History GameBreaker / Elsword

* Some accuse Lord Knight of being one due to his mix of very useful abilities and general effectiveness in both PvE and [[PlayerVersusPlayer PvP]]. After the skill tree revamp, the accusations have mostly died off, though he retains most of his PvE effectiveness.

* Grand Archer could perhaps be considered this in PvE as she has skills that can easily dispatch both groups of Mooks and bosses.

* Code: Battle Seraph is considered one of the top characters in PvE viability due to having many skills with wide area-of-effect for both clearing and bossing. An average CBS can solo maps with weak monsters quickly and easily just by using Energy Needles in Fusion Mode. Her Transcendence passives are also quite good, granting improved mana regeneration when in range of Kugel Blitz and and cooldown reduction for all skills (except her Hyper Active and Extreme Heavenly Love) when Energy Needles is activated.

* Both of Sakra Devanam's level 55 skills, Flying Kite and Suppression, are game breakers, costing 0 MP and being impossible to mana-break out of. Landing either skill tends to swing the match heavily in her favor. Due to the way her skills work, she can potentially do one strong skill after another - and some of those skills can lower the enemies' defense too. Notably, Ara's resource generation was hit by an exclusive nerf, wherein her ability to generate orbs on awakening was completely removed. Ostensibly, this is remedied in PvE with new potions, but this nerf conspicuously left other awakening-into-resource systems (Doom Bringer, Chung's Berserk mode, Rena's Nature system, etc) completely intact. While this change severely hurt Shakti, and completely deleted the potential for Vishnu to use two game-winning skills back-to-back, it was an effectively meaningless change for Devi, who can still tap into Life Swap at will.

** Nerfed examples include Furious Blade, who's Fine Swordsmanship (now [[https://elwiki.net/w/Focus Focus]]) passive was split to give significantly less A.Speed in [[PlayerVersusPlayer PvP]] than PvE, and Rena's Nature System, which had its A.Speed boost deleted entirely.

** With the Re:boots, all characters now have dedicated escape skills available from base class, of highly variable quality. Two are slow, and often put the user in a vulnerable a position (Rena, Ara), others make do just with getting a character far away (Raven, Eve, Add, Lu, Ain, Laby), while the very best either knock the attacker away like Elsword's old Destruction Mode shout (Chung, Aisha) or work so quickly and position the character close enough to counter-combo (Elsword, Elesis). Rose's is particularly noteworthy, since a bug exists that can prevent the skill from going on cooldown properly (all other escape skills have a 3 minute cooldown in PvP).

* Battle Magician's Energy Spurt used to be the definitive killer move in both [[PlayerVersusPlayer PvP]] and PvE, due to scaling exponentially with her level and bypassing all defenses. Thankfully, its damage has been nerfed to more reasonable levels.

* Code: Battle Seraph's ''Sweep Rolling - Tri Vulcan'' quickly became this - though a very, very weak spell by itself, combine it with Fusion Mode and suddenly the game's brain vomits all over itself and makes the ability deal [[UpToEleven upwards of eleven million damage]]. ''Thankfully'' this was fixed one week after the revamp.

* The Ms. Elrios Tiara was an event item given to players during the BeautyContest themed Ms. Elrios event. Elsword is no stranger to overpowered (but temporary) event items, but the Tiara had a unique stat printed on it: [Mana Regeneration per second +5]. This singlehandedly changed the entire nature of the game from one of generating mana through combos to spamming skills nonstop. Because of how it could sit in a character's mailbox without burning its expiration timer, it was months before they were all gone. Even [[ScapegoatCreator Nexon/KoG]] realized that the effect was spectacularly damaging to the game, and ''[[LetUsNeverSpeakOfThisAgain they haven't created a single item with that effect since.]]''

