History AwesomeButImpractical / WesternRPG

** The Meat of Champions Perk requires you to eat the corpses of President Kimball, Caesar, Mr. House and The King, but enables you to get +1 to Strength, Charisma, Intelligence and Luck for 60 seconds after eating a corpse. One problem is that since Kimball only appears in one of the last story missions, you can only get this benefit toward the end of the main storyline. Another is that the people you'll need to eat will lock you out of every story path besides Wild Card(which partly exists for players who have burned their bridges with every other faction) and maybe the Legion(the least popular faction) if you let Caesar die and somehow manage to get away with eating his body. The third is the fact that the stat boost lasts for too short of a period of time to be worthwhile.

** The ordinary Grenade Machinegun is already a prime candidate for the trope, it is incredibly heavy, difficult to repair, eats expensive 25mm grenades like they're candy, can easily hurt or even kill the user if not aimed carefully and will generally be total overkill for the vast majority of foes. Consider then that Mercy uses an even heavier and more expensive ammo type in exchange for even grosser overkill.

** A more conventional example from ''Fallout 2'' was the Pulse Rifle. Has the greatest damage of any single weapon in the game and is billed as end game equipment. The problem? All the enemies you fight have silly levels of resistance to its electrical type damage and due to the way the games burst fire mechanisms work, the most basic SMG you could use would do more damage. Many of the higher level weapons suffer from this. Mini Guns do no damage to anyone with armor as damage was subtracted on a per bullet basis. The Vindicator Minigun which does decent damage per shot has punishingly rare ammo. The true king of weapons is the [[MoreDakka fully-automatic]] and easily acquired BOZAR Light Support weapon which combines high burst value with a decent and plentiful ammo type.

*** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle falls under this umbrella too -- fantastic range, power and accuracy at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but it's a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants -- Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle -- aren't much better either.) Most players opt to use a Hunting Rifle instead, which has much more common ammo, is far easier to repair and degrades much more slowly (and has two quite good unique variants in Ol' Painless and Lincoln's Repeater, though the latter uses the quite uncommon .44 ammo).

*** The Scoped .44 Magnum breaks down too quickly and its ammo is relatively rare, and the gun itself is difficult to find and is almost always in poor condition when found or purchased. This means you need to find several so you can repair them into a single pristine gun which starts deteriorating rapidly with every shot anyway.
*** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle falls under this umbrella too -- fantastic range, power and accuracy at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but it's a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants -- Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle -- aren't much better either.) Most players opt to use a Hunting Rifle instead, which has much more common ammo, is far easier to repair and degrades much more slowly (and has a quite good unique variant in Ol' Painless).

*** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle falls under this umbrella too -- fantastic range, power and accuracy at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but it's a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants -- Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle -- aren't much better either.) Most players opt to use a Hunting Rifle instead, which has much more common ammo, is far easier to repair and degrades much more slowly (and have a quite good unique variant in Ol' Painless).

*** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle falls under this umbrella too -- fantastic range, power and accuracy at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but it's a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants -- Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle -- aren't much better either.). Most players opt to use a Hunting Rifle instead, which has much more common ammo, is far easier to repair and degrades much more slowly (and has a quite good unique variant in Ol' Painless).

*** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle falls under this umbrella too -- fantastic range, power and accuracy at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but it's a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants -- Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle -- aren't much better either.). Most players opt to use the Hunting Rifle instead, which has much more common ammo, is far easier to repair and degrades much more slowly (and has a quite good unique variant in Ol' Painless).

*** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle falls under this umbrella too -- fantastic range, power and accuracy at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but it's a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants -- Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle -- aren't much better either.)

** There's also the Rock-It Launcher, an improvised device that uses the VendorTrash you pick up as ammo. Generally useless junk like bent tin cans and coffee mugs become lethal weapons with it. It's quite a bit of fun to watch a super mutant killed by a ballistic teddy bear. But in terms of utility, it's not all that strong as the ammo still has weight and weighs you down, and thus it can't even be as useful as a simple assault or hunting rifle with weightless ammo. But fun to play with just for the novelty. Barring specific mods, the Rock-It makes a very loud vacuum cleaner sound all the while you have it out. If the math's correct, it will drive you stark raving bonkers in 16.14 seconds.

