Scrappy Weapon / Role-Playing Game

Scrappy Weapons in Role-Playing Games.

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• Mount & Blade
  • Practice Bows in if the player character is not built as an archer. You are doomed in any arena/tournament fight if you spawn with one and you aren't lucky enough to get a new weapon really quick as you can't fight at all in melee with one. Fixed in Warband, you will also start with a practice knife if you spawn if a bow. While it can't block, it can at least fight back and if you are strong enough disrupt attacks.
  • Swords with thrusting attacks for mounted combat — they have neither the range to easily connect like pole arms, nor the simple reliability of slashing attacks.
  • In the Gekokujo mod, naginatas, and especially the practice naginata in tournaments — they're not particularly long (in fact, the practice naginata is no longer than the practice nodachi or kanabo) and slower than the alternatives, and which weapon you get in tournaments is random.
  • At a unit-wide level in Gekokujo, bow-using Ashigaru skirmishers. Even for regions that have them as their Elites, Ashigaru simply don't get enough levels in Power Draw to really be effective with bows like Samurai become, especially when Ashigaru skirmishers from a handful of regions, such as Owari, use flintlock, which are always devastating.
• Fallout has the Mauser pistol (also present in the second game), a one-of-a-kind weapon in Fallout and one of the rarest guns in the sequel. It's also the only weapon in both games to use 9mm ammunition, which is so rare its primary source is a glitch^note The P90c uses 10mm ammo but comes loaded with 9mm when bought new and so must be carefully managed if one intends to use it. Obviously, the Mauser must be one of the most powerful small guns, right? Wrong: short of the completely-useless-after-the-first-five-minutes pipe rifle, it's the weakest — even the lowly 10mm pistol does more damage. Its only redeeming factor is a special very high bonus to accuracy, but by the time you can get it, your own leveling and the presence of various precision rifles make this trait pointless. One wonders why the devs even bothered putting it, and its very own ammo type, in the game at all.
• Fallout 2 has the Pipe Rifle, which is a terrible weapon even by early game standards. It does lackluster damage, costs 5 AP per shot, and must be reloaded after every shot, which basically means you can only shoot once per round^note You can shoot twice if you have 10 Agility, the Fast Shot trait and have the gun loaded at the start of the round, but you'll have to reload at the start of your next turn, meaning you can only get off 1.5 shots per round. The fact that this is your only means of ranged attack for the first few towns is one reason why the game suffers from Early Game Hell.
• Fallout 3
  • The game brings back the Mauser pistol, (or at least a Chinese knockoff of it, based on the real Shanxi Type 17), as the Chinese Pistol. It no longer suffers from having unique and unreasonably-rare ammo, now sharing with the 10mm pistol, but it has 2 fewer shots per magazine, is no faster or more accurate, does less than half the damage of its American counterpart, and does not have a silenced version. Its only saving graces are that it sells for a fair deal of cash (which combines well with its low weight and how common it is in the hands of Raiders in the early game), and that it has more than twice the durability of the regular 10mm. The latter is useless, as the low damage makes degradation versus damage dealt approximately equal to that of the 10mm, but with twice the ammo usage, so there's really no reason to keep even one on-hand unless you're going to sell it as soon as you get back to Megaton or find a wandering merchant. The unique variant is slightly more useful, as it is capable of setting enemies on fire in addition to the base damage and even better durability (approximately three times as much as the regular 10mm pistol). In spite of this, it's still probably one of the least powerful unique weapons out there (even weaker than many regular weapons; it only deals more damage than the regular Chinese pistol due to the fire damage) and is only good for supplementing another firearm or for lighting up occasional pockets of gas. Something a laser pistol can do as well as hit three times harder and not waste good 10mm ammo.
  • There's also the .32 Pistol, which does less damage than the starter 10mm pistol which you probably fled Vault 101 with hours prior, has an unusably small ammo capacity (5-shot cylinder) and uses ammo that, while plentiful, is much more useful when loaded into the far stronger and better-ranged Hunting Rifle. Wild Bill's Sidearm in The Pitt DLC is actually pretty decent, doing more damage than other common pistols at 10 points of damage (albeit only one more point of damage than the regular 10mm) and the only pistols that hit harder are energy pistols, the very rare and inexplicably flimsy scoped .44 Magnum, and Colonel Autumn's 10mm pistol.
  • The Big Guns branch as a whole gets this, since not only do a lot of them fall in the Awesome, but Impractical or flat-out useless pile, but it's a separate tree from the common guns that make up most of the game's arsenal, and it's very hard to find a Big Gun in reasonable condition. This means you don't really use things like rocket launchers outside of hairy moments, but you also have to invest a lot of effort to ensure you aren't better off with a shotgun in those moments. It's not for no reason that future games removed Big Guns as a skill and let its weapons be governed by the same bonuses as more practical ones.
