Dump Stat / Video Games

• In Advance Wars, this is what makes the otherwise useless Grimm so damned effective with Battle Copters and Bombers. Grimm's gigantic weakness of -20% defense is a dump stat for these two units, as they are both very volatile units that tend to die in one hit from everything that can effectively engage them anyways.
• In Ancient Domains of Mystery, charisma and appearance have very minor effects on gameplay outside of shop prices. Shop prices, after the mid-game, are irrelevant because there is a way of generating an endless supply of money (the Casino). Later versions make Appearance more useful by making it reduce corruption rate. Charisma is still useless, however.
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura has Beauty. It affects people's initial reactions to you, which in most cases either won't affect their dialogue in any meaningful way or, with a couple extra points in Charisma, can be made positive just by asking them to tolerate you for the duration of the conversation. As long as you don't have any other effects that lower the reaction modifier (like a barbarian-style armor), you can get every single quest in the game no matter how ugly you are. Possibly the only way it impacts upon the game is by altering how much merchants will charge during trade dialogue.
  • Due to the game's Absurdly Low Level Cap, any character build is bound to pick more of those. Non-ranged fighters or mages can safely dump Perception, Constitution is only useful for spellcasters (and can be bypassed by stealing a necklace that artificially increases mana regeneration). Beauty is notable for being universal.
  • Arcanum also has dump skills, particularly Gambling and Haggle. The reason is that money isn't hard to earn to begin with, and the one advantage those skills give - access to the items equipped by merchants - can be achieved with Fate Points or exploiting the AI quirks.
  • The game also allows using character points to directly boost Health and Fatigue. While this raises them faster (4 points per CP instead of 1-2 points via Strength, Constitution, or Willpower), you get 2 extra points of both automatically with every level, so neglecting your stats in favor of durability is not a very good idea.
• The Charisma and Wisdom scores are typically dump stats in Baldur's Gate II. Unless you're playing as a Cleric, Wisdom is only useful for the Wish spell, and even then you can just get a character with high wisdom to cast it or use a cheap, readily available potion that boosts Wisdom before casting it. As for Charisma, you get a ring after completing one of the first quests in the city which boosts your Charisma score to 18 when wearing it, and its only usefulness is to get small discounts from shopkeepers (in a game where you would quickly swim in money anyway).
• The Assessment skill in Betrayal at Krondor determines how much of your opponent's stats you can see when you highlight them in battle, which isn't really very helpful. It's also the only skill you can't actively power up - the only way to boost it is by buying a skill book, getting Count Corvallis to train you, or attending some lectures. All cost money that would be better spent on any number of other things in a game where money is generally pretty tight.
• In the second and third Boktai games, Spirit (your MP meter) is always the stat you don't bother leveling up. Even when levelled you deplete it very quickly and have to rely on skylights, sunlight, and items to charge it back up and you have melee weapons that work even without magic, so there's rarely a time that having more ammo capacity will actually help you out.
• Badass Ranks in Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! are special tokens that confer small percentage increases to certain traits such as reload speed or accuracy. Some aren't considered very useful:
  • Players dump HP because a player with over 50% of their health remaining cannot be killed in one hit even if that hit should drain their shield and health completely. The use of Moxxi weapons meant players wanted low HP so that the Life Drain effect present on all Moxxi weapons would bring them back up over 50% within the next shot or two.
  • Not all characters can fully take advantage of melee in a given game; as a result, the Badass Rank spent there is often better spent on another, more universally effective stat such as shield recharge.
  • Krieg gets the most of these since he has the most proficiency in melee, but cooldowns and recharge rates actually hurt most of his builds. On the upside, HP is the best for him since his best builds require being below a certain percentage of health to maximize his performance, and the more health he has for this, the better.
• Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game has a stat for Strength... in a quiet, investigative thriller with no combat. Until the very end, and even then, it's with guns, not your fists. In practice, it's more about intimidation in some dialogue trees, and it's typically more helpful to take conversation options that utilize your other stats anyway, giving few reasons to pump points into Strength unless you're specifically trying out that build.
• Castlevania: Circle of the Moon: To a much lesser extent than most examples, but of your four primary statistics, Intelligence functions as slightly less useful than the other three. Why? Because contrary to what most RPG's have taught you, Intelligence does not increase the power of your spells in this game, serving only to determine your MP regeneration rate as a multiplier of percentages where 1 MP / Second is 100%. Offensive spells offer a flat percentage bonus to your attack stat and scale with it rather, and there are items to restore your MP rather than wait five minutes for your MP to restore on its own, though those can be difficult to find due to the low drop rate of items in this game. Chances are most players will probably not worry so much about MP Regen once they have enough intelligence to offset the usage of the Venus cards that boost the other three stats. Played FULLY straight in Warrior Mode, however, as Nathan will never find any DSS cards and thus, your MP Regen and Intelligence as a result are utterly meaningless for him in that playthrough.
• In Cataclysm, intelligence is usually considered the least useful stat. Strength lets you move furniture around to create barricades, carry heavy loads, resist disease and injury, and hit enemies harder. Dexterity lets you hit enemies more often and throw stuff better. Perception lets you detect traps, aim ranged weapons, and see farther in darkness. Intelligence increases the rate at which you level up your skills and makes reading books faster (some advanced books have a large penalty to reading speed if your intelligence is below a threshold), but these disadvantages can be circumvented by simply having a lot of time. Unlike other stats, there is nothing that a character with low intelligence will never be able to do. The only unique use for intelligence is an unarmed build with Dragon style kung-fu, which gains added power from intelligence, seemingly as an Obvious Rule Patch to make the stat less useless.
• In Cat Quest if a piece of equipment affects max HP it'll be about the same as the bonus to other stats... but you get over ten times the HP on level up as you do your other stats.
• In the various video game versions of Games Workshop's Chainsaw Warrior, the computer does a "weighted" random roll so that it's almost impossible to have completely great stats, a large equipment pool, and a nice skill. So what should be the acceptable loss? It's the Warrior's health. In the game, only traps and certain powerful enemies can do more than a single point of damage per hit on the Warrior. Any health rating in the double digits for the Warrior is plenty. It's much more important not to get hit or fall for traps in the first place (long fights and getting tangled in traps, cost time, and you only have an hour to save the world). Every other stat is important if you want to win the game without using the Implosive Vest.
• Crash Fever has two characters, Longinus and Aegis. Longinus has decent HP and REC, but a laughable 1 ATK. However, he's meant to buff it up with his skill, which changes everything on the board to CP. Not so with Aegis' measly five REC though, but she does have tons of health to make up for it.
• In Chrono Trigger, the Attack stat is this for Marle and Lucca since their Hit (accuracy) stat determines their attack output (unless they are close enough to perform a melee strike, which is uncommon and depends entirely on the enemy layout). Thus, using Power Tabs / Strength Capsules on them is a waste of items that should be used on the rest of your party instead.
• In Daikatana, leveling up Speed results in a nigh-uncontrollable sprinting speed, which is especially useless given how fast you can sprint around with base stats anyway.
• The campaigns of Dawn of War II both require and encourage this trope, as Attribute Points are severely limited and certain stats provide incredibly powerful traits at higher levels. For example, it is just as useless increasing the melee damage of Avitus (a ranged specialist) as it is increasing the ranged damage of Thaddeus (a melee specialist) or the health of Cyrus (a Glass Cannon). The only uncertain character is Thule however, who gains useful traits from all his stats and which one a player decides to be the Dump Stat (or whether he will be a Master of None) is entirely a personal preference.
  • It is somewhat averted with Tarkus and Thaddeus since putting points into their "dump stat" actually allows them to change specializations to a limited degree by allowing them to equip new weapon types (Tarkus get the ability to equip melee weapons while Thaddeus becomes able to use ranged weapons), it's debatable how useful this is though.
  • The Chaos Rising expansion plays with this, however, by putting several powerful traits (we're looking at you, Cluster Mines) in progression tracks of attributes you'd normally not consider putting points in (in the case of the aforementioned Cluster Mines, Cyrus' melee attack. Cyrus is one of two characters who can't even equip a melee weapon).
• Destiny 2: The mobility, resilience and recovery stats for the characters individually impact both regular gameplay interactions but also dictated the class ability recharge for the hunter, titan and warlock respectively. At launch they were not a major factor in gameplay on their own, but the balancing has changed over the years.
  • Resilience increased your damage resistance by so little that you were only mitigating 10 percent damage with the stat at the max than at the minimum. Mobility is similar in that it only had a marginal affect on jump height and strafe speed, which is only truly useful for the highest level players. The faster Regenerating Health from higher Recovery was much more effective, especially in the Crucible PVP where an extra second of cover really matters.
  • In year five a balancing change tuned Resilience to 40 percent damage reduction, causing a significant change where a character could genuinely Draw Aggro for the first time. This meant that when the situation called for Min-Maxing that Titans and Warlocks had easy choices to focus on Resilience and Recovery, while Hunters had to spec into Mobility for their class ability recharge and then choose either Resilience or Recovery.
• Deus Ex has Swimming. It increases your swim speed and your ability to hold your breath, but rebreathers are cheap, your starting swim speed is fine for finishing the game, there are plenty of swimming-related augs, and if you pick up Regeneration, then your Regenerating Health actually heals back more damage than you take while drowning. And Deus Ex is not one of those games where you have a ton of points to spare.
  • The fan mod "Biomod" (included as part of the Deus Ex: Revision package) was aware of this and replaces Swimming with the much more useful Athletics skill, which not only boosts your swimming ability, but makes you run faster, jump higher and, at level 3, allows you to mantle onto ledges, letting you get to a lot of new areas that were formerly just out of reach.
• The Diablo series has quite a number of examples throughout each generation.
  • Diablo:
    • In the first Diablo, healing potions were both plentiful and easy to spam, so any damage you took could be undone right away. The main danger on higher difficulty levels was inescapable stunlock from multiple enemies attacking at the same time. To counter stunlock, you needed miss chance which was provided by armor. In short, the size of one's health pool was largely irrelevant and Vitality was mostly useless beyond the early game. Luckily you could purchase stat points and max out everything anyway.
    • For Sorcerers, Vitality was actually worse than useless. The Mana Shield spell enabled you to use your mana pool as hit points. Due to a bug, taking lethal damage did not stun you, even if the damage was then absorbed by Mana Shield. Basically if you kept your health as low as possible, you were immune to stun from Hell difficulty monsters, giving you a slight advantage in combat. Players even intentionally allowed themselves to get hit by Black Death zombies (which permanently drain hit points) to further reduce their maximum health.
    • Dexterity for Sorcerers was a noob trap. Yes, the only thing that could kill triple immune enemies was a weapon. But what the game didn't tell you was that the Stone Curse spell sets enemy armor to zero, and your attack speed was so slow that you pretty much had to stone your targets anyway just to win the fight. Also, there was a rollover bug that made high-level opponents trivial to hit.
  • Diablo II:
    • Diablo II has Energy, which controls mana. No one, not even Sorceresses, puts a single point into it for several reasons. Your mana pool increases with character level, and high-level items add a lot of mana as well. Mana steal scales with weapon damage, making it more effective too. There is also a runeword for hirelings that gives the entire party a large mana regen bonus. Also, mana potions are readily buyable and dropped in massive quantities by every mini-boss if those are still not enough for you. Meanwhile, very few skills go up in mana cost per skill level. This means if you just wait for a few more character levels, your lack of mana will solve itself.
    • Strength. The damage bonus provided by the stat is negligible, so the only reason to invest into Strength is to meet gear requirements and you can make do with zero strength if you have some + strength items. Therefore 95% of the viable builds in the game require the same stat point distribution: the minimum Strength to wear end-game gear, just enough into Dexterity to attain max block, and everything else into vitality.
