Game Breaker / Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

• Like in the previous game, attack speed bonuses are useful for just about every warrior, especially the ones with slow basic attacks. Even a +8% bonus can give a noticeable improvement.
• Dodge Cancelling breaks the game wide open when used by certain characters (e.g. Impa). Many attacks or moves, such as the Stasis Rune, will lock certain characters into animations, but dodging will usually break characters out of that animation allowing them to initiate normal combos rather than be locked into the typically slower animation or attack string, which will allow them to rack up more damage than is typically available through the default animation and deplete or expose enemy weak points.
• Just like the first Hyrule Warriors, Link's Sword and Shield moveset is incredibly powerful and has a finisher for every situation, especially once you get a hold of the Master Sword (which happens a lot earlier than it did in the first game). Dump some time into upgrading the Master Sword afterwards and it will likely be the strongest weapon you get until you're nearing the highest levels and getting a hold of an upgrading savage Lynel weapons. Also worth noting is that like in Breath of the Wild, the Master Sword gets its sacred glow when confronting Malice-corrupted enemies, which means its already excellent damage has a spiked increase once you get into the latter half of the game when the Calamity has begun. Also worth mentioning with Link's Sword and Board movesets is his unique action, which has him draw his bow and fire off a flurry of aimed arrows; if you headshot most enemies with this, it exposes their weak point gauge instantly - just for a brief period of time, but if you follow it up with the Stasis rune mentioned just below to expand on that time, it can stunlock even Malice Lynels to back to back weak point smashes without letting them fight back.
• The Stasis Rune in general. Even if a character has a variation of it that puts them into a canned attack animation, nearly every single one of them can Dodge Cancel out of it and take full advantage of the Time Stands Still effect with their usual combos. If you freeze an enemy with an already exposed Weak Point Gauge, you usually have enough time to go totally ham on them with one of your most damaging combos, allowing you to destroy the gauge in one cycle with enough practice and the right moves. Revali happens to be an excellent example, as if you time the Dodge Cancel right after he fires his Rain of Arrows you get both that attack and the opportunity to set up his aerial Strong Attack 5, which together are often enough to nearly completely destroy a Weak Point Gauge.
  • Impa’s Stasis lasts the longest, can freeze huge crowds of enemies, and every slash of her kodachi hits every single one of them. Link is the only character that can throw multiple Remote Bombs. Combine those and you can almost one-shot anything short of a Lynel or Guardian.
• Early impressions have Impa as one of the best characters in the game, as the clones made from her Symbols ability also her to tear through armies incredibly well even by Warriors standards, as you can have up to six clones at once that each have the same damage output that you do. The only thing holding her back is the limited time that the clones stay active and how much effort it takes to summon them... until you realize she can absorb multiple seals at once with her strong attacks, and even her special can be used to immediately absorb all seals available, allowing you to quickly refresh your clones after they expire. In fact, if her seals are about to run out, you can still use her Special for a stronger attack that consumes them, but then restores one back. Even if you're only up against a single enemy, you can use seals on that enemy one after another in order to get your numbers back up.
• Teba is easily one of the best playable characters in the game obtained through story mode once you get used to his fast, aerial play style. His attacks can sweep through enemy groups with ease while being fast, and he is completely mobile throughout the duration. Usually his archetype is the "good with mobs, bad at single fights", but the latter is solved with his Stasis rune and unique action. He can aim the stasis rune at a distance and on multiple enemies while having an absurdly long timer. At that point he can repeatedly spam his YX move (for a single enemy) or YYX move (for a swathe of enemies), and as his moves encourage Spam Attack, he has practically delivered enough damage to whittle the enemy for a Weak Point Smash. And then there's a fact that his Unique Action, a chargeable arrow shot, can be indefinitely held during a combo string and be unleashed at any point in it, giving him a thorough offensive set without glaring weaknesses. His attacks also mostly put him airborne without a start-up animation like Revali, giving him a massive advantage with Midair seal and being generally harder to be hit by enemies.