  • The Sawed-off Shotgun breaks easily, only holds two shots, is unusually rare (making it hard to repair outside of merchants so it'll never be at 100% for long), doesn't do all that much damage, and has an effective range of about two feet. It's barely even worth carrying back to sell once you loot it off one of the few raiders in the game that carries it.
  • The Combat Shotgun is better at slightly further ranges, is common enough thanks to tripwire traps that it can actually be repaired in the field on occasion, and due to a bug, the total critical damage is applied when any sub-projectile gets a critical hit (through chance or a sneak attack) instead of the same value divided by the number of shots per discharge, resulting in obliterative sneak attack crits (when all the buckshot subprojectiles crit). The named variant called "The Terrible Shotgun" found in Evergreen Mills can kill the nearby Super Mutant Behemoth in a single sneak headshot.^{How does it all work?} If the shotgun is in perfect condition and with a Small Guns skill of 100, the weapon deals 80 damage with an extra 40 damage for critical hits. However, this weapon fires 9 pellets, so because of this when the weapon is fired outside of V.A.T.S. (something very important to note) and scores a critical hit, the critical hit for each pellet is counted individually. This means that if all pellets make contact, the weapon will deal 440 damage (80 base damage, plus 9 extra 40 critical damages). While sneaking, it doubles to 880 points of damage. In addition, if the player has the Better Criticals perk, the damage will increase to 1240 (880 + 440 extra points from the perk). If you manage to score a headshot (not an easy task due its high spread of 6), then that damage doubles again to 2480. That's 480 points more than the five super mutant behemoths' hit point count! You can kill a twenty foot tall mountain of mutant muscle in a single shot... if every pellet hits outside of V.A.T.S. However, this comes at the cost of similarly-terrible durability, and if you don't get critical hits then enemies will still just shrug off the buckshot like it was a passing breeze.
  • Grenades also feel like this most of the time. In theory they should be awesome, but in truth they are very a situational and hard to use weapon. First off, they usually don't deal a whole lot of damage to a single entity. Their charm is theoretically that they can hurt a lot of different people at once; however, in the game it is difficult to find situations where people are huddled together within a grenade's effective radius and will stay that way until it detonates — and usually when they are, it's also within a group of other explosive objects like the abandoned nuclear-powered cars that either would do just as much damage to the enemy with a couple much cheaper bullets, or will cause a chain-reaction that kills the player as well. Most frustratingly, however, is that VATS isn't designed to use them, and even if it does manage to lob a grenade right at an enemy's feet, they will usually run away before it explodes. This is made worse by the fact that manually aiming with them in combat is difficult and takes some practice, which will cost you expensive grenades. They're fortunately common enough that you can just sell them to make some quick and easy cash, but even on that front they fall short of similar weapons: land mines do just as much damage, can easily be thrown in the path of approaching enemies (who will fail to react to seeing you place it in their path, unlike with grenades), and are so common as part of pre-placed traps that you can sell them for a better chunk of caps than grenades and still have plenty left over to actually kill things with. Alternatively, bottlecap mines deal five times the damage and are insanely cheap to make versus their assembled value (ten caps plus a few other odds and ends found basically everywhere to make something that sells for a base of 75), especially with multiple copies of its blueprints allowing you to make two or three mines for the same amount of components.
• Fallout: New Vegas also has a few.
  • First of all, there is the .357 Magnum Revolver, which is essentially an only-slightly-improved version of the .32 pistol. It does rather low damage, being the weakest revolver in the game, it's single action (especially troubling if you took the Trigger Discipline perk, which increases accuracy at the cost of fire rate for every weapon), uses the same ammo as the infinitely more useful Cowboy Repeater rifle, and unlike every other revolver it can't use a speed loader, forcing you to load all six shots painfully slowly. Its strength is meant to be its higher damage per shot, which lets it punch through higher damage threshold than the 9mm - or it would, if any moderately armoured enemies existed at the stage of the game where using one at all was a good idea. Even with the "Cowboy" perk, there's no point to using it over the normal 9mm Pistol, which has the same DPS and doesn't use valuable rifle ammunition. Averted with its unique variant, Lucky, which is far more useful than its normal variant, with the former's higher DPS and Critical Chance.
  • The Single and Caravan Shotguns fire the low damage 20 gauge rounds, and suffer from the usual weakness… and can only fire one or two shots respectively before reloading. To make things worse, the damage is divided between a large number of low-damage projectiles, each of which have their damage reduced by the target's damage threshold. Fortunately, the Shotgun Surgeon perk helps with the damage threshold problem, and much better 12-gauge shotguns that can be modified and take a wider array of ammo types make an appearance in short order.
  • The Sturdy Caravan Shotgun from the Courier's Stash DLC has its own set of problems. It deals slightly better damage than the regular version, is much more durable, and doesn't have the same Guns skill requirement to use effectively… but, due to shoddy programming, it is not affected by either of the shotgun-centric perks and doesn't count for shotgun-focused challenges. Both versions of the caravan shotgun are also hard to use with slug rounds due to the strange decision to use the raised screw from the release lever as a rear sight rather than screwing it in properly and using an actual sight that doesn't completely block your view of the target at any range where slugs would be worth using over buckshot.