    • There is one build that benefits from a lot of Energy, but that build only uses the extra Mana to sponge damage, not to fuel attacks: the Sorceress skill Energy Shield transfers some damage from Health to Mana, so it's possible to crank it up to the point where you take very little actual damage, but it puts a huge stress on your Mana pool. Instead, Vitality and/or Dexterity becomes the dump stat, depending on your focus.
  • While Diablo III does away with assigning stat points altogether outside of Paragon levels and even removes stat requirements for wearing gear, the items nonetheless get affected by this phenomenon. Some of the primary magic properties on items that are generally regarded as less valuable include +Life on Hit, +Life on Kill, +Armor, +Resistance, +Life from resource use and occasionally Vitality. Once the Mystic NPC was introduced in Reaper of Souls, it was very common for players to re-enchant these affixes to things like Cooldown Reduction, +% Damage, Gem Sockets, % Critical Chance, Vitality^note if the build requires it (e.g. Crusaders), or when the vitality on a piece of gear is lower than the maximum roll available and/or +Critical Damage, which are considered among the highest priority stats.
• In Divinity: Original Sin II three of the six stats can be this, depending on the build. Constitution, Memory, and Wits are generically useful, setting hit points, number of equippable abilities, initiative, critical chance, and ability to detect secrets and traps. Of the other three, most characters will want as much of one as they can get, and none of the other two.
  • Strength allows equipping heavy melee weapons and armor, sets carry weight, and allows a character to move heavy objects. Characters not intending to use heavy weapons have little use for any of these benefits.
  • Finesse is the clearest Dump Stat in the game. It sets the damage for daggers and bows, allows the equipping of medium armor, and that's it.
  • Intelligence sets damage with wizard weapons like magic wands and staves, sets damage for nearly all magic, and allows equipping magic robes with paltry physical armor but oodles of magic armor. It and Memory are the most important stats for casters, and non-casters have no use for it.
• In the Dragon Age games, there is an interesting inversion of dump stats based on the character class you choose. Typically Magic is the dump stat for all kinds of Warriors and Rogues, seeing as how they have no magical ability and don’t gain anything from investing in it. But if you play as a Mage, Magic becomes the One Stat to Rule Them All while Strength becomes the dump stat. Even if your mage is a heavy armor wearing sword-wielding Arcane Warrior, Magic replaces Strength in determining your ability to use weapons and armor.
  • In Dragon Age: Origins, Survival becomes a dump stat due to it serving no useful purpose except two ranks in it being required for one minor quest involving a distressed halla. While it increases the detection range of hostile creatures, often times, they are detected way too far for most abilities to be used on them anyway. It grants Nature resistance, which only protects you against poison attacks, which aren’t that damaging anyway. Even the Demonic Spiders who attack you, actually finish you off easier with web traps and Overwhelm physical attacks, while their poison isn’t that lethal.
  • Willpower is a dump stat for everybody. It determines your stamina/mana reserves, which are used for special attacks/spells, but warriors and rogues don't use that much stamina anyway, and mages are much better off taking Blood Magic specialization and investing in Constitution instead, which will allow them to both Cast from Hit Points and also not die from a stray sword hit. Battles in Da O are very chaotic, and it's virtually impossible to stop an enemy from attacking whomever they want, so a Squishy Wizard will not survive for long.
• INT in Dragon Quest. Yes, it's useful in the early levels, but it suffers serious decay since it does not determine magic damage. (Magic damage is fixed and then multiplied by elemental resistance.) INT and its cousin, VIT, are still useful, mind: They do raise HP and MP. But after a while, that's irrelevant.
  • Luck in Dragon Quest III, IV and V is pretty useless. It does not factor into critical hits, item drops, minigames, or anything else you'd expect it to; instead it just gives a higher chance to avoid negative status effects. Due to the way its calculated though, this is hardly noticeable - a character with 20 luck and another with 200 have a 5-10% chance difference at most to avoid a status, and it caps at 255, which only the Lethal Joke Character Jester/Gadabout class can realistically achieve. You're much better served gearing your party toward Agility; defeating monsters quickly so they never have a chance to cast debilitating statuses in the first place is much more effective than spending tons of time and effort trying to resist them.
  • Style in Dragon Quest VI and VII isn't really worthwhile to pursue either. It does factor into the Best Dressed Contest side-quest in VI and the Excellence Grading Organization in VII (which admittedly do have some nice prizes), but that's about it. You can easily use style-boosting equipment and vocations to get whatever score you need, so there's little purpose to actively boosting any character's core stat for it.
  • Charm in Dragon Quest XI is useless for most characters; it gives a very small chance for an enemy to become enamored with them and lose a turn (and even with hundreds of points of Charm, it remains a very minuscule chance). The lone exceptions are Sylvando and Jade, who have many useful support skills that run off it.
• In Dungeons & Dragons Online, every class will have to pick a dump stat just like the P&P version if they want to be the best at what they do. However there is a number one rule of character builds that all veteran players agree upon: "Con(stitution) is NOT a dump stat" for any class, due to hitpoints being extremely important for fighting (and sometimes the only defense against) high-level monsters.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Throughout the series, save for Skyrim which did away with Attributes, Personality is a major Dump Stat. Both it and the skills it governs (particularly Speechcraft) can be increased temporarily by numerous means (spells, potions, enchantments, racial powers, etc.) when needed. Since the game time freezes when you enter into a conversation, you can easily create something to increase Personality considerably for 1 second. Use it, then immediately enter the conversation. The effect will persist until you leave the conversation.
  • Monster language skills in Daggerfall. They only allow you to speak with a particular class of monster to have a chance to avoid combat. Even more useless as you also needed to sheathe your weapon, which is not a good idea in a monster-filled dungeon.
  • In Oblivion and Skyrim, the Security/Lockpicking Skill is this. It governs your ability to pick locks, but in these two games, picking a lock is a mini-game based more on player skill. A high Security skill makes it somewhat easier (and saves you from breaking as many lockpicks), but a skilled player can easily pick even the highest leveled locks with a minimum Security Skill. Notably, this is not the case in Morrowind, where the success of picking a lock is up to the Random Number God. A higher Security skill increases your odds of picking it, while having too low of a security skill will make it impossible to pick higher leveled locks. (The game does mitigate this by offering an "Unlock" spell, which can be used instead. However, a max level Unlock spell costs an immense amount Magicka to cast as a spell and cost an exorbitant amount to create as an enchantment.)
  • The Willpower Attribute in Oblivion. One of the only things it affects is your maximum Fatigue, which is also affected by other stats. It also controls your rate of Magicka regeneration, but it's more effective to increase your Intelligence so you have more Magicka in the first place. In addition, mages almost always take Atronach birthsign which gives a large bonus to Magicka and a 50% chance of absorbing enemy spells at the cost of removing Magicka regeneration altogether, therefore making it completely pointless to increase the rate of it.
  • Skyrim:
    • Skyrim removes Attributes all together. Everything boils down to Health, Magicka, and Stamina. There are, however, dump-skills that would be inefficient to waste perk points on; for example, Lockpicking (as noted above) works just fine without putting any perk points into it or artificially trying to raise it.
    • Magicka becomes practically useless for any character build that does not use magic. Similarly, stamina is only useful for the carry weight on a character build that only uses magic. Once you max out Enchanting and get all of the perks, magicka becomes useless for mages too, since you can enchant a full set of armor to reduce the magicka cost of up to two schools of magic to zero.
• In EVE Online, only characters training to be traders, corporation executives, and fleet commanders benefit from high Charisma, and even they need the other stats to train to fly the right ships as well. The developers attempted to make charisma more useful by making a high Charisma stat grant a boost to learning the skills that boost stats, so having a higher charisma means you spend less time boosting the skills that boost your stats, but the effect is minor enough that it takes at least a year to recoup the time you invested in boosting your charisma.
  • This was rendered moot with the removal of learning skills, so unless you were training an alt for Planetary Interaction or really need extra jump clone slots, you're better off with a mix of the other four stats.
• E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy has Mental Balance, which reduces the likelihood of the player freezing up or going insane when casting psychic abilities or taking huge amounts of damage. However, insanity can be cured by using the Maintenance ability, which only takes a few seconds at the cost of locking up your weapons and screwing with your vision. Not like it particularly matters if you die while using it, because you have multiple resurrectors in each mission. Mental Balance is made further redundant by researched items which increases your resistance to insanity, and later can make you outright immune to it.
• F-Zero X has Grip which dictates how well your machine maintains traction around corners. However, some of the more advanced techniques rely on having an E-rank (the lowest rank possible for a stat) Grip, meaning that a high-Grip machine won't do you any favors for competitive time attack runs.
• Fallout:
  • In the first game, Charisma doesn't do much apart from giving you access to a few perks that are just as useless. In fact, the stat is so useless that you can have a Charisma of 1 and still complete a pacifist playthrough.
  • Fallout 2:
    • The resistances Endurance provides are rarely relevant and items exist to erase any effect that Endurance resist. It influences Hit Points, but so does Strength (albeit to a lesser degree) and there's enough good armor laying around that you're rarely going to take damage that isn't a freak One-Hit Kill critical, anyway.
    • Strength, while a useful stat, could actually be safely dumped if you weren't planning to play a melee character right off the bat. Taking the Gain Strength perk once it was available, then using the Strength boosting chip once you got access to the Brotherhood base and wearing Power Armor and eventually Advanced Power Armor would boost you up to 10 Strength.
    • The game also has several skills that are better left ignored: Throwing is of marginal usefulness due to the rarity of grenades and other throwing weapons being sub-par; Gambling and Barter are easily skippable due to the abundance of caps you can get from looting weapons off of enemies even without them; Trapping is pointless due to the rarity of traps in-game and how they can easily be circumvented by other skills or high enough armor to tank damage from a sprung trap; First-Aid is straight-up inferior to Doctor; and Outdoorsman only affects encounter rates and can be substituted by a high enough Luck. But if you really want First Aid and/or Outdoorsman, you can also boost them to 91% with relatively common books instead of spending valuable skill points.
  • Fallout Tactics's emphasis on combat over story was heavy enough during single-player, but the game also allowed players to create teams of soldiers to face one another in an arena-style PvP battle. Charisma was a worthless stat since neither it nor any of its associated skills did anything in combat, so it was common for every single soldier created for multiplayer squads to have a charisma score of 1.
  • Poor little Charisma in Fallout 3. While the other S.P.E.C.I.A.L. values control things like damage, criticals, enemy spotting, health, skill points per level and action points, Charisma controls very little. It is rarely if ever used for speech checks, usually defaulting to its respective Speech or Barter skills, and has little other practical use. It's just easier to rely on alcohol and items to boost your Charisma the few times you need it.
    • In terms of skills, never put a single point into Big Guns. Not because Big Guns are bad, but because the Raider boss of the Bethesda Ruins drops a Big Guns skill book. Any dungeon you clear out will repopulate after three days, which includes respawning the boss if there is one. The boss of Bethesda Ruins will drop the skill book every time, allowing you to max out Big Guns without ever putting a single point into it.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • The main things Charisma gained since 3 are increasing companion damage and DT by as much as 50% as well as one more perk—which makes your companions better when you're at low health. If you play solo, it's exactly as useless.
    • Luck increases Critical Hit chance and makes it easier to win at gambling. However, unless you're specifically going for a Critical Hit Class build and using specific weapons that have a higher-than-average chance to crit, you won't see many critical hits even with 10 Luck, and certain weapon types (shotguns, flamers, or explosive) get little to no extra damage even when they do. Gambling also doesn't start getting profitable until you have at least 7 Luck. Anything less than that and you might as well keep it at 1.
