History Main / FakeBalance

** A less noticeable example would be some of the unlockable melee weapons compared to their default counterparts, specifically for the Pyro's Fire Axe, Heavy's Fist, Scout's Bat, and Soldier's Shovel. The unlockable weapons generally are better in specific circumstances and worse in others (Axtinguisher does huge damage against burning enemies and less against others, [[DesperationAttack the Equalizer does less damage at high health and more at low health]]), or grant special abilities at the cost of making them less effective as weapons (the G.R.U. deals less damage and makes the Heavy take more damage, but lets him run faster; the Atomizer deals less damage in exchange for giving Scout the ability to triple jump). The catch is that default weapons for those classes are almost ''entirely useless'' in the first place, even as {{Emergency Weapon}}s (the Rocket Launcher and Scattergun reload as fast as their classes' respective melee weapons can be swung, while the Minigun and Flamethrower [[BottomlessMagazines don't even have to reload]] and rarely run out of ammo if the player knows what they're doing), so there's nowhere to go but up most of the time.

** A less noticeable example would be some of the unlockable melee weapons compared to their default counterparts, specifically for the Pyro's Fire Axe, Heavy's Fist, Scout's Bat, and Soldier's Shovel. The unlockable weapons generally are better in specific circumstances and worse in others (Axtinguisher does huge damage against burning enemies and less against others, [[DesperationAttack the Equalizer does less damage at high health and more at low health]]), or grant special abilities at the cost of making them less effective as weapons (the G.R.U. deals less damage and makes the Heavy take more damage, but lets him run faster; the Atomizer deals less damage in exchange for giving Scout the ability to triple jump). The catch is that default weapons for those classes are almost ''entirely useless'' in the first place, even as {{Emergency Weapon}}s (the Rocket Launcher and Scattergun reload as fast as their classes' respecivte melee weapons can be swung, while the Minigun and Flamethrower [[BottomlessMagazines don't even have to reload]] and rarely run out of ammo if the player knows what they're doing), so there's nowhere to go but up most of the time.

** A less noticeable example would be some of the unlockable melee weapons compared to their default counterparts, specifically for the Pyro's Fire Axe, Heavy's Fist, and Soldier's Shovel. The unlockable weapons generally are better in specific circumstances and worse in others (Axtinguisher does huge damage against burning enemies and less against others, [[DesperationAttack the Equalizer does less damage at high health and more at low health]]), or grant special abilities at the cost of making them less effective as weapons (the G.R.U. deals less damage and makes the Heavy take more damage, but lets him run faster). The catch is that default weapons for those classes are almost ''entirely useless'' in the first place, even as {{Emergency Weapon}}s (the Rocket Launcher reloads as fast as a melee weapon can be swung, while the Minigun and Flamethrower [[BottomlessMagazines don't even have to reload]] and rarely run out of ammo if the player knows what they're doing), so there's nowhere to go but up most of the time.

** EmptyLevels are a problem in basically every edition (except 4th, which gives everyone the same advancement for everything). LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards was in effect even in 1st Edition, where Fighters gained nothing from leveling besides incremental bonuses. One very common reaction to this in the 3.5 era was to give the character utility class features whenever it seemed like they wouldn't get anything from their core abilities. In theory, this meant that the character would always have something to look forward to. In practice, this left some classes laden with disparate and near-useless class features that were so minor and situational that they frequently forgot them. The Monk was the worst offender by far; sure, you get something every level, but when that something is a once-per-day fourth-level spell or a once-per-''week'' OneHitKill attack that [[UselessUsefulSpell usually misses,]] why bother? (Exemplified by one {{Narm}}-tastic [[http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cwc/20061013a article]] on the Wizards of the Coast website, which claimed that "[[BlatantLies players always have something to look forward to with the Monk]]." On the other end of the power scale, the Sorcerer and Cleric get nothing for leveling up but advancement of their spells and familiar (for Sorcerer) and domains and TurnUndead (for Cleric). Since TurnUndead was [[GuideDangIt needlessly complex]], familiars were liabilities, and many domains didn't advance by levels, players would simply jump into a PrestigeClass that advanced casting and lose basically jack in the process. Some even used alternate class features that swapped out their familiar or Turn Undead, giving them literally no reason to ''not'' take a PrestigeClass. ''TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}}'' did its level best to rectify this by nerfing spellcasting some, cutting down on full-casting prestige classes, buffing many formerly-useless abilities, and redesigning many classes so their abilities ''always'' advanced by level. Sadly, as the problem is built into the game, it didn't work, though it did boost the power of the weaker classes... though they were still useless compared to casters.

