manage to have civilians around, they cannot be tied down in order for them to revive you. Considering that SWAT tend to rescue civilians fairly quickly, you will barely get any use out of the skill.
  • Dead Presidents for the Ghost tree boosts the value of loose valuables that you steal. Handy in the start of the game when you're hurting for money, but you'll quickly gain lots of money from your paydays, making the skill useless.
  • Lucky Charm in the same tree did nothing but slightly boost your chances of scoring a rare item drop. What makes this more infuriating is the skill is at the very top of the tree, requiring you to spend a ton of skill points just to get to it. The skill was eventually replaced with a slightly more useful skill called Camera Loop, which scrambled a camera for a few seconds so you could sneak past it. However, you could only disable one camera at a time and the skill becomes worthless once stealth fails.
• Quest for Glory:
  • The early games generally do a good job of keeping the various utility spells useful. By the later games, particularly in Quest for Glory V, the focus shifts increasingly, if not totally, to the combat magic, making the utility spells such as Fetch and Open much less useful. Probably the the best example of this trope however, is Juggling Lights. It's needed precisely once in the entire series: during the mage duel with the Leopardman Shaman in Quest for Glory III, and otherwise serves no real purpose. It can also be used on one screen of Quest for Glory IV, but this usage is entirely optional. Thermonuclear Blast can also be considered this, as when cast it destroys everything within a 10-mile radius, including the Hero. It can be used in the confrontation with the Dragon of Doom in Quest for Glory V, but results in a Non-Standard Game Over.
  • The Paladin's danger sense as well. Usually when it triggers it's only a vague and undefined warning and the player is aware they're in a dangerous place or situation without needing it (since this is a Sierra game, that covers about 90% of the game screens). On the rare occasions where it does provide a specific warning, the danger is generally blindingly obvious.
• The Cure and Detoxify spells in Ragnarok Online. The former cures Blind, Confusion, and Silence, while the latter cures Poison. Both spells are covered under a single, dirt-cheap, Green Potion purchasable at Tool Dealers in almost every town.
• Due to the sheer amount of weapons it's featured over the years, Ratchet & Clank has encountered this with more than a few of them.
  • Ratchet & Clank (2002) has Walloper — an electric boxing glove that propels you forward and deals okay damage, but has a brief cooldown after being used when Ratchet cannot move, so it is basically unusable if there are more than one enemies unless you want to get hit.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando manages to feature several, thanks to not really cutting any weapons out during development:
    • The Hoverbomb Gun, which fires a floating mine that deals a colossal amount of damage. The catch? The bomb moves incredibly slowly, and to direct it over obstacles, Ratchet has to stand still. The upgraded Tetrabomb does nothing to improve this, firing five mines instead of one. While this gives it a higher damage output per shot than even the mighty RYNO, the slowness of the mines renders it practically useless.
    • The Spiderbot Glove can be quite useful in pre-emptively striking enemies before they're aware of you, but doing this will cause them to notice you, and many enemies aren't killed by the spider. More than this however, the terrain will prevent the spider from getting to enemies in the first place, as it cannot jump. Thankfully, the upgraded Tankbot Glove gives the spider a turret and bomb lobber.
    • Most infamous of all is the Zodiac. It has a high damage output that annihilates any and all enemies in one shot, turning them to ash. The downside? This only applies to any visible enemies; anybody not on screen or hiding behind something is not affected. Bosses aren't affected in any situation. It also locks you in place while firing, fails to fire if you take damage before it shoots, and can't be fired while in the air. Making this worse is the fact that it's more expensive than the more reliable RYNO, it only holds four shots, and each shot costs 10,000 bolts at the vendor.
    • The Lancer gun you get in this game does wonders early on, however the power stays very low and doesn't improve much at all during the course of the game. Meaning that the gun really just exists to waste ammo.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal introduces Infector, which temporarily brainwashes enemies to do your bidding, but its effect lasts too short for larger enemies and trying to brainwash the smaller ones is not worth it.
  • Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction:
    • Combat Devices in suffered this due to one crucial flaw: none of them could earn XP, which is better used on the Weapons that can, and thus nobody used them. The only Devices to subvert this were the Groovitron, as it didn't damage enemies to steal XP, and Mr. Zurkon, who back-sassed enemies and thus provided comedic value.
    • The Predator/Raptor Launcher fires multiple small missiles that lock onto an enemy. Unfortunately, the missiles don't deal a great deal of damage, take a while to fully lock on (especially once fully upgraded), and run out of ammo quickly.
• A number of the alchemic formulas in Secret of Evermore end up being complete duds:
  • Acid Rain is actually a decent attack in its own right, outclassing both Flash and Hard Ball by quite a bit even at its starting level and for dealing immediate damage (rather than a slow-moving projectile), but the problem is it costs three parts water and thus dips into your reserve of all-important Heal formula ingredients. Conversely, by the time you've found Super Heal and Miracle Cure and can afford to waste water all willy-nilly, you'll have also found Corrosion which is basically "Acid Rain, but better."
