Game Breaker / Elsword

New character/class additions or revamps tend to be this before being rebalanced, often due to a lack of damage normalization or some degree of Obvious Beta. Due to the effect that enhancement has on stats and damage, however, high raw damage output is not usually cause for long-term concern.

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.

Elsword

• 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.
• Sheath Knight's Sword Shield is reviled by many for its ability to continuously damage opponents just by getting close to him. Not only that, it gives a bleeding Damage Over Time debuff, denies opponents their running ability if upgraded, and with Brutal Slayer passive, has a chance of burning opponent's MP too. The fact that the attack doesn't flinch after 2 seconds of activation is the only saving grace.
• The Way of the Sword system (specifically, the Vitality side that lets him recover mana much faster). With character Reboots, Elsword is now able to freely switch between Wot S modes, with many staying almost permanently in Vitality.

Aisha

• Elemental Master's status fluctuates between "MP generation so high it obsoletes everything else" and "nerfed so hard as to be unplayable", and she's regarded as the "company's daughter" due to a perception of being very spoiled. With the Transcendence system's built in feature of resetting cooldowns on certain skill slots during awakening, expect EMs to flagrantly ignore what was once a minute-long cooldown on Meditation.
• Void Princess, with transcendence, gains Petit Angkor - Millions, a 100MP skill with extremely potent tracking, dozens of Angkors, and the option to chose a trait that burns 3MP per hit. This, on a VP built with high cost and cooldown reduction (thanks to the El Resonance system, an entirely separate can of worms) and used with the aforementioned Transcendence Skill Slot's built-in cooldown reset, results in a Void Princess that can throw legitimate Millions of Angkors at you, with no space to retaliate or do anything other than Mana Break. Combined with what many would blow off as a joke system, Memorize, it created a playstyle that was virtually indistinguishable from old-school infinite mana/zero cooldown hacks, and may be part of the reason why the Trans slot has gotten significantly nerfed.

Rena

• Out of all the character systems, Rena's seems to be the most favorable. What's especially notable is that it completely lacks any downsides, unlike systems that force a character to manage an alternate resource or lose out on skills, defenses that may serve to handicap or even inadvertently kill a character. This system has been subjected to numerous nerfs, with the latest one completely replacing the original bonuses (all speeds+MP Gain per NF bar) with ones that do not have a direct mechanical impact (Critical Chance+Damage, Resistances), as Rena had become notorious for casting Bravery tier skills in the middle of enemy combos thanks to the attack speed bonus.
• Grand Archer could perhaps be considered this in PvE as she has skills that can easily dispatch both groups of Mooks and bosses.
• Night Watcher's Briar Trap also makes the list, with the ability to apply the much-reviled Bleed debuff and reach the Bleed III stage even faster than Sword Shield, with a single cast. While the fact that it can be shaken off was originally hidden from players, an indicator has since been implemented.

Raven

• Reckless Fist: Known for having very high base damage and a Combo Breaker-breaker Active. Getting caught by an RF results in very large amounts of damage very quickly. While he does have Area of Effect skills to make relatively easy catches with, RF is primarily known for his absolutely absurd damage output.
  • 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 very next balance patch.

Eve

The most oppressive part of playing against any Eve is a fundamental lack of interactivity. Mana Conversion allows Eve to tap into substantial resources without engaging her opponent, and her generous air movement allows her to cross most maps without touching the ground. Sariel and Ultimate can fly above where the map's skybox renders, making meaningful interaction all but impossible. Eve also has her V-key, Code:Recovery, which paired with Mana Conversion means Eve is the only character with access to a direct HP-to-Resource and back system.

• 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.
  • 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 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 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.
• 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 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. Even dedicated Nemesis players think she's become too powerful.
• Finally, Code: Esencia epitomizes the fundamental issue with Elsword's summons. Oberon, Ophelia, and Sentry are all in permanent super armor and are not pushed, meaning that Eve can simply be pushed out of any given combo while a wall of summons stands between her and her opponent. Additionally, Eve's summons act as extra launch points for certain skills, including Mega Electron Ball and Tesla flare. With enough bodies, this is enough to cover the entire screen. Like Sariel above, Esencia also gains a passive that increases her passive MP recovery per second - while this is dependent on the number of summons, this all but guarantees Esencia will never run out of meat shields once she spawns one.