* The further along you play in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyCrystalChronicles1'' the more obvious it becomes that it's really not meant for single player. Come cycle 3 onwards, if you haven't been making repeated trips into the dungeons, you're going to be way behind while enemies in cycle 3 and above can hit you exceptionally hard if not in even greater numbers than before to the point of overwhelming the single playetr. You can't go back through cycles either; so if you've been playing carelessly through the game without farming or stocking up on artifacts, you're in big trouble late game.

* In ''VideoGame/DarkestDungeon'', you can decrease your [[DynamicDifficulty Light meter]] to make the game tougher (reduced scouting chance, increased chance of being ambushed, increased critical hit chance for both sides), but increases the amount of loot obtained. The issue is that when you open a loot container, the only thing it will check is your current Light meter, so if you were to fight the enemies guarding it at full light and snuff out the torch, you get the full bonuses from having no light. Also in regards to this, some expert players believe torchless runs (you play through the whole game with no light) are actually ''easier'' than a regular run because the amount of loot you gain from being always torchless outweighs the increased negative modifiers you receive, which is especially important early on as the main challenge in the early game is gathering enough money to [[EarlyGameRun keep your Hamlet and crew upgraded]].

* Azazel in ''VideoGame/TheBindingOfIsaac'' was intended to be a GlassCannon and FragileSpeedster, with his high mobility, ability to pass over obstacles, and powerful basic attack balanced out by having no red hearts, a very short attack range, and a brief delay before being able to fire. The idea was he moves fast and hits hard, but you need to get ''very'' close to hit opponents and can't fire off a quick counterattack, thus putting yourself in easy range of enemy attack and taking ''permanent'' damage since all he has for health are the temporary black hearts. In practice there are so many items that grant HP ups that it's ''very'' easy to negate his one real weakness, and so many powerups combine with his basic attack so well that he is able to utterly sweep foes in seconds meaning enemies typically never get the chance to inflict damage anyways. Azazel is so thoroughly and utterly ''broken'', not to mention ''very'' easy to unlock by making three deals with the Devil in one run, that there's little reason to go for or use any other characters outside of a SelfImposedChallenge since even mediocre players will be able to tear through a run as this guy.

** On the subject of difficulty, after ''United Offensive'' was more difficult between fewer medkits dropped by enemies and their use of noticeably stronger weapons, ''Call of Duty 2'' switched to the now-standard system of RegeneratingHealth - so now, to balance that out, you're forced into stuations where you hae to make some [[ViolationOfCommonSense realistically suicidal decisions]] every fifteen seconds - things like running right up towards alert enemy tanks and standing directly in the line of fire of machine-gun nests. This opened the floodgates for this sort of thing as well, where when every other game [[FollowTheLeader started also using regenerating health]], they designed their games around the idea that the player has effectively infinite health, without accounting for the fact that the player needs time where they're ''not'' getting ventilated to actually recover that health.

** ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty2'' and ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyWorldAtWar World at War]]'' both suffer from brutal gaps in weapon effectiveness, since they're set during World War II. Each country's weapon set includes bolt-action rifles, semi-automatic carbines, and fully automatic submachine guns. Both games end up favoring one weapon type completely. In ''2'', the bolt-actions reign supreme, because they are always a one-shot kill, regardless of where you hit, even while the semi-auto ones were pathetically weak in comparison, to say nothing of the faster submachine guns. In ''World at War'', the full-auto submachine guns are by far the most used and useful; the semi-autos just do not have the fire rate to compete even with their higher damage per-bullet, and the machine guns are too heavy and slow for their similar fire rates and firepower to match the [=SMGs=]' comparatively-lightning-quick movement and reload speeds.