* In VideoGame/{{STALKER}}, pretty much any explosive weapon besides hand grenades. In the first two games, rifle-launched grenades are hard to come by and typically limited in use without farming them from a specific faction, often have a pretty pathetic blast radius, and the launchers themselves are also often hard to find [[GuideDangIt unless you know specifically where to find them.]] The RG-6 Bulldog revolver grenade launcher is definitely this -- it's damn heavy, you can't sprint with it out, it takes forever to reload, but you can launch six grenades at something within a matter of seconds, so if you decide to raid the Freedom base on your way north you can get one and a load of grenades for it, and it's hilariously effective inside the CNPP where the grenades are incredibly dangerous to Monolith troops, and once you run out you can just drop it. The RPG is even more into this trope, as one rocket from it can kill virtually anything you come across, but in the first game you're only guaranteed to find one or two rockets in the entire game, and it's even heavier than the RG-6. In the third game, they edge more towards DifficultButAwesome, as some traders will stock the weapons and grenades after a certain point, and you can upgrade your carrying capacity more easily.
** Strangely enough, ''pistols'' become this later after midway through the game. After a certain point the common pistol caliber switches from 9x18 to .45 caliber, which is heavy and just doesn't do that much damage. By the time it does, you'll probably be carrying an assault rifle for day-to-day work, a sniper rifle if you're lucky, and a shotgun for varmint cleanup, and a pistol is just extra weight that you probably won't use, despite all the cool .45 caliber pistols around. On the other hand, you can find a HandCannon chambered for 9x39 mm ''sniper rounds''. Both the pistol and the ammo are absurdly heavy. [[RuleOfCool Not that it stops most people.]]

** In-universe, Cosmic Knives. Said to be super sharp and made of a 'space age saturnite alloy' that will never chip or dull, the blades ended up being so sharp that at least one chef at the Sierra Madre nearly lost a finger dicing vegetables, and they would destroy cutting boards in a normal day of use. They also retain heat terrifyingly well - after being left on a burner the blade would remain red-hot for hours, potentially causing even further harm as one could easily melt right through a table. Fortunately there is no risk of accidental harm when the player wields one; in fact, heating one creates one of the deadliest melee weapons in the game.

*** Each character gets a bonus to unarmed combat every few levels, however that is tied to class level. Once they become Jedi they start all over again and get feats they already have every few levels. This really only effects Bao-Dur and the Handmaiden as they are most useful unarmed. Although they gain force powers, they're stuck dealing the same amount of damage as enemies get tougher.

** In-universe, Cosmic Knives. Said to be super sharp and made of a 'space age saturnite alloy' that will never chip or dull, the blades ended up being so sharp that at least one chef at the Sierra Madre nearly lost a finger, and they would destroy cutting boards in a normal day of use. They also retain heat terrifyingly well - after being left on a burner the blade would remain red-hot for hours, potentially causing even further harm as one could easily melt right through a table. Fortunately there is no risk of accidental harm when the player wields one; in fact, heating one creates one of the deadliest melee weapons in the game.

** In-universe, Cosmic Knives. Said to be super sharp and made of a 'space age saturnite alloy' that will never chip or dull, the blades ended up being so sharp that at least one chef at the Sierra Madre nearly cut off their own finger with them, and they would even destroy cutting boards in a normal day of use. They also retained heat extremely well - after being left on a burner they would remain red-hot for hours, potentially causing even further harm as one could easily melt right through a table. Fortunately there is no risk of accidental harm when the player wields one; in fact, heating one creates one of the deadliest melee weapons in the game.

** In-universe, Cosmic Knives. Said to be super sharp and made of a 'space age saturnite alloy' that will never chip or dull, the blades ended up being so sharp that at least one chef at the Sierra Madre accidentally cut off their own finger with them, and they would even destroy cutting boards in a normal day of use. They also retained heat extremely well - when heated they would remain red-hot for hours, potentially causing even further harm as they could easily melt right through a table. Fortunately there is no risk of accidental harm when the player wields one; in fact, heating one creates one of the deadliest melee weapons in the game.

** In-universe, Cosmic Knives. Said to be made of a 'space age saturnite alloy' that will never chip or dull, the blades ended up being so sharp that several kitchen staffers at the Sierra Madre accidentally cut off their own fingers with them, and they would even slice through cutting boards with little effort. If heated they would remain red-hot for hours, potentially causing even further harm. Fortunately there is no risk of accidental harm when the player wields one; in fact, heating one creates one of the deadliest melee weapons in the game.