Chung

Base Chung is credited with the most oppressive kit of basic attacks in the game, with many strings leading into unsafe-to-punish Heavy Stance counters and an almost impossible to punish extra jump attack. On top of Heavy Stance, Chung on the whole has access to several quick Actives that safely chain into each other and double as catches, which makes it a herculean endeavor to meaningfully punish mistakes. Cannonball management also used to be a huge part of his early gameplay, but his advanced jobs pack passives that generally allow him to sidestep this extra resource management entirely.

• His current strongest PvP class is Comet Crusader, who boasts a near-unassailable defensive game with 1) one of the strongest approaches, 2) 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 screaming Special Active that ramps up his MP gain so high, his screams are self-refunding, 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.
• Following at a close second, Fatal Phantom has access to an exclusive passive which allows him to enter Berserk mode at 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 Super Armor 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 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.
  • Deadly Chaser->Fatal Phantom got a Mod slot for Shooting Star, transforming the skill from a barrage of small missiles into one that creates a long-lasting black hole on impact. The massive issue is that everything associated with this skill still comes with the built-in Ruthless (cancels Mana Break) trait, so for the entire time the black hole is active, the Fatal Phantom can take easy potshots at their imprisoned target. The abuse that comes with this skill and others like it has resulted in a rebalance patch in KR that removes the passive Ruthless feature of several skills, though this has reverted for standard Shooting Star, and the recently released Mod Burning Punisher also has passive Ruthless.
• Transform path Tactical Trooper originally got a half-pass due to heavy reliance on Seige Shelling, which made it easy to counter him in singles but made him a constant threat in teams. With the transition to Centurion, however, his toolkit has become substantially more oppressive: He gains a third Seige Shelling mode, kinetic bombardment, which creates a black hole effect that can easily trap targets in the direction he faces (the enemy can even be offscreen above Chung). His new >>^XXX combo also throws down a trio of grenades in front of him, adding another layer to his already suppressive ground coverage.

Ara

Ara's classes are generally high-top tier in PvP, mainly because of her high-speed continuous attacks. To compound this, her base class has access to two single-command loops that deal high damage and have low-to-zero KD, with little MP given to the target.

• 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.
• 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 Mana Broken that chain directly into each other. Bad enough with one; if two are involved you get 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.

Elesis

Can ignore defensive stances, deal 100% Critical Hit with certain attacks and lower cooldown in some skills.

• Blazing Heart, thanks to Avatar of Fire: an Active that converts burn debuffs in a local area into MP for her, at a rate of 10 per debuff, able to convert MP off of otherwise invincible targets. With the large variety of burns she can stack on a target though basic combos, this racks up to the maximum return of 120 MP very quickly, which allows her to also use Fire Wall - a spinning cyclone of fire that also locks on to nearby targets. This leads to a Cycle of Hurting where she uses Fire Wall, the target sustains burns and mana breaks^note or else sustains serious damage from Fire Wall and the BH's combos, she uses Avatar of Fire to collect a full refund of 110+ MP while they're down, and is then able to cast Fire Wall once again. To make this all even better for Blazing Heart, she has a passive which allows her to reduce a target's flame resistance, meaning that for an enemy player, even stacking perfect fire resistance is not enough to stop the Cycle of Hurting. ^note There is a patch that reduces the total number of fire-based debuff stacks she can inflict, which has reduced the amount of MP she can gain by using Avatar of Fire .

Add

Insane priority on many of his combos and can track enemies even better than CBS, while doing much more damage. The fact that he's a Glass Cannon and can easily go down himself if he isn't careful somewhat mitigates his Game-Breaker status.

