http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TooAwesomeToUse

"But what if another one shows up?!?"



"By that argument," said Nikabrik, "your Majesty will never use it until it is too late." C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian "We are certainly in great need," answered Caspian. "But it is hard to be sure we are at our greatest. Supposing there came an even worse need and we had already used it?""By that argument," said Nikabrik, "your Majesty will never use it until it is too late."

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It's flashy. It's unstoppable.

It is also single-use and impossibly scarce.

...Yup, it's going to end up sitting safe and sound in your inventory until the very end.

Games such as RPGs featuring an inventory system are prone to giving you items that are Too Awesome to Use. It could be an item that heals all your stats and makes you invulnerable for an extended period of time. It could be a special power that lets you fly, or a Status Buff that lets you destroy the universe with the snap of a finger. It could be a Superweapon with an extremely limited amount of ammo, or an ultimate sword that breaks after a certain number of uses.

It's useful, awesome, and practical — unfortunately, you're never going to use the item outside of maybe the last boss (as you wouldn't need it afterwards), either because you're afraid to waste such a valuable treasure and will be waiting for that one good opportunity to use it... and that opportunity never comes, or maybe because it simply pains you to imagine having it missing from your inventory. This goes double if you never know what and how many unexpected and arbitrary-difficulty challenges the game might throw at you any next moment (and jRPGs love doing that), so you feel compelled to always hold to a failsafe or multiple just in case.note Which is critical if the game features sections without an ability to backtrack — even if death is not final, if you're unable to beat the next challenge, you've effectively lost the game permanently, and all the time spent on it is wasted. Another factor that contributes has to do with balancing the game. If you make a super powerful super rare healing potion, it'll be most useful in a similarly difficult battle but what if the player used the potion already? Do you make that fight easy enough that it's winnable without the potion (thus the optimal option is to fight without it because you didn't actually need it) or make it so difficult it's heavily recommended to use the potion (thus a player that did waste the potion hits a brick wall)? Of course you may save it until the last boss only to realize you can't use it during boss fights...

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If a Too Awesome to Use item sticks around long enough, it can sometimes become Awesome, but Impractical as it gets outclassed by a much more efficient or re-usable item; in a game with Character Levels, it may also just become useless as your characters' stats outstrip the item's power. In any case, the item may just become useful in the Bonus Dungeon if one exists in the game.

Consequently, if there's an item duplication glitch in the game or some game mechanic that lets you obtain a spare or two, then of course you're going to be using it all the time.

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Action Games

Zombies Ate My Neighbors: A flamethrower is located in a hidden alcove. Despite being the strongest weapon in the game, the flamethrower is unique, only has 400 ammo and is best saved for the final boss. Other rare items, like Red Potions and Pandora's Boxes, may also qualify. And if you're smart you will never once use the Bazooka either to kill an enemy, even though it downs a lot of the otherwise Demonic Spiders in one or two shots. This isn't because ammo is scarce (quite the contrary), it's because the thing is simply too valuable for blasting open doors and cracked walls.

World of Tanks is a multiplayer arcade tank arena combat game that features optional consumables, such as first aid kits, repair kits, and fire extinguishers. In previous builds of the game, such items were single-use consumables that could only be spent once per match. However, this meant that you could, for instance, expend your pricey deluxe repair kit to bring your destroyed tracks back into action and escape destruction, only to have your ammo rack knocked out two minutes later, crippling your damage-dealing ability for the rest of the match. Thus, players often held on to such consumables for far too long, resulting in otherwise survivable situations being lost because players were refusing to use their items in case they would need it later. Thankfully, Wargaming realized that this was leading to an extremely gun-shy, passive playerbase, and decided to allow consumables to work on a cooldown; now, expending a consumable activates a 90-scond cooldown timer, which is usually enough to justify the item's use presently with the potential for 'later' use if needed.

Wargaming elected to go this route with World of Warships by default, tweaking it slightly such that while module repair was always available (on a cooldown), non-module-repair consumables were an option that could be spent a limited number of times per match for some temporary advantage, such as smokescreen concealment or search radars.

Action-Adventure

Adventure Games

The horror-based adventure game/first-person shooter/interactive movie Realms of the Haunting has a magic staff which has a very limited number of charges (something like 12 shots or so) and can't be recharged. It isn't noticeably more powerful than the game's other magic weapons, though, so you either never use it anyway, or use all 12 shots then forget about it. Sucks to be you if you did use it up killing common enemies, because it turns out this particular weapon pretty much insta-kills the otherwise very tough and annoying final boss.

Two items in Candy box! seem like this but one subverts it. The Berserk Potion makes the player move twice as fast and deal much more damage, but there's a finite amount that one can find in the game. As for the Chocolate Bar, you only obtain one before the post-game which makes it invoke this trope, but its one and only use is to upgrade your sword. In the game's sequel, Chocolate Bars become a genuine example of this trope. You can get more than one of them now, but their numbers are still limited and they have multiple possible uses this time, being able to upgrade multiple weapons and armor or be traded for permanent stat boosts. However, after you beat the final boss, you gain the ability to hack the Computer for unlimited Chocolate Bars.



Collectible Card Games

Hearthstone: Deathwing is a minion that, when played, will destroy EVERYTHING on the board on the spot. The catch is that doing so will cost 10 mana (the maximum the game allows at any point), and also discards your entire hand. Pretty much the only time you will see it getting played is when someone is desperate enough to destroy every other card they have just to wipe out the entire board instantly and hope beyond hope that the opponent doesn't have an effective answer. Zephrys the Great is a card that uses an algorithm to determine what cards will be most perfect for your current situation, and gives you one (of your choosing). He's always a good play no matter when you play him, which leads to a lot of players never playing him unless they have nothing else. After all, it's better to use whatever started in your deck, even if it's way less efficient, than it is to use Zephrys and lose his ability to find a different perfect play.