  • The Sawed-off Shotgun hasn't gotten much better since Fallout 3. Its only good point is that it's an improved holdout weapon, allowing you to take it into casinos, but there are much better weapons for the role. Against anything tougher than unarmored raiders, its saving grace comes with the "And Stay Back!" perk added in Dead Money, which gives each shotgun pellet a 10% chance to knock an opponent to the ground. As the gun shoots 14 pellets per shot, almost every firing results in your target collapsing in a heap; since its reload time is faster than how long it takes for the target to stand back up, no individual enemy will survive as long as you have enough ammo.
  • The Laser RCW is this if you don't invest in it. The RCW does less damage per shot and per second than a 9mm submachine gun (15/139 vs 19/171), and its (hard-to-come-by) Electron Charge Pack ammo is better reserved for the Gatling Laser or Tesla Cannon. Electron Charge Packs can be easier to acquire by recycling the cheap energy cells in bulk to make more (especially with the Vigilant Recycler perk), and there exists a weapon mod that recycles 1-in-4 shots (effectively giving you 25% more ammo). The RCW can be maintained with plasma rifles and the dirt-cheap Recharger Rifle (if you have the Jury Rigging perk) essentially making it the poor man's Gatling Laser with lower costs and weight. In addition, the "Laser Commander" perk makes the RCW far more useful in most situations, thereby rendering its issues moot and making it a worthwhile weapon.
  • The Recharger Rifle. Even for a starter weapon its damage is absolutely pathetic, being 25% weaker than the 9mm pistol. On top of that it's extremely fragile, inaccurate, and just plain ugly. Even worse, it does not benefit from the "Laser Commander" perk despite it being a laser weapon, thanks to a programmer's oversight. The point of it is to have a viable early energy rifle when microfusion cells are rare, but you'd be better off selling the gun and just using the caps to buy some extra ammo. With the Jury Rigging perk you can use these to repair the much better Laser RCW as well.
  • The Automatic Rifle was added in the Dead Money add-on. As one of the heaviest guns in the game and requiring a maxed guns skill and very high strength, it offers extremely inefficient use of expensive .308 ammo, a tiny magazine, very high spread, and low DPS compared to the submachine guns that it competes against. Plus, like everything else added in Dead Money, you can't find it anywhere in regular gameplay after you've finished the DLC; for the weight of one, you could free up nearly half the space necessary for one of the far more valuable gold bars.
  • Dead Money also adds demolition charges, supposed to be explosives made for construction purposes rather than killing people, and the only actual weapon you can acquire from the vending machines in the Sierra Madre. While you're stuck there, they're a good weapon - no Explosives skill requirement for very nearly the same damage as a frag mine (one point more, even) with the added bonus that, being explosives, they easily dismember the ghost people to prevent them from getting back up. Once you get back out into the normal game and have access to regular frag mines again, though, the downsides become obvious — it sells for the same price and deals the same damage, which does nothing to justify weighing three times as much as a regular mine, or the fact that the only way to get them is through the vending machine in the abandoned bunker that lead to the Sierra Madre — you're just as well off taking advantage of a bug where placing a demo charge then disarming and picking it back up turns it into a regular frag mine so you can carry three times as many for the same weight, then just forgetting about them once you're done with the DLC.
  • New Vegas also introduces "Fatigue Damage", which can knock enemies unconscious for a short amount of time when dealt enough fatigue damage. However, there's only six of such weapons in the game, and are all hard to come by (Boxing Gloves, Boxing Tape, the Cattle Prod, Flashbang grenades, the Compliance Regulator, and Beanbag Shells for shotguns). Unless you're going for a pacifist run, knocking enemies out isn't nearly as beneficial as straight-up killing them.
  • Throwing weapons, such as spears, hatchets, and knives, are a mixed bag — they do a decent amount of damage (moreso with poisons and perks) and are silent weapons. However, for some reason they are hard to find, with throwing knives being nearly impossible to obtain. Combine that with weight and the fact that you cannot retrieve any thrown weapons, even if you miss, and they become more trouble than they're worth.
  • The Silenced .22 Pistol and Silenced .22 SMG are both incredibly disappointing weapons. Both have silencers integrated in them and have increased Sneak Attack damage, but that's undercut by the fact that they are severely underpowered and outclassed by other weapons with Silencer modifications, such as the 10mm Pistol or the .45 Auto Pistol. They also use the .22LR round, which is rather common, but Better Off Sold, especially since it can be broken down at workbenches (netting you lead and gunpowder to make bigger pistol rounds) but can't be built (since it's a rimfire cartridge).
• Fallout 4 has several weapons (particularly in the DLC) that are more Joke Items than anything else, but a few meant for serious use instead qualify as this:
  • The Gamma Gun. It is quite effective against human enemies, but radiation damage is either largely or completely ineffective against ghouls, synths, power armor-wearing humans, super mutants, and most wild creatures. You can modify the guns to do extra energy damage that can harm these baddies, but it's far more sensible to just stick with weapons that primarily deal ballistic and/or energy damage, since there are no enemies that have complete immunity to those two damage types.