• Yunobo can force weakness gauge to appear at enemies at will by using his Unique Action and powering up. By combining it with Stasis rune, he can practically invoke Weakpoint Smashes without the need for waiting the enemy to attack or to expose a rune counterattack. He can practically stunlock boss fights through this method. In addition, his Barrier Enhanced YYYYX (the fist move) comes with its own Good Bad Bug where, if you press ZR to cancel it right before you land then it will, for some unexplained reason, do MASSIVE amounts of extra damage, and can obliterate even the final bosses weakpoint in one attack, while taking out a large chunk of HP at the same time. His Barrier Enhanced YYYYYX is also capable of taking out WPGs in just one attack with the right weapon, and doesn't rely on any bugs, although it is weaker than his glitched YYYYX in general.
• Calamity Ganon's Magnesis attack may be the most broken of them all: it summons three metal pillars that not only attract metallic objects, but also causes a localized explosion of electricity that shocks enemies, stunning strong monsters and inflicting a hefty amount of health and weak point gauge damage to anything that's not resistant to lightning. Not only are you invincible for the entire duration of the move, you can also use this rune regardless of whether or not a metallic object is nearby. Combined with the rune upgrades that shorten the recharge period, you can stunlock and break weak point gauges of any enemy that's not lightning-infused with ease.
• Master Kohga's Tantrum mechanic may seem difficult to manage, until you learn about why he is in this list. Tantrum-Cancelling! Simply hitting his special action button between the tantrum break and the tantrum itself, a 2 second window, allows him to immediately go into his beam attack, in which he is invincible and will expose and melt a bosses weakpoint guage in record time.
• The Battle-Tested Guardian is capable of melting crowds and bosses alike with its lasers once it has used its ZR move to lock on (and the lock lasts until the target is changed or killed) and have all of its strong attacks focus on them, and all from a safe enough distance that its large hitbox and slow attack speed are almost negligible weaknesses, giving it enough time to react to even Lynels' attacks. This includes its basic strong attack (the standard Guardian eye laser), which it doesn't need to manually aim when locked-on and can spam to its heart's content.
• Sooga is an amazingly broken character with his Unseeing Counter Stance. It is effectively a counter move that can be initiated even in the middle of an attack, and when the counter is triggered, it staggers the target and reveals their weak-point gauge. It can be used on anyone at any time when an attack is being launched, and the window for the attack is decently large, allowing for a lot of leeway on when the counter can be triggered. It functions a lot like Daruk's EX ability where you counter with his shield the moment an attack lands, except significantly better as it allows you to immediately move into your regular attacks. Additonally, as long as Sooga isn't knocked down or misses a counter, the counters get progressively stronger and power up his basic attacks. Practically nothing can touch him in this situation.
• Mipha is one of the strongest characters in the game with amazing combos that allow the player to damage multitudes of enemies and weaken the bigger enemies’ shields. Her ability to sprout waterfalls also allows her to attack in the air and damage bosses’ heads to weaken their weak point shields. But what sets her even more apart is her special attack which not only heals her but also heals other characters and even allies like the captains. She’s the best character to use in missions that involve rescuing captains because not only is she extremely powerful but she can heal their damage and thus save a potential failure. Her healing special attack also makes her an excellent choice in sub-missions involving no healing items. Truly, she is peerless at her craft.
• While King Rhoam doesn't get anything that blows open weak-point gauges, he doesn't really need it; his unique ability of switching his outfits and weapons at the end of attack chains are some of the highest damage attacks in the game bar none and offer excellent coverage, and his base-game upgrade to his unique action gives him even more damage for a short time after using a swap-finisher. And then DLC 2 added the second EX upgrades, and Rhoam's is the ability to use every enhanced swap-combo finisher in a row without needing to restart combo chains, meaning all of those super buffed, high damage, large-area attacks are shooting out one after the other - get even a half decent weapon with these upgrades and you won't even need the weak point gauges exposed to tear through everything in your way.
• While Daruk cannot use the stasis rune as well as other characters, he can force enemy gauges to appear on some of his attacks for a brief moment. Daruk's Remote Bomb is a large bomb that explodes and launches out smaller bombs. Couple these two attacks together, and Daruk can repeatedly kill enemy boss targets extremely quickly by striking them with the bomb rune and knocking out the entirety of the weakness gauge within a second, especially if the target is slow.