*** The original game had this same sort of issue with the semi-automatic rifles, which combined the power of the bolt-action rifles with fire rates closer to the handguns, because of the fact that the game simply didn't give any to anyone that was not on the American team. They got their choice of the more powerful M1 Garand or the higher-capacity M1 Carbine - everybody else got nothing and had to like it. Portable machine guns suffered the same issue because the only ones present in-game were the American BAR and the British Bren, with the [[RussianGuySuffersMost Russian team getting it worst]] because the Germans at least had something of similar capabilities in the [=StG=] 44. [[EarlyInstallmentWeirdness Damage fall-off also didn't exist]], so someone with one of these limited-issue guns could simply hang back and two-shot enemies from across the map. ''United Offensive'' took many steps to balance things properly, by adding damage fall-off, shifting towards machine guns that had to be mounted before they could be fired, and giving both the Germans and Russians new semi-auto rifles. Amusingly, this had the added bonus of also making the campaign [[DifficultySpike balls hard]], because the new German semi-auto rifle is handed out quite frequently, but little was done to balance how much damage the AI does with it compared to how much damage you do with it.
** On the subject of difficulty, after ''United Offensive'' was more difficult between fewer medkits dropped by enemies and their use of noticeably stronger weapons, ''Call of Duty 2'' switched to the now-standard system of RegeneratingHealth - so now, to balance that out, you're forced into situations where you have to stand up in front of machine gun fire or directly approach alert enemy tanks every fifteen seconds. This opened the floodgates for this sort of thing as well, where when every other game [[FollowTheLeader started also using regenerating health]], they designed their games around the idea that the player has effectively infinite health, without accounting for the fact that the player needs time where they're ''not'' getting ventilated to actually recover that health.

** Counterspell: Passive magic damage resistance with an active that lets him briefly reflect single-target abilities back at the caster. This is arguably his most practical "anti-mage" ability in his kit, but it's at total odds with the other parts of him. If the damage mitigation is too good early game, it can makes escaping ganks too early for him, making countering him early game too hard. While having some damage mitigation on a squishy hero is welcome, a purely defensive skill is somewhat counterproductive on a hero that wants to avoid taking damage in team fights in the first place. It also doesn't provide him with any protection against crowd control duration and area of effect disables, and being disabled with or without magic resist is equally bad in a team fight, since the disable has does its job of disrupting a high-value target. As a carry, Anti-Mage should be avoiding getting disabled in the first place, meaning he won't get as much mileage from mitigating magic damage if he's avoiding them, and carries will buy a Black King Bar to be immune to them in the first place (which Counterspell is ''not'' a replacement for).

** By looking only at his skillset, Anti-Mage seems like a type of hero who should be played by outlasting his opponent's barrage of magic damage and burn down their mana to get a big ult, which would fit a MightyGlacier type of hero. In practice, the best way for Anti-Mage players to stop caster heroes on their tracks is to [[OccamsRazor kill them before they can even retaliate]]. The time Anti-Mage starts becoming effective is when the heroes he's supposed to counters start tapering off anyway. His kit has almost zero crowd control or disables, which are generally more effective as countering casters by preventing them from using their skills in the first place. He lacks any proactive ways to counter casting, and his only options are slow and defensive counters. However, he can't be played as a tank because his survivability early game is too weak and is too high-value of a target to afford taking hits for the team. Anti-Mage's best traits are his scaling and mobility, and his mana burning, ultimate nuke, and magic mitigation are all seen as secondary. This begs the question: is Anti-Mage ''really'' an "anti-mage"?

** His stats: ''Dota'' follows the inverse of LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards, where physical attackers in general scale better in the late game than magic users. By looking at raw values, Anti-Mage is a carry, a type of hero defined by their MagikarpPower. However, his stats skew him very far into the late game. Not only is he an Agility carry, which means he'll very high damage output with some physical damage mitigation to boot late game, but his low Base Attack Speed makes him scale even harder than most Agility carries. To balance this, his early game stats are low, including his life pool, and to make him not snowball too quickly, he lacks good creep-clearing skills. The problem comes from the fact it conflicts with his design, which is supposed to be an anti-caster hero. He's a late-game hero on paper and a counter to early-game heroes in concept. Because of his exponential scaling and lack of utility and clear speed early game, Anti-Mage is shoehorned into being played as a flash-farmer[[note]]A type of carry who contributes little to the team early game to farm up clear-boosting items as fast as possible to load up on powerful, expensive items to steamroll the late game[[/note]], which means he will be spending the early game avoiding the heroes he's supposed to counter when they're at their strongest.