• Mastermind - access to the ability to clock for MP at a rate of 10 every three seconds, is rewarded for being almost exclusively non-agressive. He has access to a large repertoire of attacks that home within a set radius, and a skill that causes certain normally-spread-shot attacks to home in on targets as well without the same reduction in damage that Code Battle Seraph suffers for the conversion. On top of this, his Ultimate Fury skill deals extreme damage with no hitstun. If a Mastermind uses Ultimate Fury, then immediately follows up with a skill with a long delay (which, bearing in mind the aforementioned resource clocking is criminally easy), you will eat the full force of that skill with no chance to mana break, and more likely than not be killed nigh-instantly by a class who's design intent seems to be "get away with doing as little as possible."
• Diabolic Esper, in particular, causes chaos because many of his Special Actives use DP as an alternative resource. DP, itself, replaces the Awakening bar and all related stats on Adds, meaning that Espers can tap into what amounts to a second MP bar with the ability to substantially adjust both the rate of acquisition and how much DP gets spent on use. On top of that, nearly all of his skills refund the unused resource (DP if MP is used and vice versa), such that a Diabolic Esper can effectively never run out once he gets snowballing. It is very safe to say that an Esper's effective resource acquisition rate is significantly higher than even three or five times that of other characters, and let's not even forget the fact that all of Diabolic Esper's skills either cover a wide Area of Effect, home in on targets in front of him, or both. If you attack and interrupt him during certain Actives, the hitboxes will stick around and hit you long enough for him to retaliate. He's recently been nerfed and his damage output per hit gutted, but that does nothing to change the fact that his insane one-button-for-all-problems utility options are still intact.

Lu/Ciel

These job paths bring considerable amount of grief into the Arena, mitigated by the fact that Ciel is "broken" in the opposite way, being known for having some of the worst hitboxes and leakiest combos in the game. It's not much of a stretch to say that the best thing that Ciel can do is act as a mana potion for Lu or switch to Lu. That being established, current grievances include:

• 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 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 Super Armor 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.

Rose

Despite the extremely limited combo game lifted straight from her source Dungeon Fighter Online, has access to all of her Active skills much sooner than any other character due to her ECP system. The system covers all Active costs with ECP instead of MP, and she begins the game with a full ECP bar in all play modes. Her gunshots are also not fully cancelled if her opponent interrupts the action. While this creates a small sense of realism (unlike the other characters' attacks, a gun only needs the trigger to be pulled to fire), it very easily leads to situations where Rose's interrupted shot comes out in the middle of an enemy combo.

• Storm Trooper has been strong since release due to her near-meditation like passive, which provides free MP to her for as long as she's in Over Strike mode. This allows her access to powerful utility special actives from the start of the match, as most will dump all of their ECP on Actives and buffs before the opponent can reach them. This also allows her to use a tracking drop laser before either player has even interacted, putting her at a significant early advantage.
• Freyja has access to aerial mobility only rivaled by Eve's and grenade attacks with sizeable Area of Effect damage that also home onto a target's location within a set distance. Pressure Grenade also stuns a target, meaning that Mana Breaking out is next to impossible if she lands a hit with one and continues the chain. Adding to this, her self-buff Blazing Bullet, while originally treated as a Special Active-tier move in DFO, is given the Active treatment in Elsword, including using ECP as a cost. This gives her access to a very powerful buff at the start of the match, and it's not uncommon for games to be decided by Freyjas who can get an early hit with their long-range Musket fire and loop it against a target that isn't even on screen.

Ain

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.

• Arme Thaumaturgy is another character capable of applying high Bleed stacks instantly with cheap actives purposed to do exactly that: Fantasiegebilde Speer lays a trap that deals twelve hits, with a 33% chance of stacking Bleed for each, while Zweit Sicheln is a 40MP active explicitly designed to inflict Bleed III in a single hit.
• Apostasia/Herrscher has Chaos Feld: The normal version of the skill is inoffensive enough, on par with Diabolic Esper's Void Field. However, when Ain awakens, Chaos Feld burns 5MP per hit - much more rapidly than even Needles Cutting.

Laby

The latest character addition to Elsword. Even with nerfs to certain skills, it's very clear that Laby has been built as a "worst hits" collection of many things that have previously been broken -and fixed!- over Elsword's lifespan.

