Line #66 AwesomeButImpractical/WesternRPG


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9	* 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]].
10	** 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.
11	* 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.
12	* ''VideoGame/BaldursGateII''
13	** The Imprisonment spell, which traps the victim in suspended animation in a hollow sphere deep underground ''permanently -- without a saving throw!'' Downside: A level 9 spell won't be used on everyday foes, and the player will want the big foes' loot which they take with them to their new plane of existence if imprisoned. It was made useful in the ExpansionPack ''Throne Of Bhaal'', as by this point any enemy that drops worthwhile loot is immune to the spell anyway and a spell that reverses the effect becomes more readily available.
14	** 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''.
15	** Wild Mages in general. The increased versatility of wild mages is generally offset by the fact that their spells have a small chance of going wrong to various degrees. You might accidentally end up changing your character's colors while casting Magic Missile. Or you might summon a bunch of squirrels instead of dropping a fireball. That Lightning Bolt spell might be cast with an effective level that's three levels higher than your wild mage, doing more damage, or three levels ''lower'', doing less damage. Or, if you're really, ''really'' unlucky, [[https://youtu.be/tglcxuqfgLI?list=PLtTEtQRfZ0Vh_L1AZEsalXozCeWRsgmxq&t=2010 you can try to cast the Mage Armor spell, critically fail and cast a Gate spell, which summons a high level demon that will then kill your level 4 party that doesn't have protection from evil.]]
16	** Wild Mages also have a special spell, the Nahal's Reckless Dweomer, that allows them to cast literally ''any'' spell they know, instantaneously, [[MyRulesAreNotYourRules without having to have it memorized or even being at the level required to cast it]]; this allows them to be some of the most versatile spellcasters in the game, and potentially the most powerful. The downside is, the spell required to do so is pretty volatile and has only a ''one-in-a-hundred'' chance of being cast correctly, much much less than regular spells, with a variety of effects if you don't; some are harmless, some are beneficial, but if you [[LuckBasedMission get particularly unlucky]] with the die roll you can end turning yourself to stone. Moreso if you use a mod to play wild mages in the first game, before the Enhanced Edition; higher-level Wild Mages have methods to improve their chances of successfully casting an unmemorized spell or making it more powerful. Low-level ones don't. So while you ''could'' try to [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill cast Cloudkill at level one]], it would most likely backfire and kill ''you''.
17	** 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.
18	** The PC character can acquire immunity from normal weapons, which sounds great... but you get it at the very end of the game. The FinalBoss is an EvilSorcerer and doesn't even use any weapon. Same thing for the demons he summons which fight with magic and their claws. When you take your character to ''VideoGame/BaldursGateIIThroneOfBhaal'', ''everyone'' is using magical weapons, making this perk [[PowerupLetdown completely useless]].
19	** Backstabbing. Sure its impressive to hit for triple digit damage and gib enemies doing it, but it takes a lot of faffing around with limited use invisibility items/spells or running completely out of enemy sightlines to Hide in Shadows, plus thieves' mediocre [=THAC0=] ensures you'll often miss anyway. Not to mention basically everything you'd want to backstab - you know, powerful critters like dragons, demons, most mages and basically every boss - are immune to backstabs and/or see right through invisibility anyway, even with Non-Detection active. Unless you want to run multiple highly-specialized Thieves, it's more effective to focus on the essential thieving skills (Find Traps , Open Locks and maybe Detect Illusion) in a multi/dual class setup and support in combat with much more reliable weapons (Fighter/Thief) or spells (Mage/Thief).
20	*** Ironically the best option for a backstabbing class isn't a Thief at all, but rather the Stalker Ranger kit. Better [=THAC0=] and weapon proficiencies overall, plus they don't have to worry about managing their Thief skill points for other things since they only have Hide in Shadows/Move Silently. They can also dual to a Cleric to get the benefits of that class, though that limits them to Quarterstaves and Clubs for backstabbing (and the best backstabby weapon is a staff, so that works out well). The Shadowdancer kit in Enhanced Edition can also Hide without having to be out of sight at the cost of a lower damage multiplier and a small hit to spendable skill points (20 points per level vs 25); plus they can still Dual to bolster their [=THAC0=] and weapon proficiencies.
