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Useless Useful Spell
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A staple of RPGs, the Useless Useful Spell is an attack or skill that your characters can learn but you end up never using. They tend to have impressive names like "Instant Death", "Poison", "Confusion", "Paralyze", "Silence", and "Petrify". And they may induce some interesting Status Effects or have a gimmick like a Percent Damage Attack. But they tend not to be useful at all, for a variety of reasons: Some only work on less powerful enemies. Since they usually drain your Mana Meter, they're not worth using to dispatch The Goomba. The enemies who actually are powerful enough to make you break out these spells are usually immune to their effects — otherwise, they would be far too easy to defeat. Some are very situational, only seeing use to counteract a single type of enemy/ability or only working in certain environments. These are annoying, since you may need these spells to win, but you barely use them outside of rare, very specific circumstances. They can lead to Crippling Overspecialization if you rely on them for your build. Some are difficult to cast. They may cost a ton of MP or other resources. Or they may take forever to activate, making your character (and perhaps the entire party) vulnerable and giving the enemy an opening to attack unhindered. Those spells also telegraph themselves to smarter enemies, making it easier for them to set up a counter to them. Others might only function with specific other spells, requiring the user to complete an elaborate setup to get any use out of them at all. At best, they are one step below Awesome, but Impractical or Cool, but Inefficient. Some are redundant — you could easily replicate the effects with equipment or other party members' abilities, which are easier and less costly to use. Some are valuable in theory, but give little benefit to the character who gains the ability. Commonly by relying on a stat or tactic that the character can't properly use. A spell that increases the user's physical attack sounds useful, but it won't do much good if the Squishy Wizard is the only one who gets it. Some are indeed quite powerful, like spells that significantly buff a character's attacks, but are so easily countered through dispell effects that it's not worth the investment. This is even worse in games where there are dispells that steal the spell and give it to the caster or their allies, or characters who feed upon enemy magical enchantments to power up their attacks. The inverse is also possible with debuffs on your opponents. Of course, when any enemy possesses such spells, they will invariably be effective when used on you. The advent of the Elite Mook provides an opportunity to use these spells. They're Mooks, after all — they're not important to the story, so they're not subject to Contractual Boss Immunity. But they are tougher than your average enemy, which will force you to break out the more interesting spells. Game designers over the years have tried to mitigate the effect of Contractual Boss Immunity by making bosses not entirely immune to these spells; they just have less of an effect as they would with a regular enemy. It makes for a more interesting fight, as the player experiments with a wider variety of spells, sees how long the various status effects last, and tries to come up with a winning strategy. One interesting twist is for the boss to be affected like everyone else at first, then develop a resistance to it, meaning you have to choose the right moment to use the spell. Others let the spell have full effect, but empower the bosses so much the Spell is practically mandatory. Either from sheer raw stats or by having a technique or innate ability that'll utterly crush the party unless the Spell is used to counter it. Other systems design their spells to provide some benefit in addition to their primary effects, like stat boosts or additional damage, to ensure that the spells remain valid options. Subtrope of Underused Game Mechanic. Super-Trope to Contractual Boss Immunity. When an otherwise Useless Useful Spell is redeemed by being useful against a specific boss or in a particular situation, it is Not Completely Useless. |
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Oddly enough, the trope is followed in Dungeons & Dragons Online, the MMORPG. Although instant kills are still very effective against Mooks, bosses are immune to most if not all mind-affecting and instant death spells. Thankfully, this only applies to the main bosses of dungeons, and, anyway, fights with them are not supposed to be "CHAAARGE! -- Oh, he died." They seem to be attempting to fix this with the recent spell passes, and prestiges for Wizards and Sorcerors. If you're soloing as a Pale Master, Wail and Finger are still the best bang for your buck, spell-point-wise. | |
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This is still played straight with enemies in the Epic Level Handbook. Nine times out of ten, epic enemies are immune to paralysis, sleep, polymorphing, level draining, instant death, and basically anything that could so much as slow them down. In turn, these monsters will almost always have abilities that amount to "save or die" for a whole group, and one or two even nastier epic spells. Plus, Epic Spellcasting effectively turns any character that's at least Level 21 into a Person of Mass Destruction. The fact that they pretty much ignore most of the limits and immunities created by normal spellcasting means that status effects are never going to get used at all. | |