** His stats: ''Dota'' follows the inverse of LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards, where physical attackers in general scale better in the late game than magic users. By looking at raw values, Anti-Mage is a carry, a type of hero defined by their MagikarpPower. However, his stats skew him very far into the late game. Not only is he an Agility carry, which means he'll very high damage output with some physical damage mitigation to boot late game, but his low Base Attack Speed makes him scale even harder than most Agility carries. To balance this, his early game stats are low, including his life pool, and to make him not snowball too quickly, he lacks good creep-clearing skills. The problem comes from the fact it conflicts with his design, which is supposed to be an anti-caster hero. He's a late-game hero on paper and a counter to early-game heroes in concept. Because of his exponential scaling and lack of utility and clear speed early game, Anti-Mage is shoehorned into being played as a flash-farmer[[note]]A type of carry who contributes little to the team early game to farm up clear-boosting items as fast as possible to load up on powerful, expensive items to steamroll the late game[[/note], which means he will be spending the early game avoiding the heroes he's supposed to counter when they're at their strongest.

* Anti-Mage from ''VideoGame/Dota2'' is one of the oldest and most iconic classic heroes in the game. Despite this, he has for a long time been considered an absolute mess of a hero design, but because people are conflicted on how he should be fixed, he hasn't fundamentally changed since his ''VideoGame/DefenseOfTheAncientsAllStars'' days. He is a hero who combines AntiMagic, FragileSpeedster, and MagikarpPower into one package, but when brought up to the context of the game, his problems become apparent. Here's a detailed breakdown of the hero and his abilities:
** His stats: As a carry, he's very weak in the early game but his damage can scale very high, thanks to his high Agility gain and low Base Attack Time. The problem comes from the fact that ''Dota'' follows the inverse of LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards, where physical attackers in general scale better in the late game than magic users. Anti-Mage is a late-game hero by design but a counter to a class of early-game heroes by concept. If he's too effective at countering them, he becomes too hard to shut down early game and snowballs out of control too quickly. If he doesn't counter them effectively enough, there is something wrong with his whole concept. Adding to the problem is that his selfish kit offers little team utility and therefore his late game needs to be powerful to compensate, and his lack of creep-clearing skills forces him to be played as a flash-farmer[[note]]A type of carry who contributes little to the team early game to farm up clear-boosting items as fast as possible to load up on powerful, expensive items to steamroll the late game[[/note]], which makes balancing his early game even harder. Because of his playstyle, Anti-Mage is forced to avoid engaging with magic-based heroes when they're at their strongest, even if his kit were to actually do that job well early game.
** Mana Break: His attacks [[ManaDrain burn the opponent's mana]] and deals damage relative to how much Mana it burnt. His ultimate relies on this since its damage scales with missing mana. While in theory this can be pretty disruptive to casters, because any enemy can instantly react to being autoattacked, it can only prevent ability casts if they were already at low mana or with the help of another hero to actually suppress them first. Also, because it's tied to your autoattack speed, it's not very effective early game and because Anti-Mage is a squishy melee hero, it can't be used to harass during laning. While more damaging against high-mana enemies, it's more disruptive against low-mana enemies, and this difference used to be even worse back when Mana Break didn't scale with the enemy's max mana. Another weird problem is how it doesn't provide any bonus damage against enemies that ran out of mana.
** Blink: A [[SimpleYetAwesome fast, low-cooldown teleport with good range]]. This lets him engage, escape from fights, and jump between creep waves to farm. This single ability is arguably what breaks Anti-Mage's entire kit. Early game, Blink can't be too effective and his magic resistance can't be too high or it makes him too hard to shut down. Mid game, Blink can't have its cost and cooldown too low and range too high because it affects his farm speed. Late game, this combined with the amount of Armor he gets from Agility late game makes him even harder to kill, which skews him further into late-game and adds to the slowballing problem.
** Counterspell: Passive magic damage resistance with an active that lets him briefly reflect single-target abilities back at the caster. Again, very sensitive to value changes especially early game because it affects how likely he can escape a gank. While having some damage mitigation on a squishy hero is welcome, a purely defensive skill is somewhat counterproductive on a hero that wants to avoid taking damage in team fights in the first place. It also doesn't provide him with any protection against crowd control duration and area of effect disables, and being disabled with or without magic resist is equally bad in a team fight, since the disable has does its job of disrupting a high-value target. As a carry, Anti-Mage should be avoiding getting disabled in the first place, meaning he won't get as much mileage from mitigating magic damage if he's avoiding them, and carries will buy a Black King Bar to be immune to them in the first place (which Counterspell is ''not'' a replacement for).