21	** Triple-multiclassing. Having all the abilities of a Fighter/Mage/Thief or Fighter/Cleric/Thief sounds tempting, but you'll lag behind in levels almost immediately since you're splitting your 1/6 party experience share three ways. Pair that with an experience cap of 2.95 million and at best all of your classes will be in the low double digits - so you'll be stuck with a low [=THAC0=] (10 tops), lackluster thieving skills and never get to memory-cast any spells above Level 6. Even with Throne of Bhaal installed and an experience cap of 8 million, you'll never break the 20s in any class except Thief while the rest of your party will likely be well into the 30s. Unless you're doing some kind of solo run challenge it's much better to have a good single, dual or 2-multi class to fill a specific niche well rather than being consistently mediocre at everything. Or if you really want a versatile character who doesn't excel at any one thing, choose a Bard instead - they get some lovely support items and songs, plus a solid selection of weapons, spells and high level abilities and they level up fast (same experience table as Thieves).
22	* ''VideoGame/BaldursGateIII'':
23	** Most feats tend to have this issue when compared to the Ability Score Improvement option. While they often give abilities that can be beneficial or unique, the level cap of 12 means there isn't as much flexibility to take one, and still focus on important stats, since the majority of classes only have three chances to chose an ASI or Feat. Some of them run into the issue of also not really being helpful despite sounding neat, because of the gameplay side of things. Dungeon Delver for instance can make traps less of a problem, but a player can simply boost a characters Wisdom and Dexterity to ensure the player spots traps and disarms them easier, or even just reload a save to retry. Actor is another example, as there are few chances where things like Performance checks are an option. While some with ASI boost at least can make for good early level pick, or something like Alert or Resilient which can assist class features, it's more practical to take the ASI feature and get your classes primary stats maxed, and then maybe take one of the other feats when getting to level 12.
24	** The Dark Urge's Slayer transformation, unlockable by killing Isobel in act 2. It transforms the Dark Urge into a giant monster — with its own set of stats so that, say, a Wizard won't be screwed over by its all physical attacks. But for all that, its attacks aren't really all that powerful, and tend to be inaccurate, and lots of buffs and class abilities won't carry over when you transform. If your team is well-balanced, you might just be better off without it. Also, Isobel's death locks the player out of several merchants and even a potential party member or two.
25	* ''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.
26	* ''VideoGame/DiabloII'':
27	** 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).
28	** 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.
29	** 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.
30	** The Amazon's Impale skill is this. It's the most powerful physical attack of her arsenal. At maximum rank, it delivers a whooping +770% physical damage and spears are already very high damaging weapons. However, it's painfully slow as Hell and can only affect ''one'' monster at a time. Adding to this, there's a good chance that the weapon will reach zero durability, breaking it entirely unless it's indestructible. And last but not the least, it doesn't receive any synergies from other skills. Fortunately, ''[[UpdatedReRelease Diablo II: Ressurected]]'' made it a little more usable, by adding a slow effect on hit and making the attack uninterrupted.
31	* In the [=PLATO=] computers ''VideoGame/{{dnd}}'' game, the Fireball and Lightning Bolt spells do more damage than any other, but due to the close confines of the dungeon, they also damage the player.
32	* 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.
33	** 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.)
34	*** 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.
35	** [[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.
36	** 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.
37	* ''Dungeons & Dragons Online'' has an impossibly cool two-handed sword named Terror. Every strike has "Nightmares" effect (target must make a will save or take additional damage to psyche), every enemy striking the wielder must make save against Fear, and three time per day it can cast Phantasmal Killer spell (target must make a will save or die). And it's made of CRYSTAL. Unfortunately you have to be level 18 to use Terror, and by that time all your enemies save about 95% of the time -- if not immune to fear outright. Being crystal rather than metal, it is good for killing MooksAteMyEquipment rust monsters.
38	* ''Franchise/TheElderScrolls'':
39	** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIIMorrowind Morrowind]]'':
40	*** 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.
41	*** 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.
42	*** 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.
43	** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim Skyrim]]'':
44	*** 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.
45	*** 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.
46	*** '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.
47	*** 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.
48	*** 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.
49	** 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 [[WordsCanBreakMyBones 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.
50	* ''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.
51	** 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.
52	* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}''
53	** The "''VideoGame/Fallout2'' Hint Book", of... well, ''Fallout 2'', provides a massive amount of XP (which can be done repeatedly, letting you level up forever) and raises your skills to maximum, essentially giving you a perfect character... but you can only obtain it in the postgame. By that point, you've already done the entire main story and are strong enough to take down the game's [[FinalBoss strongest enemy]], so chances are nothing in the game could threaten you anyway. Lampshaded by the ingame description.
54	--->''Well, THIS would have been good to have at the beginning of the goddamn game.''
55	*** 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 game's burst fire mechanisms work, the most basic SMG you could use would do more damage. Many of the higher-level weapons suffer from this. Miniguns 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.
56	*** 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).
57	*** 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.
58	*** 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.
59	*** The FN FAL is a decent rifle that can be upgraded with a laser sight. However, 7.62 mm ammo is shockingly rare. Same thing goes for other 7.62 weapons like the [=M60=].