Shadowverse: Seer's Globes are used to convert cards to their animated art. Each Globe only animates a single card, meaning you'll need up to 3 to animate a full playset, and they are either rewarded for having a high Master score at the end of a season, or available for purchase in extremely limited supply. When they do become available, they are expensive — while the first Globe can be purchased for 5,000 vials, further purchases cost 30,000 vials. note For perspective, 30,000 vials can be used to craft 8 legendary cards, and is typically more than enough to fully craft a deck that doesn't have more than two playsets of legendary cards. Their scarcity results in players being unwilling to expend them until they can use it to animate a full playset of their favourite card.

Fighting Games

First-Person Shooters

Four X

Hack & Slash

Massively Multiplayer Online RPG

World of Warcraft has a lot of items like this, though Blizzard eventually changed them to be unreliable or useless against enemies over a certain level. Fortunately, many of them can still be sold to players that have less doubts about using them in a tight situation. The Holy Mightstone, an artifact that a level 50 paladin receives at the completion of a lengthy quest chain. It provides a 10-minute buff to damage vs. undead when used, but it can only be used once and can never be replaced since it's a quest item, so the end result is that most paladins end up never using it. Sadly it's fallen victim to power growth in expansions. At level 60 it would turn you into an death-machine by practically doubling your offensive stats. At level 80 - not so much. It gives the same boost, but by now it's a 5-10% power-up at most. Super Sticky Glue is an item you get from a quest in the Orc starting zone that allows you to immobilize the target. People always hang onto them in case they would ever really need one. A similar case with the unique "Light of Elune" potion (which grants full invulnerability for 10 sec and then it's gone forever). You get it as a mid-20s quest reward; people still have it in their lvl 70 character's inventory. A lot of the abilities with cooldowns over 5 minutes are seldom used except in times of utter desperation, waiting for that right moment... and sometimes in a dungeon or battleground run, never used at all. e.g. "Lay on Hands" (paladin) or "Recklessness" (warrior). Acknowledging this trope, Blizzard changed many of these skills to be somewhat less awesome, but with more manageable cooldowns, generally with the thought in mind that they should be available for every fight exactly once. Especially notable would be Shield Wall, a survival cooldown for warriors that used to have a 30 minute cooldown and make the user nearly invincible for its duration. Now it can be used every few minutes and still provides a significant damage reduction. Few abilities still exceed 10 minutes cooldown at this point, and many of those can be reduced significantly by talents. Flasks used to be like this in the original game. While they provided outlandish buffs (such as increasing player health by 1200, which for most classes meant a 30% increase in HP - an incredible amount, particularly for boss fights), they were also notoriously difficult to craft. Obviously, you needed to be a high-level alchemist (which in itself wasn't that big of a deal — many players would grind alchemy as it provided access to expendable mana and health potions). However, crafting flasks also required Black Lotus, a ludicrously rare herb (initially at any time there were a maximum of four in the entire game, up to one in each of the zones they could spawn) that wasn't tradeable: you had to find it yourself (good luck!) and in order to be able to gather it, you had to be a maxed-out herbalist. Since herbalism was considered a primary profession (of which you could only have two), if you chose any combination of professions other than "herba-alchy", you could not make flasks, period. To top off the ignominy, flasks could only be made in one place in the entire world (later two), which was smack at the end of a high-level dungeon. When C'Thun was first killed, most of the player community had problems wrapping their minds around the fact that the victorious guild expended forty flasks on this single boss fight.

City of Heroes: There are several temp powers with a limited amount of use, many of which are earned for or after a specific mission and will never be retrievable again. Not surprisingly, these usually get hoarded for emergencies, and are still waiting to be used when your own powers are so far beyond them that there's no point any more. In some cases they don't make any sense using even when you do get them, a classic example being the Loa Bone, which lets you summon a zombie. Cool for most people, utterly redundant if you are a Mastermind who can already summon zombies.



Some of these temp powers became so popular that when the developers added Veteran Rewards, a shiny badge for every so many months the player has been subscribed plus an item like a special costume item or a free character rebuild, two of the rewards each gave a choice of two temp powers that would become permanent on that character. The player can make different choices of which powers to take on every character they have. The Sands of Mu and the Nemesis Staff are the two most popular choices. The Wedding Band hero-side springs first to mind. It granted a hefty resistance buff to all damage that lasted for two total hours of on-time (and maybe required an hour to get). Since it was only available to heroes, it quickly became the major target of villains and a fair issue of player-versus-player balance. The "Echo" version of the power now gives the same level of protection, but only lasts five minutes of on time, but can be stacked with the original version. Similarly, there's the Inspirations you build up as you play, basically the equivalent of potions in other MMORPGs that can be used at any time to heal health, restore endurance, or give a number of beneficial buffs. The thing is, you rarely need to use them to win most fights so the tray quickly fills up with Inspirations you hang on to for tougher fights and emergencies that never come. Many of the high-level powers take so long to recharge you can't use them in 99% of the fights. For example, an area-of-effect attack that lowers the defence, damage resistance and health regeneration of all enemies caught in the blast? Awesome. Too bad it has a several-minute recharge, and at the higher levels you tend to breeze through foes anyway, so the effect would barely be noticeable. Later on, many of the new sets had their "Tier 9" power not as Totally awesome, but usable much more often.