    • The only good use of the Gamma Gun is lowering the health of Legendary human enemies so that it won't regenerate to full, which can be annoying. It's still incredibly situational.
  • One would think the Broadsider would be an epic overpowered weapon, being a smooth-bore naval cannon modified to be portable and fired by hand. It isn't. It's heavy, short ranged, inaccurate as hell and does less damage than a conventional missile launcher or gauss rifle. Which is basically what regular Cannons are on their own, which is a given, and is supposed to be more of a volley type of weapon than a practical singular one. Still, at least it has novelty value...
  • The Cryolator is also this. On paper it sounds like an awesome weapon; it shows freezing ammunition, can be upgraded to fire ice pellets for enhanced damage and can be acquired early in the game provided enough investment is made in the Lockpicking skill (or have Dogmeat fetch it). In practice, ammo for it is nonexistent and it chews through it like crazy (as in, it spawns almost nowhere in the game, not in loot containers, not on dead bodies, nowhere) and only Arturo in Diamond City sells any, usually around 151 shots. Those 151 shots will cost about 2200 caps, making this weapon expensive to fire and pointless to scavenge ammo for.
  • Institute laser rifles/pistols are the weakest weapons that use Fusion Cells, are huge and take up a large portion of the screen, which can obscure your view of your surroundings, and are ugly to boot. They have a higher rate of fire than pre-war laser weapons, but that's it.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Any weapon with randomized damage, e.g. axes, especially once your attack power goes high enough that randomization only hurts your damage potential.
  • In Final Fantasy, a bug meant that instead of weapons having individualized critical rates, their crit rate was instead linked to their index number. This made a number of weapons meant to compensate for low damage with high crit rates completely worthless. A key example is the Vorpal Sword, which has damage on-par with the common Mythril Sword and shows up pretty late—it's meant to have a 30% crit rate, but at that point, you're well into the Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness and every other weapon has a 30% crit rate.
  • In Final Fantasy II, Bows are considered the worst weapon type for various reasons. The first is they are the game's only two-handed weapon, meaning that you can't equip shields, a piece of equipment that is valuable to raising agility due to increasing your evasion in a game where a character increases agility by dodging attacks. Second is that they are catered for characters who stay in the back row, a row which is a bad idea to put characters in as not taking as much damage prevents them from gaining a higher amount of hit points, which means a low max HP and as such any attack that can hit the back row will shave off most if not all of a character's HP. And third if you're playing the original and Pixel Perfect versions, bows give a massive penalty to magic compared to staves and knives, making them a poor fit for magic-focused characters who'd be the best fit to put in the back row to begin with!
  • Certain weapon classes in Final Fantasy XI have been hit by this as time and patches went by. In particular, two-handed weapons were looked down on for a long time due to differences in the damage and accuracy calculations for them versus one-handed weapons. This was thankfully adjusted, but other issues have come up from time to time for certain jobs or weapons.
  • Final Fantasy XII has several weapon types that perform differently from one another. Axes, bombs, and hammers do randomized damage, which can be good for low level characters, but the inconsistent damage can seriously hamper a character's damage output by the halfway point of the game. Bows and crossbows can allow characters to attack at long range, but bows have horrible accuracy in bad weather and crossbows are simply inaccurate altogether. Guns can ignore an enemy's defense and evasion, but they are the slowest weapons to use and the gun's attack power is based on the gun and the bullets loaded and said bullets are not easy to find if you want something more than what the shops offer. It also doesn't help that a lot of late game bosses and side quest enemies have a resistance to gun damage, making the defense piercing aspect moot anyway. Pole weapons do damage based on the enemy's magic defense, which would be handy if you knew which enemies have low magic defense anyway without looking up a guide.
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • During the 2.x A Realm Reborn era, any armor or weapons that focused heavily on Skill Speed (and to a lesser extent, Spell Speed) over more useful stats like whatever stat determines your class's damage. This is because Skill Speed only affects the cooldown timers on the already short (2.5 second base) Global Cooldowns applied to all regular weapon skills. It took hundreds upon hundreds of points in Skill Speed to reduce the cooldown by even a tenth of a second. Spell Speed is slightly more useful, since it also affects the casting speed of spells, which generally takes less time than the global cooldown. This was done because XIV's dev team, especially the Realm Reborn team, felt that Haste was too powerful (only a handful of the battle classes/jobs get any Haste-like ability), and so it was intentionally nerfed.^note This was likely a reaction to its predecessor, Final Fantasy XI, where Haste was the stat every class was expected to cap ASAP because of how much it increased your DPS by lowering the time between melee hits, allowing you to use your Weapon Skills more often and reducing the casting time of both offensive and healing spells. This was further made more broken by there being multiple types of Haste, which each had a unique cap with a universal hard cap applied to them all collectively..