    • Perception affects the distance that your radar can detect enemies, but you can recruit ED-E quickly in Primm (all of the parts needed to fix him can be found in either Primm or Goodsprings), and his companion perk boosts your radar to that of 10 Perception, so there's no point in raising that above 1 either. The only other things it's good for are the "Better Criticals" perk, which requires 6 Perception and will only benefit the aforementioned Critical Hit Class or stealthy characters, and its vanishingly rare score checks.
  • In Fallout 4, Endurance becomes the Dump Stat again, after having the opposite position in New Vegas thanks to implants. Although it now has a much higher impact of Hit Points (giving you a bonus per level instead of just per point), even low Endurance rarely die before they can heal themselves. All of the perks the Endurance stat unlocks provide some sort of healing or defensive bonus, which are redundant for any build due to the prevalence of healing items and armors (damage/rad resistance from armor and perks don't stack together very well). However, if you play on Survival Difficulty, the healing effects are more useful due to standard healing items gaining negative side effects, while damage values are so high the greater hit points help you avoid suddenly dying before you can even heal.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The intelligence stat in the original Final Fantasy is bugged; it does absolutely nothing.
  • In Final Fantasy IV the Intelligence and Spirit impact the efficiency of Black Magic/Summon and White Magic respectively, so consequently Rydia won't have much use for the latter once she gets back from Feymarch and Rosa/Cecil for the former. Likewise, Edge's Ninjutsu depends on Intelligence, leaving Spirit meaningless for him. In vanilla game you won't have much chance to impact it anyway beyond equipment and Save Scumming when leveling above level 70, but in DS version it is instrumental for distributing Augments and associated level-up bonuses.
  • In Final Fantasy VI, you can boost your Strength, Magic, Speed, Stamina, HP, or MP when you level up with the correct Espers, but you only get so many levels. For those players who want to max their stats, boosting your HP or MP for more than a few select levels turns out to be a waste — not because of the stats being useless, but because HP and MP increase with levels anyway, and come pretty close to the max without Espers. The true Dump Stat is Stamina. All it does is improve your resistance to instant death attacks (which can be blocked entirely anyway), and increase the power of Poison or Regen when afflicted to the character. That's right, boosting your Stamina increases the damage you take from Poison. The Regen boost isn't worth the bonuses you could be getting in Strength, Magic, or Speed, so a savvy player won't bother deliberately boosting Stamina. Additionally, Physical Evasion does literally nothing in the SNES version; Magic Evasion covers both physical and magical effects.
  • The Final Fantasy VII Remake has an interesting case of this when it comes to Aerith. She, like the other playable characters, has a basic attack and a strength stat. Unlike the other playable characters, however, her basic attacks are motes of light energy she casts from her quarterstaff while dancing, and thus scale off of her magic stat instead, making the strength stat nearly useless. However, if an enemy gets hit by her physical weapon and not one of her magically-based motes, that's one rare instance where the strength stat will indeed factor in for damage.
  • Final Fantasy X:
    • Luck is a dump stat, but not for the reason you'd expect. In terms of what it does for your characters, Luck is absolutely godly, combining the effects of two other stats (in a game that generally averts this trope) and increasing your critical hit rate to cap it all. The problem is that the developers realized this, and made the Luck stat ridiculously hard to actually put points in - while you'll have more of the spheres increasing every other stat than you know what to do with, you'll get a grand total of four spheres for Luck boosts over the course of the main game, and if you want more you'll have to kill one of the game's Superbosses at the Monster Arena, for one each time. Most players just invest in the two other stats (Accuracy and Evade), since it's just so much easier to do.
    • However, those wanting to challenge the Dark Aeons and Penance in the International/PAL/HD releases or Min-Maxers will instead find Accuracy and Evasion to be Dump Stats since (due to the way that Luck affects evasion of attacks) being able to hit some of them requires high Luck and Accuracy won't help much with that. Meanwhile, Evasion only helps for most physical attacks, it's impossible to evade magic, special attacks, or certain physical attacks that cannot miss. Raising Luck also takes less space in the Sphere Grid than raising both Accuracy and Evasion. (Though the Aim skill can be used to temporarily make attacks more accurate, in a way that does counteract the effects of high enemy Luck.)
    • For your spellcasters, MP will also become irrelevant because of the One MP Cost ability, especially when both characters' Infinity +1 Sword has it as an innate ability at full power. While Yuna's Nirvana can be upgraded even long before the endgame, Lulu's Onion Knight will take some patience (it involves dodging 200 lightning bolts in a row). And for a few select battles where you'll need MP for others because of Quick Attack, you can just use Three Stars, which negate the need for MP altogether.
  • Final Fantasy XIV had stat bonuses you could apply to your character to raise a certain stat. For physical classes, only Strength (or Dexterity if you were a ranged class) mattered. For DPS caster classes, Intelligence was the only thing worth boosting. Healers were better off with either more Mind (stronger healing) or more Piety (higher MP). Everything else was a dump stat. Due to how pointless the entire system was as well as clueless players boosting stats for classes that didn't benefit from them, the system was abolished later on in a patch and every class simply got an extra boost to their main stat(s) upon leveling up. Another reason for it being removed was because every character could choose to play every class; it was entirely possible, if not likely, for a player to dump all their points into Strength, only to discover they preferred playing a class that required, say, Dexterity. Summoners and Scholars got it even worse as they, uniquely, shared a base class and thus levelled up together regardless of which a player used; what this meant was that the player would have to continuously pay to restat every time they wanted to swap jobs and still be effective.
    • The substat Parry was this prior to Stormblood. Increasing the stat would raise the random chance that a physical attack is parried, dealing 20% less damage. Because players rely on guaranteed mitigation and because it only works on physical damage, gear would focus on damage instead, rendering Parry an undesired stat. The developers realised how bad the stat is and in Stormblood, changed it into the Tenacity stat, which increases the tank's damage and lowers the damage they take. Unfortunately, even Tenacity scales poorly enough that players focus on other damage-building stats instead.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics A2, MP is by far the least useful stat in the game to invest in. This is because the game uses a system where all characters start at 0 MP and accumulate it over time during each battle, at a rate of 10 per turn. There are ways to gain MP faster within battle, but almost invariably your characters will never need more than 50 or so, and certainly no more than 100 - and both numbers are trivially easy to reach without any investment whatsoever in the MP stat. The only reason your MP cap would even slightly matter is if you were using the MP Shield reaction ability - and given that you would need to actually reach the cap every time you used that unit, even that is absurdly impractical.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Throughout the series, the least important stat for a character to have is usually regarded as Luck. It provides boosts to your hit and dodge rates, but Speed also increases dodge rate and Skill also increases hit rate, both do it to greater degrees, and most units with high Speed have high Skill. Luck also (generally) has the side effect of reducing the enemy's crit rate, but since it generally reduces enemy crit rate at a faster rate than Skill increases it, you really don't need much Luck to not have to worry about crits. Some enemies do have increased critical rates (i.e. swordmasters or killer weapon-users), but most of the time, those increased crit rates are too great for Luck to completely negate them; at that point, it's best to just plan around the possibility of the enemy critting. That's not to say it's useless, and having no Luck at all can be a tricky prospect, but ten points in Luck is pretty much never worth five in Speed and Skill. In some games, it's even less useful, such as in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, where it only boosts Avoid and does nothing to crit rate (though you can probably count the number of crit-capable enemies in Genealogy on your fingers), and Fire Emblem: Three Houses, where it keeps the crit reduction but only boosts hit rate or Avoid when dealing with magic attacks.
  • To a lesser extent, Skill itself tends to get passed on, as once you're outside of Early Game Hell, most weapons have high enough accuracy to not be a problem anyway, every game since the sixth rigs the RNG to turn middling chances into high ones, and there are a laundry list of other ways to fix the RNG in your favor (support bonuses, exploiting Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors, forging, etc). The major exception to this rule is Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, where a combination of terrible accuracy rates on a lot of weapons and very agile enemies keeps hit rates a going concern, meaning characters with high Skill like Rutger are now in fairly high demand. (Luck also tends to be given somewhat more respect, as enemies are known to actually crit on occasion.)
  • Resistance reduces damage from magic attacks. Mages are a fairly uncommon enemy type who don't tend to do crazy damage; generally, you'll have two or three characters with high Resistance and they can kill any magic unit you'll come across while everyone else trucks along with it in the single digits, if not a flat zero. It doesn't help that the Barrier/Ward staff and Pure Water can simply give any unit a temporary +7 to Resistance, which is usually enough to make even the most dangerous magic attacks survivable at best and an annoyance at worst.
  • The Avatar creation system in Fire Emblem: Awakening goes out of its way to avert this. Whichever stat you pick as 'worst' will actually lower other stats too, though not as much. Picking Luck or Resistance (generally considered Dump Stats) for worst will also lower Strength and Magic or Magic and Speed respectively, all of which are considered very important stats. In practice, Luck still ends up as this more often than not. The deficit in Strength or Magic can be easily worked around, and the Avatar's initial Luck growth (which the Asset/Flaw system also influences) will be quite high anyways. Averted however with Resistance, due to Speed being as important for offense as it always is, and Magic being an important stat for those who go with magic classes as well (and, to a lesser extent, hybrid classes). Also averted with Skill (the third consideration for a Dump Stat) because a high Skill growth helps to ensure that you're able to Dual Strike more easily, and Skill itself factors into the proc rate of many useful (offense or defense) skills in the game. In addition, taking Skill as a Dump Stat also results in a deficit in Defense and Strength, both useful stats (with Defense being the most useful of the two for any character).
  • The Luck Stat, even if chosen as your flaw, will usually eventually reach near the cap, mostly due to how much you'll probably use the main character and put him/her through reclasses which basically amounts to infinite levels, meaning that even with flawed luck you can still reliable or assuredly pull off the skill that uses it the most, which most people want because it lets you use a weapon without expending the uses.
• Fire Emblem Warriors plays with this, as all the stats are quite important. All the Units in the game have structured stat gains for everyone, but the general consensus is that Magic users don't need Strength and Physical units don't need Magic, with the unit's defenses matching as well. The two forms of dump stats in the game are either a stat having poor numbers or a stat that's barely existing.
• Formula Racer: It's typically better to max out Engine plus Handling and ignore Boost, as it's situational and provides help even at 0%.
• FromSoftware:
  • While the other stats in Demon's Souls have a major effect on health, damage, and are necessary to even use weapons/spell, Luck primarily decides resistance to Plague and is a Random Drop Booster. Plague is a very rare status effect you can just buy cures for and your drop rate only goes by a paltry 1% per point of Luck (by comparison, the Large Sword of Searching doubles it). There is a single weapon (the Blueblood Sword) that scales off Luck, which can get pretty tremendously powerful, but it's only notably better than average if you overlevel a raise many stats because the Luck boost isn't affected in the usual way by Diminishing Returns for Balance.
  • In Dark Souls, Resistance increases physical and flame defense and resistance to poison. These first two are almost useless because they both go up nearly as much when you raise any stat (because this raises your level, which increases all of your defense stats) and you can gain much more defense against every type of damage (including lightning and magical, which Resistance does nothing against) by wearing heavier armor and putting points into Endurance (which decides carrying capacity) to compensate for the extra weight. Poison resistance is only especially valuable in specific areas, so it's better to get it from equipment. To make it even worse, Diminishing Returns for Balance kicks in once your armor-less defense reaches a certain point from putting points in resistance or level up—so you're just getting a headstart up a slope that gets pretty close to being flat at higher levels. Neither of the next games have a Resistance stat: Dark Souls II effectively spread its effect across Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, and Endurance. Dark Souls III has Resistance's effect as a secondary effect of Vitality (which is now what decides equip load, but not stamina).