60	** ''VideoGame/Fallout3'':
61	*** Big weapons in general in ''Fallout 3'' are difficult to put to practical use for a variety of reasons[[labelnote:examples]] relative rarity of Big Guns within in-game stores and loot drops, the sheer costs of replacements to repair them and ammunition, etc.[[/labelnote]], which is likely the reason later games simply removed Big Guns as a skill entirely (redistributing the usual suspects as top-level gear in the Explosives, Energy Weapons, or Guns categories).
62	*** The Fat Man launcher fires miniature nuclear warheads. Its [[AceCustom unique variant]], the Experimental MIRV, is a weapon that can fire ''eight'' mini-nukes at once. Problems: there's a limited number of mini-nukes and no more spawn in weapon shops (seventy-two in the entire game), and the largest bosses in the game take maybe two hits to kill with a regular Fat Man. At most, you can fire a Fat Man 72 times and the Experimental MIRV 9 times per playthrough. And firing this weapon will very likely blow up the wielder along with the target, especially in the close-quarters fights that frequently happen in-game. Overkill much? Fire it once for the "cool value", then sell it or stick it in a locker and never use it again.
63	*** The Minigun is useless in VATS, goes through ammo like a broken sieve, is too bulky to carry as a backup, and worst of all doesn't do the damage you'd think it should (it cannot score critical hits, ever!). It also has a long windup sequence to get the barrel spinning while your target is blasting you to hell. Since it is only really useful at close range, it is outclassed by the flamer which has equally high damage potential and fires instantly when you pull the trigger.
64	*** The Missile Launcher has a clip size of one and takes too long to reload between shots to use as a primary weapon, and doesn't do enough damage per shot against high hitpoint targets to warrant carrying as a backup. It is also useless in VATS at long range as it will often miss. It also has the issue of likely blowing the player up while using it, with the tendency to violently scatter all items/loot within the blast radius.
65	*** The only Big Gun that seems practical enough for regular use is the Vengeance Gatling Laser, the unique variant of the standard Gatling Laser. However, spare Gatling Lasers are hard to find and are accordingly expensive, it deteriorates extremely quickly, rarely ever scores critical hits, and it can still go through ammo quickly if you aren't careful. Also, the only place where it's obtainable is a sanctuary filled to the brim with ''[[DemonicSpiders Deathclaws]]''.
66	*** Many small guns and energy weapons also have this problem:
67	*** 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. Its unique variants (Blackhawk and Callahan's Magnum) pack even more of a punch but degrade even faster. A better use for that .44 ammo is Lincoln's Repeater, a unique Hunting Rifle that can be repaired with its common variants.
68	*** The Sniper Rifle is an even more extreme version of the Scoped .44 Magnum, sporting fantastic range, power, accuracy and a high crit multiplier at the cost of having a rare ammo type and degrading extremely fast. It's second to none for picking off distant enemies, but 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 than the base model either.) Most players save their sniper rifles for special circumstances and opt to use a Hunting Rifle for general use 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 relatively scarce .44 ammo).
69	*** The Alien Blaster will vaporize any standard enemy with one shot, due to its 100% critical hit chance and high base damage. But it breaks down very quickly (and can only be repaired by certain [=NPCs=] for cash) and has such a limited ammo supply that it's almost not worth using. Its best value is for headshots at EliteMooks in VATS where more conventional weaponry won't take them down fast enough.
70	*** Melee weapons in general are almost always suboptimal for anything but sneak attacks. Why? Because most enemies will be shooting at you from a distance (and have friends around them doing the same all around the player), and the ones that don't (like Deathclaws) will have melee attacks that will kill you in one or two hits and therefore should be dealt with at range anyway. While MinMaxing your stats and perks to do insane damage with the Shishkebab while investing in the best-quality armor, defensive perks, and combat drugs to help you survive until you reach your target is a viable (and fun) option, it's never going to work as well as plain old BoringButPractical small guns.
71	*** [[PunnyName Jack the]] [[ChainsawGood Ripper]] takes the cake. It's a handheld {{chainsaw\|Good}} with strong base damage that hits (read: gives {{Critical Hit}}s a chance to proc) over 30 times a second and has a great [[CriticalHitClass crit rate]], chewing through high-level enemies like nobody's business. He also degrades in quality incredibly quickly and can only be repaired by cannibalizing the already-rare standard Ripper for parts or [[CastFromMoney spending lots of caps with merchants]]. Expect to switch back to the equally-awesome but far more practical [[InfinityMinusOneSword Shishkebab]] after old Jack craps out in the middle of a long quest one too many times.
