Poll of the Day > What are the most powerful abilities in games that end up useless?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Some clarifying notes:

-I don't mean spells that become obsoleted by immunities such as instant death spells against relevant bosses

-The ability has to be powerful in concept; it's dominant strategy or poor game design that makes it useless

-Not broken cuz of glitches

XP and money bonuses.

Does Ultima from FFII count?

EclairReturns posted...

Does Ultima from FFII count?

mmmm... possibly, I can't remember if it has decent base power

But ya, it's on track. I was gunna include Holy/Flare from FF5 since they are a required event and don't end up getting used, but are strong on Spellblades

most Skyrim master spells take too long to cast to be useful (3 seconds to charge, you have to stand still, and if you're staggered it's interrupted)

Sahuagin posted...

most Skyrim master spells take too long to cast to be useful (3 seconds to charge, you have to stand still, and if you're staggered it's interrupted)

Easy yes

The Death From Above nuke attack in Saints Row IV kind of sucks, because you'll rarely be able to get yourself high enough in the air to trigger it, and if you do it's hard as hell to aim. And even if you manage to pull it off perfectly, the enemies you're aiming for have a bad habit of despawning once you jump high enough (and far enough away from them), so the whole thing is way cooler in premise than it is in actual usage.

-Most of the high level spells in Super Mario RPG don't do appreciably more damage than weaker spells or even normal attacks, and are absolutely not worth their sky-high FP costs.
-Megid in Phantasy Star Online is semi-useless thanks to its low activation rate against most enemies (it's a one-hit kill attack, but its activation rate is based on how low the enemy's EDK stat is; in Ultimate difficulty, most enemies have an EDK high enough that it's far faster to just kill them the normal way).
-If we're allowed to go with entire classes, both the Sniper and General in Fire Emblem have historically suffered from this. The former would be amazing in a game that didn't include counter-attacking; the latter would similarly be great if the game design included more defensive maps instead of ones that expected you to move against enemy positions, often penalizing you if you take too long (by having recruitable characters get killed or enemy thieves loot treasure chests, for instance).

darkknight109 posted...

-If we're allowed to go with entire classes, both the Sniper and General in Fire Emblem have historically suffered from this. The former would be amazing in a game that didn't include counter-attacking; the latter would similarly be great if the game design included more defensive maps instead of ones that expected you to move against enemy positions, often penalizing you if you take too long (by having recruitable characters get killed or enemy thieves loot treasure chests, for instance).

Longbows, +Range Skills, Boots, +Movement Skills, Teleportation Staves and Dancers are all options to deal with that, depending on the specific game in question.

darkknight109 posted...

the latter would similarly be great if the game design included more defensive maps instead of ones that expected you to move against enemy positions, often penalizing you if you take too long (by having recruitable characters get killed or enemy thieves loot treasure chests, for instance).

the Starcraft 2 zerg campaign in a nutshell. They give you a whole bunch of defensive and counter-siege untis, there's only 1 defense mission in the whole campaign and they outright give you a special ability to help with it, too.

The Saw in Final Fantasy Legend is mostly useless except at the very end of the game. The way it was supposed to work is if the user's strength is higher than the target's defense, it's an instant kill. But they got the check backwards, so it only works against enemies with a higher defense than the user's strength. That means it's totally useless against most normal enemies, though it can be used to one-hit kill the final boss, the Creator, and the normally undefeatable form of Su-Zaku before obtaining ERASE99 (this is pointless, however, as you get nothing for winning, and it will continue to attack you randomly until the actual story encounter).

Two that come to mind:

1)
Wolverine's Rude Awakening Extreme from X-Men Legends 2.

Its opening level of 10% of your max health restored usually means you'll be immediately killed again shortly after resurrection.

It doesn't work if you die falling off a cliff.

They should have made it a passive skill that would in effect as long as there was at least one other character active in the team.

2)
Many of the weapons from Deus Ex :Human Revolution are only useful in certain circumstances that you're not going to know where the ideal situation is on a first playthrough.