Kingdom of Loathing: Many, many one-use items, especially the ones that were available for a limited time in the past and most likely will never become available again. Many of the semi-rares fall prey to this trope. This may be later averted when diving Fernswarthy's Basement, where every little bit of stockpiled resistance and HP buff becomes more and more necessary. The items you receive as rewards while diving Fernswarthy's do qualify, though. Frosty's Iceball is an interesting variation. It does a large amount of elemental damage, even if you're low-level, and it isn't lost when used...the first two times. If you use it three times in one day, it vanishes. Getting it back is possible, but difficult, since it's a 20%-chance-drop from a certain boss in a multiplayer dungeon. The risk of accidentally destroying it by using it one too many times is a pretty strong deterrent against using it at all.

(Literal) Easter Eggs in Nexus War, because they can only be found once a year, at Easter, and have variable effects which can't be determined before use. Later versions did this with Valentine's Day gifts as well.

zOMG! has the power-ups (Superchargers to restore partial health & stamina, and Ring Polishers to temporarily increase the strength of your rings). Players get a couple of these from early quests in order to try them out. You can buy more, but the cost is in Gaia Cash, which requires spending real money (as opposed to Gaia Gold, which you can earn in at least a hundred different ways). Therefore, the power-ups earned as quest rewards can become Too Awesome to Use. Recent updates have attempted to mitigate this: power-ups are now rare loot drops, and power-ups bought from the store can be resold on the site's marketplace, which uses Gaia Gold as its currency.

EVE Online has several extremely limited-run ships that were/are only handed out as a result of one-time events, such as the Alliance Tournaments. Since being able to say that you destroyed one of the five, say, Imperial Issue Apocalypses in existence is cause for immense bragging rights, the result is that these ships sit in their owners' hangars, never actually being flown.

The original release of EverQuest had "The Aegis of Life" — a (then) high-end shield for clerics that required an extended camp. note Two rare spawns on a 4-hour timer, and had to be of two different versions of the same rare monster. Doing the required camp usually took 3-4 real-time days with around-the-clock vigilance to complete. The shield had immense (for the era) AC, but also had a single expendable charge of "Complete Heal" built into it. The perfect way to heal a tank in a dire raid emergency. And nobody ever, ever, ever used it, because clerics had "Complete Heal" as a regular spell anyway, and there's always another raid....

The shield had immense (for the era) AC, but also had a single expendable charge of "Complete Heal" built into it. The perfect way to heal a tank in a dire raid emergency. And nobody ever, ever, ever used it, because clerics had "Complete Heal" as a regular spell anyway, and there's always another raid.... RuneScape: The Tiger Shark, one of the most powerful pieces of food in the game. It heals more Hit Points than any other fish note Except the Baron Shark (also very rare), which heals slightly more, but with a delay, and it can even boost your life above its normal maximum. Of course, it can only be obtained with a near-maxed fishing level, requires a near-maxed cooking level to be edible, can't be traded with other players, and it's very rare, obtainable only through the Fishing Trawler minigame at an average catch rate of roughly one tiger shark for every hour of trawling. The Ancient Warriors' equipment used to be this. While chaotic weaponry and Nex armour surpass or at least rival them, Ancient Warriors' equipment has been around much longer. Ironically, the armour regained some popularity when they are given high damage soaking, as while they degrade into dust very quickly, individually they are cheaper than Nex armour and is less of a loss in high stakes PvP. In the "Sizzling Summer" promotion, players who had membership during a certain time period could redeem their fate cards for up to four extremely useful items, particularly the instant-kill darts, which could only be used on NPCs. The special items were removed from the game in the beginning of 2013. Since then there have been more events where the Deathtouched dart can be obtained, and in 2018 a new store was added that sometimes sells them for 5 million coins each.

Final Fantasy XI is absolutely the king of this trope. Most items are extremely painful to get in this game and many of them are single-time use only. Many of the items below were extremely powerful when they were made available; their use has diminished somewhat since the level cap raise. Phantom Tathlum — mediocre one-time use multi-class throwing weapon that is dropped by a Notorious Monster (NM). The only reason to own this item is the rather useful +2 INT that it provides when equipped in the throwing slot. To spawn the NM, one must trade an iron ore (uncommon item) to a ??? marker that randomly pops up in a high-level zone every 15 minutes. The item drops approximately 15% of the time. Woe be to you if you accidentally push the "Use Ranged Weapon" button. Ambrosia — this nectar of the gods provides +7 to all stats for 4 hours. To obtain this item one needs to a) travel to a specific zone to kill enemies that have a 5% chance of dropping a specific craft item, b) travel to vendors that may or may not sell specific crafting supplies based on whether players control certain regions in the game, c) have nearly 100 cooking skill, d) cook a Cursed Soup item, e) travel to an high-level end-game zone where a Notorious Monster spawns every 2~6 hours and has a 33% chance to drop a 'Oblation Abjuration' item, f) give the abjuration and cursed soup to an NPC to receive the "Ambrosia" item. The item buffs used to not persist through death. Amrita — a drink which restores 500HP over 5 minutes. Follows the exact same creation process as the Ambrosia. The Abyssea expansions have Primeval Brew, an Abyssea-only one-use item that boosts all your attributes to 999, your HP and MP to 9999, gives you a 500 point HP and MP restoration and 50% TP every three seconds. The downside: It costs two million cruor (An abyssea-only currency that can't be traded for and is usually only gained in small amounts) to buy just one three minute dose. However, it goes from Too Awesome to Use to Awesome, but Impractical once you defeat the final boss of the Abyssea expansions, when you a receive a key item that drops the cost to a somewhat more palatable 200000 cruor. To put the Brew's power in perspective though: With normal abyssea buffs, an average damage-dealing job can do 3000-6000 damage with one weapon skill on a normal opponent. With a Brew-buffed Corsair with an Armageddon, one can do 75000 to 99999 damage with one weaponskill. And with the 50% TP/3 second gain, one can perform a weaponskill every six seconds.

