YMMV / Hordes.io

• Low-Tier Letdown: Certain skills suffer from this treatment.
  • A large number of buffing skills apply to this, with the exception of Gloomfury events (where buffs are a necessity) since many of the buff's effects do not outweigh the loss of not being able to use a move that more directly affects your opponent.
  • Archer:
    • Cranial Punctures is the most egregious example. It is a passive skill that gives you +12.0% Critical (the chance of landing critical hits that do extra damage). Because optimal sets often have additional methods of boosting critial via the stats on their gear, this skill is often overshadowed, especially because the increased critical does not justify taking away skill points from a potentially vital skill like Blinding Shot or Vampiric Arrow. As such, almost no experienced Archer player uses this skill.
    • Pathfinding is a skill that boosts your speed for only a short while. Because rapid movement is already possible via mounts outside of PvP and the Dash skill in PvP. Additionally, many PvP fights often occur only in small areas, with the areas where PvPers cover a large distance only occuring with massive war parties that likely have shamans to summon them. Thus, this skill is just considered redundant.
  • Warrior:
    • Taunt is a debuffing skill that slows target's movement speed for a short duration. This is often useless in PvP combat as the effects can be easily removed or negated by well-timed movement skills or debuff removal skills/charms. It is however crucial in Gloomfury events.
    • Tempering isn't that bad of a skill, being able to remove the dreaded stun effects that are every player's bane, but it is redundant due to the existence of the Little Bell Charms, which is instant, while Tempering requires two seconds to charge up. In addition, due to being a skill, Tempering cannot be activated in stun effects that prevent the user from taking action, namely Agonize, Deep Freezes and Relentless Cry).
  • Shaman:
    • Spirit Animal is a skill that removing all movement impairing effects active at the point of the transformation and grants the user additional speed. While the base level is useful, using higher level Spirit Animal skills are not worth losing the skill points. Additionally, Spirit Animal is overshadowed by Mimir's Cleanse, which also removes damage debuffs, has a faster cooldown, and can heal other allies. Spirit used to have a niche with the "double mount strat" (using the skill and their mount at the same time would greatly increase their speed, making Shamans able to outrun hostiles quickly) but this glitch has since been patched.
  • Mage:
    • Ice Shield is a skill that grants players a shield that tanks a certain number of hits. While it has its uses, its generally considered not that useful as players will often hit the shield with weaker attacks to waste block opportunities, before launching their burst attacks to defeat the enemy.
  • In certain cases:
    • Archer is by-and-large the worst class for anyone planning to farm money. Suffering from extremely poor AoE damage with only a few spells to boost it (The Precise Shot+Serpent Arrows combination, which cannot deal with large quantities of mobs, and Volley, which has a brutally long cooldown timer), it is poorly suited for taking out hordes of mobs. And this is even AFTER it got buffed in 0.50, where beforehand it was even worse (Serpent Arrow Precise shots were considered a waste, leaving only Volley for AoE). At the very least, the new farming meta ensures that Archers will have to team up with others to farm.
    • Ever since the 0.50 update, Warriors have become the most undesirable class to do Obelisks due to the simple reason they have to be at the front line to use their melee attacks, thus rendering them the most likely to get killed when a new obelisk wave spawns. While this was not an issue prior, the 0.50 update returns fame loss that applies in Obelisk, so many warriors will often hesitate to rush in and defend themselves out of fear of dying.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Basically, everything and anything related to RNG in the game.
  • The infamous Blacksmith, where you have to pay with runes and money (that you will not receive back) which can reach into the hundreds of gold and involves the use of many rare runes that one can only get after hours of farming (no, this is not an exaggeration) in order to upgrade your gear. The problem comes from how unreliable the blacksmith is, as he can fail even at the highest levels. There are repeated jokes among the community that they lose thousands, yes, thousands of gold due to the Blacksmith.
  • Gloomfury luck mechanics are rough, as the check of the percentage of the items they receive is barely effected by their performance, with the performance only managing the cap on how good the gear could be - emphasis on could. This means that one could have the best Gloom performance of their game, only to receive gear that would be useful to a person who had just reached the threshold of being even able to play Gloomfury events.
• That One Attack:
  • Mage:
    • Frostcall is a move that deals damage to all targets in a radius, along with slowing down targets. They were extremely flexible, dealing tons of damage and having a faster cooldown than the previous main area-of-effect skill Chilling Radius, with the only problem being its massive MP toll (which can be negated with ally shamans in PvP and potions in non-PvP contexts) and its uselessness in 1v1s.
    • Shatterfrost was considered to be the bane of all skills when it was first released. For a class advertised to be a grouped, area-of-effect user, Shatterfrost was a devastating single-target attack that dealt even more damage to deep-frozen targets (which would occur often during PvP) and at times outdamaged Archers (a class that is primarily for single-targetting enemies!).
  • Archer:
    • Bone Shot is the quintessential One-Hit Kill: it does tons of damage, and also does additional damage to targets at low HP.
    • Blinding Shot. While it doesn't do any damage, it is instant cast and it casts the dreaded stun effects on the opponent, which at the highest level can stun the opponent for a whopping 11 seconds. More than enough time to for you to ready a Bone Shot and a few Precise Shots to ruin your enemy.