72	*** The expansion DLC also adds a perk possible only at level 30 which results in a nuclear explosion around you when you hit 20 HP. While this sounds very awesome, it's not at all useful because while you aren't harmed by it, any nearby allies may be, and the nuclear explosions are actually rather small and it likely won't affect any enemy shooting at you. Therefore it only can really have an effect against enemies like Deathclaws, which cut through your HP so fast you'll likely be dead before you hit the threshold of 20HP ''without going to zero HP'' and it goes off, let alone survive the aftermath.
73	*** There's also the Rock-It Launcher, an improvised device that uses the ShopFodder 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.
74	** ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'':
75	*** Consider the ARCHIMEDES II KillSat: when you fire it, it brings down a rain of laser-based punishment. Problems? Finding the tracking device you fire it with is a GuideDangIt, you only get to fire it once every 24 hours, it takes almost ten seconds to reach full charge, the tracking device inexplicably weighs ''15 pounds'', and you can hit yourself with it if you're not careful. It's even lampshaded in Veronica's personal quest, where she learns that the Brotherhood of Steel sacrificed half their numbers for what she calls "glorified artillery."
76	*** It's hard not to get caught in the blast from the "Big Kid" ammo for the GRA Fat Man. For context, it deals far more damage than the standard Mini Nukes and leaves more radiation at the impact area, but the rounds are significantly heavier than the default version... so they can't be fired as far. In other words, Big Kid nukes are an even higher degree of "unnecessary overkill" compared to Mini Nukes and make it far, ''far'' easier for the player to get killed by their own round than normal.
77	*** The Fat Man in the base game is even worse, where its high weight is coupled with an extreme lack of ammo, a pitiful 14 (or 12, with the "Wild Wasteland" trait) compared to 70 free ones in ''Fallout 3'' along with the DLC having their own mini nukes. It also does 1000 less points of damage than its ''Fallout 3'' counterpart, and if you try and strengthen it with the Demolition Expert and Splash Damage perks, [[HoistByHisOwnPetard it will only make you more likely to have it blow up in your face.]] On the plus side, it's a fair bit more useful than its counterpart in ''3'', since the SequelDifficultySpike means that there are actually regularly-appearing enemies that would warrant a shot from the Fat Man to take down.
78	*** The Meltdown perk causes a plasma explosion whenever you kill an enemy with an energy weapon, which inflicts damage proportional to the killing weapon's damage. Since the players and their companions aren't immune to Meltdown's explosion, the perk turns using energy weapons at close range into suicide[[note]]Meltdown also inexplicably affects the Thermic Lance, a high-damage DT-ignoring '''melee weapon''', turning one of the best melee options in the game into certain self-inflicted death[[/note]] and will quickly kill your melee companions. Meltdown is actually fairly useful to a player who uses energy weapons only for long range, but a player who isn't focused on energy weapons will have a hard time meeting the skill requirement of '''90'''.
79	*** The king of this trope has to be the [[Film/MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrail Holy Hand Grenade]]. Available only in [[SillinessSwitch Wild Wasteland]] playthroughs, it's basically a hand-thrown grenade with similar properties to a Mini-Nuke. Too bad [[TooAwesomeToUse there's only three of them]], and because they're hand-thrown and have such a large and deadly blast radius, it's extremely likely ''you'' [[HoistByHisOwnPetard will be caught in the blast as well]]...
80	*** Remnants Power Armor has the highest Damage Threshold of all armors, but degrades the fastest, is very expensive to repair, has lower Rad Resistance than the T-51b, gives a Charisma penalty due to its RageHelm being infamously scary in-universe, and there's only two of its kind in the game (three if you include the lighter Gannon Tesla Armor), one of which is earned from Arcade Gannon's companion quest, the other of which is found in a hard-to-reach Deathclaw-infested location.
81	*** The Stealth Suit Mark II from ''Old World Blues''. Sure, it gives you +25 Sneak, +1 Perception, +1 Agility, and +20% to Stealth movement speed when fully upgraded, and automatically injects Stimpaks and Med-X when you're injured, but tends to waste the former drug and get you addicted on the latter, and is for some reason classified as a Medium armor, therefore carrying a 10% running speed penalty, despite having a lower DT than the higher-level Light armors. Also, [[AnnoyingVideoGameHelper it talks all the time]].
82	*** Mercy, the unique Grenade Machinegun, uses 40mm grenades instead of the usual 25mm, which means it packs more punch, but its ammo is significantly heavier in Hardcore mode, as well as being rarer and more expensive. Better traded for the 25mm Grenade APW from Gun Runner's Arsenal. The truly worse part of this is it's only in Dead Wind Cavern and guarded by the Legendary Deathclaw. Mercy becomes more of a BraggingRightsReward with this in mind.