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Star Wars Saga Edition had a few feats that at best had a bit of use at lower levels but were garbage at higher ones. Toughness increased your hit points by your level, but could only be taken by Soldiers who tended to have massive amounts of health anywaynote A level 20 Soldier could have as much as 320 health without prestige classes. Force Boon gave you three extra Force Points each level, but meditation could restore Force Points anyway and higher levels gave plenty as is. Any Armor Proficencies a character didn't start with were pointless due to the fact Armor Is Useless without certain class-specific talents. Linguist gave additional languages based on your intellect modifier but characters already knew additional languages based on their intellect modifier and most could get by with Basic, Huttese, and Bocce which were by far the most common. | |
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The Sorcery! series of books has 48 different spells... and barely enough option to cast each and every single one of them throughout the adventure. Seasoned players will instead rely mostly on some of the earlier spells like thunderbolt or fireball, and some lower-cost and economical ones such as confusion, telepathy, Doppelgänger Spin or razor edge (and the occasional Summon Magic to call for goblins as backup) but most of the time a successful playthrough of all four books will include on average between 20 to 30 available spells used. Of course, it is possible to finish the game with all 48 spells, but that one is more of a Self-Imposed Challenge. | |
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Dungeons & Dragons Status effect spells, at one time, inverted this. The game made traditionally Useless Useful Spells into the most powerful in its 3rd edition, with direct damage spells falling well below them in power level. This is because most spells are equally likely to succeed in affecting a foe, thus a spell which can kill a foe instantly is far more effective than a spell which can just hurt one. Some status-affecting spells automatically succeed, and many others essentially cripple enemies by disabling them for long periods of time, allowing players to kill them without fear of retaliation. Relatively few foes are immune to such spells, while many foes are resistant to elemental damage spells. A wide variety of spells which don't even directly harm opponents are also extremely powerful, and all in all this leads to wizards and other powerful spellcasters being game breakers. This is still played straight with enemies in the Epic Level Handbook. Nine times out of ten, epic enemies are immune to paralysis, sleep, polymorphing, level draining, instant death, and basically anything that could so much as slow them down. In turn, these monsters will almost always have abilities that amount to "save or die" for a whole group, and one or two even nastier epic spells. Plus, Epic Spellcasting effectively turns any character that's at least Level 21 into a Person of Mass Destruction. The fact that they pretty much ignore most of the limits and immunities created by normal spellcasting means that status effects are never going to get used at all. Oddly enough, the trope is followed in Dungeons & Dragons Online, the MMORPG. Although instant kills are still very effective against Mooks, bosses are immune to most if not all mind-affecting and instant death spells. Thankfully, this only applies to the main bosses of dungeons, and, anyway, fights with them are not supposed to be "CHAAARGE! -- Oh, he died." They seem to be attempting to fix this with the recent spell passes, and prestiges for Wizards and Sorcerors. If you're soloing as a Pale Master, Wail and Finger are still the best bang for your buck, spell-point-wise. In 4th Edition, direct-damage and status-effect spells are much more balanced. Although very few enemies are immune to status effect spells, most of those spells can be ended with a "saving throw" that the victim has at least a coin flip's chance of making every round. Most status effects don't last more than a few rounds anyway. It is possible to 'permanently' stun an enemy at high levels by giving an enemy such a high save penalty that he can't succeed, but by that time, you can probably take out such an enemy with direct attacks very quickly. The guys you really want to lock down for a round or two are usually the same guys that have bonuses on all of their saving throws, giving them a greater chance of breaking out. Thus, a condition like "until the end of your next turn" is much more useful than "until they make the saving throw". 