** In-universe, Cosmic Knives. Said to be made of a 'saturnite alloy' that will never chip or dull, the blades ended up being so sharp that several kitchen staffers at the Sierra Madre accidentally cut off their own fingers with them, and they would even slice through cutting boards with little effort. If heated they would remain red-hot for hours, potentially causing even further harm. Fortunately there is no risk of accidental harm when the player wields one; in fact, heating one creates one of the deadliest melee weapons in the game.

* ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights2'' had you spend a major chunk of the mid game collecting a series of powers designed to kill the BigBad; it turns out they weren't necessary at launch. Additionally, late in the game you get your hands on an InfinityPlusOneSword, that's also often superseded by gear a player already has access to.

* ''VideoGame/SecretOfEvermore'' allows you to level each of your weapons up twice, gaining a new and more powerful ChargeAttack with each level and with the level 3 charge attack being absurdly effective and leaving nothing but blood and experience points in the wake of your enemies. However, as you get handed new weapons like candy in this game (for example you get handed the Horn Spear ''about 30 seconds'' after you defeat Thraxx and got the Spider's Claw for it) and it takes outright kills with that weapon rather than mere experience points to level it up (around 99 kills for level 2, and about 200 more kills for level 3, and both alchemy and dog kills don't count), it basically necessitates setting the dog to [[ActualPacifist search-only]] so he doesn't KillSteal and spending a few hours grinding each one to get the thing leveled up if you want to be able to enjoy it for any amount of time whatsoever. Pretty much the only weapons worth leveling up are spears as they give you a projectile (which are not only ''neccessary'' to pass parts of the game, but a level 3 Horn Spear is basically your only realistic option to defeat [[ThatOneBoss Salabog]]), and whichever of the three [[InfinityPlusOneSword Infinity +1 Weapons]] you ultimately choose to use against the final boss (if you don't decide to just cheese him with a [[GameBreaker fully-leveled Crush formula]] or any of several [[GoodBadBug infinite Call Bead glitches]] instead).

* ''VideoGame/BetrayalAtKrondor'' has the Mad God's Rage spell. The name, the very concept, and the way it looks are all awesome. However, since your mage won't stop casting it until all his visible enemies are dead, or he falls over dead or near-dead from exhaustion, it's not very practical. For groups of enemies, Firestorm provides better damage to cost ratio. For single, powerful enemies, Fetters of Rime are a cheap way to freeze them and finish them off at leisure. It's not even good as a desperation move, because you can only cast as much of it as you have stamina/health, so if you're near dead to begin with, it won't do much good. Still... damn, that's a cool spell.

** There's also Lightning Bolt, which is really cool in theory but actively suicidal in practice due to its unpredictable rebounds when within any enclosed space - i.e. ''virtually anywhere''.

* ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights2'' had you spend a major chunk of the mid game collecting a series of powers designed to kill the BigBad; it turns out they weren't necessary at launch. Additionally, late in the game you get your hands on an InfinityPlusOneSword, that's also often superseded by gear a player already has access to.
* ''VideoGame/PlanescapeTorment'' has level 9 ultimate spells with intensely cool cutscenes, which is rare in a Western RPG. Unfortunately, barring some serious LevelGrinding, by the time you're able to use these you only have ''one'' enemy left worth using them on, and that's a SkippableBoss.
** Very little grinding, in fact. Cloudkill + underSigil = lots of fast exp. However, those high level spells are fairly useless because enemies potentially worth using them on tend to have high magic resistance. Which means the spell typically takes a minute going through its complex, "awesome" animation, and at the end... does nothing. Better just spam some easy to use level 1-5 spells.
** Gaining immunity to poison. Unfortunately, poisons attacks aren't that common in the game. And the way to gain the immunity is to eat 100 rat tails. This can only be done through a conversation with a merchant which will allow you ''to buy one single rat tail at a time''. To buy a hundred will require hundreds of mouse clicks and enough money to pull it off.

*** Well, the silly level of elect resistance comes from any form of metal armor (which, to be frank, almost every human enemy towards the end wears), but energy weapons remain exceptionally useful versus monsters - particularly the Deathclaws, Floaters and Centaurs that crop up towards the end, which tend to be resistant to physical attacks (including bullets).
*** The biggest problem with the pulse weapons is that they have a tendency to do critical hits very often, and critting someone with an electrical attack pulverizes them - so you don't have a handy corpse to loot. You have to pixel-hunt for the loot at the base of the small ash puddle that remains of the enemy, then laboriously pick up every single drop. This gets old ''very'' fast.
** The Solar Scorcher you can pick up from an EasterEgg. It's basically a powerful solar-powered laser pistol that uses no ammunition. But it's prevented from reaching GameBreaker status by being only reloadable in bright light - if you happen to empty the six-shot capacitor during the night or in a cave, it becomes entirely useless.

*** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle falls under this umbrella too - fantastic range, power and accuracy at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but it's a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants - Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle - aren't much better either.)

*** {{Averted|Trope}} with the Wounding and Explosive legendary modifications - these two are such {{Game Breaker}}s in their own right that ''any'' weapon with them is insanely overpowered, especially weapons that put out large amounts of ammo. The Explosive Perk's splash damage ''can'' be a liability to the player and friendlies, but it's not a fatal drawback when you can also mow down disproportionately high-leveled enemies in just a few seconds.

** Someone made a mod that adds a Mini Nuke Minigun- [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin a gun that fires mini-nukes as quickly as the minigun fires bullets]]. It destroys anything in its path, but consumes ammo at a horrifying rate when only one mini-nuke is enough for most targets, to say nothing of what happens when you fire so many at once. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRNRp3JoNls See it in action here.]]

** The M-920 Cain aka "Nuke Gun" from ''VideoGame/MassEffect2''. The final heavy weapon to research, it is for all intents and purposes a nuke cannon, and it works as advertised - anything within a very wide area of the target dies in a very pretty mushroom cloud. However, it eats most of your heavy weapon ammo with one shot, requires four seconds of charging before it fires (not a good idea when under fire in one of the situations you would ''want'' to use something this powerful), and has such a large blast radius that there are very few opportunities in the game where you can fire the Cain and not hit your own party. Most of the time, the Avalanche cannon or Collector Particle Beam are much more practical.\\

** And the Geth Plasma Shotgun makes ''every'' heavy weapon Awesome But Impractical. Its charged attack does more damage than every heavy weapon except the Cain - and it uses conventional thermal clips. You'll never use heavy weapon ammo again!
** ''VideoGame/MassEffect3'' adds an Awesome, But Impractical tactic: Hijacking Atlas units. Sure, the idea of stealing a mech from the enemy is amazing, but the crystal canopy protecting the pilot is so tough, by the time you shatter it, the thing will be about five shots away from being destroyed - and that's assuming your squadmates don't destroy it before you can draw a bead on it. Even if you can jack it, chances are there's only going to be about two or three mooks left to use it on, at best. To add insult to injury, the best way to set up an Atlas for hijacking in order to get the achievement for doing so is to use a free Atlas you're given in one of two missions.