** By looking only at his skillset, Anti-Mage seems like a type of hero who should be played by outlasting his opponent's barrage of magic damage and burn down their mana to get a big ult, which would fit a MightyGlacier type of hero. In practice, the best way for Anti-Mage players to stop caster heroes on their tracks is to [[OccamsRazor kill them before they can even retaliate]]. The time Anti-Mage starts becoming effective is when the heroes he's supposed to counters start tapering off anyway. His kit has almost zero crowd control or disables, which are generally more effective as countering casters by preventing them from using their skills in the first place, and is too high-priority to be used to tank hits. Since he lacks any ways to ''proactively'' stop casters, he is never utilized as a counterpick to them. Anti-Mage's best traits are his scaling and mobility, and his mana burning, ultimate nuke, and decent early-game magic mitigation are seen as secondary. This begs the question: is Anti-Mage ''really'' an "anti-mage"?

*** Many years later, Magebane was eventually reworked. While he didn't receive any brand-new abilities, he was changed to a Strength hero with better early-game stats, while adding more utility to his kit. His Flash of Anti-Magic has shorter range and longer cooldown, but it deals [=AoE=] damage, has a slow, and if it hits an enemy hero, he gains a magic damage shield, and Master of the Mantra gives him passive magic damage reduction and more damage reduction to the whole team in a teamfight, and it can be activated to gain a temporary aura that deals damage to enemies based on how much mana they've spent. All these changes combined lets him be played as a front-line tank, less dependent on flash farming and a more useful hero early and mid game, and while he's longer has an insanely powerful carry and split pusher late game, he gained more defined weaknesses, without changing the "feel" of the hero. As for Anti-Mage, he got a bit of utility with a magic damage reduction aura and a Blink that spawns an illusion for more mana burning, but they're gated behind Aghanim's Shard and Scepter, which are rather sub-optimal picks on a carry stat-wise and aren't available early game.
** tl;dr version: Anti-Mage is a GlassCannon FragileSpeedster whose skillset is optimized for a MightyGlacier and a [[MagikarpPower late-game]] hero who is supposed to be a counter to a class of heroes that are primarily at their best early-game, yet his methods of countering them are too impractical to actually fulfill his niche. If he's ever relevant to the meta, it's to abuse his mobility and late-game power in a carry-centric meta, and almost never for his anti-caster abilities.

** Another issue with those two typings are the fact that they have ridiculously well spread moves on both offensive sides. ''Every'' Dragon-type can learn Outrage, Dragon Pulse, and Draco Meteor, and Kingdra and Dragalge are the only fully-evolved Dragon-types that can't learn Dragon Claw. As for Water types, Hydro Pump is extremely common, and Surf, Waterfall, Aqua Tail, and Scald are spread amongst every Water-type in existence (and to add insult to injury, Scald has a higher burn chance than ''most Fire moves''). While other types have more powerful and specialized moves on one side of the offense, no other types have the combined balance of typing coverage and movepool that these two have, so much that there's only one Dragon type that is not OU on Website/{{Smogon}}'s Tier List for Gen IV (Altaria), which is considered as really underpowered stats-wise, and Water has the most number of OU Pokémon and even many of those not considered OU are perfectly usable in that tier. Even in Ubers, Dragon is considered the most dangerous offensive typing of the tier while the so called "[[FanNickname King of]] [[GameBreaker Ubers]]" is Kyogre, a Water-type.

*** Gen VII did a lot to help Ice. Every Ice type introduced her is dual typed and while this gives some of them quad weaknesses it means they can do more than just fight Dragons. Hail received some boosts as well by finally getting a [=Swift Swim/Chlorophyll/Sand Rush=] equivalent in Slush Rush.

** Mana Break: His attacks [[ManaDrain burn the opponent's mana]] and deals damage relative to how much Mana it burnt. His ultimate relies on this since its damage scales with missing mana. While in theory this can be pretty disruptive to casters, in practice it'll only prevent re-casts (after they've ''already used it'') and not for cheaper, low-cooldown skills or maybe one skill if their mana wasn't topped off, without significant back-up from someone with disables. Also, because it's based on your attack speed, it won't burn that much mana in the early game, not to mention since Anti-Mage is a squishy melee it can't be used to harass during laning. While more damaging against high-mana enemies, it's more disruptive against low-mana enemies, and this difference used to be even worse back when Mana Break didn't scale with the enemy's max mana. Another weird problem is how it doesn't provide any bonus damage against enemies that ran out of mana.