    • When the Heavensward expansion released, Skill and Spell Speed got a massive buff, and the devs felt comfortable enough to bring in more Haste-like abilities that buffed Auto-Attack Speed as well. Instead, the new Scrappy Weapons and Armor are anything with a heavy focus on Determination. A generic stat that boosts damage dealt and healing received, which received a nerf at the same time as the buffs to Skill/Spell Speed, a single point in Vitality or your current class's main damage stat provides a much larger boost than several points of Determination.
    • Stormblood and Shadowbringers had further rebalances and reworks of the attributes and stats. The Main Attributes^note Strentgh, Vitality, Dexterity, Mind, Intelligence were limited to being boosted purely by class level and gear, with materia for them phased out. This put the focus of materia slots on secondary stats^note Critical Hit, Direct Hit, Determination, Skill Speed, Spell Speed, Piety, and Tenacity for player customization. Determination got enough of a boost to be considered useful after improving other key stats for the player's class. The role of Scrappy Materia Upgrades became the Tank-Role exclusive stat of Tenacity, which is intended as a general boost to all things useful to a Tank but has to be kept necessarily weak to prevent tanks from become overpowered. Tank Players who hit the level cap instead tend to focus exlcusively on adding Direct Hit materia to their gear for the improved chance of dealing "mini-criticals hits" for higher DPS.

• The enemy weapons you get off Aces in Valkyria Chronicles, tend to fit this trope early on, as the marginal increase in power compared to regular Gallian weaponry does not make up for the severe drop in both accuracy and range. While the rifles and machine guns improve to the point where they become viable options, captured sniper rifles consistently have less than half the range and accuracy of their counterparts, which eventually become capable of scoring long-range headshots with almost every shot. The exception is enemy flamethrowers, as they are generally more powerful than their Gallian tier equivalents.
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has Polearms. Though fans have been lamenting about their loss (each game in the series that has followed does not include them), it's rare to find someone who actually uses them. A major factor is that they're two-handed weapons, meaning you cannot use a shield or light source in your off-hand, while doing damage on par with one-handed weapons.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Fist weapons until Mists of Pandaria, and Polearms pre-Burning Crusade. Both were hampered by the fact that there were just not enough in the game, and the ones that were there were overshadowed by better weapons. It didn't help that Dagger specialization for rogues was much better than fist weapons, whereas sword or mace at least gave damage output or a chance to stun. Burning Crusade remedied this by adding more polearms to the game, although they were most commonly used by hunters for stats. They were officially Rescued from the Scrappy Heap later on, especially around Legion when Survival Hunters became a melee class that preferred staves and polearms.
  • The fourth expansion added Pokémon-like pet battles. Many pets have very weak movesets, although none are truly useless. There are, however, instances of very rare pets that are effectively identical to much more easily obtained alternatives.
• The Mass Effect series has a fair share of examples.
  • Mass Effect:
    • Due to the Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness and Random Drops in the first game, several guns were rendered completely useless five minutes after you picked them up because you'd immediately find another gun of the same type with objectively better stats.
    • Sniper rifles for Shepard - unless you're a Soldier or Infiltrator (or take Sniper Rifles as your bonus skill on New Game Plus), you can't zoom in with the scope (defeating the entire purpose of sniping), and even if you do have training for it, you need to put to put a ton of skill points into it to stop the damn thing from shaking. The environments are small enough for perfect aim with pistols or assault rifles (and the former is available for every class). A Sniper rifle of any power will (almost) overheat from a single shot and take seconds to cool down, making it useless for the Zerg Rush that every fight devolves to. And with the game's infamous "permaheat" bug, every shot with a sniper rifle carries a risk of forcing a saved-game reload.
    • On the upside, in the squadmates' hands, sniper rifles equipped with high-explosive ammo turn into a perfect-aim rocket launchers that eject enemies from the level.
  • Mass Effect 2
    • The Shuriken was the most useless weapon in the game. It's a weak, inaccurate machine pistol that doesn't even have the benefit of a fast firing rate, since it shoots three round bursts. It did less damage and had worse accuracy than the Predator pistol, which you got before it.
    • The Tempest the submachine gun that replaces the Shuriken wasn't much better. High rate of fire and ammo capacity but horrible recoil. Good luck keeping the thing on track. The only submachine gun worth using in the game is the Locust, which combines good damage with good accuracy and recoil but only available in a paid DLC.
    • The Katana and Scimitar shotguns had an effective range of about five feet, and even point blank weren't powerful enough to one-shot basic mooks. To get any use of them you had to get in an enemy's face, exposing yourself to automatic fire. Literally the only reason to ever use them in battle is if you're out of other ammo for other weapons and have melee enemies like varren coming up close. They were so bad that the game designers created the Eviscerator shotgun as a free DLC to replace both of them.