3.5 edition's Cleric spells like Righteous Might and Divine Power tend to fall into this category. A fully-buffed Cleric is perhaps the deadliest close-range combat fighter in the game, with absurdly high Strength and damage, along with full casting prowess and tons of other significant buffs. But by the time you're finished casting all the spells to buff the Cleric that much, the fight's either almost over or you'll need to focus on bringing people back from the dead. (This is one of the main reasons that the Persistant Spell metamagic feat, which could rig the buffs to last a whole day, was considered a Game-Breaker, especially when combined with the cleric-only Divine Metamagic feat, which let clerics spend Turn Undead uses to power their metamagic. Turn Undead attempts in general are this, especially for Paladins. Clerics and Paladins can channel their divinity to cause undead enemies to flee or, in extreme cases, explode. The trouble is that it only works against Undead, usually fails unless the Undead are weak enough to not be much of a threat, and making them run away isn't very useful. Paladins get it even worse because they Turn Undead as if they were a Cleric of significantly lower level. This status seems to be acknowledged by designers as the Divine subclass of Feats was eventually introduced, all of which allow spending turn attempts on something more useful. Divine Metamagic in particular is one of the most potent Feats in the game (it allows Clerics to apply extra effects to their spells by spending turn attempts instead of increasing the spell's level). This became powerful enough that the Nightstick (a magic item that merely had to stored on the Cleric's person and granted extra turn attempts) became an essential part of most optimized Cleric builds. Detect Undead isn't that useful compared to Detect Evil, since that can do everything Detect Undead could do, but better. Detect Evil is the same spell level, lasts ten times as long, and usually picks up every undead creature anyways because the undead are almost always Evil-aligned. The only saving grace Detect Undead has is that it appears on the wizard's spell list and might potentially find Good-aligned undead, but Detect Undead is so situational compared to Detect Evil that it's usually not worth wasting a spell slot. 5th Edition just folded Detect Undead's effect into Detect Evil and Good, which, despite the name, now detects specific creature types rather than alignments. Wish often seems like it should be treated as a Useless Useful Spell. In theory, the Wish spell is "the mightiest magic a mortal can wield", since it grants you a wish for basically anything you want. But it's traditional for the DM to scrutinize all wishes for ways to punish the wisher. Wish also eventually got some drawbacks to put it under Too Awesome to Use or Godzilla Threshold territory; among them, if you wish for something other than replicating the effect of another spell, there's a chance you can never cast Wish again as long as you live. The drawbacks and potential Killer Game-Master tendencies associated with Wish means it's almost not worth the trouble, even if its effects are incredible. Melf's Minute Meteors can deal more damage than Fireball (12d6 on each of three to six rounds), and is far more precise, letting you chose several smaller areas to hit, rather than one large area. But, Melf's Minute Meteors takes three rounds to get its full effect, after which you probably won't have a lot left to use them on. One interesting thing that 4th and 5th Edition did was add the Ritual tag to some spells, specifically ones that lacked combat utility. In older editions, spells like Identify or Leomond's Tiny Hut were things you'd typically only bother with by way of magic wands or spell scrolls. Ritual spells can be cast without using a spell slot... it just takes at least ten minutes to do it. And since each round of combat in D&D is said to take six seconds, there's no way you're taking a hundred turns to cast that spell. 5th Edition trimmed away or consolidated a number of spells to reduce the level of this trope, but there are still examples. Ray of Sickness isn't a particularly powerful spell on its own merits; it does less damage on a successful hit than a Magic Missile (which hits automatically), and if the attack hits and the target fails a saving throw, it also applies the poisoned condition for one round. This might still be of some limited use, if not for the fact that an overwhelming number of monsters and quite a lot of humanoid characters are either resistant or fully immune to poison damage, the poisoned condition, or both. True Strike became this in 5th Edition. The spell gives you Advantage on an attack roll, which is hugely powerful, but the spell takes an action to cast, requires you to target a creature that's within 30 feet of you, and doesn't grant advantage until you make an attack roll on your next turn. As such, it's entirely too slow to be something that can be relied upon, and if you target a creature that moves out of your line of sight or gets killed before your next turn the effect is wasted. But the single worst part is that using it has half the potential damage output than if you used those two rounds to simply attack twice. It's universally considered to be the single worst spell in the game. Find Traps is generally regarded as a waste of a spell slot. It only works on traps that are in your line of sight (so a trapdoor under a rug would not be detected because the rug is in the way), it only detects traps intentionally made to harm people (so naturally-occurring hazards would not be detected), and even if it does detect a trap it only gives you a general idea of what kind of trap it is rather than telling you where it is. Effectively you're spending a second-level spell-slot to learn that there is a trap nearby, but not any information that would be useful in avoiding or disarming said trap. |