* The name "Attack Speed" is a bit misleading, as it also decreases the time your character spends in hitstun. This leads to something of an A.Speed arms race: you need to have high speed to safely combo characters that have higher speeds. If this gap is not closed, the targeted player can [[ButtonMashing mash]] skills to get free combo reversals. Further compounding this issue are passives and external systems that increase A.Spd beyond the maximum socketable 130%. Party Attack Speed bottoms boost A.Spd by a percent of what you already have (130% + 10% = 143%, not 140%), causing them to be highly desirable for high level [=PvP=]. While the bottoms alone do not elevate any one character, character-specific systems tip the scales too far and can make characters too fast to combo even with them.

* Escape buttons on the whole resulted in a very polarizing [=PvP=] experience, often built entirely on trying to play around them. In most cases, it was even possible to counter-catch and combo with them, making them even better than the [[ComboBreaker "better Mana Break"]] they were originally supposed to be. The system was strained to near-breaking with Arme Thaumaturgy's Fragarach, but it finally did collapse with Erbluhen Emotion's Elfe skill. For 100MP, Elfe allowed Ain to dash away and leave a trap when attacked from behind (or, as with Western Fire above, if a [[ButtMonkey Raven]] attacked him at all.) The single greatest escape button in the game, it cost the bare minimum of a Mana Break while revenge-catching the opponent and setting up a return combo. After Elfe, all escape buttons were hit with a massive blanket nerf, removing the functionality from Destruction and Annihilation modes, Stoic Strong, Western Fire, Fragarach, and Elfe. It also removed Shadow Step's ability both to escape Raven's core shield and to backslide entirely (though for some reason Eve's core escape still works), and Lord Knight's Auto-guard was changed to automatically knock down an opponent rather than block, because the block function allowed him to Roll immediately after for an easy revenge catch at close range.

Examples that continue to break the game after rebalances are often the result of a disproportionate utility-to-cost ratio, resource generation, and/or the ability to counter anything that gets thrown at them. In PvP, this often results in a flowchart that doesn’t change or react at all regardless of what the opponent does.

As of Summer 2019, PvP has been locked into a Laby/Chung/Eve meta.

* Some accuse Lord Knight of being one due to his mix of very useful abilities and general effectiveness in both PvE and PvP. After the skill tree revamp, the accusations have mostly died off, though he retains most of his PvE effectiveness.
* After the Skill Tree revamp, Rune Slayer's Freeze and Heat Runes made him go from "mediocre" to "absolutely broken" in PvP. The reason for this? The concept of both abilities is simple, a Fire or Ice rune is created in front of the user, dealing initial damage and stun and then dealing minor damage every few moments while the opponent is in the Rune. The catch? Like any other Active skills, ''every single one of these hits has a normal chance to activate your weapon's element''. Combine this with Dark III-enchanted weapons (giving chance to siphon enemy's HP and MP by normal attacks) and suddenly the damage is not only ''not'' minor, but all of the Rune Slayer's mana problems are suddenly gone. He also has an attack that almost no other characters can pass through: the "flying aerial rune" combo that can be repeated endlessly. Other adjustments he received as well as his skill selection has pushed him above even Lord Knight in the eyes of many in terms of Strongest Elsword class.

** Mod Maximum Dive allows RH to teleport directly to a target within a screen's width of the cast. However, it also had an absolutely massive vertical range, more than covering the maximum height difference in any PvP map. This was nerfed in the [[ObviousRulePatch very next balance patch.]]

** In PvP, Needles Cutting is considered broken for being a 100MP (80 with Light trait) homing catch capable of rapidly draining the opponent's MP - each needle typically burns 2 MP, but using Tenacity skill damage boosters can increase it to 3 MP, which adds up with the skill having over 100 needles. In addition, due to 1 bead of Awakening being equivalent to 100 hits inflicted OR 50 hits taken, the opponent hit by the skill will gain twice as much Awakening as the CBS, possibly putting them at the disadvantage of having more beads and therefore being able to awaken less often for catches. If used early, Needles Cutting can also force a target to remain below 100MP, making it impossible for them to mana break and escape. The mana burn problem is best exemplified with [[https://clips.twitch.tv/ObservantLittleFishRiPepperonis this clip.]]
** Battle Seraph/Sariel is also the only character with a passive that grants a flat passive MP Recovery increase (see the Ms. Elrios Tiara entry below) and [[TheScrappy it shows]]. Sariel is widely despised in PvP due to her ability to clock for free MP, only further being exasperated by her nigh unparalleled aerial mobility.

