Game Breaker / Bravely Default II

• Triffids are one of the most devastating captures in the game, only helped by the fact they are found in abundance at the very beginning of Chapter 3: they're practically built to be anti-boss with their Tempest attack which fires off seven or eight hits on random targets, and if an enemy is the only one on the field when Tempest goes off, every single one of those hits will land square on that enemy's face. These aren't light hits either: they often average five to six hundred damage unmodified; splatter a bit of defense-lowering paint with the Pictomancer, Brave, and then let four Triffids off the leash and...
• Sub-Job BP Saver, obtained from leveling Pictomancer to level 9, reduces the BP cost of sub job abilities by 1. This makes some abilities from sub jobs absurdly powerful. The Vanguard's Gift of Courage becomes a free and spammable way to give party members extra BP, the Monk's Pressure Point becomes a free and spammable attack that pierces both Defense and Default, and the Spiritmaster's Devotion becomes a free way to restore good amounts of MP.
• Godspeed Strike returns as the Thief's most powerful attack in its arsenal, dealing massive damage based on its very high Speed stat, but this game somehow makes it even stronger by also adding in additional damage that procs after the initial attack if the enemy somehow survived the first attack.
• After being relegated to the background in Bravely Second, Poison is back to its former glory from the first game. And this time, with the addition of an aggro mechanic, many, many bosses can just be patiently stalled by your Vanguard or Shieldmaster as the poison tears them apart. In a series where you often have to selectively time when to go all-in with attacks, a simple use of Poison and a tank goes a long way towards ensuring victory. It borders on Disc-One Nuke, too, given all of the Chapter 1 bosses are both susceptible to it and will never counter its use, allowing the player to obviate the tedious process of figuring out what actions draw out bothersome counterattacks. For extra reliability, combine with the Red Mage's second specialty noted further down to make damn sure the poison sticks as early as round one, then have fun going all out with the massive damage Chainspell and Poison gets you.
• On Ice, obtained by capturing Cait Siths with a Beastmaster, might qualify, at least until it isn't able to hit enemies as consistently later on. It's the only ability in the game that can inflict Freeze (aside from the Red Mage's second specialty, and even then, it must be combined with a Black Mage to cast water spells). Take the useful aspects of using Poison on bosses to damage them, then make it so they also can't take any actions. While the freeze status does wear off, unlike poison, you can use the turns that the enemy missed to build up BP, buff, and otherwise prepare for when they finally thaw and start attacking. Or just freeze them again.
• Counter-Savvy, gained from the Ranger class, does its job too well. Anyone with Counter-Savvy will evade any counter-attack aimed at them unless the source is specifically a spell. Spell-like abilities won't cut it — the counter must be a spell to hit someone with Counter-Savvy. Counters are something of a contentious point in this game, mostly because of how a lot of boss fights are dependent on them to be threats. Since the majority of bosses aren't spellcasters, having Counter-Savvy cuts their challenge in half; in the case of Adam, it actually makes the boss die faster, since Adam's go-to counter is a Diabolism ability, which will deal massive damage to him.
• Elemental Supplement, an unassuming ability the Oracle gets, is disgustingly overpowered. The intended use is to give an ally an elemental affinity so their physical attacks can hit enemy vulnerabilities. You can absolutely do that...or you can set it on an enemy. Elemental Supplement is considered a buff, and buffs always stick when used on enemies, even without Phantom's Results Guaranteed. There are a ton of armor sets, shields, and hats, not to mention dedicated accessories, that passively give the wearer elemental resistances. So, if you give your allies each two lightning talismans, use Elemental Supplement on an enemy, and give them lightning attacks, the enemy will do nothing to you, no matter the physical attack. How this breaks boss fights can't be stressed enough — even if an attack has multiple elements, like Shroud being darkness and whatever element you gave Marla, the fact it is even partially an element you resist means all the damage is canceled. With a little creativity, this broken technique can get even more powerful — such as having a Vanguard Enrage targets to focus their ire on them, thus freeing up how much you need to give other allies elemental resistances, or buffing the resistance even further so the enemy heals you. Elemental shields that nullify all damage are also purchasable in shops after a certain point, so you don't even have to up your own resistances once you buy them. The only limiting factor is that the buff only lasts two turns, but if you just have someone with either an Oracle job or sub-job focusing on giving out Elemental Supplement like candy, this is barely a limit at all.