** Counterspell: Passive magic damage resistance with an active that lets him briefly reflect single-target abilities back at the caster. Again, very sensitive to value changes especially early game because it affects how likely he can escape a gank. While having some damage mitigation on a squishy hero is welcome, a purely defensive skill is somewhat counterproductive on a hero that wants to avoid taking damage in team fights in the first place. It also doesn't provide him with any protection against crowd control duration and area of effect disables, and being disabled with or without magic resist is equally bad in a team fight, since the disable has does its job of disrupting a high-value target. As a carry, Anti-Mage should be avoiding getting disabled in the first place, meaning he won't get as much mileage from mitigating magic damage if he's avoiding them, and carries will buy a Black King Bar to be immune to them in the first place (which Anti-Mage will ''occasionally buy anyway'').
** Mana Void: Deals [=AoE=] damage around the target based on the target's missing mana. Because damage is dependent on the target's missing mana points, it's rather weak in the early game, even as a finisher. Getting the optimal scenario for this skill is also very impractical: the target will probably need to spend mana for all their skills (thus allowing them to do their job), let themselves get hit by Anti-Mage long enough from him to burn enough mana, and put themselves right in a spot that lets him hit most of the team with the ult. Even when not going for the most optimal scenarios, it's a difficult skill to time due to many factors like the damage threshold required to kill someone and whether the target has a big enough mana pool (and there's its radius, but it's been buffed to be so high that it's a lot harder to miss in a team fight). By the time Mana Void can be an effective nuke, a farmed Anti-Mage will have dealt enough damage and render the skill sub-optimal, or have outright killed them already.

*** Many years later, Magebane was eventually reworked into a Strength hero to make his stats synergize with his kit better. He lost his late-game damage potential and Armor gain in exchange for more bulk from Strength. His Flash of Anti-Magic has lower range and longer cooldown, but it slows and deals damage, gives him a magic damage shield, and has a shorter cooldown if it hits a hero, and Master of the Mantra gives him passive magic damage reduction and more magic damage reduction to his team when he attacks, and it has an active that deals damage to nearby enemies based on how much mana they've spent for a duration. These changes lets him fight in the front lines more effectively, allowing him to tank magic damage even early game, gives him better laning and teamfight utility, makes him better at farming while also making him not overly reliant on early farming, and giving him a clearer weakness to physical damage and not totally monstrous in the late game. As for Anti-Mage, he got a bit of utility with a magic damage reduction aura and a Blink that spawns an illusion for more mana burning, but they're gated behind Aghanim's Shard and Scepter, which are rather sub-optimal picks on a carry stat-wise and aren't available early game.

* In the ''TabletopGame/StarWarsCustomizableCardGame'', (almost) all cards have a "Destiny" value in the top right corner. During just about any type of confrontation (aiming a weapon, resolving a battle, holding a lightsaber duel, attacking the Death Star's exhaust port), one or both players were allowed to draw the top card of their deck and add its Destiny value to whatever total they had previously. The rationale was to allow TheForce (read: luck) to affect the outcome, and since the Force is always with the underdog, common / weak cards always came with high Destiny values. Unfortunately, the strong cards were often ''so'' powerful that they were essentially immune to the effects ''of'' Destiny, so, in the end, it didn't work.

* Azazel in ''VideoGame/TheBindingOfIsaac'' was intended to be a GlassCannon and FragileSpeedster, with his high mobility, ability to pass over obstacles, and powerful basic attack balanced out by having no red hearts, a very short attack range, and a brief delay before being able to fire. The idea was he moves fast and hits hard, but you need to get ''very'' close to hit opponents and can't fire off a quick counterattack, thus putting yourself in easy range of enemy attack and taking ''permanent'' damage since all he has for health are the temporary black hearts. In practice there are so many items that grant HP ups that it's ''very'' easy to negate his one real weakness, and so many powerups combine with his basic attack so well that he is able to utterly sweep foes in seconds negating meaning enemies never get the chance to inflict damage anyways. Azazel is so thoroughly and utterly ''broken'', not to mention ''very'' easy to unlock by making three deals with the Devil in one run, that there's little reason to go for or use any other characters outside of a SelfImposedChallenge since even mediocre players will be able to tear through a run as this guy.