* His current strongest PvP class is Comet Crusader, who boasts a near-unassailable defensive game with 1) one of the strongest approaches, 2) [[AreaOfEffect several screaming full-screen]] catches that work as godly Okizeme, and 3) passives that grant him an additional 20% MP gain for every interaction. Finally, with Transcendence IP gains yet another [[ScreamingWarrior screaming Special Active]] that ramps up his MP gain so high, his screams are self-refunding, [[https://puu.sh/uD06A/e3b47a68da.gif leading into matches where IP can easily claim victory just by screaming repeatedly.]] He is considered hideously broken even compared to other characters in his tier, and suffice to say, if a CC catches you first the match has just about been decided.
** Chung really struck the jackpot with the 3rd job update, as Iron Paladin->Comet Crusader gains passives of much greater quality than other characters', cramming what most classes get in two passives into one. Not only does he get the same skill-focused ones as the other characters, he gets a free attack-debuff that affects his enemies passively when he gets hit. This makes the already tough to crack Paladin nearly unkillable as a Crusader, and makes the resources gained by being hit grossly disproportionate to the HP he loses. The spare passive slot is set aside for considerable Awakening buffs. Surprisingly, where other 3rd job passives are designed to steer characters to using certain skills, these passives are both almost entirely non-conditional. This Chung path in particular has suprassed ''Devi'' in terms of PvP brokenness.[[note]]To give further context to how stupidly busted this is, the North American 1v1 tournament had [=CCs=] in ''four out of six'' finalist slots, with the other contenders being another Chung (Fatal Phantom) and a Rose (Minerva), and CC's passives allowed them to bypass the Freezing Grenade infinite combo that allowed the Minerva to reach Finals in the first place.[[/note]]

* Yama Raja is infamous for possessing the ability to resurrect upon death, a full-screen, gravity-powered Suppression skill that answers nearly every problem, and low-cost, low cooldown, high damage skills that can't be [[ComboBreaker Mana Broken]] that chain directly into each other. Bad enough with one; if two are involved you get [[https://youtu.be/JoPiV5ubpIg this]]. On top of that, she has access to one of the only dedicated projectile-reflecting skills in the game, was given a black-hole-esque skill by Transcendence that only costs orbs, and, provided she has enough orbs stocked up, can resurrect with up to a third of her maximum HP. Unlike Wind Sneaker, this resurrect-recovery is applied immediately, so it can't be worked around with debuffs. It does, however, force all of her skills into cooldown, a saving grace against her as previously it wasn't uncommon to fight Rajas who would stall and cycle her resurrections to then end the match with her Hyper Active or other powerful skills. She held the title of Goddess of PvP, as almost nothing anyone can throw at her puts her at a significant disadvantage.

Originally billed as a character for more advanced players, Ain had already exhibited some major power balance issues within the first days of his release. His Basic projectiles are huge: larger than Aisha's fireballs with the speed and range of Rose's bullets, easily hitting a platform above Ain. Paired with his air-dash and stomp attacks, Base Ain's kit is so strong that they form the core of his PvP playstyle for all three paths, only occasionally being supplemented with Herrscher or Richter's dive combos. He also possesses some of the widest backwards hitboxes in the game, allowing him to comfortably combo in reverse. Schwert Platzen, which is listed in the former game breaker section due to a bug, is still taken as a core PvP skill for all Ains just because it increases the potency of these normals further.

* [[LimitBreak Hyper Actives]] in general, though their damage is nerfed in PvP.