  • For anyone who decides to use elemental infused weaponry, Strength and Dexterity essentially become dump stats, especially in the first game, where elemental weapons did increased base damage but eliminated stat scaling entirely. This meant that the weapon would perform exactly the same for someone with the minimum required Str/Dex to use the weapon as it would for a character who had maxed out both stats. This frees you up to put all those points that would have gone to Strength or Dexterity into boosting Vitality and Endurance to obscene levels. Most players take this a step further and only give themselves enough Strength to use the weapon two-handed — which is much lower than the requirement to use it one-handed — and combine this with the ever-popular Stat Stick the Grass Crest Shield. The sequels lessened this somewhat by making elemental weapons scale off other stats like Intelligence or Faith, and not completely removing the Strength and Dexterity scaling. Of course, Raw weapons now function like the first game's elemental weapons, as do Fire and Deep weapons in III, but generally aren't nearly as powerful as the standard versions with its scaling stats at the softcap.
  • Luck makes a return in Dark Souls III, and while it isn't the complete joke that it was in Demon's Souls it's still considerably less viable than the other offensive stats. Besides the same effect on drop rate and resistance to Curse (like Plague, very rare), Luck increases most sources of Poison or Bleed buildup, weapons with a Hollow infusion will scale off it, as will sorceries cast with the Man-Grub's Staff. There's also Anri's Straight Sword, which is the game's equivalent of the Blueblood Sword and, like it, gets tremendously powerful at high Luck. However, even these are somewhat undermined by Poison damage being very weak in III and the fact that you still need enough Strength/Dex/Int to meet weapon/spell requirements even if you want to scale them off Luck, so you might as well just make one of those your primary damage stat. Incidentally, this makes Knight and Pyromancer the only two starting classes worth picking 99% of the time for making an optimized build, since they are both tied for having the lowest Luck. Even if you want to make a Luck build, you're still probably better off picking one of them over a luckier class since they'll start with more points in stats you're going to want points in anyway, and so will be more useful in the early game before you can actually get any Luck-scaling equipment.
  • The Arcane stat in Elden Ring manages to be both this trope and One Stat to Rule Them All at the same time. Similar to Luck in Dark Souls III, Arcane makes you better at inflicting Poison and Bleed (as well as the new Scarlet Rot status) and grants you access to unique weapons that scale off Arcane, such as Rivers of Blood. While these options are much more powerful in Elden Ring compared to its predecessor, they all require a significant investment in to Arcane to properly benefit from. The remaining benefits of Arcane are Holy Damage Resistance (important late game, but Arcane provides a very minor benefit compared to items and equipment), Deathblight Resistance (a rare status you can just craft/buy cures for), and item drop chance (also outclassed by items and equipment). While other stats are either important to every build (i.e. Vigor determining your HP) or are frequently required to meet certain equipment/spell prerequisites (i.e. Strength and Dex for most weapons) in order to incentivize putting at least a few points in to them, Arcane is all or nothing.
• In Genshin Impact, bonuses to Health and Defense are considered inferior to other stats for most characters; the few characters whose focus is to shield and/or heal (like Noelle or Barbara) are rare exceptions and usually it is one or the other, not both.
• Grand Theft Auto V gave us the Stealth stat, which...doesn't really do anything. Stealth outside of missions is minimum to zero as all it does is remedy the amount of noise the player makes when moving, which doesn't really matter much at all since rarely, if ever, the player will be in a tight spot with cops nearby who can hear them.
  • It is, however, more useful in GTA Online, but only in PvP modes, as stealth makes the character quieter and not appear in the minimap for nearby players. Outside of that, however, in free mode, stealth is useless once more.
• GreedFall: Craftsmanship. While being able to craft your own armor and weapon upgrades is nice, there's a blacksmith in New Serene who can do it as well and the amount he charges is negligible. You're much better off if you reserve your Attribute points for Insight, Vigor, or Lockpicking.
• In Guild Wars 2, Vitality isn't a very popular attribute, unless Toughness comes with it: in a game where every class has healing abilities (for themselves at least), reducing incoming direct damage is better than having more HP to heal - healing abilities scale with a different attribute called, well, Healing Power. The Necromancer is the only class that gets a substantial benefit from Vitality with the Death Shroud that scales with maximum health and is generated in percentage amounts rather than flat amounts. In the Fractals of the Mists, Vitality even becomes detrimental to any character due to the Agony that deals percent health damage and reduces all healings received by 70%, making high health characters take more damage from it and have fewer chances of survival than one with less health for the same amount of healing received.
• Hyrule Warriors has a variant despite not having a traditional stat build system for your characters. The main ways of enhancing your characters other than Character Levels are unlocking weapons or Heart Pieces/Containers to increase your damage and health, respectively, for each character. To obtain these, you must spend Search items in the game's Adventure mode on specific tiles to find them. While Search items are not truly finite, it's tedious to obtain more if you run out; thus, you should always save them for unlocking new weapons to increase your damage output. The reason for this is that to unlock nearly anything in the game, you must obtain A-ranks on missions, which requires taking minimal damage and racking up lots of kills. Since more health doesn't allow you to take more damage in the A-rank requirement, obtaining Heart Containers is effectively a waste of time while having strong weapons is nigh-vital. Furthermore, you already get additional health as your characters level up anyway, which is more than enough for the few situations in which having more health is helpful.
  • This is fixed in the Definitive Edition of the game, where the damage requirements for A-ranks are now a percentile based on your max health, meaning Heart Containers make the requirement easier. Furthermore, you can buy Search items with a small sum of Rupees in this version, meaning there's no need to pick and choose what you use them on anymore. Weapons are still vastly more useful, but Heart Containers are no longer useless.
• Icewind Dale puts a much heavier focus on combat than its sister game, Baldur's Gate, and as a result Wisdom and Charisma become even more niche than before. Wisdom is only important on Druids and Clerics and Charisma isn't really worthwhile at all outside of classes that require it (Druid, Bard and Paladin). The game does subtly encourage you to have at least one of those three on your team though, as they all get unique dialog options (and experience opportunities) that other classes do not.
• In the first four Inazuma Eleven games, Stamina only affects how fast a character uses up GP, representing physical fatigue. Characters will eventually hit a point where they'll seldom if ever become fatigued, making Stamina only useful early in the game. Usually, you can stop caring about your team's Stamina entirely around halfway to 2/3rds through the story. Inazuma Eleven GO 2 fixed this with the introduction of the Mixi-Trans Super Mode, which drains the user's GP very quickly. With the revamped stat system in Inazuma Eleven GO, adding 4 points to a character's Technique stat had the exact same effect as adding 1 point each to Kick, Dribble, Block, and Catch, making Technique a dump stat. This was also fixed in GO 2 with the addition of Critical Failures, the odds of which decrease as user's Technique stat increases.
• Kaguya Table parodies this trope. You can dump Experience Points into Bossiness, which does...absolutely nothing. Like a boss.
• Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II make you choose a dump stat. It's odd, in that its effects on your stats is minimal, but its effect on when you learn which abilities is massive, making the choice very much a Guide Dang It!.
  • Kingdom Hearts III does this as well, but it also offers a choice between Vitality (increases max HP but lowers max MP), Wisdom (vice versa), or Balance (neither). On Critical Mode, Vitality is very much this trope as you will still be a Glass Cannon that dies in one or two hits, while the nerf to your max MP in that Mode makes it all the better to choose Wisdom and give yourself as much MP to use as possible.
• For a long time, moxie became a bit of a dump stat in Kingdom of Loathing, to the degree that having a high level of it would make the final boss battle exponentially harder, with the main attractiveness of the moxie classes (the special Moxious Maneuver) being less than useless. This disparity has since been modified. A bit.
• Certain types of equipment in La Tale such as gloves can be enchanted with unique enchantments that tend to be prioritized, but all equipment that can be enchanted can have the base four, strength, stamina, magic, and luck. Strength and magic boost damage for physical and magical classes respectively, but by such a small amount that almost everyone prefers luck (boosts the odds of a critical hit) and stamina (only base stat to boost survivability) over them.
• Live A Live:
  • In the remake, Masaru Takahara, the protagonist of the Present Day chapter, has Special Attack as this. Because all of his attacks are physical based, he never gets any actual benefit out of the stat.
  • Akira Tadokoro, the protagonist of the Near Future chapter, has Power (or Physical Attack in the remake) as this. While he does have physical based attacks, most of his abilities are connected to his IQ (or Special Attack in the remake), making his Power/Physical Attack stat irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. In addition, there's a good chance his Power/Physical Attack won't increase when he levels up, and if it does, it will only go up by one point.
  • Cube, the protagonist of the Distant Future chapter, has their Power/Physical Attack and their Speed as this, both of which are locked at 26 and 18, respectively. The fact that they're the only protagonist who can't level up through EXP during the Dominion of Hate chapter also means that it's impossible for their stats to increase naturally.
  • Streibough from the Middle Ages chapter has Power/Physical Attack as this. Not only does it have a chance of not going up when he levels up, but he also just straight up does not need it, as all of his abilities are magic-based and therefore rely on his IQ/Special Attack instead.
• Lords of the Fallen: During the first playthrough, Luck increases the odds of finding crafting materials and consumable items. Crafting materials just means add-on gems. That's it. It becomes much more useful during New Game Plus, as a high luck stat means 3/4ths of all treasure chests have Rare Candy in them.
• Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals allows you to boost your four stats through the Mystic Stone board. The GUT stat affects IP regeneration, but the Mystic Stone board already has spaces that give boosts to IP regen or max IP when activated. Most characters don't need the boost, and you can just switch out IP-reliant party members to let their IP regenerate. The other stats let characters hit much harder with all of their attacks, IP or non-IP, with STR and INT also boosting defense stats.
• MapleStory has four primary stats players can put points into every level (plus HP and MP), but most classes only use two at best. Even then, players never put points into their class's secondary stat until they reach the cap of 999.
  • Warriors and melee Pirates use Strength primarily, and Dexterity second.
  • Bowmen and ranged Pirates use Dexterity primarily, and Strength second.
  • Magicians use Intelligence primarily and Luck second.
  • Thieves use Luck primarily, and Dexterity second.
  • Xenon, considered both a Thief and a Pirate, uses Strength, Dexterity, and Luck equally, leaving Intelligence as his only dump stat.
  • Demon Avenger, despite being a Warrior, uses HP as his primary stat, meaning that his dump stat is all of them.
• The four spellcasters that join your party in Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis use magic for everything, even standard attacks. This gives them no way to use their attack stats. Pamela's immunity to physical attacks also renders her defense stat useless once unlocked.
• In Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, Paper Mario's Copy Block ability allows him to create a minimum of six copies (and can be increased up to ten) of himself that stack together. This lets him deal higher damage per turn than Mario and Luigi, but, more importantly, renders him nigh-invincible, since, whenever he takes damage, his copies take it in his stead. Furthermore, a late-game rank bonus can allow the use of the Copy Block a free turn, so Paper Mario doesn't have to waste a turn when he needs to replenish his copies. This renders Paper Mario's HP and defense stats obsolete.
• Mario Kart:
  • In general:
    • Top Speed tends to be a dump stat whenever AI drivers are involved since the game's Rubber-Band A.I. will simply speed up all the other racers to compensate. This is especially true if items are involved since the AI will be throwing them at you so often that you'll almost never be able to maintain your top speed for very long, making acceleration (i.e. the ability to recover when you do get hit) much more important.