    • There's a reason no one uses the Avalanche heavy weapon; it's simply a waste of power cells. While the freezing effect is nice, the Cyro bullets for other weapons do the same thing. Most other Heavy weapons have either more ammo or better damage, as the Avalanche has only 50 damage with 30 cells.
  • Mass Effect 3:
    • The Shuriken, Katana, and Scimitar are still terrible, with the re-introduction of weapon mods doing little to compensate for their faults.
    • The AT-12 Raider shotgun has the worst accuracy in the game and only holds two shots. Its redeeming quality is supposed to be very high damage, but the Wraith does more damage, so there's no reason at all to pick up the Raider.
    • The Geth Pulse Rifle, which was considered a decent weapon in the second game and great in the first, has moved into Scrappy Weapon territory in 3. It's been nicknamed the "Geth Piss Rifle" by the community simply because it does low damage overall. Not helping matters is the competition from the Particle Rifle, which has a similarly high fire rate but also benefits from having infinite ammo and a beam that increases in damage as the trigger is held down.
    • The Kishock Harpoon Gun sniper rifle. It has a number of features that sound great on paper: great spare ammo capacity and reload speed for a single-shot sniper rifle, shots that can be charged for extra damage, a higher headshot damage multiplier than normal, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to ignore the "shield gate," a massive damage reduction that occurs when excess damage shatters an enemy's Shields or Barriers and goes on to their Health or Armor. However, the weapon's projectile is slow-moving and requires a lot of aiming compensation, charging shots is extremely inefficient from a DPS perspective without producing enough extra damage to justify it, 40% of the shot's damage is dealt in bleed (meaning it actually deals relatively little damage up front, and even common infantry can potentially survive a headshot), and the scope is of such a low magnification that the weapon handles more like an assault rifle with a scope attached than a sniper rifle. The result is a weapon that is so bizarrely balanced and has such a ridiculous learning curve that even after numerous patches and tweaks, it remains, along with the Shuriken, the only weapon in the game that the Mass Effect Wiki advises against using.
    • The Viper sniper rifle got nerfed hard in this game, having its firing rate lowered and the clip size reduced from 12 to 6. Combined with the buffs given to other guns, the Viper just looks pathetic; the Carnifex, for example, not only does more damage, but it also weighs less and can easily be modded to hold more shots. Still in multiplayer, the Viper can be a literal Poor Man's Substitute for the Carnifex, since the former is an uncommon weapon and the latter is a rare, which means that you'll probably max out the Viper first unless you're particularly blessed by the Random Number God.
    • Phoenix Adepts and Vanguards use Shock Batons for their melee attack. Said batons are slow and don't do a lot of damage, and leave you exposed the entire time.
• Chrono Trigger:
  • Lucca's "ultimate weapon", the Wonder Shot, randomly inflicts 10%, 50%, 100%, 200%, or 300% damage. It does not deal 200%/300% enough to make the gun worthwhile.
  • In the Nintendo DS remake, Marle gets the Venus Bow, which is guaranteed to do 777 damage. The problem is that this means critical hits are impossible, and if she gets confused, that 777 guaranteed damage can be turned on your own teammates (which is bad when they can have at most 999 HP).
• In Ultima VII, the Firedoom Staff. A fairly potent weapon, it had the problem that you don't control your party members and so they are likely to wander into the blast radius of the fireball. It was manageable, though, if you wanted to. What you should never, ever do is give this weapon to any party member, because they will promptly start blowing up the entire party by not caring one whit about who is going to get caught in any given explosion.
• Monster Hunter: All weapon classes are useful in some way or another, so how scrappy they are tends to depend on whether you're hunting solo or with a party:
  • Sword & Shield is widely regarded as a poor choice for solo hunts. Although S&S users have generally high elemental or status ratings on their weapons, amazing mobility compared to other melee classes, a shield for blocking attacks (including those ever-annoying flashes and roars), and can use items without sheathing (making them excellent support in multiplayer), the damage-per-second and reach leave much to be desired. And unlike most other classes, the S&S class doesn't have a hard-hitting special attack or Super Mode. Thankfully, Capcom seems to have recognized this last drawback and has given the weapon its own charged heavy slash in 4U, among other improvements.
  • All Gunner classes (the Bowguns and Bow) can be this in solo hunts as well, due to sacrificing attack power in exchange for allowing attacks from a safer distance. It's possible to defeat most monsters as a solo Gunner within the time limit, but unless you have the correct technique and armor skills, it will usually take much longer than just coming up close and whacking away with a good melee weapon. Also, Gunners have to use separate Gunner armor, which means having to farm for more drops. On top of all that, Gunner armor has only a fraction of the raw defense of Blademaster armor despite boasting higher Elemental resistances, which means if a monster reaches you and starts beating you up, your health is going to be ripped apart like toilet paper.
