History GameBreaker / Warhammer

** The current Lore of Life is disproportionately powerful. Let's put it this way: under the 8th edition magic rules, throwing large handfuls of dice at spells is possible but discouraged, because an irresistible force (or, any two dice coming up 6) automatically produces a wild-magic miscast effect, which is likely to lead to something unpleasant happening to the wizard. "Throne of Vines" allows you to discount this on a 2+, or ''five times in six''. And spells are resolved before you roll on the miscast table, so if you get irresistible force ''on'' Throne of Vines...yeah. If you think that's nasty, combine it with "The Dwellers Below" from the same lore, which can cripple ''entire units'' by killing large numbers of them with no saves allowed. The main balancing factor? The large handfuls of dice needed to cast it are likely to lead to an irresistible force, the resultant miscast and your mage's head exploding. Unless he's able to ignore miscasts on, for example, a 2+...

** Slann Mage-Priests can be built to nerf the opposing wizard's effect on the game, some of their magic items make miscasts an accepted fact of life, removing the ability to cast with Irresistable Force, forcing stupidity tests every turn. Saurus Old-Bloods can easily be kitted out to crush spammed infantry thanks to the Carnosaur mount.
*** Lizardmen in general have been bumped one step closer to gamebreaker thanks to 8th edition's broken magic system making Slann one of the few wizards to bypass all the negatives of the new magic system and the added emphasis on large infantry bricks make Saurus Spear Warrior units into one of the nastiest basic troopers in the game. But with the two together you face waves of tough infantry guarding non-squishy wizards that are blasting all of your army into Hell/pieces/ashes. Then they got nerfed pretty heavily in the 8th edition army book; they're still very scary, but you can no longer buy Slann that get free dice for everything, the miscast-guaranteeing effects are gone, and the resistance to miscasting is reduced to an option allowing you to add or remove one point from the roll. Of course, they still have some of the scariest wizards and basic infantry in the game, but that just makes them "tough", rather than "the annihilating fury of vengeful, presumably dead gods" as they were previously.
** Vampire Counts character Mannfred Von Carnstein (Lord edition) can raise ridiculous ammounts of undead if left unchecked. How ridiculous? In a single magic phase he can produce 40 zombies if not dispelled or rolling miscasts.
*** Whats worse is that those 40 Zombies with the Spammfred build is with roughly average to just below average rolls... According to the 7th edition rules.
*** Tomb Kings and Vampire Counts in general can be considered overpowered for their ability to continuously summon more and more and more cannon fodder to overwhelm their enemies with.
*** That was really all Tomb Kings had going for them until the newest armybook.
** Dark Elf assassins can cause victims to roll a toughness test on 3D6 or die. Considering that except for Daemons most characters have a Toughness of 4, that means trying to roll below 4 on 3 six-sided dice.
*** And they are Weapon Skill 9 characters for ninety points each.

** Most armies in general have a few gamebreakers at any one time, the exceptions being Ogre Kingdoms or Orcs & Goblins.
*** Ogre Kingdoms now have the Thundertusk. 250 points for an absolutely huge monster (4 attacks, 6 wounds, S6, T6, riders with 3 S4 attacks each), it has Thunderstomp, which means D6 S6 auto-hits per round of combat. It also has a S3(6) stone thrower AND all enemies within 6 inches of it Always Strike Last. One of these at the center of your line means your charging line means your enemy better have the gods of luck on their side, or their entire line is going to collapse.

** The successor game, ''TabletopGame/WarhammerAgeOfSigmar'', tries to avoid this by not caring about game balance to begin with, to the point where units don't even have points values, but some of this still crept in as early as the changeover PDF's. High Elf Repeater Bolt Throwers, for example, are ambiguously written so it's not hard to read them as firing 72 shots per turn. Also, with no restriction on the units you can bring at all, fielding 36 Dark Elf War Hydras or an entire wheelbarrowful of Nagashes is mechanically fine; the expectation is that it'll be balanced by you being thrown out of the gaming group, which is kind of an awkward basis.
*** So far averted with Match Play, the point system of Age of Sigmar.

** Prior to 8th edition, which was designed to {{nerf}} them, daemons were arguably the most broken army ever released in the game's history. EVERYTHING in the army had at least 5+ ward save and caused fear (Lord units causing terror). This basically meant the enemy was, unless it was Tomb Kings or Vampire Counts who all have immune to pyschology, going to spend most of the game running scared. The rare case your enemy doesn't run, he's dead anyways, since the magic the army can throw around will wreck, the worst case being an utterly broken spell that a Lord of Change has access to called Glean Magic that causes you force a target enemy wizard to use ALL their spells on targets you chose, and they can't be dispelled, and the icing on the cake being that Glean Magic was incredibly cheap, especially for what it does. And that's not even getting to how all the units in the army were incredibly strong and the only things that wouldn't being running away due to fear or terror will get torn to pieces in melee. There's a reason the 8th edition nerfed this army and why it was so hated for how overpowered it was.

* The first edition of ''TabletopGame/WarhammerFantasyRoleplay'' contained several somewhat ill-considered spells, the most infamous of all being the innocuous-sounding Glowing Light. Glowing Light is a very basic Petty Magic spell used to turn any handy useless object into a disposable torch. At least, that's what it was ''supposed'' to be used for. The spell description actually just said "The object glows brightly for one hour, and then vanishes." ''And then vanishes.'' Most novice wizards considered that a one hour time-delay was a fair price to pay for the power to vaporise anything they could lay their hands on.

*** So far averted with Match Play, the point system of Age of Sigmar, so far its been halted as Games-Workshops most balanced system to date.

Daemons of Chaos feature the Great Unclean One. For 600 points, it is possible to field a Lord-level mage who has T6, 10 wounds, 4+ armour, 5+ ward, and regeneration. In larger games, you can field ''several''.

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[[folder:Black Crusade]]
* In ''TabletopGame/BlackCrusade'', players can start the game with items of certain rarity (each item has a rarity modified by craftmanship rating and quantity).You can abuse the system to for example start with 1 000 000 poorly trained slaves carrying shitty lasguns. The true gamebreaker comes from the fact that the Heretek class could start the game with 100 of the "mechanicus assimilation" cybernetic upgrades (Hereteks count the upgrade as being more common than other classes, so it only works for them). Said upgrade gives you the "machine" trait, or if you already have it, +1 to the trait and nowhere does it state that there is an upper limit on how many times you can take it. Each level of machine gives you +1 armour, so you can start the game with 100 armour. For comparison, SpaceMarine PoweredArmour has 8 armour (10 on the chestplate if it has the reinforced armour subsystem).
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Deathwatch]]
* In ''TabletopGame/{{Deathwatch}}'', you have the Devastator (sometimes known as the Cheesetator) with a Heavy Bolter. Average BS of 50-60 means it hits with about 4-5 shots per turn. That means it rolls 15d10 in damage, and a single 10 on any of those means that it does the 'weapon's entire profile again'. Did I mention that a single average hit is ~23 damage, enough to reduce the average full-health human character to near crits? And that's not even going into the Techmarine, which can take the Breaching Auger very early. Said Auger does 4d10+3 damage. Factoring in a Marine's Strength Bonus, that's 4d10+13. ''It can be dual-wielded'', and has rules so it can NoSell armour (Pen 7 + Power Field, which means a 75% chance of destroying any weapon without a power field as well used to parry it). It rolls five dice (with Tearing), with a reroll for two damage dice, and ''any'' result of a 10 means it does its entire profile again. With this thing, a Techmarine can and will turn anything in front of him into fondue in a turn or two.

* GameBreaker/WarhammerFourThousand