The crossbow and rocket launcher are great in specific locations, and the lack of ammo for the powerful grenade launcher makes it practically useless.

Biggoron Sword and Great Fairy's Sword in Zelda.

In the original Battlefield: 1942, the scout class is mostly useless because the engineer gets the exact same gun, just as powerful and accurate with only slightly less zoom, and the engineer gets more ammo plus det packs and land mines, and the ability to make repairs. The only special ability the scout has is spotting for other players using artillery pieces, which is only useful if your teammates are actually using artillery correctly.

The anti-tank class isn't that useful either. Their main weapon is a bazooka/panzerschreck, which is great for taking out armor but it has limited splash damage against enemy troops and is useless against aircraft. You also only get a handful of shots and it's very slow to reload. Other classes can do nearly as much damage to tanks using grenades, or the engineer's det packs and land mines.

And the assault class is mediocre at best. They have a powerful gun and lots of ammo, but that's it, no other special abilities.

Dragon powers in Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter. Theyre very powerful and they arent useless butthey have some very severe limits that discourage you from using them.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

Longbows, +Range Skills, Boots, +Movement Skills, Teleportation Staves and Dancers are all options to deal with that, depending on the specific game in question.

-Longbows are generally bad
-+Range skills are not in most of the games
-Boots are rare and typically have better options to use them on
-+Movement skills are both not in most games and are typically not native to snipers or generals
-Teleportation staves are rare, with a limited number of uses (and, again, generally have better options than saving an otherwise lacklustre unit).
-It is frankly a waste of a dancer to use them on a general or a sniper most of the time.

It's Fire Emblem, so any unit *can* be saved if you don't mind abusing game mechanics and/or pumping them so full of stat boosters that they would never pass a drug test for the rest of their lives, but this raises the obvious question of why you would bother doing that when you have an entire roster of units that don't require nearly as much effort to make worthwhile.

PikachuMaxwell posted...

Biggoron Sword and Great Fairy's Sword in Zelda.

In what way are either of those useless?

Biggoron Sword is literally better than the Master Sword in every way except for fighting the final boss, fighting the Flare Dancers in the Fire Temple (due to a bug), and activating some glitches, and it can be acquired immediately after getting to adulthood and freeing Epona.

Great Fairy's Sword, similarly, is purely an upgrade over the equippable swords. About its only major drawback is you have to clear out nearly all of the last "main" dungeon to acquire it, but it is still good in the Secret Shrine and/or fighting the last boss if you don't have the Fierce Deity's Mask (and it is excellent in randomizers, if you are fortunate enough to get it early).

Nearly every end game spell in Fromsoft games aren't worth using compared to the starting spells. The giant laser does more damage than the tiny laser, but you can cast the tiny laser way more times, and it ends up doing more damage against the boss eventually.

captpackrat posted...

The Saw in Final Fantasy Legend is mostly useless except at the very end of the game. The way it was supposed to work is if the user's strength is higher than the target's defense, it's an instant kill. But they got the check backwards, so it only works against enemies with a higher defense than the user's strength.

This is the most early-Squaresoft thing I've ever seen.

With some games, kickass end-game abilities that you only get to use for a tiny bit before the game's over.

They're items, not abilities, but generally any super powerful potion or healing item is useless to me, because I just hang on to them forever and never actually use them. I can be in the middle of the final boss battle and have 50 Elixirs or Unicorn Potions or whatever and I won't use them even then because I might need them later.

This probably doesn't count exactly but in original ff7 you get Aerith's final weapon and can use it for exactly one battle before you never control her again.

Pretty much any card/spell above 6 mana in hearthstone. The devs love aggro and hate long games with decision making.

argonautweakend posted...

This probably doesn't count exactly but in original ff7 you get Aerith's final weapon and can use it for exactly one battle before you never control her again.