* The {{Roguelike}} ''VideoGame/AncientDomainsOfMystery'' has a learnable spell called Wish (or, for divine casters, Divine Intervention) which does ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin: you get a wish. Unfortunately, the spell is extremely difficult to learn even for high level wizards, attempts take so long that you will usually be forced to abort by [[WizardNeedsFoodBadly hunger]] or risk starving to death, and if you have teleportitis it '''will''' interrupt your reading. Even if you do manage to learn it, it costs 3000 [[{{Mana}} PP]] to cast (enough to put it out of range for many characters even with [[CastFromHitPoints casting from hit points]]; one of this game's {{Self Imposed Challenge}}s is to craft a character who ''can'') and takes 10 points off of one of your stats. It's much easier to simply use Potions of Exchange to polymorph a large pile of worthless rings until you get Rings of Djinni Summoning, which can give you a wish, and then use those to get more Potions of Exchange until you have [[GameBreaker infinite wishes]].
** The Moloch Armor has an obscenely high PV (damage reduction) value of ''+50''. The problem is that it weighs so much you won't be able to even pick it up unless you have Strength of Atlas active, and it comes with huge DV (dodge chance), to-hit, to-damage, Dex, and speed penalties.
* ''VideoGame/DiabloII'':
** The druid's Armageddon spell can be used while in werewolf form and causes a rain of meteors to follow you, but the meteors hit randomly and do very little damage compared to the sorceress ones. Not to mention acquiring it requires putting points in pretty much all of the elemental skills, regardless of whether you're going to use them or not (and, if you're a werewolf, you won't use any of them).
** The Barbarian can pull the badass trick of dual-wielding throwing weapons. This has only been successfully utilized by a select few individuals for Player vs Monster or [=PvP=] due to how limited one's choices for dealing consistent damage with them are.
** The Sorceress' awesome-looking Thunder Storm is ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin but even maximum-twinked damage from it is relatively pitiful compared to more boring utility lightning skills. The multi-headed Hydra spell is a fireball-shooting stationary turret that does little damage at maximum and many monsters are immune to fire anyway. She can also activate a skill that leaves fire in her wake wherever she walks that when used, even if you ''again'' take max-twinked damage into account, is effectively cosmetic.
* ''VideoGame/MightAndMagic'':
** Some spells are woefully impractical when it comes to their usability. The top contenders would be Armageddon and Divine Intervention. Armageddon deals damage to ''everything'' on map, including your party, therefore a) you need to have healer ready to undo the damage and b) if you don't want to kill civilians, you'll be restricted to use it on maps without them, and those have usually monsters so strong you'll need to cast it dozen of times or so (while maximum is 3 or 4 casts per day). Divine intervention heals all party, including removing all status effects and replenishing mana, but it ages caster by 10 years. Here the age affects your party's stats, and aging is incredibly hard to remove. The spell itself is also usually hard to get as it requires a sidequest to complete.
** ''VII'" has the relic poleaxe named Splitter. Its gimmick is explosions. Every blow from the axe makes a thundering Michael Bay-class fireball centered where the blade strikes something, with perfectly obvious effects on the party. Sure, the axe grants + 50 fire resistance to the wielder, but having to tape the pieces of the party sorcerer back together every time you hit something it battle isn't worth the fireworks. Besides, by the time you start tripping over relics you should be swimming in great gear anyway, so it's not worth it even if you can muster up the resistances.
* Certain games from ''VideoGame/{{Ultima}}'' have the Armageddon spell ("Imbalance" in ''Ultima VII Part II -- Serpent Isle''). The spell kills all enemies on screen as well as all enemies not on screen. It also kills your entire party, all bystanders - and everyone and everything in the world except for you and Lord British (and Batlin in ''Ultima VII'')! Naturally, the game becomes {{Unwinnable}} at this point, so there is absolutely no reason to use this other than to see Lord British's reaction [[spoiler:(and to find out why Batlin sided with the Guardian)]].
** ''VideoGame/UltimaIV'' had the Skull of Mondain, an item that would kill all non-party members in the immediate area at the price of wrecking the players KarmaMeter.
** Ultima IV also had the Mystic Swords, which do more damage than anything in the game... but are short-ranged weapons. It's actually more practical to just sell them and buy spell reagants, Magic Wands and Bows for your party instead; they do less damage per hit, but their range ensures you'll take far less damage from enemies than you would spending several turns running up and engaging them in close quarters.