    • Most courses are designed to be forgiving enough that even with the worst possible handling, there's no turn that can't be taken with practice and by simply drifting earlier than usual. However, this seems to have changed a bit since Mario Kart 8 introduced the 200cc class. Courses are not designed with this higher speed in mind, so sharp turns are much harder to take. Handling builds became more common since it came out.
  • Traction is a very weak stat in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. It's essentially how quickly you can reach max handling while drifting. On road traction is not affected at all by the stat, while only making minor differences off-road. It has its uses but they're smaller than Handling. Ironically, the hidden turbo stat, despite being rarely more something else than purely opposed to top speed, reveals itself to be is more useful.
  • In Mario Kart DS, drift and weight. Due to the exploit of snaking, it was actually beneficial to have LESS drift since if you had more, you'd be turning too sharply while power sliding on straightaways. The same is said for weight since it's combined with the "offroad" stat. The less weight you had, the faster you could go off-road such as in grass or dirt. Plus, bumping into other players had no effect online. The item stat was also pretty useless, especially online where you couldn't get triple items. It was good for some courses during time trials though, as you got more mushrooms to take shortcuts.
• In the Might and Magic games, intelligence has no effect on classes lacking elemental spellcasting abilities, while personality is useless for classes that can't cast self magic. Very few classes make actual use of both.
• In the Mass Effect series
  • In Mass Effect First Aid often becomes a dump stat for Shepard due to Medicine in Engineer/Sentinel Shepard or Kaidan having a greater impact on healing and the availability of Medical Exoskeletons for your armor, which grant you regenerating health.
  • In Mass Effect 2 Pull and AI Hacking, while not true dump stats, don’t offer much benefit to upgrading them beyond two ranks. Pull’s purpose is to levitate targets for biotic combos, so a wider area and longer duration serve no useful purpose if the field is going to be detonated soon anyway. And since mechs of all sizes are now equally affected by AI Hacking, coupled with the fact that they have to be down to just health bars for the ability to work, the benefit of a longer duration hack is lost.
• Pull is once again a dump stat in Mass Effect 3 since Liara is now available with the much better Singularity for levitating enemies, as well as the availability of Lash which works on armored targets too. Its primary benefit - yanking shields off Cerberus Guardians - can be obtained with just one rank in it.
• All the Power Cell consuming Combat abilities in Mass Effect: Andromeda get dumped due to the requiring the use of power cells, which aren’t as easily available as ammo is, and you cannot carry a lot of them anyway. So you may get barely 3-4 uses of that ability before you have to scramble for more power cells.
• Mount & Blade:
  • Trade: Lets you see market prices and gives you tips on where to sell certain goods. That's it.
  • Shield: Each point reduces the damage your shield takes when blocking a hit by 8% and improves how quickly you can block with a shield. Not very useful when your shield rarely gets destroyed, and even if it does you can grab one from the battlefield.
  • Athletics: Increases your base running speed and nothing else. Even then, unarmored Looters can still outrun a heavily armed and armored man or woman on foot even if he or she has 10 points in this skill. Is absolutely useless if riding a horse.
• Charisma in Murkon's Refuge just reduces the rates you pay at inns and clinics. And the inn in the first town is always free, so if you keep that as your home base, it only affects clinic prices. (In the pre-web version, it instead affected how often monsters were friendly, a feature which the creator decided to dump for the web port.)
• Defensive stats in Nippon Ichi games can be viewed as dump stats (unless using a class whose attacks are based on them), especially at moderately high levels (say, when you first top 1000). This is because the games are turn-based and damage is calculated in such a way that the absolute value of an attack stat matters quite a lot (i.e., 17K attack against 17K defense can still do several thousand damage while 100 attack against 100 defense will barely scratch). Depending on the game, it may be best to view Bonus Dungeon maps as one-turn blitzes. SPD, especially in the later Disgaea games is useful though; since almost everything in the post-game is a one-hit KO even with maxed defensive stats, simply being hard to hit is a good way to be defensive. Not only that, but for fists (which are one of the better weapon types due to the Big Bang ability), the SPD stat is half of the damage calculation, making it quite the opposite of this trope for fist users, acting as both offense and defense.
• Flat DEF and DEF% in Onmyōji (2016) are stats that basically exist to screw up your souls. Onmyoji in general has a serious case of Rocket-Tag Gameplay, but even when you want to make a tanky shiki, you want to stack HP (both flat and %-based) not DEF. DEF has a fairly minimal effect on the damage your shikigami take from attacks, and there are too many abilities that reduce or ignore it. Additionally, a lot of shikis (mainly healers, but also Bukkuman's curse damage cap) have abilities that scale with their HP, while only two shikis (Samurai X/Heiyo and Jinmenju) have abilities that scale with DEF (and Samurai X's DEF-scaling attack is irrelevant because he's a CC-tank, while Jinmenju is just a Low-Tier Letdown who does nothing no matter how much DEF he stacks). Unfortunately, stat gain when you level-up souls is randomised, and DEF/DEF% have a datamine-confirmed artificially-bloated chance of appearing on them, so it basically exists to make the majority of the souls you farm and level up worthless, forcing you to grind more while leaving you at the mercy of the Random Number God.
  • Effect HIT is one of those cases where it's either absolutely essential, or this. On shikis with debuff or CC abilities, Effect HIT improves their chances of affecting opponents, which often makes the difference between a shiki crippling the opposing team, and them achieving nothing at all. On shikis who don't have abilities that scale with Effect HIT (mainly DPS, but also healers, orb generators, and pullers/pushers), getting it on a soul you're leveling up for them literally does absolutely nothing; even DEF is more useful. Nothing is more frustrating than leveling up a Crit DMG-primary Shadow soul for a massive-damage shiki like Ibaraki Doji, hoping to get enough Crit to reach 100%, only to get 5 levels of Effect HIT, giving him a +16% bonus that a Samurai X would kill for... which is completely going to waste, rendering the soul fodder.
  • Effect RES, on the other hand, is a stat that SHOULD hypothetically be essential, as CC can have a massive effect on the game- except it doesn't work properly. A shiki can have over 100% Effect RES and still be CC'd (in fact, it appears to be bugged so that shikis with too much Effect RES are easier to be CC'd than those without it), so investing heavily into the stat is just a waste of soul space.
• The Heart Points stat in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is this to all but first-time or novice players. You'll get more mileage out of having a surplus of Flower Points, granting you the ability to use special moves frequently, and Badge Points, letting you equip said special moves, as well as various other abilities and stat boosts. This is bolstered by the existence of Superguarding (a perfect block that makes you take 0 damage and works on all but seven attacks in the game, all of which are exclusive to bosses) and badges that can reduce damage taken or make enemies miss with attacks. Even if you do want to boost your health, the HP Plus badges let you gain 5 HP, the amount you would get for leveling health, for 3 BP, the amount you get for leveling BP: essentially the same benefit, but with the ability to remove that health and equip more badges in its place if you want to. The "Danger Mario" setup capitalizes on these things by paying Chet Rippo to reduce Mario's HP stat from 10 (its starting point) to 5, letting him stack loads of badges that boost his attack and dodge rates when at 5 HP or less.
• Parasite Eve has several kinds of stats, but only a few that are worth boosting. Boosting a gun's magazine capacity was generally a waste since it would be overkill to give a gun anything above 20 bullets in a magazine before having to reload. Likewise, dumping bonus points into your item capacity would give you more space to hold items, but since you get more from leveling up anyway, it's pointless to boost it. The only stats that really matter are the attack strength of your gun and the defenses in your armor.
• Path of Exile's item crafting is an exercise in avoiding rolling as many Dump Stats as possible. Rare items can have up to six suffixes, and the best, most expensive gear have the optimized mods of the highest magnitude, but even budget gear needs decent rolls and what rolls are needed differs between equipment. For example, increased Energy Shield is only desired in Intelligence-type armour, and Critical Strike mods aren't useful to builds that don't make use of them. The one stat that's unanimously deemed useless, however, is increased Item Rarity. Item Rarity doesn't actually increase the odds of obtaining actually rare items; it only affects the chance of an item dropping with a higher Rarity class (as in, whether it's Normal/Magic/Rare/Unique). Runner-ups include reduced Attribute requirement and flat Life regeneration (at least before it got buffed; it used to be always worse than percentage life regen for even the squishiest builds).
• PAYDAY 2 has Health, Armor, Dodge, Stamina, Steadiness, and Speed for character stats. Each stat is determined by whatever skills you unlocked in each skill tree, what perk deck you have equipped, and the type of armor you are wearing. Heavy armor will give more armor at the cost of not being able to dodge bullets and moving slower and tiring out faster when sprinting while light armor or even wearing no armor makes you be able to dodge bullets via random chance and be able to run really fast for a while before tiring out at the risk of going down quickly due to your lack of armor. A lot of players gravitate towards dodge builds where they focus on having a high dodge stat and dump the armor stat since moving quickly means they can zip from cover to cover and move loot quickly whereas heavy armor users can't run across the street without getting mowed down by the police. While it is possible to play in a setup where you have a ton of armor and shoot from cover, it won't protect you if A) cops focus their fire on you and B) Cloakers can instantly incapacitate you, regardless of your health or armor.
• Pillars of Eternity tries to avert this by giving all of its stats combat value that applied to all of the game's classes, meaning that if a player or character dumps it, it's because that was the playstyle they wanted to use: want to be a battlefield-control Barbarian? Maybe go Intellect and Perception. A More Dakka blaster-Wizard? Try Resolve and Dexterity. Etc.
  • Might boosts damage from all sources (melee, magic, and ranged), including healing magic power, and poison resistance.
  • Constitution boosts health, stamina, and poison resistance.
  • Dexterity boosts attack and action speeds, and area-of-effect dodge chance.
  • Perception improves the chance to interrupt the enemy's actions, (meagerly) boosts accuracy, and affects area-of-effect dodge chance.
  • Intellect increases the area-of-effect of their special abilities and duration of any status effects they apply, and also boosts mental defenses.
  • Resolve, finally, protects the character from having their actions interrupted and minorly improves general physical defenses (in a mirror image of Perception's effects), and also boosts mental defenses.
• Phantasy Star Online 2 has two versions of this.
  • For characters, it's Dexterity. Damage is calculated by rolling a number between your minimum and maximum damage thresholds when you hit with an attack; Dexterity increases the odds that you'll roll higher numbers. The thing is, the effect on your DPS is minimal at best, and when you have rarer weapons, the range of values the RNG can roll is restricted between 90% and 100%, so Dexterity is literally useless except for equipping weapons that require it. Later updates made it useful for three specific classes due to having a passive skill that gives a 1:1 return in useful stats, but outside of that niche, it's something of a noob trap.
  • For gear, it's Defense/Resist. Adding Defense or Resist on equipment eats up valuable Special Ability slots that can go towards increasing other, more useful base stats like HP, PP, ATK. Most players rely on the Defense and Resistance stats granted by their Units.
• In Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, stats are much harder to abuse and/or distort since base PSO2's ATK and DEF stats are consolidated into attack and Defense, respectively, and no capsule affixes directly affect them either. That said, the capsules in question which provide the boosts to your gear do have a few stinkers that people will use as Might/Precision/Technique III fodder instead or just plain never use whatsoever.
  • Affliction resist capsules are the aforementioned fodder; sure, being able to resist Freeze ^note stops all movement and attacks and Shock ^note occasionally flinches you as it inflicts damage sounds cool on paper, but these effects aren't common enough in general play to waste precious equip slots on them. In higher-difficulty content like Leciel Exploration, where afflictions crop up more often, the ability to completely dodge all damage and status procs means you won't be using those capsules there, either.