Final Fantasy XIV dips in and out of this trope. At the beginning of 2.0, X-Potions, X-Ethers, and Hi-Elixirs were difficult to obtain and craft, but as time went on, not only they were easier to get, but stronger potions were made in later patches. Similarly, a lot of gear used for glamouring purposes tend to be hard to craft, which drives up their prices in the player market, but over time, the items are easier to make and the prices fall. The Palace of the Dead has the Pomander of Rage, an item that transforms the user into a manticore and lets them become a One-Hit Kill machine to everything except bosses. Because RNG is fickle, you may barely get any, which causes people to either save them in a dire emergency or use them in conjunction with the Pomander of Fortune, which boosts the drop rate of coffers left behind by defeated enemies.

Billy vs. SNAKEMAN has Consumable Kaiju Drops. They are moderately rare items that give a small bonus as long as you have at least one in your inventory note multiples don't stack but a massive bonus if you consume one. Naturally, the consume bonuses of such items are far less than the cost of obtaining them.

but a massive bonus if you consume one. Naturally, the consume bonuses of such items are far less than the cost of obtaining them. The Lord of the Rings Online occasionally gives consumable items as quest rewards or as part of the in-game lotteries that are bound (can't be sold or traded) and give a significant benefit (stat boosts, or increasing the amount of XP you earn, or counting each kill as double for slayer deeds) for a strictly limited time. In most cases you can buy more of these in the Turbine Store, but in practice you're usually better advised to save your turbine points for stuff that's even better, like items that permanently boost your stats. Limited inventory space does help provide an impetus to actually use the items while they still confer a significant bonus, though (+150 HP is a game-changer when you normally have a couple hundred; by the time you reach the level cap it's a pretty pathetic tank who isn't boasting at least 10k).

Prior to the Generation 6 update, SD Gundam Capsule Fighter had the OC 100% chip, which allowed players to level up their units to the next Over Custom level without fail, though only to OC 5. However, you could only obtain them via giveaways and events, so you'd only get 2-3 at a time and with dozens of Mobile Suits... There's also the special attacks all the Mobile Suits get. They're powerful attacks that let you take out a weaker opponent in one good hit or cut down an opponent's life a good deal. However, using it and missing cuts out a third of your special bar, forcing you to rebuild it to use it again and using it and connecting wipes out the entire bar, forcing you to rebuild it to restore your skills. Most players tend to keep it until they're down to their last sliver of health.

In Marvel Heroes, various heroes' ultimate skills take a looong time to recharge, up to 20 minutes . You aren't just gonna use Deadpool's Server Lag to annihilate this group of mooks right? Definitely not even on this sub-boss or elite mob. Maybe not even against this stage's boss, what if you'll need it for the next one?

. You aren't just gonna use Deadpool's Server Lag to annihilate this group of mooks right? Definitely not even on this sub-boss or elite mob. Maybe not even against this stage's boss, what if you'll need it for the next one? Lucent Heart has two different healer type skills that are this. While they do boost damage by a sizeable chunk, they do not increase defense, have lengthy cooldowns, and force the user into melee. This is impractical for such classes.

Aion has this in spades with the Spiritmaster class, who specializes in summons and in heaping effects on the enemy. Most of the Spiritmaster's spells are rather normal... and then there's the Cursecloud spell, an area - of - effect spell which has a cooldown of one hour, deals fair initial damage, but shines because it snaps away a good chunk of an afflicted unit's health whenever it casts a spell. Since not all enemies cast spells or have enough HP to require percentage damage, very few situations where Cursecloud is viable exist.

Aside from the various rare and powerful items that players might be tempted to hoard, Aura Kingdom interestingly uses this trope as the reason why the Big Bad Reinhardt came to being in the first place. He was a devout knight serving the bishop who had a miraculous artifact that could restore someone to perfect health even if they were inches from death. However, when Reinhardt's wife was ill with a seemingly uncurable illness, the bishop justified his unwillingness to use the artifact to cure her with this trope, believing the artifact should only be used to help save someone powerful and influential who was aiding with the fight against the darkness. When Reinhardt's beloved wife passed away, his anger and resentment toward what he thought was an avoidable tragedy led him to rebel and become the nation's biggest threat.

MOBA

This is pretty much a defining rule of the MOBA genre; any player character with a single big ability that comes with a long cooldown will always suffer from this. Many players would rather let themselves or an ally die than use these abilities in any situation other than a 5v5 teamfight - indeed, part of the genre's massive learning curve is figuring out which situations it's okay to use a two or more minute cooldown ultimate in.