Ok, this is a top winner right here

Since you brought up SC2, as a Coop veteran, Artanis's Tempests. They do relatively high damage per hit, have absolute massive range, are aerial, and you can kite while shooting. They sound like an ultimate unit that if you can get a bunch out you've already won the map. In practice? You have 15 ships firing on one zergling in a group of 30, overkilling the hell of it with a slow rate of fire, as the other 29 run past you and murder your base. The unit is essentially only good at killing buildings, which is only actually the objective in one map. Compare this to mass Battlecruisers or Carriers and while those take as long to really get off the ground macro-wise, they can both handle small and larger units extremely well, don't waste firepower on overkill very much, and are only really countered by hard counters like Vipers, mass Scourge, or whatever the hell Terran does in coop. Basically, enemies in coop use their numbers to offset how dumb the AI is, and Tempests just are usually not functional against mass anything

Instead of these basically vanilla campaign/versus units, on Artanis, you can warp in Zealots with charge and even better spin than usual, Phoenixes that can lift two units, and his Dragoons have extra range and are easy and safe to mass like sniper Marines (I should also note you can effectively immediately warp them in anywhere). Best part is you don't even unlock Tempests until later on in progression so you assume they should be good enough by default. Not really!

Ness's higher level Rockin' PSI, Gamma uses 40 pp, when he will have at 200 pp at most. Omega uses 98! when he can get up to 500 pp after Magicant. You're better off just using the budget Beta at 14 pp. Ness is also your main healer.

Does Martins Fury count?

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Martin_Fury

Was a shirt that did insta death on all hostile NPCs near you, but wasnt meant to be acquired by players, and sent to someone by mistake by a GM. It was a GM tool, not a player tool. The player and his guild got banned, and the item got nerfed.

But on the WoW train, a powerful thing in concept, was Twilight Devastation. Was powerful on its own, but the more you stacked the more negative stuff you got against you. You stacked enough as a tank you could take down current bosses by yourself, or with a group just with tanks, no healers or dps.

In Adventure of Mana/Final Fantasy Adventure, by the time you finally get the ultimate sword, Excalibur, you have literally about 1 or 2 minutes before the final battle and maybe a half-dozen enemies.

And the Blood Sword is actually a lot more useful, since it restores HP every time you do damage with it so you can just ignore the enemy's attacks and spam attack.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

Longbows, +Range Skills, Boots, +Movement Skills, Teleportation Staves and Dancers are all options to deal with that, depending on the specific game in question.

None of those solve the most critical problem with Archers/Snipers, which is that they can't do anything during the enemy phase unless they're attacked by another archer or a mage that couldn't get closer. They can dish out lots of damage very safely during the player phase, but that's still just 1-2 attacks per round (potentially 2-4 with a dancer or equivalent), after which they're mostly useless until the next player phase. Classes that can counterattack more consistently, though, can potentially throw out dozens of attacks per round, allowing them to dish out far more total damage and making it easier to level them without directly favouring them (especially when paired with Vantage or similar skills).

If memory serves, FE10's legendary bow had a 1-3 range, which made Deadeye a very nice class once you blessed that weapon and could use it indefinitely, but even that's pretty niche and really only applies for the last 3-4 maps of the game.

Curse of forlorn encystment in Fall of Ascolais 2

Several Ultima games had the Armageddon spell, which literally killed everything in the game but the caster and a handful of powerful NPC's. .

rjsilverthorn posted...

Several Ultima games had the Armageddon spell, which literally killed everything in the game but the caster and a handful of powerful NPC's. .

Which is metal AF, even though it's useless

I mean, you literally destroy the world - they don't let you do that as a side-ability in other games, just a ragequit button

Sahuagin posted...

most Skyrim master spells take too long to cast to be useful (3 seconds to charge, you have to stand still, and if you're staggered it's interrupted)

I never had much problem with the lightning one since it had good range. The fire one sucked. Don't remember the ice one.

But I'd use the lightning on on dragons mammoths ect from a distance.

Loved the master level dead thrall though.