  • In multiplayer, weapons with long sweeping reaches tend to be loathed due to the knockback and tripping when accidentally hitting other players, the usual culprits being the Longsword, Switch Axe, Charge Blade (in axe form) and Hunting Horn (otherwise a stellar support class due to its Area of Effect buffs and healing). Unless the monster is big enough that everyone can spread out to avoid hitting each other, it is hard to avoid interrupting other players' combos with these weapons.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV has the Almighty Rounds, purchasable in the members-only area of Ginza. Hooray, bullets that are Almighty-elemental and thus can't be reduced in damage, reflected by, or nullified by 99% of enemies! Except said members-only area requires investing a costly 165,000 Macca to enter, and the bullets themselves are horribly expensive, moreso on Master difficulty where they cost a whopping 1.3 million Macca. Last but not least, they're not even that good, with only 20 attack power, which is about the strength of most early-game bullets. In short, mostly-unblockable bullets that are expensive and just too weak to be worth it.
• The World Ends with You:
  • The Anguis pin in the first game, despite having the highest raw damage number in the game, fails in practically every other way imaginable and then some. First, it's highly inaccurate - in a game where enemies move constantly, this is a big problem. Second, it never reboots, meaning It Only Works Once per battle chain - if you string 16 battles together, you'll only have a single use of Anguis in one of those battles, and in a game where most battles are either chain battles or long battles, this is a huge problem. Third, the Anguis pin is considered a Reaper-class pin. The player is only allowed to wear one Reaper-class pin into any battle chain, meaning using Anguis takes away from a wide variety of pins that actually have consistent use. What brings Anguis from merely being a bad weapon into the area of players utterly loathing it with a passion, however, is mastering the pin. Anguis takes a ridiculously long time to master. You can have 99% of the pins in the game mastered, and then spend days just mastering that one last Anguis pin. And there's a piece of equipment that requires a fully mastered Anguis pin to buy. If you want the game to acknowledge 100% Completion, you need to have everything in your inventory, which means both a fully mastered Anguis pin and the piece of equipment you use one to buy. This means going through the trouble of mastering the pin twice. Small wonder people have been known to (deliberately) misspell it as the "Anguish" pin...
  • In the second game, NEO: The World Ends with You, Kinesis-element Psychs are reliant on randomly-appearing "large objects" for their best damage output and for Beatdrops, making them one of the most awkward types to use due to relying on luck.
• Salt and Sanctuary: Bows and Crossbows are absolutely terrible at all tiers, due to somewhat lackluster rate of fire and pitiful damage that gets outclassed by daggers two tiers below in terms of damage per strike. Their range may be better than any other weapon in the game, but it's still lackluster to the point of the projectiles flopping like NERF darts halfway, and since it's a 2D platformer the extra range isn't too much of a benefit, since you can't see past the screen. That, and if you want range most magic spells have you covered, and are much stronger anyways. Literally everything in the game outclasses them because of these facts; even daggers, which are widely acknowledged to be fun but rather underpowered due to their high attack rate and combo capacity allowing some kind of offense.
• Dragon Quest VIII, unlike most Dragon Quest games, actually tied certain skills to your weapon, on top of certain special attributes (ie, whips hitting groups of enemies, boomerangs hitting all enemies). Unfortunately, due to the skills available as well as the accessibility of certain weapons, it developed:
  • Scythes and clubs. Most of them were available only via alchemy and when you did have some of them, axes had much higher attack power and better skills attached to them such as Hatchet Man and its upgrade Executioner. Thankfully, clubs in the 3DS version were Rescued from the Scrappy Heap with Morrie. His abilities with the clubs function very similar to axes, allowing clubs to become a feasible weapon. Almost too powerful, as Morrie's fist weapons become Overshadowed by Awesome.
  • Knives. In the PS2 version, only Jessica could use them, plus she was a Squishy Wizard who had access to whip abilities, considered very overpowered. Later on, knives vanished because they would allow Jessica to use swords - but her attack power was so low that not even the Falcon Blade or the Über Falcon blade could let her catch up. Much like with clubs and Morrie, Red in the 3DS version enables for knives to become useful. As a fighter, she is much more equipped to use knives than Jessica, and when she learns swords she will be able to deal good physical damage. However, this is only one option - most players actually believe Fans to be Red's signature weapon.
  • Unarmed, for everyone but Yangus. Yangus's strength was high enough that he was able to keep up with everyone else, however they lack the power of axes. For everyone else, they will be lacking as fisticuffs does not give them as much access to the utility that picking and committing to a weapon skill does.
• The sequel, Dragon Quest IX averted this during the game's main story - one way the game is balanced during the 30+ hour main story is the fact that there is always a weapon available to you. So you decided to use a fan or a bow? Well guess what - you'll find a weapon upgrade available in the next town. Unfortunately, this still happened in the post-game - many of the weapons like attacking staves and fans became useless as they do not have as many possible damage multipliers, such as Falcon Strike, Multishot, or Multithrust. In addition, while upgrades for them post-game do exist, the raw attack power of swords and the regenerative powers of rods outclasses all of them.