* The name "Attack Speed" is a bit misleading, as it also decreases the time your character spends in hitstun. This leads to something of an A.Speed arms race: you need to have high speed to safely combo characters that have higher speeds. If this gap is not closed, the targeted player can [[ButtonMashing mash]] skills to get free combo reversals. Further compounding this issue are passives and external systems that increase A.Spd beyond the maximum socketable 130%. Party Attack Speed bottoms boost A.Spd by a percent of what you already have (130% + 10% = 143%, not 140%), causing them to be highly desirable for high level PvP. While the bottoms alone do not elevate any one character, character-specific systems tip the scales too far and can make characters too fast to combo even with them.
** Nerfed examples include Furious Blade, who's Fine Swordsmanship (now [[https://elwiki.net/w/Focus Focus]]) passive was split to give significantly less A.Speed in PvP than PvE, and Rena's Nature System, which had its A.Speed boost deleted entirely.

* All Aishas have MP charging and Teleport, which previously allowed them to win PvP on large maps just by running away from the opponent with Teleport and charging as they try to catch up. This has been fixed to where Teleport now costs an additional 50 MP and goes on a 4 second cooldown whenever used consecutively in PvP, preventing players from abusing it.
* For a time after her class revamp and skill tree revamp, Elemental Master was crazy buffed and basically ruled PvP for a time in KR. This is mainly because her Meditation (MP regen increase skill) got super charged, and she gains a lightning shower skill which basically amounts to a nigh-full screen stun.

* Battle Magician's Energy Spurt used to be the definitive killer move in both PvP and PvE, due to scaling exponentially with her level and bypassing all defenses. Thankfully, its damage has been nerfed to more reasonable levels.

* Crimson Rose has very high damage multipliers that activate when she hits targets with the Bleed debuff, which gets passively applied when using her chain-gun combos and skills (these have since been toned down in PvP). Western Fire also used to be a combo breaker nearly as effective as Elesis's Stoic - Strong and uses ECP instead of MP to cover the cost. This was particularly problematic for Ravens, as an earlier patch was implemented to compensate for some previous HitboxDissonance. The patch, unfortunately, caused an entirely different kind of HitboxDissonance in that Raven is considered to be ''hitting the front and back of a target simultaneously'' with his standard attacks, while the trigger condition for Western Fire was "when Rose is attacked from behind." It took stoic or prediction on the level of ''mind reading'' for Raven players to effectively fight Crimson Roses who were aware of this.
* Before nerfs, Base Ain's SuperMode buff, [[GratuitousGerman Schwert Platzen]] caused certain moves to cancel a target's Mana Break charge. The most infamous application of this was his ^Z loop, which became an infinite (a combo that never knocks down) when used with Schwert activated. Using the combo in PvP would leave essentially no options for the opponent to escape unless the [[StealthPun executor]] messed up or the opponent got knocked out of the stomp's hitbox long enough for them to run away.
* Arme Thaumaturgy's Autosuggestion raises his and his teammates' maximum HP and MP by significant amounts. Previously, raising the maxiumum HP also caused '''current HP''' to be increased by a similar amount, keeping this raised amount even after the buff faded. This meant that Autosuggestion was also the most powerful healing skill in a game where healing in PvP is usually minimal and gradual at best. Against classes with a low damage to hits ratio like Battle Seraph, Thaumaturgy's healing meant the match was all but impossible to win before the healing capacity of Autosuggestion was removed.
* Erbluhen Emotion's Blatt Blume Rein was once broken in PvP due to its massive healing - on release it healed 6% HP and MP per second with a duration of 10 seconds for a total of 60%. With the Reversed skill trait (now removed) and the [Enhanced] skill effect, the MP cost went from 300MP to '''144MP'''. This meant that [=EEs=] could simply let their opponent attack them until they had enough MP, escape the combo, and use Blume Rein to negate all the damage they had taken. On top of this, [=EE=] has a passive that raises his max MP to 450MP, meaning the skill heals 270MP without ERP or other ways of increasing max MP. In other words,[=EEs=] could potentially gain 126MP for using a skill that cost 144MP - nearly a full refund. It was later nerfed to 2%, 1%, and finally its current value of 0.5% per second.