• Her base class has access to aerial movement flexible enough to make Catastrophe and Eve green with envy, and all of her midair-dashes and jumps are covered in hitboxes, making her almost completely unapproachable in mid-air. Like with Ain, Lu, and Rose before her, Laby also possesses incredibly generous backwards hitboxes on most of her normals and possesses very little, if any, ending lag on her attacks, compounding this lack of accountability. Her base active Andromeda also serves as a combination of teleport and escape button (see below in Past Game Breakers), at less than half the cost of a Mana Break, which allows her to easily follow up with a ranged attack or Special Active. Her Awakening attack, like Add's, does not pause the game, but it covers an enormous area (about the same size as RH's Charged Bolt) and inflicts a debuff unique to Laby, Groggy, which is even better than pre-nerf Sand Blast; Groggy stuns the target and denies them their controls for two seconds, including mana break, and shuts down the Super Armor attacks which are the only way to safely approach Laby in the first place. She gets to apply this groggy state with several additional skills in her Eternity Winner path. Like Ain, base Laby's kit is so wholly oppressive that her job path additions have barely been explored. Most of her normals leave sticky hitboxes that are the size of Raven's Maximum Cannon skill, and last nearly as long, meaning practically no precision is required to string together her infinites.
• What's most telling about Laby's grotesque power level (in both modes) is that Ko G announced the next wave of character revamps to bring everyone else up to par with her. The last character to be so fundamentally broken that a full-cast revamp was required was Add.

Non-character specific

• Hyper Actives in general, though their damage is nerfed in PvP.
• The mounts can be pretty much this since they can make you move faster and has very powerful attacks. But especially the Holy Fox and the Oberon bikes, due to exploits. Rickshaw Phorus are no slouch either, going well into the billions of ED ingame due to amazing mob clearing power.
• 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 Difficult, but Awesome, 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 Rose and Arme Thaumaturgy. Crimson Rose/Black Massacre can reach high stacks quickly with a single Special Active, while Arme's actives are designed to apply the debuff quickly. These include 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 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 name "Attack Speed" is a bit misleading, as it also decreases the time your character spends in hitstun (the stat has in fact been recently rebranded "Action Speed" to reflect this). 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 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 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.
  • The fact that nerfs towards excessive A.Speed have been made in the past makes it all the more glaring that two of Chung's three paths have untouched A.Speed passives: Comet Crusader's Veteran Technique gives him 8%, and Fatal Phantom's Tussle Technique gives him a horrifying 10% increase. This boost gives Chung an A.Speed advantage that simply cannot be compensated for by any means, and is a large part of his unstoppability.
• The Freeze Bug: An issue that has been in the game longer than Laby with no signs of getting fixed any time soon. The Freeze bug causes an affected character to experience the mother of all speed debuffs, severely reducing their movement speed if affected by Freeze 1 and effectively eliminating their jumps at Freeze 3. Water attribute, already highly valued because it decreases target defenses and Action Speed, is unquestionably the best attribute in the game because of this bug. There's no way to know when it'll strike, and most means of addressing the bug (character relogging, relaunching the game, or a complete reinstall) are temporary at best.
• Escape buttons used to be restricted to a few characters, resulting in a very polarizing PvP experience that was 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 "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 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.
  • 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).
• For the pets, the Kumihos (Miho, Shiho, Naho, and Beeho) are considered to be best pet for PvE.