83	*** 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.
84	*** Just like ''Fallout 3'', the Alien Blaster is the most powerful weapon in the game, and if you have the Jury Rigging perk, can be repaired with Energy pistols. The big downside, it only has 222 of its ammo in the entire game, and once it runs out, it becomes completely worthless. Worse, it replaces the YCS/186, which is a unique Gauss Rifle, and the YCS uses microfusion cells as ammo (something that is somewhat easy to get). In order to get the Blaster, you need to turn on Wild Wasteland, but in the long run, you're better off with the more practical YCS/186 instead of the awesome Alien Blaster.
85	*** Terrifying Presence. You gain the opportunity for unique dialogue options that intimidate some of the most powerful and ruthless individuals in the Mojave into cowering before you, at the cost of the opportunity to choose a potentially more useful Perk.
86	*** 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.
87	*** 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 damage 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.
88	** ''VideoGame/Fallout4''
89	*** For the most part downplayed, at least as far as weapons go. Many weapons are simply too heavy or use uncommon ammo to carry around and use all the time, but that hardly means you'll never use them. However, unlike in previous titles the lack of item health or skills mean you don't ''have'' to build a character around the idea of using awesome guns. With this in mind, There are plenty of points in the game when you'll know a tough fight is ahead and head back to base to dust off the Minigun and Fatman.
90	*** The Gatling Laser is sadly this now. It uses the very rare fusion cores for ammo, the same as power armor. Without the right perks or weapon upgrades, it will eat fusion cores at unacceptably high rates for its damage.
91	*** Even if you fix the ammo consumption, you'll still have to contend with more ammo management issues. Because the weapon ''always'' uses the highest charged core in the inventory when reloaded or equipped, you can't just insert a partially-charged core, fire it for a while, insert a new core, sell the nearly-depleted core when you're done, and be done with it, clean and simple. No, instead, you'll have to micromanage the charge level and shot output of all the boatloads of partially-charged cores it'll produce, or else settle for an lower shot output when you run out of fully-charged cores.
92	*** The Broadsider is certainly this. It's a naval cannon scavenged from the ''[[CoolBoat USS Constitution]]'', rigged to a metal frame. It does ''a lot'' of damage, and shooting it as just as fun as it sounds. However, it's also very heavy, short-ranged, difficult to aim, only holds one shot (three if you upgrade it, but that's still not great), and uses extremely rare cannonballs.
93	*** The Junk Jet, the Commonwealth's answer to the fan-favorite Rock-It Launcher from ''3'', has also been reduced to this. The most obvious one is that with the introduction of the settlement system, every single junk item now has value in being used in the workshop as material to build things and craft weapon and armor mods (compared to most junk items ''only'' having use as ammo for the Launcher in ''3''), so why would you want to throw any of it away? Not to mention, unlike conventional ammunition, junk often has a weight, so you can't carry much (unless you entirely rely on the weightless pre-War money junk item).
94	*** Once again, the Minigun. It's still heavy and has a long spin-up time before it actually starts firing, and it has the lowest damage per bullet of any gun so against heavily armored opponents it can only inflict ScratchDamage. And that's assuming that you actually hit your target- it's a fantastically inaccurate weapon so most of the bullets fired will miss. And at times the reload animation can be annoyingly slow.
95	*** Rather than simply throwing out 8 Mini-Nukes in one go like previously, the Experimental MIRV Launcher is now much more ammo-efficient and sends out one nuke that splits up and rains multiple huge explosions directly down on enemies. The problem? It stops traveling horizontally in mid-arc, so the payload will drop down dangerously close to the wielder. This makes it far less useful for taking out enemies at a distance and increases the chance of you getting caught in the blast if you didn't lob it at just the right angle. [[YetAnotherStupidDeath You'll know you got it wrong if it instantly kills you]].
96	*** {{Averted\|Trope}} with weapons sporting 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 one'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.
97	*** The ''Far Harbor'' add-on puts the Harpoon Gun on this list. A very awesome heavy weapon that can be modded to fire either standard large harpoons or a FlechetteStorm of smaller projectiles, either of which will inflict heavy damage, it suffers from having the longest reload time of any weapon in the game, which is especially bad given that it's a single-shot weapon. It's also got fairly limited range, further making things bad. It can be good at picking off single targets from stealth, but against groups or against single targets tough enough to survive the first hit (like Deathclaws and Fog Crawlers), you'll be cut to pieces before you can reload it for a second shot.
98	*** 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.]]