* The Shapeshifter specialization available to Mages in ''VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins'', which allows a Mage to transform into a spider, bear, or insect swarm, sounds pretty awesome. It's not, for a couple reasons. The Mage can't cast other spells while shapeshifted. Worse, the damage done by the shapeshifted form is dependent on the Mage's ''Strength'', which will naturally be abysmally low if you focus on Willpower and Magic instead, thanks to a glitch.
** Any spell with an area of effect and friendly fire will be this on higher difficulties, since there are no situations where you can depend on your companions' AI to neither wander into the blast radius nor hit ''you'' with it if you're standing too close to an enemy (or both). Even on lower difficulties (in which friendly fire is deactivated), you still can't trust an AI-controlled character to use Fireball or Cone of Cold. They won't kill you themselves, sure, but the game doesn't consider being frozen in place or knocked prone by an explosion to be "friendly fire," so those things can still easily happen to you. (This is one of the things [[VideoGame/DragonAgeII the sequel]] fixed about combat.)
*** These spells are made even less practical because the non-friendly fire [=AoE=] spells are more powerful anyways, making the more impressive looking elemental [=AoEs=] extremely wasteful in terms of the time and mana used to actually use them.
** [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast Storm of the Century]], the king of Awesome, But Impractical. It does tremendous damage over a large area: any non-boss caught in it will die very quickly, and even bosses will get pretty beaten up. The impractical part? It's a combination spell, meaning you have to cast two high level elemental spells on top of one another, each of which has a long enough casting time on its own to qualify as Awesome, But Impractical. Oh yeah, and the caster(s) have to be under the effects of a certain long term self-buff, which is pretty useful in itself, but requires an additional skill point investment, and makes the storm even more expensive overall. And that bit above about friendly fire? Yeah, better hope you know how to wrangle your ally AI well enough to keep them out of the area, or they'll die just as quickly as your enemies.
** The fourth-rank Rogue talent that grants a one in five chance to evade any physical attack sounds great, and can save your bacon when neck deep in darkspawn, but its unpredictable activation can be a pain in the backside - not only does it interrupt your autoattack chain, meaning you lose an attack and need to manually order your Rogue Warden to start attacking again, it also interrupts ''Rogue talents'' - and the Stamina cost of, say, Arrow of Slaying or Scattershot is not so low that having it interrupted by your own automatic, inescapable dodging isn't going to be a complete nuisance.
* ''VideoGame/{{Fable}}'' features the Divine Fury/Infernal Wrath spells, which cause amazing amounts of damage, only problem is that they cost incredibly high amounts of EXP to level up, and require your character to stand in place charging the spell for 10 seconds to do anything, and then, only things in the immediate vicinity will get hit.
** Made even worse by the fact that if you're hit during the charge up period (unless you have physical shield), the spells fizzle out.
* In VideoGame/{{STALKER}}, pretty much any explosive weapon besides hand grenades. In the first two games, rifle-launched grenades are hard to come by and typically limited in use without farming them from a specific faction, often have a pretty pathetic blast radius, and the launchers themselves are also often hard to find [[GuideDangIt unless you know specifically where to find them.]] The RG-6 Bulldog revolver grenade launcher is definitely this - it's damn heavy, you can't sprint with it out, it takes forever to reload, but you can launch six grenades at something within a matter of seconds, so if you decide to raid the Freedom base on your way north you can get one and a load of grenades for it, and it's hilariously effective inside the CNPP where the grenades are incredibly dangerous to Monolith troops, and once you run out you can just drop it. The RPG is even more into this trope, as one rocket from it can kill virtually anything you come across, but in the first game you're only guaranteed to find one or two rockets in the entire game, and it's even heavier than the RG-6. In the third game, they edge more towards DifficultButAwesome, as some traders will stock the weapons and grenades after a certain point, and you can upgrade your carrying capacity more easily.
** Strangely enough, ''pistols'' become this later after midway through the game. After a certain point the common pistol caliber switches from 9x18 to .45 caliber, which is heavy and just doesn't do that much damage. By the time it does, you'll probably be carrying an assault rifle for day-to-day work, a sniper rifle if you're lucky, and a shotgun for varmint cleanup, and a pistol is just extra weight that you probably won't use, despite all the cool .45 caliber pistols around. On the other hand, you can find a HandCannon chambered for 9x39 mm ''sniper rounds''. Both the pistol and the ammo are absurdly heavy. [[RuleOfCool Not that it stops most people.]]
* ''Franchise/TheElderScrolls'':
** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIIMorrowind Morrowind]]'':
*** The Hammer of Stendarr in the ''Tribunal'' expansion is a MASSIVE war hammer that does insanely high damage, but breaks on the first swing and weighs half a ton, rendering it nigh-unusable.
*** Vampirism. It gives you some extra powers and some massive stat boosts that can break the stat caps... but sunlight will kill you, you can no longer use any shops or services in Vvardenfell, and you can only complete quests for House Telvanni, the Mages' Guild, and one of three [[GuideDangIt well-hidden]] vampire clans.
*** Lycanthropy. You turn into a werewolf and get massive boosts to your killing power, and can murder anyone without acquiring a bounty. Unfortunately, you can't use any equipment, cast any spells, or pick up any items while you're a beast. And if an NPC sees you transform, then you're marked as "kill on sight" by everyone.
** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim Skyrim]]'':
*** Two-handed weapons tend to suffer from this, battleaxes and warhammers moreso than greatswords. Since they're so heavy they're remarkably slow and pull you forward with every swing, leaving you susceptible to attack (this is also when the AI uses them), and since they occupy both of your hands you're better off using a faster one-handed weapon in one hand and a spell or shield in the other.
*** High-level shouts often fall in this category. [[http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Storm_Call Storm call]] summons a lighting storm for massive damage but doesn't differentiate between friends and foes and takes ''ten minutes'' to recharge, preventing you from using other shouts for the duration. Also using it inside a city or a town will incur a bounty that will pile up as more citizens are accidentally killed.
*** 'Master' level Destruction spells are powerful and flashy if you can get them off, but they have an absurdly long charge time during which you're vulnerable to attack and being interrupted. Even if you do get one off, lower-level spells do more damage for the magicka and do so more quickly and reliably.