• In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Shield Hammers are almost universally considered the worst Blade type. They are meant to allow their user to serve as meatshield tanks, but of the two designated tanking members of the party, Mòrag is an agile evasion tank who doesn't suit this role, and Tora can't resonate with any Blades other than Poppi anyway. Aside from this, Shield Hammers almost universally have a low damage output, their attacking animations are very slow, and they're hard to use in a Driver Combo as neither Rex nor Nia have Driver Arts with them. The exception is Finch, who grants her user an Agility bonus, making her useful to equip on Mòrag. The DLC introduced a much better Shield Hammer in Poppibuster, but also introduced Shulk as a Guest Fighter who makes his Driver a much faster Moveset Clone of the Shield Hammer, making him outclass each and every Shield Hammer in the game.
• In Nioh 2, the Hatchets are a kind of zoner's weapon in a game about multi-layered, fast-paced melee combat. Their range is pitiful, their melee combos are abysmal and have limited utility, their ki use is high, and Dual Swords are much faster and do more damage; the primary advantage Hatchets have is being able to throw them for admittedly decent burst damage. In practice, it leads to "Throw axe, dodge counterattack, rinse and repeat" play that many players find boring.
• The Pokémon games have a few moves which players despise using.
  • Frustration. It's a full-power Normal-type attack which grows in power the less your Pokémon likes you, maxing out at 102 base power at 0 happiness. The problem? Your Pokémon's happiness goes up just by walking around with it, leveling it up, and using items on it, while reducing its happiness requires you to let it get knocked out or use a set of bitter healing items on it. The move's counterpart Return, which maxes out at 255 happiness instead, is a much more viable option; Frustration, meanwhile, is an exercise in frustration to use in-game, and only a seriously Stupid Evil trainer would consider using it. It does see more use in competitive settings where happiness can be set manually, though, as it's effectively identical to Return there.
  • Submission in the gen 1 games. It's a mediocre Fighting-type attack, with 80 base power and only 80% accuracy — in comparison, other types like Fire, Electric, and Ice have moves with 95 power and 100% accuracy, and their less accurate options have 120 base power. However, Submission doesn't just have low accuracy as its only drawback: it also damages the user with every use, dealing 1/4th of the damage inflicted. What really forces Submission into this status is that it's the most powerful Fighting move in the game with wide availability, with the stronger High Jump Kick only being learnable by Hitmonlee, so most Fighting-types are forced to use a crappy STAB move to deal acceptable amounts of damage. And as the cherry on top, two of the most powerful and widely-used Normal-types in competitive play are Snorlax and Chansey, both of which have huge HP and low defense, so Submission will severely damage the user even if it does hit. Later generations, fortunately, added much better Fighting attacks with superior power, more reliable accuracy, and more manageable drawbacks.
  • Wild Charge is essentially the modern counterpart to Submission, but for Electric-types — while it has 90 base power and perfect accuracy, it still inflicts recoil damage, when most recoil moves have 120 base power or more.^note Volt Tackle is an Electric move with 120 base power and recoil, but it's the Secret Art of Pikachu. As such, physical Electric-types have to make do with a mediocre STAB move, while their special counterparts can instead use Thunderbolt, which has no recoil damage and comes with a chance to paralyze the target. If you can't bear the recoil, your only other option is to use a move like Thunder Fang or Thunder Punch, which are quite weak.
• Unlimited Saga: Guns. Guns are technically the easiest weapon to build for - A Level 4 Gun Panel makes hitting the yellow panels in the Reel a snap and a Line Bonus of Gun skills on the Growth Panel gives an impressive Skill boost. However, that growth is immediately undercut by numerous downsides: Guns only appear in a few of the available stories^note Laura, Ruby and Armic never find them., have a static 20 Attack^note Even base weapons bought from shops typically manage 30), cannot be forged^note They can only be repaired, and by one Blacksmith in the game...unless Mythe is equipped with useless side-skills that let his own Blacksmith in Longshank do so., only have one single attack and don't scale off of any stats; making their damage fixed. All the other weapons can be forged into stronger variants, have various abilities to mess with and often come with unlockable passive debuffs to tackle tougher enemies. Guns start off as a Disc-One Nuke, but by the mid-game, they outright Can't Catch Up without something else to compliment them and every other option outshines a Gun by a country mile.
• Dark Chronicle: Monica's Monster Badges. The concept is supposed to be Monica's answer to Max's Ridepod - The ability to transform into a monster and use their unique attacks against enemies (and engage in banter with other ones). Sounds nifty on-paper, but each monster form needs to be individually levelled-up and even your basic starter weapons dwarf the forms in stats and function, necessitating intense grinding to make them even close to viable. The one thing that prevents Monster Badges from being an outright Joke Item is the various Monster Drops you're given for reaching level milestones (and several Gemstones if you max a form out), which serve as decent Synthesis items. However, the sheer amount of grinding needed to make the forms useful (as well as their below-average performance) offsets those benefits and powering up weak weapons to fuse to your primary ones yields faster, more consistent gains anyway. Simply put, there's nothing Monster Badges can do that Weapons can't do thrice over.

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