• One of the best moves in the game is none other than the humble Body Slam from the Freelancer, meaning that you can get it immediately with grinding if you're so inclined. What does it do? It does quite a bit of damage based on your current equipment but more importantly, decreases the enemy's ATB gauge, all for the cost of 1 BP. In a game that runs on the Combatant Cooldown System, being able to decrease the enemy's gauge means you can Stun Lock them permanently as long as everyone continuously tackles over and over again, making this move hideously overpowered. You can make it even more powerful by making the Freelancer your sub-job and then using the Pictomancer's Sub-Job BP Saver passive ability to make this move free of cost, assign the Ranger's Counter-Savvy and Phantom's Turn Table abilities to reduce the chance of counter reprisals while getting extra BP for more body slams, and making your main class something fast like the Thief to make sure you can start body slamming as quick and often as possible. Who cares about how much damage you deal per hit or how many BP the enemy gets from Counter Any Ability or similar variations if they never have a chance to act? Honestly, you should be more worried about the party's shoulders after tackling so many times without rest.
• Some of the Jobs' second specialties obtained by leveling them to 12 are absurdly powerful, which makes them worth using even late in the game.
  • The Freelancer's Late Bloomer, previously considered a Power Up Letdown in the previous games, receives a significant buff in this game. Instead of a 1% increase to all stats per job mastered, it instead grants a flat boost to stats per job mastered (They are: +100 HP, +10 MP, +15 Strength/Magic/Defense/Magic Defense, +4 Healing, +3 Aim, +2 Speed/Evasion, and +1 Critical), which adds up very significantly as you master more jobs.
  • The Black Mage's High-Velocity Spells, which makes their spells able to outright ignore any elemental immunities or absorptions the enemy has.
  • The Vanguard's Attention Seeker. The higher your aggro stat, the higher your critical chance and physical attack power. It's not a 1-to-1 bonus. You can easily see your physical attack jump into the 900s by Chapter 6 once you start getting equipment that really starts boosting your chance to be targeted. This isn't very powerful with the Vanguard's skillset alone, but it can be combined with pretty much any class with a multi-hit attack to do obscene amounts of damage. Pairing it with Swordmaster, for example, means your Ninefold Flurry is suddenly doing 5,000-8,000 damage per hit. A fully realized Vanguard with Swordmaster supporting it can even outdo the Phantom / Thief in terms of max damage due to the sheer number of hits. Unless the enemy being fought has a dedicated means of countering physical blows, most fights will end in seconds.
  • The White Mage's Holistic Medicine doesn't sound like much on paper — its description is written oddly in saying that "all healing magic affects all allies", which does nothing to alleviate the dispersion typically issued full-party magic. What it actually means is that any spell you can cast with a healing effect can be cast on all allies, whether or not it could do so otherwise. This allows you to raise your entire team from unconsciousness or treat everyone's afflictions all at once... with the White Mage itself. With a Red Mage subjob, you can cast the Heal series of spells on the entire team with no power deprecation, while with a Spiritmaster subjob you can cast Regen and Reraise to everyone in one go, and supplant it with a spirit of your choice to boot. Suddenly, White Mage just became a lot more powerful...
  • The Beastmaster's Creature Comforts, which boosts all stats based on how many monsters you've captured. With enough time and patience, the Beastmaster can potentially beat out the Freelancer's Late Bloomer in terms of stat boosts.
  • The Red Mage's Chainspell, which makes all spells be cast twice in a row, doubling the Red Mage's overall damage output.
  • The Ranger's Apex Predator, which greatly boosts the potency of their Slayer skills, and grants them 1 BP whenever they score a critical hit or a kill. Given the Ranger's naturally high critical rate, it's easy to get extra BP.
  • The Shieldmaster's Chivalrous Spirit, which restores their MP and grants them 1 BP whenever they cover for an ally, nearly eliminating the need to press the Default button.
  • The Swordmaster's Double Duty, allows the user to use their sub-job's two specialties if two of the same weapon is equipped. This makes the Swordmaster an absolute monster if using certain specialties like the ones listed on this page. Like for example using the Freelancer's Late Bloomer or Beastmaster's Creature Comforts to greatly boost the Swordmaster's stats so that they'll be doing insane damage from abilities and counters.
  • The Phantom's Results Guaranteed, which ensures that any ability that has a chance to activate will always do so, at the expense of 40 MP. This means that, for instance, Strong Strike will always hit, Revenge will always give you 1 BP upon taking damage, Capture will always work on a monster no matter what its health is, and status effects will always land on any enemy that isn't outright immune to them. If you really want to break things, give the Phantom the Salve-Maker as a sub-job and equip the Sub-Job Specialty 1 passive from the Spiritmaster. Now the Salve-Maker's Master Medic specialty will always trigger, ensuring that every item that that character uses will never be consumed as long as they have at least 40 MP, which includes results from Compounding, and the status effect bombs will always inflict that status against enemies that can be affected by it (which also pairs disgustingly well with Rewarding Results, the Phantom's level 10 passive, which grants them extra actions for inflicting status effects). The one downside is doing that costs a lot of MP, especially against large enemy groups, but the Salve-Maker can also compound Elixirs and high-tier Ethers, which also will never be used up.