99	* ''VideoGame/GachaWorld'': By using Phoenix Ami as team leader which multiplies attack by 3x when you are at full HP and placing Shishi, Penelope Coconut, Senpai Slayer Kuku, and Dice as the team members, it is possible to summon Dice after acquiring seven gacha stars to deal damage so high that the number overflows outside the damage indicator's textures. (205,876,599 damage) However, by the time that you level these five units to such inhuman levels, there are simply more reliable methods to achieve victory and also, Dice has a 25% chance to deal no damage when summoned, a trait not shared with any other unit in the game. You also had to stay at full health to keep the 3x damage multiplier from Phoenix Ami's leader skill which is not the easiest thing in the world with this team build as it has units that are suited for different purposes banded together solely for statfeeding.
100	* ''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.
101	* 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.
102	** 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.
103	*** 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. You can mitigate this by [[GuideDangIt never leveling them up before making them into Jedi]].
104	** If you start a DarkSide [[KarmaMeter run early on]], then on Nar Shaddaa instead of Mira you get the insane Wookiee BountyHunter [[TokenEvilTeammate Hanharr]]. While having your own DarkSide Chewbacca sounds cool, from ''both'' a gameplay and story standpoint it makes your party that much weaker. TheExile is a PowerParasite who gains their power from Force-sensitives; Hanharr is a BadassNormal while Mira is an ''EmpoweredBadassNormal''.[[note]]The original plan was for Hanharr to be Force-sensitive as well but [[WordOfGod George Lucas said no more Wookiee Jedi]].[[/note]] It's much more efficient to stay neutral early on, then go all in and [[TheCorrupter turn Mira]].
105	** The games also have [[DeflectorShields personal energy shields]], which temporarily nullify any energy attacks up to and including lightsabers. [[ForgottenPhlebotinum Why doesn't everyone have these in the present day you ask?]] Because they're canonically inconvenient, expensive, get unbearably hot when used for longer than a minute (hot enough to burn the crap out of whoever touches them and bake the user to death), and as a result were not used often. After the Old Republic era, blaster technology eventually caught up to the point where the ones used by the player became worthless. By the time of the films the majority of similar applications of the tech were too dangerous to be used by organics, limiting them to droids, and the handful that weren't like the ones used by Kyle Katarn in the ''VideoGame/DarkForcesSaga'' were far less effective by comparison.
106	* ''Videogame/TheLegendOfDragoon'':
107	** 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.
108	** 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.
109	** 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]].
110	* ''Franchise/MassEffect'':
111	** Due to the weapon customization system in ''VideoGame/MassEffect1'', you can make guns like this. The default shotgun (no modifications) can fire a reasonable number of bullets before overheating, but you can turn it into a [[OneHitKill one shot killing machine]]. It can only fire one shot before overheating, yet [[RuleOfCool it kills most enemy grunts in one shot and it sounds like a cannon]]. [[Music/{{ACDC}} For those about to rock indeed]].
112	** 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.\
113	\
114	The Cain is useful, no doubt about it. What makes it ''impractical'' is that it can be used for, at most, a half-dozen fights throughout a twenty five hour game. Using it on anything weaker than a Praetorian is pointless overkill, and if you miss, [[ItOnlyWorksOnce you won't get another shot]]. Except on the final boss. In the FinalBattle, the Cain suddenly becomes simply awesome, as Harbinger drops heavy weapons ammo when killed, presumably so as to compensate for the Cain's impracticality in this case. You'll have to waste him a couple of times to get enough ammo to fire the damn thing again, but in case you brought the Cain instead of one of the less insane weapons, you'll still be able to complete the fight.
115	** Also, the Blackstorm Energy Projector, which is a heavy weapon that one gets by pre-ordering the game[[note]]although it's since been released as free DLC[[/note]], is a gun that fires black holes, but it's not as useful as you might think seeing as it needs to charge up just like the Cain, meaning the enemies may have moved or strafed away by the time the black hole detonates, and unlike the Cain, when it hits, it doesn't necessarily kill everything in the immediate radius. However, it still has a few uses, and is one of the easiest ways to deal with the rapidly arriving Collector platforms in the Collector Ship mission.
116	** 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!
117	** ''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.
118	** The Claymore shotgun dishes out a ton of damage...but there are other shotguns, like the Wraith, that dish out nearly as much and weigh considerably less.
119	** The Scorpion heavy pistol's sticky bombs are neat, but the delay means that in some cases, most notably if you take one to Mars with a NewGamePlus, it can make an otherwise fairly simple boss fight {{Unwinnable}} because it reaches and dismembers you before enough go off to kill it. Its low ammo capacity doesn't help.