* '''Balance through MinMaxing''': Badly-designed or poorly-aged characters and items are often extremely difficult to properly balance without significant overhauls or complete redos because they simply do not fit in the context of the game. A cheap and easy fix (and one that is a dead giveaway for devs who don't know what the hell to do with the character or item) is to bloat or gut its numbers. This seldom works because the issues are generally structural, not numerical, and it usually results in a TierInducedScrappy because the character or item is overtuned (if good) or completely useless (if bad). For instance, if a character sucks because they lack ranged attacks and can't close the distance to their targets, then increasing their melee damage even further doesn't solve the problem; the character still struggles to do damage, it's just that they can now win even harder against people they would have beaten already.

** The Back Scatter is a fine example of Overestimated Ability. The idea is pretty sound: it's a [[ShortRangeShotgun scattergun]] that deals 35% extra damage if [[BackStab you shoot someone from behind]], at the cost of a reduced clip size, more bullet spread, and no random crits. As the Scout is a GlassCannon who's very good at flanking enemies, this sounds like a decent tradeoff: you have less shots and have to get behind the opponent and attack at close range, but in return, you get a hefty damage boost. However, in practice, you realize that a scout deals about 105 damage if he's at point-blank range and all scattergun pellets connect, in a game where starting health is either 125, 150, 175, 200, or 300 depending on the class. Upping the damage to 141 doesn't help much, because you still two-shot Medics, Demomen, Pyros, and Soldiers and three-shot Heavies. Sure, you now one-shot Engineers, Snipers, Spies, and other Scouts, but a Scout versus a lone Spy, Engineer, or Sniper is already a very lopsided matchup, an Engineer with his sentry active is even more lopsided ''against'' the Scout, and the odds of landing an all-pellets-hit meatshot against a fellow Scout [[FragileSpeedster when they're running and jumping all over the place]] is slim to none. So even when everything is going well for the gun, usually all it does for you is improve your chances in matches that were already foregone conclusions.

* ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'' had the Sandman, a good example of an unbalanced skillset. The Sandman's baseball attack could knock out a player temporarily, but the actual melee attack was weaker to make up for it. But nobody used the Sandman for its melee attack, since the Scattergun was stronger at melee range anyway; the Sandman amounted to a certain kill, provided you could hit with the ball (which wasn't as hard as some players liked to claim). Even worse, the Sandman could stun players under the effect of an Ubercharge (temporary invincibility), which meant either a few wasted seconds of the Uber (if you hit the charge target) or, worse, an ''entirely'' wasted Uber (if you hit the Medic). All of this made it ''the'' single most hated unlockable, with CEVO actually banning it from competitive play.

** The Performapal archetype is an infamous case of Unbalanced Skillset. The deck has an absolute morass of cards that cpuld be politely described as "gimmicky crap", but being used by the main character of the anime, it saw an absurd number of cards printed. Eventually, the law of averages kicked in, and the deck had three different search cards that could also search each other (Monkeyboard, Pendulum Sorcerer, Skullcrobat Joker), leading to an infamous deck that exclusively used those three cards and two drawing-related Performapals as a means of setting their scales and building advantage, ignoring the rest of the deck almost completely. Tellingly, after Monkeyboard was banned, the deck's tournament results fell off a cliff and never recovered.

* The ''TabletopGame/YuGiOh'' card game is also famous for the same reason as ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'' at game balance. Many of the most powerful cards were not only GameBreaker cards, they were considered "rare", with some others being “Secret rares” that would never ever be encountered by the average player. Now here's what creates the fake balance… after a while, you could buy tins with most of those secret rare cards in there.

** The Evilswarm/Verz deck demonstrated both Unbalanced Moveset and Situational Advantage. Evilswarms had about four or five worthwhile Main Deck cards, but nothing was forcing you to use anything besides those four or five cards - cue lots of decks that were "[[ComplacentGamingSyndrome 3 Heliotrope, 3 Kerykion, 3 Castor, 3 Mandragora, 3 Thunderbird]]". It also featured Evilswarm Ophion, a very easy-to-summon card that locked out the opponent from Special Summoning anything above Level 5 - completely meaningless to Rank 4 or lower XYZ-based decks, but debilitating to Synchros, Fusions, most non-Extra Deck users, and higher-Ranked decks. This meant that Evilswarms would either almost always win or usually lose, depending solely on your choice of summoning type.