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Magic: The Gathering has quite a few: Sorrow's Path is too complicated and far too expensive. Being able to swap your opponent's blocking creatures is merely okay. Having to pay 2 life and suffer 2 damage to every creature you control is like saving money on glasses by stabbing yourself in both eyes. Apocalypse Chime destroys all Homelands cards. If Homelands cards other than Autumn Willow and Baron Sengir were actually useful, this card would be. Common Cause. Pointless since all Nonartifact creatures must be the same color, even your opponents. Stupid errata...and even if you manage to make it work, it benefits your opponent's creatures, too! Spells and abilities that endow creatures and to a lesser extent other permanents with specific abilities (including but not limited to the aura subtype of enchantments) may fall under this. Consider Flight. From the enchanted creature's perspective, it's potentially a great effect — it gains flying if it didn't have it already, allowing it to bypass most non-flying blockers and/or block flying attackers itself. Get to the point where you actually want to put the card into a deck, though, and you'll soon realize that if having flyers is important to your strategy, you'd best include a number of creatures that have the ability in and of themselves already in case you don't actually draw that Flight card...yet the more of those you have, the less good the card actually does you in the first place! (This logic does not, of course, apply to abilities that actually have a cumulative effect. However, many of the more commonly granted abilities — like flying, first strike, or trample — do not fall into this category.) Then, there's the issue that the empowered creature isn't necessarily any harder to kill, potentially taking the entire investment in extra cards, mana, and/or other resources to the graveyard with it... Magic the Gathering also has a fair share of Instant-Win Condition cards — as in, they actually SAY "You win the game" or "Target player loses the game". However, they're either highly situational, require a certain action that will almost certainly get interrupted, or are just ridiculously expensive. And we have Great Wall, generally considered the worst card in the game. All it does is let you block creatures with plainswalk, of which there are only four that no one uses, only one of which was around when Great Wall was released (and it was terrible). Landwalk as a whole has been made obsolete, but even when it wasn't, plainswalk was the rarest type, partly for flavor reasons and partly to avoid confusion with "planeswalking", a concept which, unlike plainswalk, is actually rather important to Magic. And speaking of plainswalk, consider Aysen Highway, which gives all white creatures plainswalk. The problem? Well, first, it costs six mana, which is just absurdly high, on par with the strongest creatures in its set. The second is that plainswalk is only useful, by its nature, if your opponent has a Plains out. The third is that it affects both sides, and if you're using a lot of white creatures, you probably have a Plains out, too — and if your opponent has a Plains out, they're probably using white creatures themselves. Basically, you splurge all your mana on a situational ability — and in the one situation where it would be handy, your opponent gets it, too. Mudhole is an instant that exiles all land cards from a graveyard... but there are other cards that exile entire graveyards (and hit more relevant graveyard-based threats) for lower cost, like Tormod's Crypt which is completely free! The only practical use would be to get around removing a specific non-land card in your opponent's graveyard to screw over some bizarre combo that doesn't even exist yet. Shelkin Brownie has the ability to remove "bands with other" abilities from creatures. At the time it was printed, there were literally zero creatures with printed "bands with other" abilities (much later, a Joke Character card with the ability was released in the set Unhinged, but these cards aren't usable in any but the most casual formats). There's a creature that can create tokens with a "bands with others" ability, and a cycle of lands that can grant your Legendary creatures "bands with other legends". But the tokens cost a ridiculous amount, and the lands had the drawback of being unable to produce mana. On top of all that, "bands with other" was already a Useless Useful Spell, as it was a variant of the weak and confusing "banding" ability that managed to be even weaker and more confusing. So nobody ever actually used "bands with others" anyway. In terms of keyword abilities, there are a few. For example, Wizards of the Coast stopped printing cards with Landwalk in 2015 because, against some decks, they were unbelievably overpowered, but most of the time, they did literally nothing. Intimidate and Protection from (quality) had similar problems. This trope disappearing can be a source of competitive advantage in Limited formats. Magic has only so much design space, so abilities tend to get re-used with minor tweaks between sets. It's common for a card or ability that has historically been mediocre to gain a new twist that makes it good in Limited. A canny player will identify this shift and have easy access to the effect at a draft table as everyone else ignores the good card for its resemblance to bad ones. An example is the Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty common Suit Up. For 3 Mana, it overwrites a creature's stats to 4/5 and draws a card, all at Instant speed. Most other cards that do similar things cost 2 mana but don't draw a card. It turned out that the ability to suddenly outsize an opponent's creature in the middle of combat and come out up a card was worth much more than 1 extra Mana. |