120	** In [=ME2=], you learn that a species that was wiped out by the Reapers 37 million years ago had some kind of weapon that ''[[OneHitKill one-shotted]] a Reaper Capital ship'' and ripped a deep trench in another planet ''in a different system'' at some point in their future. Unfortunately, that species only got off that one shot and there were more lots more Reapers, which is why it's speculated to have been a weapon made out of defiance rather than a practical military application.
121	** The Javelin is devastatingly powerful, and its ability to kill people through virtually any cover with the right build is certainly amusing, but its ammo capacity is tiny and you need to be ''really'' good at predicting what targets are going to do, because the Javelin isn't {{hitscan}} in the way that other sniper rifles are.
122	** In [=ME3=] EDI points out that while the Krogan clans are formidable having fought each other on their homeworld for centuries, they don't have enough ships to actually transport their forces en masse, or the resources to actually fight a prolonged war, requiring their allies to provide both for them in order to avert this.
123	* ''VideoGame/MightAndMagic'':
124	** 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.
125	** ''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.
126	* ''VideoGame/NetHack'' has the "huge chunk of meat," obtained by [[spoiler:casting stone to flesh on a boulder]]. It's food. It will ''never spoil''[[note]]Spoilage is a common problem with the corpses of your enemies, your main source of food. It can cause, among other things, delayed instadeath[[/note]]. It has a nutritional value of 2,000, the highest in the game; eating one will definitely cure hunger, weak, or fainting status. However, unless you're in the latter condition, eating a huge chunk of meat is guaranteed to put you in "oversatiated" status, in which your movements will be stifled and eating ''anything'' will cause you to choke to death. And you can't really carry it around either; it's extremely heavy. Good for feeding to your pet dragon, though.
127	* ''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.[[note]]The sword is actually very impressive - It bears a host of unique abilities, including an attack that launches a hail of shards at a distant enemy on command, a unique look, and a massive number of passive bonuses that would allow it to be good on any character. However, it is unlikely to truly benefit a specialized or optimized character - It's passive bonuses don't stack with other equipment and are relatively modest compared to more focused equipment, it's unlikely to match up with the weapons a melee combatant has specialized in, and a non-melee character or spellcaster probably has a lot of abilities that make it's admittedly-cool abilities redundant. Select characters, especially longsword-focused fighters, may find it's unique abilities well worth it, however.[[/note]]
128	* In ''VideoGame/NewHorizons'', 1st rate-ships are floating fortress that's impervious to anything but forts and other 1st rates. They can obliterate anything smaller: nothing short but awesome. However, they need close to or over 1.000 crewmen to be controled without a performance suffering. It stuffs your entire hold with nothing but ammunition, gun powder and supplies to keep the men and cannons fed. Must already be rich just to pay the crew. Furthermore, repairs and ressources lost after every battle will be a huge drain on any fortune. They are a must-have for the biggest forts which may require a full fleet of them note, but other than that, a humble 3rd rate will do most jobs just as well with only a fraction of the costs.
129	* ''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.
130	** 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.
131	** 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.
132	* In the same vein as the above, Creator/{{Sierra}}'s ''VideoGame/QuestForGlory'' series has the Thermonuclear Blast spell, which, when cast, essentially causes a nuclear explosion that destroys everything in a mile's radius -- centered on, and including, the caster. The spell first turned up as a fake spell listed in the manual of one of the early games, as if the spell existed in the game (it didn't). The final game in the series revisits the joke by actually making the spell available to the player, though casting it is [[NonstandardGameOver highly unwise]].
133	** There's also the ''vast majority'' of combat spells for the mage: to wit, the mage gets Flame Dart, Force Bolt, Lightning Ball and Frostbite throughout the course of the series, each spell having a different elemental affiliation (Fire, Force, Lightning and Ice, respectively). The problem is that the mage gets Flame Dart in the first game, which means it has a lower casting cost (5 magic points) than any of the later spells (8/10/15 magic points, respectively), making it far more efficient to use, and subsequently to level grind for higher damage. There's almost no reason to use any other offensive spell, as even things that should be strong against fire still take a lot of damage from it (and ''very few things'' are resistant to fire, with most enemies taking ''more'' damage from it!), and two high level Flame Darts do more damage than two high level Frostbites, for a third of the cost to boot. Coupled with the fact that you only need minimal grinding to make the Force Bolt spell strong enough to overcome puzzles, and that the Frostbite and Lightning Ball spells work for puzzles regardless of your skill level with them (and are only used in two puzzles (Frostbite) or one puzzle (Lightning Ball)), and you'll be a flame-slingin' mage for the entire ''series'' because it just makes more ''sense''[[note]]There is ''one'' exception to this, which is the fairy fight in the fourth game. They have reflect spells, which means you can use direct damage spells on them, forcing you to use Frostbite (which is stated to be an AOE spell, even though it has no other use in the game). But you also just got a magic staff, which means that you have enough magic to use Frostbite without having to use your limited mana pool[[/note]].