On a similar note, we have League of Legends's Flash, a summoner spell available to all champions. It is basically a short range Flash Step with a lot of utility, and it's a given that most summoners will equip it due to League's emphasis on positioning (it is rare to see a side with less than 4 players using Flash). But on the flip side it has a higher cooldown than most champions' ultimate abilities, and so it runs into the same problems of players saving the ability for 'the right moment'. All too often players will use Flash only after any advantage of doing so has been long lost. In fact, Flash is considered so valuable (both offensively and defensively) that forcing your opponent to use theirs without having to expend too much for it (most commonly your own Flash) is considered a win; ganking an opponent and forcing them to blow their Flash to escape is considered a "successful gank", even if they lost nothing else (usually because you can come back for a second gank while their Flash is still down and you have yours).

Platform Game

Puzzle Games

The question skips in The Impossible Quiz. You do actually need to stockpile every last one to get past the last question. Muhahahaha.

Mojo! Has the bonus infusers, which allow you to change into the respective color at will. However, you must have all four in order to unlock a powerup for a ball at the end of the world, and those powered-up balls are MUCH more useful than a bonus infuser

The Talos Principle: The Messenger hints are a subversion. You get a maximum of three for the whole game, and although you need to solve a whole lot of its 120+ puzzles to even unlock them, there's still plenty of riddles left to use them on. The problem is that they tend to be so vague and generic they usually don't tell you anything but the current puzzle's most basic approach while the info you actually need to proceed would be much more specific.

In Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle, players can obtain the really rare Elder Kai cards. Elder Kai cards can be used to level up a character's Special Attack level, making their Limit Break hit much more harder. However, many players suggest trying to find or grind cards for that character to save them for someone who would probably need it more.

Racing

In Mario Kart 8, the Super Horn. Sure, it can hurt all other racers in a wide radius, and destroy incoming red shells to boot, but its ability to destroy spiny blue shells means that if you're even close to first place, it's probably not going anywhere.

For the same reason, the Red Eco Shield in Jak X Combat Racing. It is the only thing able to stop Peacemaker or Supernova, the former essentially being this game's Blue Shell and the latter destroying everybody in front of the player who fired it and also delaying their respawn, therefore it will sit in your inventory until the time is right.

Real-Time Strategy

The heroes in Warcraft II are almost always Too Awesome to Use, as in most missions if they die you lose the mission. Only the human side has healers, auto-healing doesn't exist, and you don't always have healers in every mission, so most of the time you keep your hero locked up tight in your base where no one can hurt it, so that you don't accidentally lose the mission by getting them killed. The expansion Beyond the Dark Portal made the heroes into souped-up versions of the regular units, so you might be tempted to use them (and you're often forced to by the mission); in vanilla Warcraft II, they're weaker than regular units (due to not actually counting as the unit they use the sprite of, meaning they don't benefit from unit upgrades) and far too easily killed to ever be risked in battle. Except when you really need that spell only the hero can cast.

Heroes were a big problem in most early RTS games, including Starcraft and Age of Empires. Generally the heroes only found use if they were either expendable or in a no-production mission. Newer games, especially Warcraft III, combat this by making Hero Units respawnable and able to be customised and levelled up (though since it has RPG-esque items, it runs into the same problem. Use the one-time Scroll of Resurrection now or wait for an emergency?).

Starcraft II: Explicitly averted in Wings Of Liberty's secret mission- the loading screen actually tells you not to hoard the weapon powerups you find around the level you're being chased by an unkillable monster during the second half, most of the weapons are One-Hit Kill against mooks that get in your way... and yet you will very likely barely make it to the exit). Starcraft II has the Co-op mode where players pick specific commanders with certain units and special abilities. Every commander gets powerful cooldown abilities, such as Raynor's use of the Hyperion, Vorazun's Time Stop, or Mira's Space Station Reallocation. The keyword is "cooldown", and some abilities can have in excess of 300 seconds for a cooldown without upgrades and mastery levels. As such, it's possible to see players in the normal or easy difficulty, who don't have a fair grasp on the game yet, save them for if their base gets overrun, but then realize twenty seconds before victory that this dreaded scenario never came true, and they could have used it a half dozen times during the match where it would have made the mission significantly easier. This kind of practice is fairly rare in hard and nonexistent in brutal, but can still pop up in both from time-to-time depending on the co-op partner.

Dawn of War: The Eldar's relic unit is the Avatar of Khaine, a Physical God with the most health of any unit, very high damage, and makes nearby units much more resistant to morale damage. And yet many players (and the AI) will keep it inside their base, where it can't get into combat. Why? Well, because it also makes every unit build faster, and increases the cap for infantry and vehicles. You can call in Veteran units at any time in the campaign mode from the previous missions. You never will because you might need them when the AI decides you have won too many games in a row and starts to rush you with an unbeatable amount of units. In the second game, the artillery strikes are hard to get and only work in incredibly specific situations (Tank traffic jams) but can win you the game. Averted when you play a longer game mode though, as you will probably get enough resources to use these strikes and other support abilities multiple times.