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Warhammer 40,000: In some ways blast weapons are starting to turn this way. Most blast weapons are quite powerful, especially heavy ordnance weapons, but due to the new way of resolving Blast weapons, you'd be pretty lucky if the shot land anywhere near your intended target (it's entirely possible that the shot will make a "return to sender" move, and there's a good chance of it happening too!). While a Space Marine can be very accurate with his aim-based Krak Missile, he is a worse shot than a drunk stormtrooper when it comes to firing the explosive Frag variant. Both missiles are fired from the same weapon. Also, there are very powerful weapons called meltas that basically take any vehicle or Elite Mook and melt them into slag. However, nearly all meltas in the game have a 12" range (pretty much the shortest range outside of some irregular Tyranid ones) and only obtain their extra armour penetration ability within half that. While Space Marines with insane defenses can quite happily walk up to an enemy Heavy Support unit and annihilate it with one of these, more physically frail units like Eldar will often find themselves floored by the entire enemy's weapons before they can fire them. Which is why everyone pulls them in a transport, and thanks to the Eldar having some of the fastest ones in the game it completely makes the meltas range issue moot. The tyranids have a variant of this. Warp Lance is a powerful Anti-tank weapon with a Strength value of 10 and AP value of 1 (the best the stats can be) as well as the Lance attribute, meaning the only thing it's short of being the best anti-tank weapon in the game is Melta. It however only has a range of 18 inches, just barely outside of charging range. On top of that the Zoanthrope is a classic example of a Squishy Wizard, having a low number of wounds and a save easily penetrable by rapid-fire weapons, not to mention being gibbed by most tank weapons, the very things it's trying to hunt. There is also a slight chance that the Zoanthrope will suffer a brain tumor if the spell goes awry. Pinning is worse off. Blast and Melta weapons have limitations that can be overcome, as the tank-happy Imperial Guard are happy to demonstrate. Pinning requires that the enemy is vulnerable to it. Most armies have either a preponderance of Fearless units (Chaos Marines, Chaos Daemons, Tyranids, Orks), very high Leadership (Space Marines, Eldar, Dark Eldar), or else use many small units of infantry who rely on tanks for their big hitters (Imperial Guard). Ironically, one of the few armies vulnerable to Pinning, the Tau, are its biggest users. For Grey Knight Paladins, Feel No Pain. Paladins are Terminators that have 2 wounds, and with Feel No Pain can virtually double that survivability because statistically half the wounds of small arms fires will be ignored. Looks great on paper, not so much in practice. The Apothecary upgrade needed for that FnP costs 75 points, enough for another Paladin to join the squad (note that this upgrade does not give the unit another body, it just makes an existing Paladin an apothecary). On top of that, because of their high armor save and 2 wounds, Paladins are scared shitless of any AP 2 or Strength 8+ weapons already, which are the only things that will now stop their Feel No Pain, turning them from once being possible targets to now Tankshell magnets. Several who argued that Feel No Pain was considered a Game-Breaker later had a serious case of Did Not Think This Through. |
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Lone Wolf: Grey Star's Prophecy and Psychomancy are pretty good at eliminating variables when faced with a choice — sometimes. Psychomancy can just give you a warped riddle that may or may not be right, and Prophecy sometimes completely fails to illustrate the nature of your impending doom. Use it when you're in a valley of poison gas, it just goes "GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT" without saying which way to go. The New Order series adds on "Astrology" to the list of Kai-Disciplines. It's supposed to let you look into the far future rather than the immediate future like Sixth Sense does, but the opportunities to use it come up so rarely it's like the author forgot he put it in the list (only once in the first New Order book, and not at all in the next two). The few times it comes up, you tend to get a Vagueness Is Coming reading, too. For that matter, the Grandmaster upgrade for the previously quite useful Sixth Sense / Divination ability, Telegnosis, is mostly useless, and occasionally actually counterproductive. There are several instances where you take damage simply because you have Telegnosis. |