*** The Werewolf and Vampire Lord transformations from the Dawnguard DLC. While both are cool, neither one gains much in the way of synergies with the perks you'll gain as you level up (Vampire Lords can gain some benefit from a few Conjuration perks, but not much). Vampire Lords gain perks by killing enemies using a life-drain spell that unfortunately doesn't improve as you gain level, so it becomes less and less effective as you face more durable enemies. Kill an enemy with any other power and you've lost that XP. Werewolves at least level by eating the hearts of dead opponents, and it doesn't matter how they died so gaining perks is relatively easy for them. You'll still run into the issue of Werewolves being limited to just running around and meleeing enemies and the fact that as you progress and get the stronger Shouts, Armor, Weapons, and spells your combat ability actually diminishes if you decide to transform. Quite a few players choose to go with being a Werewolf or Vampire just for the disease immunity and don't bother with the other powers.
*** The Bend Will shout is your ultimate reward for beating ''Dragonborn'', rank 3 will let you charm nearly anything in the game without ContractualBossImmunity, even dragons. However, unless you rushed to do ''Dragonborn'' as soon as getting the prerequisites, you'll likely be powerful enough that mind controlling enemies is a distraction for you at best, and the two shout-specific dragons you can get are much stronger and don't have the availability issue of random dragons, plus the dragon riding you can do amounts to little more than [[MundaneUtility glorified auto-pathing]], as you can't control the dragon directly, just tell it where to fly to and take in the scenery while it does.
** In an in-universe example from the series' backstory, Wulfharth Ash-King, the ancient King of the Nords who [[EternalHero has died and come back to life]] at least three times, was a Dragonborn with a monstrously powerful [[MakeMeWannaShout Thu'um]]. It was so powerful that he couldn't be sworn into office as High King of Skyrim verbally. Scribes had to draw up his oaths as a result.
* The highest damage output spells in VideoGame/AvencastRiseOfTheMage also have very impressive animations. Unfortunately spells are cast by button combinations that also move your character slightly and enemies can continue to move during the attack animation, so they're quite unlikely to actually hit.
* In ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublicIITheSithLords'', Battle Meditation is the skill that made Bastila so important in the first game, and you can learn it - and it does give useful bonuses, especially at higher tiers. Unfortunately, its brief duration and inability to be part of the Force Enlightenment omni-buff mean that ultimately you will not be using it that often.
** Later in the game, you can make class-change certain party members into Jedi. While this does grant them Force powers and the ability to use lightsabers, it causes them to lose out on the feats they'd normally gain from their base class, typically winding up as [[MasterOfNone Masters of None]] compared to specializing them in their initial roles or using your party members who are ''already'' Jedi. Bao-Dur is the most extreme example, as it not only ruins his unarmed offense (potentially including his unique damage boost/stun passive) and high skill growth, but his stats are ''absolutely terrible'' for becoming a Jedi and he can't equip ''any'' armor that doesn't restrict Force usage.
*** Each character gets a bonus to unarmed combat every few levels, however that is tied to class level. Once they become Jedi they start all over again and get feats they already have every few levels. This really only effects Bao-Dur and the Handmaiden as they are most useful unarmed. Although they gain force powers, they're stuck dealing the same amount of damage as enemies get tougher.
* ''Last Stand at Union City'': the chainsaw, just like in real life.
* ''VideoGame/IcewindDale'' has the ChainLightning spell, which can hit many opponents with lightning damage. It also has a very strong chance of bouncing back at you or your party members. Keeping everyone many screens away from the caster will not protect them. Unless the room is jam-packed with enemies, casting it is a mistake.
* In ''VideoGame/RavenswordShadowlands'', the game features blunderbuss guns. It sounds awesome on paper, but in practice, even the highest-level ones prove unreliable (not always making a hit even if you're aiming straight at the target), and don't deal nearly as much damage as the highest-level crossbows.
* ''Videogame/TheLegendOfDragoon'':
** At Dragoon Level 5, each character gets a spell that summons a dragon to attack the enemy. It sounds like an incredible attack until you realize that you could do the same amount of damage with only a couple weaker spells for a much lower cost. The only ones really worth using is the White Silver Dragon, since it does a lot of damage and heals the party, or the Sea Wave Dragon. This is also due to the high magical attack of Shana/Miranda and Meru.
** Dragoon form itself becomes this in the late game, since the majority of the endgame bosses can cripple it with the Dragon Block Staff. This includes the final battle.
** The Ultimate Wargod accessory causes a character's Addition to always succeed. But it costs 10,000 gold in a game only {{MetalSlime}}s drop more than one or two hundred. In the time it'd take to farm the gold necessary to buy two or three Ultimate Wargods, most players will have perfected their Addition timing anyway. Lastly, equipping an Ultimate Wargod prevents usage of other accessories such as Rainbow Earring[[note]]Prevents all status effects[[/note]] or Mage Ring[[note]]Recovers magic points every turn[[/note]].
* ''VideoGame/SecretOfEvermore'' allows you to level each of your weapons up twice, gaining a new and more powerful ChargeAttack with each level and with the level 3 charge attack being absurdly effective and leaving nothing but blood and experience points in the wake of your enemies. However, as you get handed new weapons like candy in this game (for example you get handed the Horn Spear ''about 30 seconds'' after you defeat Thraxx and got the Spider's Claw for it) and it takes outright kills with that weapon rather than mere experience points to level it up (around 99 kills for level 2, and about 200 more kills for level 3, and both alchemy and dog kills don't count), it basically necessitates setting the dog to [[ActualPacifist search-only]] so he doesn't KillSteal and spending a few hours grinding each one to get the thing leveled up if you want to be able to enjoy it for any amount of time whatsoever. Pretty much the only weapons worth leveling up are spears as they give you a projectile (which are not only ''neccessary'' to pass parts of the game, but a level 3 Horn Spear is basically your only realistic option to defeat [[ThatOneBoss Salabog]]), and whichever of the three [[InfinityPlusOneSword Infinity +1 Weapons]] you ultimately choose to use against the final boss (if you don't decide to just cheese him with a [[GameBreaker fully-leveled Crush formula]] or any of several [[GoodBadBug infinite Call Bead glitches]] instead).
* ''VideoGame/Wasteland2'' has the heavy machine gun proficiency. You can seriously send out quite a few bullets heading your enemies' way in a turn with one of these babies? Well, one problem is that these weapons chew through lots of ammunition, which can be an issue in the first third of the game. A larger problem, however, is that almost every heavy weapon has a chance to jam with every shot, and unlike virtually every other weapon, ''heavy machine guns can't be modded period, much less to reduce jamming''. Sure, 3% doesn't sound like that high of a chance, but when you're shooting 10-15 bullets a round, get ready to lose some turns at the worst moments.