Star Wars: Rebellion: The Death Star if you played as the Empire. Though costly and time-consuming, building one immediately helped your popular support, but if it left the sector, all the planets would slightly favor the Alliance. Furthermore, if you destroy a planet or if your Death Star is destroyed, you lose popular support throughout the galaxy. But if you've found the Alliance headquarters and have already captured Luke and Mon Mothma, it's a quick win. Conversely, the Alliance has Luke: High in all stats except Diplomacy and Force-sensitive, his Force powers meant he could level up with a certain number of missions. If Vader or Palpatine were present, it would be that much quicker. (In fact, if you have Palpatine under blockade, you can have Luke powerlevel by sabotaging everything on the planet, and then abducting Palpy.) But if Luke encounters Vader or Palpatine, there is a chance he'd be captured instantly, one third of the Imperial victory conditions. But you need to encounter Vader to learn that Leia's Force sensitive, and he wins an event that captures both Vader and Palpatine (a massive two Rebellion victory conditions) if he's used enough that he completes enough missions to promote to Jedi Knight or higher. The event happens automatically as well, so if you decide that he is indeed too awesome to use, you'll end up losing him to the Empire for no reason at all. There's also the fact that the game randomly selects who will be Force sensitive (aside from the canonically required characters) each time you play. While there's no guarantee that your Force-sensitive characters will be any good, if you'll lucky enough to end up with a Force sensitive Thrawn, for example (who has naturally high stats to begin with, and Force training increases all stats), you'll probably not want to risk losing him. Especially since, unlike Palpatine and Vader, he can be killed in battle, thus eliminating the possibility of a rescue mission.

Pikmin 2: Purple Pikmin. They have ridiculously high attack power and can stun enemies if they land on them, but they're incredibly slow and lack any immunities like other Pikmin types, and on top of that they can only be created through rare Candypop Buds underground, unlike the primary Pikmin which come from Onions. Considering most bosses ingame either rely on a specific immunity or being able to get out of an attack quickly, some players prefer to use Red Pikmin than risk losing their Purples, due to only having slightly lower attack power than Purples, but are much quicker and plentiful. Also, there's the issue of requiring 100 Purple Pikmin to lift a dumbbell in Wistful Wild, which encourages players to save them until reaching that part. There's also Bitter Spray, which completely immobilizes enemies and makes even the toughest bosses complete jokes. To balance this out though, they are much rarer to come by than the Spicy Spray, which just powers up a Pikmin's attack and speed, and the berry plants needed to make them are often in inconvient locations. As such, most players just save them for when they're really in a jam and there's no other way out. (Usually when faced with Spotty Bulbears.)



Rhythm Games

When playing as Vegas or Pointman in Audiosurf, players may hold on to a paint or sort powerup until they get a large combo or the end of the song so they can get clean finish. Overfills that could have been avoided by using one of these powerups will ruin their plans, however, due to losing all power ups you were carrying when you overfill.

Items in Groove Coaster. Especially the SAFE/FOLLOW items (turns up to 10 Misses into Goods that don't break your chain) and SUPER SAFE items (turns up to 20 Misses into Goods). Yeah, it might be tempting to deploy one and go for a No Miss or a Full Chain especially since maximum chain makes up a whole 10% of your score note And that's just in the arcade versions and AC charts in the smartphone versions. Chain bonuses in the smartphone-exclusive charts are even worse. , but you might want to use it on this other song, or save them for an upcoming event.

Roguelike

NetHack: In the late game, certain expendable items do become almost useless - namely scrolls and potions. (No need to hurl potions of paralysis at a monster when you can smite it with Excalibur, after all.) Almost, because you can dip potions and scrolls in water to blank them out; "blank" potions of water can be transformed with an altar into holy water, an essential de-cursing tool, while blank scrolls let you write a new magic scroll with a magic marker (itself an example of this trope, rare and versatile but wears out quickly). This encourages hoarding potions and scrolls that you don't intend to use in their current form, just in case you get the chance to remake them into something better. The most dramatic example, however, is the wand of wishing, a limited-use item that lets you summon almost any item or object. Only one of these is guaranteed to spawn, and you're likely to reach the end of the game with a few charges left on it, saved for a dire emergency that never happened. In this game, though, being Crazy-Prepared is a good strategy.

In Slash'EM, a NetHack variant, may come across the Houchou, an artifact-level spoon. Throwing this spoon at a monster results in an instant kill, after which the artifact is destroyed. Slash'EM mostly averts this trope, though, because just about every player has their own idea of which single creature in the game deserves skipping.

In Dungeon Crawl, many a run has ended permanently because a player was too proud to use that fancy wand when they and the orc they were facing were both at death's door, and the player was certain that next blow would strike true. Being a good Dungeon Crawl player is very much about knowing when to avert this; in a game with permadeath, a powerful tool sitting on your corpse might as well have not existed at all.

Being based on the same principle, but adding in an overworld and the ability to buy storage houses... let's just say it is very common to have a ginormous amount of these in Elona. One example is prayer, which will remove negative statuses, uncurse your equipment and protect you from harmful magic for a while...which will also cost one tenth of your accrued Favor with your God, which is only built back up from offering corpses and God-specific items at altars. Also, praying above certain Favor tresholds will give you certain gifts to a God, so doing this will set you back if you aim to get the gifts. Rods of Wishing, for obvious reasons. The Astral Light Pen is one of the rarest and most valuable item in the Elona+ expansion, allowing you to recruit a clone of any enemy you have a high relationship with in your party. Other than the grueling choice of which of the many unique NPCs to copy, this also creates the added effect of inflicting this trope on Tokens of Friendship and Love Potions, which are the only way to meet the requirements with hostile monsters.

Summon feathers in Chocobo's Dungeon allowed you to replace your partner with far more powerful summon creatures. This meant calling to your aid allies that could take down the game's bonus boss singlehandedly while taking only pitiful damage in return. The downside is that, should they actually die, you lose the feather you likely spent hours trying to get your hands on. A random summon feather takes away that risk but doesn't give you the option of selection.

In Castle of the Winds, you randomly find magic wands that can cast all kinds of spells, even the room-clearing Ball spells, with as much as a dozen charges. Even if you do put one in your belt, you'll probably forget you have it.