  • Defi capsules piss people off because they provide extreme damage boosts in Duel quests... and only Duel quests. Having to waste an Ajax or Octo armor to slot with all Defi capsules is seen as a waste of money and resources unless you're able to do Duel quests reliably.
  • Decold capsules provide resistance to extreme temperatures... which only shows up in Rayjord Gorge. Thus, once you've found all the red boxes there with the few temporary cold-proofing items and Kvaris food and Mag buffs available to you, you abandon those capsules and never look back.
• Planescape: Torment averts this with the main character. The Nameless One can be a fighter, thief, or mage, which means Wisdom and Charisma should be unimportant stats. However, combat is not a major focus, so Wisdom and Charisma are both extremely valuable, while Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution are fine at fairly mediocre values.
• In Planet Alcatraz, Charisma can be safely lowered to 1 for little to no penalty. A higher charisma gives you better "Attitude" and thus makes it easier to persuade or intimidate people, however, a variety of clothing items and weapons can boost your Attitude, making this stat useless. A lesser example is Perception, which determines deviation when shooting firearms, is irrelevant when the character in question uses a melee weapon or always engage at near point-blank range.
• Pokémon
  • Attacks are divided into physical and special; usually a Pokémon naturally has one attack stat higher than the other. By teaching a Pokémon inclined towards Special attacks only Special moves, the Attack stat becomes completely useless. The opposite is also true; similarly, it's not usually worth it to boost either defensive stat for Glass Cannon Pokémon who have really bad HP, since they're not going to survive much of anything anyway, or the speed stat for a slow Pokémon, because once you're slower than any likely opponent, the stat doesn't matter anymore (and some attacks/sets benefit from a low Speed stat, like Gyro Ball, which gets more powerful the higher the target's speed is compared to yours, and Metal Burst, which doesn't even work unless you go last). There are, however, some movesets that take advantage of upping what would normally be a Dump Stat in order to barely survive what would normally be a lethal blow, or to better utilize attacks that work well against an otherwise difficult opponent.
  • Each Pokémon Nature gives a bonus to one non-HP stat and a penalty to another (except for a five that increase and decrease the same stat, effectively canceling each other out.), thus it's generally advised to select a Nature where the penalized stat is the Dump Stat. For example, a pure physical sweeper would want Adamant to maximize their Attack and lower their Special Attack, which they do not need. A speedy special sweeper would want a Timid nature to maximize their Speed and lower their Attack. A physical wall would want a Bold or Impish nature to maximize its Defense, and lower Attack or Special Attack. So on and so forth.
  • Some Elite Tweak builds emphasize this to the extreme. The most ridiculous example is for Shuckle, which naturally has four dump stats: its Speed, Attack, Special Attack, and HP are all, to be charitable, quite abysmal. Due to its absurdly high Defense and Special Defense, as well as the Sturdy ability (which allows it to resist One-Hit Kill attacks), it can afford to use only Status Effects to deal damage — a strategy used by the Pike Queen in Emerald. Using this strategy, everything except HP becomes a Dump Stat when leveling up: the two defenses are already high enough that they don't need the help (though Defense will end up getting points anyway because they have to go somewhere), the attack stats are irrelevant, and Shuckle is going to be going last so often (i.e. pretty much always) that there isn't much point to increasing its Speed.
  • Pokémon actually encourages the Dump Stat mentality for Special Sweepers; it's more advantageous to have a special sweeper with a low attack than a high one. Why? Confusion damage is calculated based on the attack stat, so a Pokémon with a higher attack will take more damage hurting itself in confusion. That's the whole point of Swagger. There is also a move called Foul Play which uses your attack stat against you instead of the user's, and several special attackers are already weak to the move from Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors.
  • The Pokémon Shedinja essentially has three dump stats; since its HP is always set to 1, putting effort values in HP, Defense, or Special Defense^note unless you Baton Pass a Substitute to it, then the last two have a use, though not a major one is altogether meaningless, not to mention its pitiful Special Attack.
  • There was a Suicune build in the second generation that actually used Speed as a Dump Stat — even though it's normally the One Stat to Rule Them All! You see, the vast majority of people dealt with powered-up Pokémon by using Roar or Whirlwind, which normally goes last... but a bug made them fail if it went first, and if both Pokémon used Roar or Whirlwind, only the slower one succeeded.
  • A snag that can occur with some Pokémon is that their movepools (a list of moves that a Pokémon is able to learn) don't work well with the base stats that the species have. A Pokémon whose physical attack stat is much higher than its special attack might be stuck with a movepool of predominantly special moves or vice versa. This could change if the Pokémon can evolve into another more powerful form (For example, Larvesta has a higher Attack stat, but it evolves into Volcarona, who has a really strong Special Attack stat), but some aren't as lucky as they're forced to fight left-handed while letting their higher stat go to waste.
    • This was an especially prominent problem for some Pokémon in the first three generations when attacks were classified as physical or special according to the attack's type, meaning several Pokémon were left with stats oriented in favor of the wrong attack stat for their type (such as a physical attack oriented Water type or a special attack oriented Fighting type). This would be mostly fixed from Generation 4 onwards, where attacks are now classified as physical or special depending on the attack itself rather than its type, so most Pokémon now have at least one viable move for their type that uses their higher attack stat.
  • Mega Beedrill actually invokes this. Since all Mega Evolutions only increase base stat total by 100, its already weak Special Attack stat is shot down even further so that the removed stats are transferred to an even bigger boost to Attack and Speed.
• In Progress Quest, Strength is the only stat that affects gameplay at all (increases your carrying capacity, which means fewer trips to the store for faster leveling). The rest are completely useless.
• In the game Punch Club, you have three skill trees to work with, with one of them being the dump stat. Way of the Bear is all about hard hitting strikes while sacrificing agility, meaning you'll whiff a lot of attacks which suck up energy. Way of the Tiger is all about hitting people hard and often, though you sacrifice stamina in your fights. Way of the Turtle is all about being a tank, making people wear themselves out trying to take you down, though you'll also have to sacrifice agility.
  • In the original version of the game, Strength and Stamina were a dump stats: Agility was the One Stat to Rule Them All, as consistently hitting your opponent was more important than hitting them harder but less often, and Way of the Tiger ignored Strength entirely by doing damage based on Agility instead. Given that Agility also influenced your ability to dodge attacks entirely (and therefore negate damage), making a build with anything other than Agility was essentially taking the much more difficult road. Later updates to the game balanced things out a bit more by making Strength more consistently useful, but Stamina is now the dump stat, better in a secondary role (to increase HP and Endurance) instead of a primary role (focusing on letting opponents wear themselves down by punching you in the face).
• As alluded to by this ProJared review for Quest 64, anything that isn't Earth or Water magic. Earth contains a magical repulsion spell and since everything in the game uses magic to attack, you can't be hurt if you use it so you definitely want that (and the Avalanche ability has the potential for massive damage depending on how the boulders fall so that doesn't hurt either). Meanwhile, the Water elemental enables healing and you'll need that before you get your repulsion spell and by the time it's earned, you might as well just grind it all the way up. The character's innate abilities (like Agility) also operate like this due to the "you-get-more-by-doing-that-thing" experience system (which, as also mentioned in the review, works against itself and creates Dump Stats of counter-productive abilities, such as physical vs. magical attacks).
• The LCK stat in Ragnarok Tactics. It raises magic attack and criticals, but 1. Criticals almost never trigger and 2. It's easier and more efficient to raise magic with the MAT stat, which raises magic attack, magic defense, and MP at the same time.
• While not a video game itself, ask anyone familiar with RPG Maker games what the Luck stat does. Most players might not have ever even thought of it, and the developers themselves are split between those who don't know what it's even supposed to do and those who know what it's for, and never use it seriously. The Luck stat actually judges how effective inflicting status effects on enemies is, as well as how effective being inflicted with a status effect is, but the player has to have their Luck stat in the hundreds (if not thousands) to even notice a difference. And that means "compared to the enemy," a stat ratio of 6,600:6,100 is as effective as 600:100.
• Dexterity (DEX) in RPG Maker XP. It's supposed to be used to calculate the accuracy of normal attacks (the accuracy of skills and magic are calculated separately) and the chances of critical hits. The issue is that DEX only uses the target's agility (AGI) and not the actually Evasion stat (EVA) to determine if the normal attack lands or not and it's usually it's EVA that has the greater influence on evasion. As such, if you make a thief with a DEX of 80 and a fighter with a DEX of 40, the player will not even notice that the thief is more accurate. So unless you're creating DEX-based skills, the stat is pretty irrelevant.
• In RuneScape, though players may wish to level up their firemaking skill for the purpose of increasing their total level or rank on the high scores (or to obtain a firemaking cape which signifies that they have leveled the skill to the maximum level), the skill itself provides very little use ingame. The primary use of the skill is to make fires which can be used to cook food. However, as permanent fires and ranges are readily available throughout the game, in addition to the fact that a fire made by a player with level 1 firemaking will cook food just as well as a fire made by a player with 99 firemaking, renders this ability redundant.
  • Prior to the evolution of combat, for players wishing to engage in player killing, the defense skill could also be considered a dump stat. Because of the way combat levels are calculated, players that ignore defense in favor of offensive skills will often be stronger than players of the same combat level that choose to train both offensive skills and defense.
  • In Old School RuneScape, while Agility and Runecraft are undoubtedly useful skills (Agility increases the rate run energy regenerates and gives access to useful shortcuts and crafting high-level runes like Blood or Wrath runes is one of the most profitable activities in the game), but training either of them is a slog with low experience rates, so it's common to see players with with high total levels with Agility and Runecraft levels as low as their Firemaking levels. However with the addition of very profitable skilling minigames like Wintertodt (trains firemaking), the Hallowed Sepulchre (trains Agility), and Guardians of the Rift (trains Runecraft), more players have been getting these skills up. In fact, it's not uncommon for Ironman players^note Players who can't trade with other players or use the Grand Exchange to start Wintertodt at a very low level and play it until they reach 99 Firemaking, simply because of how useful the supply drops are and a mechanic that makes Wintertodt harder the higher your Hitpoints are.
• Subverted with early Shin Megami Tensei games. The Player Character is usually unable to use magic but is still able to increase Intelligence (normally a universal Dump Stat) and Magic. Despite this, they are still both important as Intelligence increases the success of demon negotiation regardless of the game it appears in, and without a decent Magic or Intelligence stat most end-game spells can rip a character to pieces. The second game goes a bit further by requiring the main character to have at least ten Magic points at one point in order to win a dance contest.
  • In Shin Megami Tensei IV the strength stat can be considered one because elemental resistances and weaknesses matter more than raw power, because of the "press turn" system which gives you additional turns by hitting the enemies' weaknesses, and very few enemies are weak to physical attacks. The main problem, however, is that Dexterity exists. Dexterity increases the damage of gun attacks. AND physical attacks. AND is better than Strength at increasing physical attack damage, so if going for a physically inclined character, there's literally no reason to build into strength over dexterity. Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse addresses this by having Physical skills scale off strength and Gun attacks only off dexterity, meaning that a Strength build becomes viable. Luck is this trope across both games because they have too little of an impact compared to the other stats. Apocalypse incentivizes diversity anyways since each demon now specializes in a couple things, So you can't just have something like a casting-focused demon that has spells of every element.