• The Bravebearer job, obtained in Chapter 6 by defeating Sir Sloan's ghost, is the ultimate job, boasting fantastically high stats overall, and access to very powerful abilities that can make short work of enemies, with a special mention to Victory Smite, Victory Double, and Best Practice, which deal massive damage based on how many battles you've won, and how long you've played the game, which pretty much guarantees that you'll hit incredibly hard. It also gains a passive that lets you use your sub-job's second specialty. Combine that with the Freelancer's Late Bloomer or Beastmaster's Creature Comforts, and you have yourself a god. And if you thought those attacks were powerful, the real piece de resistance for said job is the passive skill "Across The Board". It allows any single target move to become multi-target. Thief's insanely OP "Godspeed Strike"? How about you take that and do 200K combined damage to all enemies on the field for each BP you spend. What's more, you can get a weapon that gives you ALL of this job's passives at all times! Broken doesn't begin to describe it.
• The 22 job weapons you can possibly get from beating the Asterisk Holders in the trials. They're the most powerful weapons in the game you can get and they each have the effect of giving you the job passives of the respective job class the weapons belong to. And several jobs have very powerful passive abilities. The best part is that several passive abilities you can equip from the weapon can STACK with the passives you can equip manually. And you can farm multiple copies from the bosses as well. Some notable weapons:
  • Roddy's Red Moon. It gives revenge, which has a chance of giving you BP upon being hit, Magic Critical, and HP/MP Converter which allows you to use skills that require MP to use HP instead.
  • Anihal's Ringmaster Spear. Anyone equipping this weapon will always go first because of the Beastmaster's Spearhead. There's also Raw Power and Brute Force which increases your physical power based on the number of times you braved in one turn, and as mentioned above, stack with the same passives you can equip. MP Saver and Beast Whisperer are also stackable.
  • Bernard's Givampalui allows the stacking of Thief passives including Mug, Magpie and Rob Blind, allowing more steal attempts, a better chance of rare items and more items when a successful steal is pulled off. For best results, a Phantom equipped with 2 them and Mug and Rob Blind as passive abilities can use Results Guaranteed to make 3 mug attempts with every attack, potentially netting 4-12 items because of the way these abilities stack. Equip 2 Thieves Gloves for a better steal chance, and add the Berserker passive Indiscriminate Rage so you can mug all enemies at once. Then find an area where the enemies have stealable Booster Buns ^note the volcano dungeon near Holograd is a good choice, having enemies that drop booster buns for speed, evasion and HP... speed and evasion being 2 of the hardest stats to max with Beastmaster's Creature Comforts and turn it into your own personal Peninsula of Power Leveling.
• Freelancer's level 15 skill Mimic, which you get immediately upon starting Chapter 6. It has no innate cost and repeats the last basic attack or active ability action that any ally, including the user, used that battle also for free on the same target(s) (if applicable). After the first use of an ability and then using Mimic, anybody can, for example, repeat -aga spells to nuke a single enemy or the enemy party, keep an enemy from ever acting by repeatedly using BP Depleter on them (or helping a particular ally get a lot more actions with BP Tonic), leave the party mostly out of battle and striking enemies every so often with Soul Jump, or pile the pain on single targets with expensive skills like Pressure Point, Godspeed Strike, or Freelancer's own Body Slam — all for free.
• The Hellblade's level 13 skill Ultima Blade, with a little Elite Tweak. This move expends all of your MP to deal damage proportional to the MP spent. With the Red Mage's HP/MP Converter, you can switch this to spending your HP to deal ten times the typical damage; with the Bravebearer's Across the Board you can hit the entire enemy party; with the Hellblade's Surpassing Power you can jack the damage cap up to 99,999; with the Berserker's Bloody-Minded you can guarantee it always connects; with the Salve-Maker's Advanced Compounding you can cheaply craft Elixirs to heal yourself up and do it all over again. The result is a combo that can deal 199,998 damage to everyone on the opposing field in a single salvo, enough to bring an immediate end to nearly any fight in the game; only a few high level Superbosses (Helio with his Reraise, Lonsdale with his Reflect Physical Damage, and Gwydion with his Reflect Physical Damage and 500,000 HP) can survive.
• B'n'D has its own Minigame Breaker in Martha, which you can grab as early as Rimedhal. Once you've placed her down on the field and as long as her tile isn't broken, she will automatically grab one extra tile after every time the opponent plays a card, which can potentially net you more than one if it happens to flank an opponent's tile or give you the right position to flank them with your next move. Add to that it having shades of an A.I. Breaker (Opponents won't prioritize breaking Martha's tile, while the player can just counter an opponent's Martha as soon as they play it) and it becomes an easy way to win against any opponent except those packing cards that specifically counter Character cards or can randomly remove her.