Past Game Breakers

• Common across all classes, Elsword's Roll Skill is a fast, reliable Stoic move that comes out quick, costs next to nothing, and, thanks to unforeseen synergy with Lord Knight's Autoguard passive, can be used in the middle of an opponent's combo to revenge-catch. Matches against Elswords often still revolve around the utility of Roll, as it can be used to catch if the opponent messes up their combo - particularly if Elsword is knocked out of the air. However, with the escape button nerf below, it isn't nearly as centralizing as it was before.
• 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.
• Void Princess, while originally not qualifying for this list, gained a new skill to match EM's Shining Body - Shadow Body, which has followed a similar "nerfed-to-unusablilty/buffed to game breaker" curve. Originally, it gave VP Super Armor for 19.5 seconds (Killing Blow skill trait) with a measly 20 second cooldown. The tradeoff is supposed to be unrealistically harsh - VP becomes unable to use her Z button attacks, which would cripple just about every other class. This being Aisha, though, relying solely on her X attacks (shooting fireballs) and skills is easy enough to render a Z key unnecessary, and effectively guaranteed a win against melee-focused classes. The stoic property on this skill, as well as Dimension Witch's matching skill Energetic Body, has been swapped out with a physical attack and MP recovery buff, which basically kills the skill for Aisha's playerbase.
• 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.
• On launch, Rena's Nature Spirit system used one of the alternative resources it gave Rena to add a heavy-hitstunning explosion to actives and combo finishers, which eventually led to Rena having the safest, most risk-free combo game, bar none, with everything being safe to lead into everything else. With the character renewals, however, the hitstun of this bonus attack has been patched out. However, during the Rena renewal, the Nature system's defensive parameters were tweaked, making it fairly easy for Rena players to pull together 100% Damage Reduction in the Arena. With so many Renas No-Sell-ing even Raid Boss attacks, this feature of Nature Spirit was removed entirely.
• Grand Archer: Post-Transcendence, her homing attacks are also likely to ignore a patch that was implemented earlier (Homing projectiles should disappear if they meet an invincible hitbox), meaning that a player can Mana Break from Guided Arrow or Wind Blast and still get hit by the skills anyway when they recover. This super persistent tracking was originally patched out because it made skills like Dread Chase far too strong, and with its apparent return (intentional or not) in Guided Arrow, it's easy to see why they had to remove it in the first place (And why they've removed it from Rena yet again. Certain skills still possess this trait, though there are only a few and they're usually expensive to use).
• After renewals, Veteran Commander gained access to Mental Break, a skill which would cut off a target's MP gain with a debuff that lasted longer than the skill's cooldown. With access to Raven's KD-resetting X-drops, VC gained a brief reputation as "One Combo Man." The good news is that the debuff duration on Mental Break has been slashed. For a time, however, his 200MP skills' damages were crazy high, which made it so that most matches against VC ended when he decided to stop tanking and one shot you with any of those skills.
• 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 upwards of eleven million damage. Thankfully this was fixed one week after the revamp.
• Asura has quick stoic approaches and high MP regen. The game-breaking part was that, on release, she was able to combine single-command loops with MP burning and stalling moves to effectively guarantee a single-catch win.
• Crimson Avenger. All three of Elesis's jobs have Stoic Strong, which used to interrupt enemy combos, and in some cases allowed her counterattack (this has since been removed, and Stoic - Strong now behaves the same way Elsword's does). CrA buffed this skill further, causing it to deal rebound damage when triggered. In other words, she literally punished you for attacking her. A more recent trend with Avengers was that they cycled Injection Stigma, a skill very similar to Infinity Sword's Sword Shield. This includes the fact that it can apply Bleed stacks quickly and deals constant passive damage to enemies nearby (which hasn't been changed). The differences are that the skill only applies hitstun on cast (which covers an area of about one character's height in all directions around Elesis), and cost next to nothing. Stigma used to cost a negligible amount of HP instead of MP to cast. If her HP was less than 35%, it ignored the HP cost entirely, making it completely free. This has since been patched so Stigma costs 30MP again.
• Lunatic Psyker had a horrible oversight in that his >>^ZZZ combo, a very safe, non-committing string of aerial projectiles, could trigger his Nasod Armor combos, which basically sum up to "Mash buttons on hit." This turned every match with LPs involved into "who can land a hit of >>^ZZZ first?" This was patched out very soon after his release.