  • In Devil Survivor, for humans it tends to be Strength— The way the game works, all the human characters share the same pool of moves (duplicates not allowed), and physical attacks are uncommon. So you run a single physical attacker and three mages. Relatively few passive skills require strength, so it's safe to dump once you get past an early boss the requires the main character to have some. For demons, though, speed is fairly useless. Demons don't have to worry about how skills are spread out or stat requirements, which means everyone can run Mighty Hit if they want, making Strength useful. But Speed affects when they move in a round and not much else^note nominally it affects mosts thing that depend on RNG as well, but the effect is minor and seems to stop mattering after the early levels, and with the way the game works^note hitting a weakness or landing a crit will usually grant the character doing so an extra turn, and remove said extra turn from the opponent so attacked it can actually be advantageous to move after the enemy.
  • In Digital Devil Saga, Luck is a complete waste. The rare times you'll be using ailments (the main skills that rely on luck), you'll be using them against weakness which means always accurate. Hitting and dodging? You're better off with Agility. In fact, Luck being your dump stat is practically essential to beating the infamous Superboss, as you need to goad his flunkies into putting you to sleep if you want to survive his attacks.
• In Stellaris, you can pick Traits to customize your race to make them smarter, stronger, weaker, shorter-lived, etc using the Point Build System. The Sedentary trait is almost always considered a Dump Stat, as it affects population resettlement and migration, the former you will use only sparingly (on account of Influence cost) and the latter happens automatically in the background randomly all the time anyway. Taking this disadvantageous trait is always good for a free Trait point^note This is becoming less and less true as the game is constantly updated. For example, with the Megastructures expansion, you can build space-borne habitats with many bonuses over a planet, but you can only locate pops there by resettlement, at least at first, in which case Sedentary works against you.
  • In general, which Trait becomes Dump Stat will depend on your Ethos. Choosing Fleeting means you will get to build more of the unique once-per-ruler structures and units exclusive to dictatorships. And if you are playing as genocidal Xenophobes, who cares what your neighbors think of your Repugnant appearance and customs?
  • For Hive Minds, which get an automatic +25% to pop growth speed, the -20% pop growth speed of Slow Breeders is an easy choice, as you'll still have 5% faster growth than normal empires. Especially considering Hive Minds are locked out of 2/3 ascension paths, only able to take the Biological Engineering, ensuring they can remove the trait later anyway.
• Super Mario RPG gets this two-fold:
  • The game has characters that are in specialized roles and their stats reflect this. At every level up, you can choose to boost either physical attack/defense, magic attack/defense, or max HP. Mallow is the game's Squishy Wizard that specializes in magic, making his physical attributes a waste to even boost. Likewise, Bowser is the Mighty Glacier that can hit like a truck, but his magic stats are awful and aren't worth raising to compensate. Most players will keep boosting Mallow and Bowser's stats in what they specialize in so they can perform their roles well. The game attempts to avert this by gradually decaying the bonuses for a stat if you boost it repeatedly, but your character-specific stat bonus is still more worth it than an even spread between all three stats.
  • Max HP, on the whole, is largely worthless. While it's nice to have a much higher HP cap, those few extra points to physical or magical defense tend to more than make up for those few less to HP. Simply alternating between Physical and Magical, and completely ignoring the max HP stat, will make even Princess Peach capable of inflicting decent basic attacks on the whole, often enough to allow your entire party to KO the enemy party in one turn before they even get the chance to damage you in the first place. Furthermore, as the game is rather restrictive on item space and MP, it's much more economic to have higher defenses and lower HP as it requires less healing spells and weaker items to replenish it.
• In System Shock 2:
  • Endurance becomes a dump stat on the Hard and Impossible difficulty settings. On Easy you gain ten HP per point of endurance, on Normal it's five (not a whole lot, but still useful to a point), and on Hard and Impossible it's a paltry three, which doesn't justify the hefty cyber module cost. It also adds resistance to radiation and toxins, but you find a Rad Suit in the early stages that gives you 75% resistance to both anyway, and the damage from both hazards are generally easy to deal with anyway.
  • The Exotic weapons tree also qualifies. Not only are they situational weapons with very sparse and limited ammunition, you also need to sink a ton of modules into the Research skill before you can even begin to use them. Meanwhile, the basic pistol and shotgun (and grenade launcher) have plenty of ammo to scavenge and cost far fewer modules to access. The one exception is that you need one point (the bare minimum) in Exotic skill to use the Crystal melee weapon, which is vastly superior to the basic wrench melee weapon and makes for a better investment for non-energy weapon users (energy weapon users get the Laser Rapier, which is not as good as the Crystal but doesn't require investing in off-build skills).
  • Repair is arguably even less useful than the previous two. Since it's only good for fixing items that are broken, you're better off spending your modules on Maintenance to make sure that your equipment never breaks in the first place. While it does allow you to use some extra Replicators and to access certain weapons earlier on, they are still not enough to make it worth your precious cyber-modules^note Right up until your customized pistol/assault rifle breaks because you ran out of maintenance tools and kept getting into fights. Then you'll be wishing you had all the Repair points you could get.
  • The Tank OS upgrade zig-zags this. 5 extra HP is pretty useless on Easy or Normal difficulty and still not great on Hard. But on Impossible, where you start with 10 HP at 1 END, one hit from a basic Hybrid does exactly 10 damage and every Cyber Module expense costs 80% more than normal, suddenly having 5 more HP for basically free is a very valuable option.
• The Suikoden series has this for a fair few of the combat characters. While a bulk of the characters are varying degrees of a Magic Knight that can function as utility fighters or mages where needed (one standout example in the series is Flik, who is a great front-line swordsman but is also an excellent lightning magician), other characters (some examples being Crowley, Luc, Estella, Maxine, and Levi) are either pure magicians with absolutely pitiful Strength stats, or pure melee/tank fighters (examples here being Ronnie Bell, Humphrey, Nicolas, Gau, and Galleon) that gain next to no magical stats. While it's hypothetically possible to boost the stats up for these characters up so they can function opposite their intended roles, it would take a *long* time to pull it off.
• Tales of the Abyss's ENH stat, in subsequent playthroughs. The game gives characters special skills in combat that are based on the buffs they've received to their stats; for example, buffing AGL can increase speed in combat, or allow for a Double Jump while buffing P. Atk can increase your number of basic attack hits. ENH can give some of the best abilities in the game when invested in, but it doesn't do anything other than give these abilities. The skills you get from these stat boosts carry over to a New Game Plus, but the boosts themselves don't. So ENH has the odd position of being very well-balanced and important on your first playthrough or two, but once you've gotten all the skills to start carrying over and start playing Unknown, ENH may as well not even exist.
• Trials of Mana (the SNES version) was a bit hastily programmed in this regard, so Dexterity and Luck are near useless.
  • Dexterity is supposed to raise Hit Rate and Evasion Rate, but there's no effect on either of those; all that remains is Hawkeye's access to skills and the damage thereof. More damning is that Speed Up and Speed Down have absolutely no effect on anything. The 2020 remake outright removed the Dexterity stat altogether.
  • Luck is supposed to affect crit rate, but it doesn't, and its other effect, rigging the trap wheel in your favor, only appears whenever a chest is trapped, which affects less of the game than you think. You should raise it after capping the other four stats (last if playing Hawkeye).
  • This is subverted in the remake due to the fact that skills and spells are bound to stats. As such, this means that characters like Angela have to invest in Strength and Stamina in order to get Fire and Earth spells as well as Reisz needing to invest in stats other than Strength in order to gain the ability to passively buff allies.
• In Torchlight II, Dexterity is by very far the worst stat in the whole game, even for the Outlander class that is supposed to improve this stat above all else: it gives a very weak increase in critical hit chance, that gets weaker with each point invested and doesn't give any noticeable increase in damage unless you have a lot (and really, a LOT) of Strength to get an increase in critical hit damage, an increase in dodge rate, also with diminishing returns but justified in this case, that hits a hard cap quickly and is helpless against area attacks that are everywhere at high level, and a decrease in damage penalties of "fumbled" attacks, that happen for 20% of basic attacks and never happen for special skills that all classes spam continuously rather than using basic attacks. The Outlander class was as a result very inefficient with its main weapons since dumping Dexterity meant only using the crappiest ranged weapons and increasing it meant lacking in other stats, and Outlander builds using anything else were more powerful.
  • Vitality provides boosts to health, armor, and chance to block but these bonuses are negligible compared to the boosts available from equipment. Vitality is generally only useful for helping to reach the block cap (Typically via the shield Parma's Coal-Burner, the Blocking VI tome, and sufficient Vitality boosts from enchantments), or for cannon wielding Engineers as most cannons require it.
• In the doujin game Touhou Labyrinth, points put into stat and skill advancement, equipment enhancements to them, and points from gaining experience levels all act as a percentage multiplier to the base score. Thus it's hard to avoid emphasizing a character's initial strengths and weaknesses. Beyond that, every character (and monster) has one common dump stat: due to an unfixable bug in the game engine, it is impossible to avoid attacks, making Evasion completely useless (This is quite bizarre, as basic Touhou gameplay is built on dodging). This makes the Fragile Speedster-type characters significantly more squishy (as they would have relied on high EVA to dodge often lethal attacks), but on the plus side, your super-powerful Master Spark will never miss.
• Trillion: God of Destruction: Almost every stat besides Attack, Speed, and Affection, especially defensive stats (Hp and Mp), and, to a lesser extent, Magic and Capacity. Defensive stats are worthless because Trillion does massive damage no matter how high those stats are, and because only heavily investing in them, to the detriment of other stats, yields even noticeable results. Hp and Mp are useless thanks to the unique mechanic of Affection (a third gauge that doubles as both Hp and Mp), and thanks to how the battles with Trillion work, you are practically dead if it runs out anyway. Magic becomes less and less viable as the game goes on and is outright useless against Trillion’s third form due to the form having an It Only Works Once ability against all forms of non-basic attacks, and Capacity is reliant on friendly AI, which is pretty bad.
• Ultima generally avoids this trope as most games have only three prime stats (Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence), which are all useful and self-explanatory. There are some notable exceptions, however.
  • Ultima I has the Stamina stat, which allegedly allows you to take less damage from attacks. It doesn't seem to actually work that way, though, and its only confirmable (working) effect is letting you drink more in bars without being seduced; rather pointless.
  • In both parts of Ultima VII, boosting Intelligence (or its derived stat, Magic) on anyone but the Avatar is a waste of time since, for plot reasons, they are the only one who can cast spells.
  • All Dexterity affects in Ultima IX is how many special techniques you can learn from trainers - unlike Ultima VIII, it does not alter your accuracy or attack speed whatsoever. You don't even move faster with higher Dex. Since special techs cost money to learn, have lengthy animations without invincibility frames and rarely do enough extra damage to justify the risk, there's little reason to bother with them. You're much better off investing in Strength and Intelligence first, and only putting points in Dex once you're forced to (after maxing out the other two).
• Vermintide II has several worthless equipment properties:
  • Respawn Speed. On lower difficulties, you won't be dying often enough to take advantage of the decreased respawn time, and on higher difficulties, your team will be busy fighting hundreds of enemies to be able to rescue you, making the property moot.
  • Movement Speed. You would think that any bonus to mobility would be useful in a game where taking as little damage as possible is paramount. You would be wrong. Movement Speed bonus confers practically no benefit and can make platforming sections trickier.
  • Crit Power. An interesting case, as Crit Power can actually be quite useful on a few classes, but it's mechanically better to just take Power Vs. or Attack Speed instead in most cases. Besides, regular crits quite often kill most enemies in one hit anyway. The exception is classes that have high crit damage and ways to guarantee crits for consistent damage, like Bounty Hunter and Shade.