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Useless Useful Spell | |
| Useless Useful Spell / int_f367511c | comment |
Yu-Gi-Oh!, in its diverse card pool, definitely has some duds. Several cards are specifically designed to counter a very powerful card, and potentially reverse its effect on the opponent. Gryphon Wing counters Harpie's Feather Duster, Anti-Raigeki counters Raigeki, Call of the Dead counters Monster Reborn, etc. However, those powerful cards are either Limited or banned, and these specific counter cards are absolutely useless in any other situation. It's often simpler to negate powerful plays with more general-purpose effect negations. There are three cards that rely on the use of Pot of Greed: Spirit of the Pot of Greed, Avatar of the Pot of Greed and Jar Robber. The first two increase the draw of the Pot from two to three and the other negates the opponent's use of it and lets you draw one card... thing is, Pot of Greed is banned, so they're actually totally useless. Final Destiny has a devastating "destroy all cards on the field" effect... but it requires you to discard five cards to use it. A six-card hand (counting Final Destiny itself) in a well-built Deck would probably contain two or three options to take out your opponent's field anyway, and those options wouldn't require you to cripple yourself. Not to mention that if you draw it late in the game, you're likely to have spent most of your hand at that point, making it completely useless. Super Polymerization was this for a while, despite being a central card in the third season of GX. Unlike regular Polymerization, it cost a card from your hand and couldn't fuse cards in the hand (which makes trying to Fusion Summon with it very slow). Its first advantages (can't be negated and a Quick-Play) were okay, but its main attraction (can use opponent's cards in the Fusion) was less so. Simply put, it was highly unlikely that your opponent would have the right Monster on the field for you to fuse, unless you were trying to Summon a card with very vague requirements. As a result, Super Polymerization ended up being a much costlier, much slower version of Polymerization (which wasn't a very good card in the first place)... until Fusion monsters with very flexible material requirements, like the Attribute Heroes and Shaddolls, came out, turning the card into a powerful means of removal and getting it on the banlist for some time. Infinite Cards and Hieroglyph Lithograph remove the hand size limit, altering a fundamental rule of the game. However, if you have more than six cards in your hand, the thing you should be doing is playing as many as you can, not letting them sit in your hand and take up space... and you certainly shouldn't be playing a card designed to make them continue to sit in your hand and take up space. A handful of cards get advantages for having a lot of cards in the hand, but most of them are awful, and the few that aren't (most famously Slifer) would be considered overkill with six cards in the hand, much less seven. Instant-Win Condition cards often enter this territory, with a special mention being reserved for Final Countdown. It wins you the Duel in 20 turns, which is obviously quite powerful, but to use the card essentially requires that you dedicate your entire deck to drawing Final Countdown and then stalling for those turns. Not only does this give your opponent plenty of time to build up resources and stomp your face the moment you run out of defenses, but the overall strategy is incredibly boring to use. In recent years, thanks to so much generic support for every monster type, card type and the infamous Link Summoning, pretty much every card in the game has some sort of use. It may not be the best tool for the job, but it can do it you try hard enough. Examples include Shapesnatch or Morinphen, two notoriously terrible normal monsters in the TCG and OCG respectivly. The former is a Normal Level 5 Machine, one of the best type and level combos in the game. Cyber Dragon Nova and First of the Dragons can easily be made with him. Not to mention the pendulum normals which make such plays more viable. Then there are cards like Larvae Moth. There's no beating around the bush or secret strategy here. He's just useless in every way. As the metagame changes and different decks with differing weaknesses gain popularity, formerly useless cards can break out of this trope, becoming an Achilles' Heel or a powerful support to whatever's popular. For instance, Summoner's Art, a Spell which only searched the deck for high-level Normal Monsters which very few people would play, became an instant hit once Qliphorts broke into the scene, as that Spell could search for their very important Qliphort Scout. |
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| Useless Useful Spell / int_f367511c | featureApplicability |
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| Useless Useful Spell / int_f367511c | featureConfidence |
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| Yu-Gi-Oh! (Tabletop Game) | hasFeature |
Useless Useful Spell / int_f367511c |
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