* Escape buttons on the whole resulted in a very polarizing PvP experience, often built entirely on trying to play around them. In most cases, it was even possible to counter-catch and combo with them, making them even better than the [[ComboBreaker "better Mana Break"]] they were originally supposed to be. The system was strained to near-breaking with Arme Thaumaturgy's Fragarach, but it finally did collapse with Erbluhen Emotion's Elfe skill. For 100MP, Elfe allowed Ain to dash away and leave a trap when attacked from behind (or, as with Western Fire above, if a [[ButtMonkey Raven]] attacked him at all.) The single greatest escape button in the game, it cost the bare minimum of a Mana Break while revenge-catching the opponent and setting up a return combo. After Elfe, all escape buttons were hit with a massive blanket nerf, removing the functionality from Destruction and Annihilation modes, Stoic Strong, Western Fire, Fragarach, and Elfe. It also removed Shadow Step's ability both to escape Raven's core shield and to backslide entirely (though for some reason Eve's core escape still works), and Lord Knight's Auto-guard was changed to automatically knock down an opponent rather than block, because the block function allowed him to Roll immediately after for an easy revenge catch at close range.

* The Polar Bear costume suit was originally also distributed as a permanent event prize, and seemed harmless enough. It was a goofy suit that at first didn't seem all that remarkable, until it was discovered that it caused many characters' attacks to [[HitboxDissonance hit behind them]] while worn. The utter dominance of this item in PvP prompted a reform of item model and hitbox properties, including a patch that normalized hitboxes across all of a character's weapon costumes. [[IgnoredEpiphany This makes it all the more bizarre that characters released after this patch often come with backwards attack hitboxes on normals.]][[note]]See Lu, Rose, and Ain[[/note]]

* The Way of the Sword system (specifically, the Vitality side that lets him recover mana much faster)

* Taking up the mantle, Code: Nemesis has been treated extremely kindly by the Transcendence patches, with several major buffs that have placed her at the very top, a place she hasn't seen since soon after her release in S1. To wit: she has access to improved maneuverability, allowing her to fly higher than most stages even render in some places, an aerial combo that costs next to nothing, lays down sticky hitboxes, and allows her to continue aerial movement after it's been completed (which also allows her to re-use the combo for as long as she has air dashes). She has a much more rewarding Mana Conversion than her sisters, and [[http://elwiki.net/w/Cheat_Code:_Destruction a passive that drastically improves her Mana gain with Queen's Throne active, while simultaneously reducing the cooldown on one of her most powerful skills to a measly three seconds.]] [[EverybodyHasStandards Even dedicated Nemesis players think she's become too powerful.]]

* His current strongest PvP class is Iron Paladin, who boasts a near-unassailable defensive game with 1) one of the strongest approaches, 2) [[AreaOfEffect several screaming full-screen]] catches that work as godly Okizeme, and 3) passives that grant him an additional 20% MP gain for every interaction. Finally, with Transcendence IP gains yet another [[ScreamingWarrior screaming Special Active]] that ramps up his MP gain so high, his screams are self-refunding, [[https://puu.sh/uD06A/e3b47a68da.gif leading into matches where IP can easily claim victory just by screaming repeatedly.]] He is considered hideously broken even compared to other characters in his tier, and suffice to say, if an IP catches you first the match has just about been decided.

* Following at a close second, Deadly Chaser has access to an exclusive passive which allows him to enter Berserk mode at a 50% chance off of any number of awakening beads. Keeping in mind that Berserk mode also gives Chung access to infinite cannonballs for the duration, it was laughably common to see Chasers who's entire game plan revolved around using a Ring of Fury at the start of a game to go straight into dumping heavy-artillery skills prior to the [=RoF=]'s nerf. To top this off, it is also very common to see Chasers who string SuperArmor commands one after the other, leaving opponents with very little leeway to capitalize on their mistakes. Alongside this, Intense Showtime also reduces the cost and cooldown on his special actives, including the impossible to [[ComboBreaker mana break]] Bullet Blitz, a skill that has a nearly full-screen range, and Shooting Star, a skill on the same level as Dread Chase in terms of being a highly damaging homing skill that cannot be mana broken. Shooting Star now has been tweaked to where it's possible to mana break on the last few missiles but not before, however the large amount of damage it inflicts often results with some players opting to take the skill head on in case they're defeated before they can even mana break from it at all.