• KoG clearly hadn't learned their lesson from the Fire Wall debacle, as Mastermind had access to a cheap, spammable, almost-impossible to miss Tenacity skill of his own in Dynamo Configuration - Charged Impulser. Formerly costing 80MP when Enhanced, DC-CI summons a unit that sucks enemies in, with an effective range of about the entire half of the screen in front of Add thanks to the suction. Because suction forces a silenced effect on affected targets, it's very difficult for most characters to run away. Plus, if you turn around to destroy the One-Hit-Point Wonder unit, you're exactly in a position the Add wants you in. The skill also sported an enormous screen-freeze time, so the Add could close distances and attack you even if by some miracle the skill missed. Finally, it cannot be stressed enough that this incredible utility skill cost 80MP on a character who can freely generate MP. No matter what you did against him, a match against a T.Mastermind or Dominator would eventually devolve into an endless string of Charged Impulsar cycling. Recent nerfs to this skill have targeted it's screen freeze time, cooldown time, and bumped the cost up from 80 to 110MP.
• Dynamo Configuration - Reverse Field was 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 fed 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 had 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 had effectively job changed from Veteran Commander to Mad Paradox, and Paradox's insane utility kit made it much easier to pull off. Due to the existence of this infinite, DC:RF and Energy Boom -a Base Add skill that also burned MP- were deleted entirely during the character Reboots.
• Noblesse/Royal Guard: The dominant strategy used to be to clock for Mana and constantly cycle through Soul Sigil, a relatively low-cost "buff" skill that summons a sigil behind the caster and allies that shoots off homing missiles on a set timer. Unlike most other homing skills in the game, which use the casting point as the homing radius, the effective homing radius on Sigil's missiles is centered around the missile itself, and they have considerable horizontal range. These missiles also apply the "Slow" debuff, meaning that Noblesse can very effectively whittle away at an opponent's health without needing to take any risks, and if their MP gets low? Trick question. It never gets low: they can switch to the resting character. They also had a switch combo that had, to players' knowledge, an infinite range hitbox. See for yourself here. The abuse of this strategy has died out with the removal of hitstun on Soul Sigil's projectiles.
• Dreadlord/Chilliarch: Ruinous Impact was known for one-shotting players almost as soon as its skill note came out, which negated all forms of defense. The saving grace here was that, unlike Energy Spurt above, Ruinous Impact has a fairly short, strictly horizontal range directly in front of the caster.
• 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 Hitbox Dissonance. The patch, unfortunately, caused an entirely different kind of Hitbox Dissonance 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 Super Mode buff, 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 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.
• One could argue that the gear and sets in the game are the great equalizer between game breaking classes and those that aren't (which, going by the list above, is really not very many at all). The problem therein is that gear is available to all characters regardless of game-breaker status or lack thereof. Of particular note is the Ring of Fury, which used to provide a free Awakening Bead at the start of an Arena match, which therefore synergized especially well with the Secret Dungeon season 3 sets, all of which had effects that triggered on Awakening. The ring is banned from use in official tournaments, but there is no doubt that you will see it in the Arena proper. Continuing off of that, out of the S3 sets, the Glitter Amethyst set was probably the most broken, providing 10% of the wearer's HP upon Awakening. That got nerfed very soon into the run, but even after that it wasn't uncommon to fight wearers of the set who could tank to a bead, awaken, and heal off any damage they'd incurred.
• The Ms. Elrios Tiara was an event item given to players during the Beauty Contest 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 Ko G realized that the effect was spectacularly damaging to the game, and they haven't created a single item with that effect since.
• 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 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. 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
• Specs A and B were stats that focused exclusively on character systems. On characters with poor systems or system synergy (Aisha, Raven), they were dump stats, but for characters with already-oppressive systems (Rena, Chung, Ara, Lu) these became critical to their build. The stacking of system bonuses resulted in massive MP refunds or cost reductions, creating grossly disproportionate ratios of cost/reward. Rena, for example, treated Spec B as an additional MP Cost Reduction socket, and could stack so much that Strength and Bravery tier skills (200-300MP) cost the same as Tenacities (100MP). These have been phased out with the latest update to sockets, possibly due to the huge imbalance in benefits between characters.
• The secret set that most recently broke the meta was Sand Blast, which could freeze targets solid for two seconds without the ability to 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. With the introduction of Heroic and Elrianode gear, Secret sets have become largely obsolete.