Spells in The Consuming Shadow packs quite a punch in battle and have several beneficial uses outside combat. The problem is that they put quite a drain on the Sanity Meter, and you really don't want the protagonist to go insane before the end-game, especially since he can't cast spells with too low sanity.

Sunless Sea: The Icarus in Black is, technically, the best weapon in the game; the damage it causes is so absurd it can kill the most powerful beast in the entire game in two shots at most. However, the ammunition is similarly absurd: Angry, suicidal and very skilled monster-hunters that want to die a glorious death. Very few places have those, they are all remote, and they all want a payment big enough that their families can take care of themselves all on their own afterwards. All in all, a thousand echoes per shot in the best of cases where the most expensive thing in the game, a giant dreadnought, costs thirty thousand; you are probably not going to use it more than twice.

The Binding of Isaac: Many active items have this, with potential room-clearing effects being held until the absolute perfect moment. The granddaddy of these is Mega Blast, an item that fires a laser that obliterates everything in a wide area for 15 seconds, which persists through rooms and floors, but has a ridiculous 12-room charge time and is only charged by 3 when Isaac picks up a battery. Worse than rechargable items is any single-use active item. These often have absurd effects like destroying all rocks and killing most enemies on the entire floor and revealing every secret room, to doubling every item in the current room. It's not unusal to see players hold these thing until the absolute perfect time. This behavior is even mocked by Pandora's Box, an item that gives you a different reward based on which floor it was used on, with each floor getting better and better, until the final floor which gives you either nothing or a single penny. The Algiz rune, which provides total invulnerability for 30 whole seconds then is used up, is almost never used except to cheese any particularly tough boss unless Blank Card is involved. With Blank Card, it and any other rune can be used every four rooms, but getting it is not a guarantee. The Jera rune doubles any pickups, including treasure chests, even in the two final floors where (non-red) chests have guaranteed items. Without Blank Card, they're typically held on to until near the end of the game to get eight items from the Chest floor rather than four, unless the player is desperate for extra health or some other sort of consumable.

In Enter the Gungeon, literally every gun except your starting pistol can become this when it comes to clearing regular rooms, at least for the first couple of floors. After that, it continues to apply to whatever your most powerful gun is, because there's always a chance you won't find any new ones on that floor. Blanks, too, tend to be hoarded until the boss fight, because a few well-timed blanks can mean beating the boss without taking any damage at all, which nets you an extra Heart Container.

Shoot-'Em-Up

Bombs are very useful in Star Fox, and are instrumental in a few boss fights. You don't find yourself using them too often, though, do you? Doubly so because killing multiple enemies with a single Bomb does not offer the same cluster-kill bonus that doing the same with a charge shot does. It mostly comes down to a matter of only using it on enemies that you KNOW you can't clear out anyway, and memorizing the points where more bombs appear so you can be sure a replacement is right around the corner.

The Climax Mode Limit Break in After Burner Climax, which gives you Bullet Time and a Macross Missile Massacre, does not come that rarely, but it's still possible to fall into this mentality as there's a chance you burn it on one enemy wave only for an even larger wave of enemy planes to show up.

In Thunder Force III onwards, dying takes away your current weapon unless it's Twin Shot or Back Shot, your initial weapons. Less experienced players who are aware of this penalty may find themselves refusing to use the better weapons, out of fear of losing them.

Simulation Games

No Man's Sky: There are several materials in the game that are exceedingly rare (and in many cases heavily defended), but are required components for the most advanced upgrades to suit tech or shipboard weapons. Players who are lucky enough to gather these probably won't want to use them due to the frequency with which ships and survival gear tend to be swapped out. What's even worse is the fact that dismantling the tech might not even return some of these materials. Luckily, the post-release addition of Base Vaults helps offset this somewhat.

Spore has a "Staff of Life" which, when used, can instantly Terraform a planet of your choosing into a tier-3 world, essentially the best rating for a planet's habitability. Unfortunately, it only has 42 uses (a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and once you've used all 42 of them up, there's no way to recharge it. Since you can also terraform a world by manually tweaking the planet's temperature and atmosphere with other, rechargeable tools, it's not uncommon to just never use the Staff and have it sitting at 42 uses permanently.

Stealth-Based Games

Survival Horror

Third-Person Shooters

The Smart Bomb in Alien Swarm. When you unlock it, you can carry only one. It's pretty much the same as the Hornet Barrage, but 5 of them. It fires so many damn rockets that a huge swarm can easily be dispatched with the item. However, since you can only hold 1, you'll have a tough time figuring out when is the best time to use it.

Ratchet & Clank: For some weapons, you can't find ammo in crates or as an enemy drop. This isn't problem for R.Y.N.O or Tesla Barrier in second game (unless you're searching for Moonstones) since they have big enough ammo clip, but some weapons like Synthenoid from second game have only three shots and the power is rather weak, making them a pain to upgrade unless you're willing to return to vendor through half of level, and also limiting their use. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction has this with the Alpha Disruptor. You get it for free on Sargasso, and it deals jaw dropping damage out of the starting gate, capable of killing any normal mook in one hit and able to bring down massive enemies like Leviathans in just a few shotsand further upgrades make it the most powerful weapon in the game, even moreso than the R.Y.N.O. IV. Unfortunately, its awesome power is quickly set back by three major handicapsfirst, it has truly abysmal ammo (4 at first, upgradable to 5). Second, it has a very slow rate of fire without buying expensive raritanium upgrades and the weapon requires charging before firing a shot, making it difficult to hit fast moving targets with it. And third, it only fires in a straight line like a Sniper Rifle, which makes it great for hitting huge targets like bosses and leviathans, but very impractical for dealing with large, spread out crowds or individual mooksand while it does have an auto lock on function, this makes it even harder to use against a crowd of enemies, since it can lock onto the wrong target by accident.