** Dynamo Configuration - Reverse Field is quite possibly the single greatest active in the game, boasting homing, super armor, multihit, and mana burn properties, and able to stall for several seconds. It's almost impossible to miss with the attack, and also feeds into Esper's 100-to-0 Infinite combo.
** Speaking of that 100-to-0 infinite, Mod Mind Break is the centerpiece of that problem. Unlike Mental Crash before it, M.Mind Break denies targets half of their MP gain. However, because Paradox has so many skills that burn MP, this is easily enough to keep opponents trapped below mana break range for their entire health bar. Additionally, if the target somehow does manage to escape or get knocked down, Mind Break has always been able to target invincible enemies, meaning you aren't safe from MP denial. One-Combo Man (see below) has effectively job changed from Veteran Commander to Mad Paradox, and Paradox's insane utility kit makes it ''much'' easier to pull off.

* Diabla/Demonio: Their switch-combos, while impressive to watch, are not coded to actually connect with targets all that well. To compensate for this, KoG gave them extremely [[HitboxDissonance disjointed hitboxes and suction effects]], such that by doing these combos they can catch targets that don't even appear to get hit or take damage. On top of this, their transformation skills (Altar of Evil and Transcendence) turn the character into a mount, essentially. While they do have to deal with restricted speed and inability to Mana Break, they are in SuperArmor for the entire duration and their attacks cover a sizeable area, including a homing projectile with next to no cooldown time. The only option opposing players have when faced with a D/D team using these skills is to stay away until they run out.

* The "Bleed" status debuff. Originally exclusively available to Veteran Commander, this status effect deals high, direct-to-HP-damage calculated off of the stats of the user's weapon, stacks up to three tiers, and is now widely available among the cast. The issue is that while the original concept was for the debuff to be DifficultButAwesome, requiring precise combo-work and active-cycling to reach the third tier, several characters have a criminally easy time slapping the third Bleed stack, often automatically and nearly instantaneously. This is also the cause for much flak against Infinity Sword (Sword Shield) and Night Watcher (Briar Trap), which both are able to apply the debuff this way. Newer additions include Crimson Avenger and Crimson Rose - the former can keep a skill similar to Sword Shield up perpetually, as it costs next to nothing and can passively stack Bleed for free, while the latter can reach high stacks quickly with a single Special Active. Ain's Arme Thaumaturgy path also joins the Bleed club with actives that are designed to apply the debuff quickly, including a trap that has a 33% chance of applying Bleed stacks with each of its dozen or so hits, and an active that, in a single strike, is explicitly designed to apply Bleed III in one hit. Thankfully, Bleed's effects can be mitigated by taking Wind element resistance, but [[GuideDangIt because the fact that Bleed is tied to the Wind attribute is shown nowhere in game]], it, especially the quickly stacking "Bleed Free", is still quite potent.
* The secret set that most recently broke the meta was Sand Blast, which could freeze targets solid for two seconds without the ability to [[ComboBreaker break]] or stack resistance like with Petrify - more than long enough to kill them. The ability to break from this petrification has been patched in, but plenty of players became dependent on the set and continued to use it, even in its weakened state.

* The Ms. Elrios Tiara was an event item given to players during the BeautyPageant themed Ms. Elrios event. Elsword is no stranger to overpowered (but temporary) event items, but the Tiara had a unique stat printed on it: [Mana Regeneration per second +5]. This singlehandedly changed the entire nature of the game from one of generating mana through combos to spamming skills nonstop. Because of how it could sit in a character's mailbox without burning its expiration timer, it was months before they were all gone. Even [[ScapegoatCreator Nexon/KoG]] realized that the effect was spectacularly damaging to the game, and ''[[LetUsNeverSpeakOfThisAgain they haven't created a single item with that effect since.]]''