  • Hard Ball is effectively worthless. You already know the much more versatile Flash formula by the time you find it, and even when leveled up to 9 it can only manage around 100 HP at best where even a level 3 thrown Horn Spear will deal several hundred. Pretty much the only nice thing to be said about it is the ingredients are cheap and the only other worthwhile formula to use either of its stock of ingredients is Defend, so if nothing else it can be economically spammed, but why even waste the alchemy slot on it when even a single cast of a sufficiently leveled Crush will do more damage than about a dozen Hard Balls?
  • Call Up is a weird case. While the ability to create Call Beads sounds promising, there's only a set number of ingredients available for this one as only 13 Dry Ices can be found in the game, leaving players to wonder why the developers even bothered to create this formula instead of simply putting Call Beads where the Dry Ices were found. This is of course ignoring the fact that, thanks to a Good Bad Bug in Nobilia, infinite call beads can be picked up anyways.
  • Force Field works well enough in that it protects you from the next damaging attack, but by the time you find it you already have Barrier and Reflect, both of which do what Force Field does for a set period of time instead of only against the one next attack leaving no realistic scenarios where it would even be worth using.
  • Sting, Miracle Cure, Escape, and Double Drain are all this not because they're bad spells, in fact Sting and Miracle Cure are quite effective in their own right, but because they use the prohibitively rare ingredient vinegar that is only sold from two merchants in the game, one of whom becomes unavailable after you defeat Aegis. Even if you're willing to make the trek back to Strongheart to buy vinegar, this means you can't reliably level these formulas up and thus they'll be simply far less convenient to use than their equivalents like Crush, Cure, Wings (which are an item), and Drain unless you're willing to spend a lot of time grinding very close to the end of the game. Furthermore, Miracle Cure has a bug where it will "cure" the confound ailment without actually removing the Interface Screw, which will leave you permanently confounded until you get the ailment again and cure it properly with another formula or item.
• The Spirit Engine has a really vicious one. At first, the Life Drain spell seems really great — it deals the highest damage in the game, doesn't take too long to cast and completely bypasses any protection an enemy may have. It really is great for the majority of the game. And then you come to the final two bosses. Not only are they some of the worst difficulty spikes in a game, they're also completely immune to this spell. Since you likely sunk all your skill points into this spell, what with it looking like a gamebreaker, you'll be left with at least one useless character. Since combats are luck-independent in The Spirit Engine, you may have rendered your game unwinnable.
  • Fortunately the skill system is set up so that unleveled skills are still ok if used in an appropriate situation, and you can't put more than half your points in one skill (unless you count putting the rest in HP/MP). The shield spells are still useful for the semifinal boss and the final boss's first and third forms. The problem is if you were so foolish as to rely on the spell that completely ignores armor as your main method of beating armor, because the final boss's second form has obscenely high damage resistance that half the game's attacks can barely dent, and shields are only useful as a backup plan if you fail to stop secondary attack — once. The game throws you a bone with The Cavalry showing up if you're losing with a strong attack... except there's no real way of protecting the guy and his health will not last through the battle. The author learned his lesson and in the next game the only boss that has damage soak higher than the stronger normal enemies is an optional fight.
• Shadow the Hedgehog: Chaos Control, which can be activated once you kill enough dark-aligned enemies, lets Shadow move at blinding speed through the level. Problem is you have zero control over it. It just keeps moving you towards the level's Chaos Emerald until your Hero Gauge runs out. That's fine if you're attempting to complete the neutral missions, but the problem is that the Hero and Dark Missions are typically things that require exploring every nook and cranny of the level so making a beeline for the end is not something you want to be doing.
• Starbound has the unused Invisibility buff, what does it do? It makes the entity invisible, making players unable to see you. The effect is purely cosmetic; NPC's, monsters, security cameras, and everything (except other players, and yourself) can still see you. To add even more insult to injury, other players can see the name over your head with the press of the 'Highlight Interactibles' button. Huh? Your name is a space or ^reset;, and therefore invisible? The command '/debug' reveals the hitboxes of everything on screen. Also, the invisibility effect lasts for 5 seconds.
• It could be argued that all Magirock spells in Terranigma falls under this category — most of the standard enemies are relatively easy to dispatch through conventional means, and Magirock is not usable in nearly all boss battles. However, you are notably allowed to use magic against at least one boss — That One Boss. Bloody Mary.
• The Fire Arrows in the Thief series. They basically turn your bow into a rocket launcher, which in an average FPS would make them fantastically useful. But Thief is about stealth, and an exploding Fire Arrow is extremely noisy and conspicuous. Furthermore, it's a (very) lethal weapon, which is a problem since the highest difficulty level prohibits you from killing any humans. There's a few places where you can make good use of them against undead or mechanical opponents, but they're still overall the least useful arrows in your arsenal.
  • The aforementioned "no killing" objective on higher difficulties makes your regular Broadhead arrows fall into this too. You're not allowed to use them on humans, they have little effect on undead, and they're completely ineffective against machines. There's a few nonhuman creatures that you're allowed to kill, and shooting them near an enemy can be useful as a distraction, but otherwise the Broadheads have very little use.
• Many of the spells in Vernal Edge aren't good for much simply because they don't do nearly enough damage given how limited your ability to cast them is. For example, most enemies can survive having you spend your entire mana bar casting Barrage on them, meaning you can't exactly use it to pick off foes from a distance.
• Any magic spell in Ys IV: Mask of the Sun and Ys V. You can't use magic at all in the latter's boss battles.

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