** Additionally, in ''VideoGame/ModernWarfare'', the imbalance grows as a player's multiplayer level increases, since levels grant better attachments and perks to already powerful weapons - at least in theory. In practice, weapons legitimately meant to be end-game superguns are often beaten by early- to mid-game weapons that weren't properly playtested. Not at all helped that the last gun unlocked is always the AK-47 or its equivalent in the game, solely from its real-world infamy and a deliberate effort to curtail overuse of it, rather than any advantages over other weapons - it was the first assault rifle in [=CoD4=], after all.

** ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty2'' and ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyWorldAtWar World at War]]'' both suffer from brutal gaps in weapon effectiveness, since they're set during the second World War. Each country's weapon set includes bolt-action rifles, semi-automatic carbines, and fully automatic submachine guns. Both games end up favoring one weapon type completely. In ''2'', the bolt-actions reign supreme, because they are always a one-shot kill, regardless of where you hit, even while the semi-auto ones were pathetically weak in comparison, to say nothing of the faster submachine guns. In ''World at War'', the full-auto submachine guns are by far the most used and useful; the semi-autos just do not have the fire rate to compete, and the machine guns are too heavy and slow for their similar fire rates and firepower to match the [=SMGs=]' comparatively-lightning-quick movement and reload speeds.

** A less noticeable example would be some of the unlockable melee weapons compared to their default counterparts, specifically for the Pyro's Fire Axe, Heavy's Fist, and Soldier's Shovel. The unlockable weapons generally are better in specific circumstances and worse in others (Axtinguisher does huge damage against burning enemies and less against others, [[DesperationAttack the Equalizer does less damage at high health and more at low health]]), or grant special abilities at the cost of making them less effective as weapons (the G.R.U. deals less damage and makes the Heavy take more damage, but lets him run faster). The catch is that default weapons for those classes are almost ''entirely useless'' in the first place, even as {{Emergency Weapon}}s (the Rocket Launcher reloads as fast as a melee weapon can be swung, while the Minigun and Flamethrower [[BottomlessMagazines don't even have to reload]] and rarely run out of ammo if the player knows what they're doing.), so there's nowhere to go but up most of the time.

** ''Call of Duty'', again, has this problem as well. ''United Offensive'' decided to up the challenge present in the base game - by lessening how often dead enemies will drop medkits when you're injured and giving the Germans that didn't already have the [=MP40=] to shred you in close range a new, incredibly powerful semi-auto rifle that lets them shred you at ''any'' distance. Your only chance of survival is letting your AI teammates do all the fighting, because if you try to do anything, you will lose half your health in one shot and most likely will not be able to replenish a single bit of it afterwards. ''Call of Duty 2'' switched to RegeneratingHealth - and now you're forced to [[TooDumbToLive run right up towards enemy tanks and stand up in front of enemy machine-gunners]] (things real soldiers in real wars ''very quickly learn '''not''' to do'' if they want to live more than fifteen seconds) every fifteen seconds to balance it out.
*** Regenerating health has caused a lot of this in modern games, where developers design the game around the idea that the player has effectively infinite health, often without taking into account the fact that the player needs time where they're ''not'' getting injured for that regeneration to kick in. ''VideoGame/BattlefieldBadCompany'' is another good example, since its draw is destructible cover, combined with everyone getting explosives or the game straight-up making you suicide rush heavy vehicles at times - if you're injured enough that you have to hide and heal in this game, you're basically already dead.

* '''Unbalanced move-set''': [[GamblersFallacy If a character has a move set with a few overly powerful moves, the counterbalance to this may be to have several moves be near-useless.]] But the existence of bad moves does nothing to reduce the effectiveness of the good ones. A skilled player is likely to [[GameplayDerailment exploit the good moves]] while [[ComplacentGamingSyndrome ignoring the useless ones]], often taking away from the variety of the game.

* '''[[TacticalRockPaperScissors Counterplay-based balance]]''': An item or character is ridiculously overpowering, but falls apart if you use a certain item, character, or strategy, but this can be undone with another item/character/strategy, and so on and on until you end up with a multiplicity of layers of counterplay. The rationale here is that these powerful characters can be negated by skilled people capable of exploiting their weaknesses. This also has the side effect of creating {{Skill Gate Character}}s that are very strong against unskilled players, but weak against skilled players.