134	* 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.
135	* ''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 [[GoodBadBugs infinite Call Bead glitches]] instead).
136	* ''VideoGame/ShadowrunReturns Hong Kong'': On of the deckers you can meet at [=DeckCon=] brags about having his deck built directly into his head, meaning that he doesn't have to carry a deck on jobs. [=Is0bel=] comments that it sounds cool, but any hardware upgrades he wants to do in the future will involve major brain surgery.
137	* 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.
138	** 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.]]
139	* 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)]].
140	** ''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.
141	** 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.
142	* ''VideoGame/UltimaVII'' and its sequel [[VideoGame/UltimaVIIPartII Serpent Isle]] have the Firedoom Staff, which sends out homing explosive orbs of doom at whatever you target. They have a significant amount of splash range, though, so giving one to your party will usually result in them being reduced to cinders in a matter of seconds once a fight starts. Your allies also tend to shoot each other (and you) in the back with bows and crossbows unless you enchant all their arrows/bolts to always hit their intended target.
143	* In ''VideoGame/UltimaIX: Ascension'', the fourth level two-handed sword technique is an elaborate figure-8 slash that your trainer Duncan describes as this amazing technique that he could never master. To learn it, you have to sail (or make a bridge of objects) to a deep ocean dock off the coast of Yew, then risk drowning as you dive to an underwater crypt containing the book with the technique. Unfortunately the move does a piddling amount of damage, is very hard to aim, hits only at the very end of the swing, and takes so much time to use that you could have done a lot more damage just by using regular attacks.
144	* Many of the Gnomish Engineering devices in ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' fall under this trope, especially the cloaking device and the mind-control cap, which seem really cool in theory but have such a short duration that they are essentially worthless.
145	** In later expansions Engineering in general became more useful, though as far as usefulness goes compared to the mostly passive benefits from other professions, their devices still qualify. Even if played safe only with devices that don't backfire, its more things to keep track of on top of your regular combat abilities.
146	** Any mechanical item in the tabletop RPG, as well. All of them come with such high difficulty to use and such a long list of drawbacks that you're better off pretending they aren't there.
147	** In the classic game, warlocks could summon two very powerful demons: the Infernal and the Doomguard. The Infernal was difficult to use (for one thing, it would turn against you if you let the Enslave Demon effect run out) but powerful in the right situation. The Doomguard was even stronger, but required a 5 player summoning ritual, one of whom would ''die'' from the ritual, and if the warlock was not fast enough with Enslave Demon or was the one who died, then you had just unleashed a powerful demon to attack the party. Later expansions made this spell into a normal but short-term summon, although the Doomguard itself was made weaker; less awesome, but a lot more useful.
148	*** Enslave Demon similar skills. Enemies powerful enough to be worth enslaving without being immune to it are hard to find, even now that it has become fairly reliable. And even then you won't be able to take your new pet very far, as such targets are mostly found in Dungeons. Though it can be a blast when you get that chance, and as of the latest Warlock questline, absolutely required to win in at least one encounter.
149	** The cloud serpent mounts look gorgeous, but are so huge that they can't pass through lot of openings, and the only camera positions that let you see where you're going are either full zoom in (in which case you can't even see it) or full zoom out (in which case you can't see the details that make it so gorgeous). Many players do the long series of quests to get them, but often stop using them shortly afterwards.
150	** The wandering ancient mount, which is included with ''Shadowlands,'' is similar to the cloud serpent but more so: visually spectacular, but also huge, unwieldy, and impossible to take into any place more crowded than open grasslands.
151	** Certain Hunter pets take a lot of effort to tame, but statistically they are the same as any other pet from the same family, just with an unique color. As far as families go, Direhorns currently take the cake, requiring a level-capped Hunter to grind elite mobs on a fairly secluded isle to learn how to tame them, and then tame one on that same isle. And their unique ability certainly counts as well, deflecting all spells cast in front of the Direhorn for 6 seconds... if they are single-target and only target the pet itself, that is.
152	** Several Legendary items introduced in ''Legion'' have useful effects but are OvershadowedByAwesome because there's more useful legendaries, and players are only allowed to equip two. So a necklace that grants an absorb effect every thirty seconds is nice, but a dps will ignore it in favor of something that boosts their damage. Made even worse in ''Battle for Azeroth'' with any legendary that uses the head, neck, shoulder, or chest slot since those are reserved for Azerite armor which is considerably more powerful from the very start.
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Context AwesomeButImpractical / WesternRPG