• Warframe
  • Ability modifiers — Duration, Efficiency, Range, and Strength — increase or decrease based on which mods a frame has equipped and can drastically impact the effectiveness or tweak individual traits of every ability in the game. Exceptionally powerful Corrupted Mods can allow one modifier to be dramatically improved at the expense of taking a significant penalty to another, which is sometimes counterproductive but becomes incredibly beneficial to specific frames that either don't care about certain modifier penalties or in rare cases actually benefit from having these stats reduced. Examples of frames that typically use these modifiers as dump stats are described below:
    • Duration controls both how long effects last and how quickly toggled abilities drain energy, so very few Warframes want to lower it much. A notable exception is Trinity, whose Energy Vampire skill creates four energy-restoring pulses which are generated in intervals evenly divided over the length of the ability. Clever players quickly figured out that Trinity could generate these energy pulses incredibly quickly by lowering her Duration (and thus the length of the ability) as much as possible. This minimum Duration build continues to be one of the most popular setups for Trinity to this day. That said, all remaining pulses get released immediately if the targeted enemy is killed, so unless the mission at hand discourages killing enemies, a high-duration build generally works better, as it lets Trinity take advantage of Link and Blessing as well.
    • On paper, Efficiency sounds like it should be the opposite trope: needing less energy to cast your powers is obviously good for any Warframe. However, forms of energy regeneration such as Energy Siphon, Arcane Energize, and Wellspring have become so commonplace that energy costs are rarely a factor for advanced players. As such, most damage-dealing Warframes think nothing of sacrificing Efficiency for a massive 99% extra Strength from Blind Rage. Special note goes to Trinity, who makes all energy costs a moot point with Energy Vampire. Additionally, higher energy costs mean you get more shield per cast when using the Brief Respite or Augur mods.
    • Range is a natural dump stat on frames that simply want to buff themselves rather than teammates and primarily use weapons instead of abilities to dish out damage at a distance. Chroma and to a lesser extent Rhino tend to be very popular candidates, as they can buff their durability and weapon damage to extreme levels and proceed to clean house with whatever primary weapon they have equipped. Strangely, Mesa builds also tend to use Range as a dump stat as for some reason the only effect it has on her Peacemaker ability (which her entire kit is based around) is the size of the targeting reticule, and does not impact the distance at which her Regulator pistols can hit enemies.
    • Strength as a dump stat is a popular choice on crowd control frames such as Loki or Limbo who are primarily interested in crippling or disabling enemies and don't really care about the damage output of any of their abilities. Another notorious example is Nova, whose Molecular Prime ability normally slows down the fire rate and movement of enemies by an amount proportional to Ability Strength but instead speeds enemies up when her Strength is dropped below 100%. This is actually considered extremely useful by many Nova players since it lets you bring in more enemies to kill in a shorter period of time. In another counterintuitive example, Equinox players building for Maim also generally sacrifice Strength for Range, since Strength only affects the damage of the bleed effect, while the final burst of damage from deactivating the ability is controlled by enemy health and a fixed conversion rate instead.
  • For durability, Shields was previously treated as a Dump Stat. This is because of the shield-gating mechanic, which grants a second of Mercy Invincibility when your shields break. In previous versions of the game, you had to fully recharge your shields to get the full shield-gate; otherwise, you'd get only a fraction of the duration. Players would exploit this by keeping their shields as low as possible (such as by equipping the Decaying Dragon Key, which halves your shield capacity and is supposed to be used to unlock Dragon Vaults) and using the Augur mod Set Bonus and/or Brief Respite aura to convert their spent energy into shields, which combined with low Efficiency can mean instantly refilling your shields with a single cast, allowing you to remain perpetually invincible as long as your energy lasts. Such a playstyle was necessary for Challenge Gamers who want to run very long missions where enemies reach the level cap, making them able to inflict a One-Hit Kill to anyone who isn't literally invincible to damage. This was eventually nerfed by making your shield-gate duration be based on how many shields you have and how much they refilled before breaking, but a mod was added alongside it that lowers your shields but gives you a fixed shield-gate duration so this playstyle is still possible.
• This War of Mine has combat ability, backpack size, movement speed, and empathy as primary character stats. Needless to say, empathy is often seen as the Dump Stat, since it doesn't take much to improve survivors' morale, or it's more prudent to steal with a lower empathy stat. While these individual stats cannot be modified, it does set a number of characters focused on the One Stat to Rule Them All (such as Marko and Roman) to be at the top of the tier list while the only one survivor with a high empathy stat, Boris, being immensely useful (while Zlata is average and Cveta is a Low-Tier Letdown).
• To this day, no one has figured out what Combat Shooting does in the PC port of Wasteland. It's one of the most attractive point sinks to first-time players, and yet it might well be good for absolutely nothing. (On other platforms, it simply doesn't exist.) During the production of Wasteland 2, Brian Fargo affirmed that it indeed did nothing. In reference to this, Wasteland 2 has Combat Shooting as a secret, ridiculously powerful skill teachable to one player that makes every attack a Critical Hit.
• Luck in Wasteland 2 affects Chance to Evade, Critical Chance, chance of an extra AP point each turn, and chance of getting extra Constitution at level up (it does not affect item drops). The extra AP point chance is unlikely even with max Luck and pathetically negligible even if you get it. The other affects are useful, but Luck's effect on them are far too minor compared to Skills and other attributes: Chance to Evade is increased twice as much by Awareness, which would be the One Stat to Rule Them All even without that. How much weapon skill increases crit chance varies by weapon, but on average each level increases it as much as four points of Luck (where 3 is considered average and 10 is the max). Only the Constitution bonus comes close to matching Strength's potency, and even that's only after level 16.
• The World Ends with You:
  • HP. Not because it isn't useful, but because the only thing that has much effect on it is your effective level. Equipment can have a huge effect on your other stats, but will never do much, positive or negative, to HP, even if the item is dedicated to it. The gains from food are so minimal that it's only really worth bothering if the character has maxed everything else.
  • Drop rate can be raised by eating certain foods, but if you plan to time attack bosses, you never, ever want to increase it. Battles only officially end once all enemies are defeated and drops finish spiraling around your characters and get collected, and keeping drop rate unbuffed and your level at 100 (higher level = lower drop rate, with level 100 having a base drop rate of zero) ensures that you don't have to waste several seconds because the boss dropped an item on defeat.
• There are quite a few stats in World of Tanks, and often the differentiating factor for nations and vehicle lines is what stat they dumped to favor their preferred tactic. For instance, higher-tier French vehicles tend to dump armor and ammo capacity in exchange for speed and burst damage, while many iconic German vehicles tend to dump agility and alpha damage in favor of accuracy and damage per minute.
  • On reaching 100% in their primary qualification, tank crews can train new skills and perks. The skills start taking effect as they start training, while perks only come into effect at 100%. Three skills — Repairs, Firefighting and Concealment — and one perk — Brothers in Arms (Sisterhood of Steel for female crews) — are shared and the rest are specific to the position. Some are pretty useless for certain vehicles, require too many specific circumstances to be of any use, or have little effect to begin with.
• World of Warcraft has been through a lot of this.
  • Initially, the game had 5 core stats: Strength, Agility, Intellect, Stamina, and Spirit. Would you believe Intellect was the dump stat for pure spellcasters, of all things? The reason was that Intellect only expanded the mana pool and increased critical strike chance by a minuscule amount, and the secondary stat spell power (which in and of itself was separated into damage/healing and healing only) had a much greater impact on the oomph of spells. The game did nothing to indicate this to the player as dynamic tooltips were a while off.
    • Intellect would remain in the dumps until finally fixed in Cataclysm (the third expansion) to give a 1-to-1 increase to spell power.
  • Also, the "tier sets" (armor sets specific to a class) had a not-insignificant amount of their "stat budget" (the number of points allocable to the item's stats, based on the item's internal level) devoted to magic resistance stats, which all put together was a piffling amount at worst and basically held down the effectiveness of those sets. To be straight, the sets dump-statted themselves. In addition, some classes (notably mage) had lousy enough set bonuses for wearing a certain number of pieces that it was just as effective to just wear the highest spell power piece of gear available in each slot. This finally went away for the tier sets for the Naxxramas raid, but that area was such a ball-buster that few ever collected them when it was current.
    • Eventually, magic resistance stats were purged out of the game altogether, though they still exist on legacy gear.
  • Certain secondary stats such as Hit and Expertise were essentially dump stats if you went over whatever made it impossible to miss / impossible to be dodged/parried because they did nothing past those numbers. To partially solve this problem, it became possible in Cataclysm to reallocate part of a secondary stat on gear into a more desirable secondary, but it eventually got out of control by the end of the next expansion to the point where it was done away with altogether in Warlords of Draenor by removing stats such as hit and expertise altogether from the game and just making it so that you couldn't miss unless 1) you were fighting something more than 3 levels above you 2) you were affected by a temporary malus that dropped your chance to hit 3) you were dual-wielding (and even then only your automatic attacks could miss; special attacks, pursuant to the previous two rules, could not).
  • However, Warlords itself introduced a highly reviled secondary stat into the game: Versatility. Its effect is simple: each point increases damage and healing by a flat percentage and also reduces damage taken by half that. The main reason it is hated is fourfold: 1) there is no visceral impact to the stat (Critical Strike makes you hit harder more often, Haste makes your actions quicker, and Mastery mostly has a definite impact depending on one's class and specialization); 2) it often requires more of it than other stats to have the same impact, given scalars; 3) due to that damage reduction effects are multiplicative to each other in WoW and not additive, and due to 2, the impact of its damage reduction effect is very small; and 4) another secondary stat was introduced in the same expansion (Multistrike, which gave a % chance for any attack to immediately fire off up to two more time at 30% effectiveness, with corresponding visuals) that was far more impactful. Though Blizzard eventually decided that Multistrike was infringing into the elemental shaman Mastery (which was basically Multistrike already but on an order of magnitude higher) and removed it from the game with Legion, replacing all instances of Multistrike everywhere with... Versatility.
  • Also, due to the nuances in mechanics between classes and specializations, and the extremely dedicated math-optimizing community that plays the game, at least one stat per class and specialization is considered undesirable. A lot of the time, this is Versatility. Many tier sets from this era had just enough Versatility sprinkled around them that if even if you were fully optimized, you inevitably were going to have to have a tiny amount of it. However Battle for Azeroth is doing away with tier sets going forward, so the game may be entering an era of perfect optimization to where any gear with the dump stat on it would be considered unusable garbage. Whether this will end up being so remains to be seen.
    • Leech is considered only somewhat less useless than Versatility for a couple reasons. It heals players by a given percentage of damage they do but this number is very small, and the stat itself suffers from diminishing returns. Tanks don't deal enough damage to get any noticeable returns from the stat, damage-dealers shouldn't be taking more than incidental damage if they play well, and healers can simply heal themselves anyway. Furthermore, most classes already have a method to heal themselves. However, this is ultimately subverted because Leech does not occur naturally on gear (with the exception of 3-4 unique items throughout the entire game); it only occasionally pops up as a bonus stat.
• In World of Warships, the way a player allocates skill points to a captain usually depends on what nation that captain belongs to. For example, allocating points to gun-based skills is considered a waste for most Japanese destroyers as their guns are mediocre to horrible and their primary attack is the stealth torpedo launch. On the other hand, American and Russian destroyers tend to be gunboats first and foremost while their torpedoes are mediocre and very much a secondary weapon, so skills in gunnery are preferred to those involving torpedoes.
• Xenogears gives each character a Weight stat that can be adjusted via consuming certain types of foodstuffs available throughout the game. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that it would affect your other stats, perhaps boosting your strength or defense at the expense of speed, but Weight actually has no effect on anything; whatever purpose it was supposed to have was either not implemented at all or Dummied Out.

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