* ''VideoGame/BaldursGateII'' has a similar item, the Club of Detonation. Anytime it hits, it has a random chance of triggering a Fireball spell centered on the wielder. On the one hand, it's relatively easy to make the wielder immune to fire (you just have to kill a red dragon. No big deal, right?) On the other hand, it's much more difficult to make your ''entire party'' immune to fire.

* ''VideoGame/SecretOfEvermore'' allows you to level each of your weapons up twice, gaining a new and more powerful ChargeAttack with each level and with the level 3 charge attack being absurdly effective and leaving nothing but blood and experience points in the wake of your enemies. However, as you get handed new weapons like candy in this game (for example you get handed the Horn Spear ''about 30 seconds'' after you defeat Thraxx and got the Spider's Claw for it) and it takes outright kills with that weapon rather than mere experience points to level it up (around 99 kills for level 2, and about 200 more kills for level 3, and both alchemy and dog kills don't count), it basically necessitates setting the dog to [[ActualPacifist search-only]] so he doesn't KillSteal and spending a few hours grinding each one to get the thing leveled up if you want to be able to enjoy it for any amount of time whatsoever. Pretty much the only weapons worth leveling up are spears as they give you a projectile (which are not only ''neccessary'' to pass parts of the game, but a level 3 Horn Spear is basically your only realistic option to defeat [[ThatOneBoss Salabog]]), and whichever of the three [[InfinityPlusOneSword Infinity +1 Weapons]] you ultimately choose to use against the final boss (if you don't decide to just cheese him with a [[GameBreaker fully-leveled Crush formula]] or any of several [[GoodBadBug infinite Call Bead glitches]] instead).

*** Fallout 3's Sniper Rifle falls under this umbrella too - rare ammo type, degrades extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but it's a very costly investment if you want to snipe with any degree of regularity. (Its two unique variants - Victory Rifle and Reservist's Rifle - aren't much better either.)