Resident Evil 4 has this with the rocket launcher, which is very powerful (can one-hit just about every boss in the game), but is still better to sell for cash and use that to upgrade one of your guns that gets more than one use. Resident Evil 5 ends up playing this trope semi-straight (or at least straighter than the previous game did) due to its more limited inventory system. With only nine slots available per character, space is at a premium and it's usually best to rely on the weapon you have the most ammo for, if only to keep your inventory from being clogged with four or five superfluous ammo boxes. Sadly, the ammunition for the best weapons in the game (magnums and the grenade launcher) are almost impossible to find. And even when you do find magnum and grenade rounds chances are you won't have either of those weapons in your inventory since you so prudently chose to store them away in your hammerspace inventory accessible only in between chapters. However, while there's nothing to be done about the inventory space, the game also doesn't think to take away items you picked up if you quit a chapter, so you once you find them you can stockpile magnum ammo, grenade rounds, and even rocket launchers with relative ease.

Splatoon 2 Salmon Run mode: you have 2 specials and 3 waves. Unlike other modes, specials do not recharge so players used to the other modes are suddenly hit with the issue of finite supply, and being splatted does not lose their charge so the "use it or lose it" factor is not there. Not using them during the first 2 waves can be justified by wave 3 being the toughest - but by then, a player can get used to dealing with the salmonids without specials, and it is all too easy to only remember the specials are there when the final wave is over.

Tower Defense

Plants vs. Zombies: Most emergency plants, i.e. Cherry Bomb, Jalapeno, Doom Shroom, etc. Most of them get pretty expensive at 100 sun upward for an explosion, when you could be spending your sun on permanent attacking plants. They also take forever to recharge, so you can't use one back-to-back for multiple emergencies.

Insta-Monkeys in Bloons Tower Defense 6, especially for Tier 4 and 5 monkeys. An Insta-Monkey lets you place a pre-upgraded tower for free. High-tier Instas can potentially save you tens or hundreds thousands of cash. On the other hand, login bonuses only give you low-tier ones every few days, and the other way to get them is reaching every 100 round in a game. Even then, you'll mostly get Tier 3 ones. Tier 4 Instas are rare, and you'll need to play Expert maps for a decent chance of them. Tier 5 ones are practically unobtainable outside of special events.

Turn-Based Strategy

Wide-Open Sandbox

L.A. Noire has Intuition Points that allow you to find all clues and ease questioning, you also only get a limited amount of them and can only have 5 at once. This is inverted after you have completed the story, which lets you go back to any previous case and always start with 5 Intuition Points. This encourages using them to achieve a perfect rank on that case.

Grand Theft Auto: In most games, getting a vehicle you want to keep generally means it will stay in the garage forever, since if you take it to do a mission, you will likely have to get out of it and risk it disappearing, and they are ridiculously easy to destroy. Except the everything-proof variety. Everything meaning collision, fire, and bullets. This is taken to insane lengths in Grand Theft Auto III. Certain plot-involved cars are immune to certain things, such as bullets, fire, explosions, and wrecks. Most of these cars could only be obtained ONCE per game and often required hours of trial and error to get. Many players spent many hours collecting them, just to have them waste away in a garage, even though some missions almost require one to complete. Another notable mention of this trope are the combine harvesters in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. These vehicles had the unique and delightfully sadistic feature of turning crops of pedestrians into neatly bundled up bales of body parts. Unfortunately, the harvesters are rare, encountered only at certain times in rural areas. In addition, almost all of them are locked and can only be accessed by killing the driver of one already in use. Even after obtaining one, the size of the vehicle makes it difficult to move in populated areas and impossible to fit into a garage for safe keeping. Its slow speed and bad handling make the player easy for law enforcers (who inevitably start to show up after a few good mauls) to catch. Finally, if the player decides to exit the vehicle for any reason, the door locks behind them.

No More Heroes has Anarchy in the Galaxy, the most devastating Limit Break move in the game that clears the entire screen of enemies. It's also the only Limit Break that can not only be triggered at will (thus avoiding every other one's problem of almost always being gained from the last kill in a room), but stacks as well in case you get more than one over the course of a level, and you get a sizeable cash bonus if you make it through the level without using it. The cash bonus increases on subsequent playthroughs. It also does squat to bosses.

Minecraft: The original Golden Apples were the king of Minecraft's Too Awesome To Use throne. At the time, red apples alone were incredibly rare, only being found occasionally in dungeons — this only several updates after golden apples could found that way — or dropping off Notch, the game developer, should he grace your server. Then, you had to encase that red apple in 8 blocks of gold. A gold block takes 9 gold ingots. You would have to mine and smelt 72 blocks of the fairly rare gold ore in order to have enough material to make a single golden apple. And then, since hunger didn't exist yet, its only effect was to fully heal you, something you could get much more cheaply from cake. Later updates after the hunger system existed boosted the 8-block golden apple's power to better match its expense, made red apples easily farmable, and added a less-potent golden apple made from gold ingots, making the whole thing much more practical. Some consider diamond equipment to be this. A pick-axe made of diamond mines faster and lasts a lot longer than one made of iron or stone... but it still breaks eventually, and if you're killed by underground monsters or a lava flow, you risk losing it forever. Similarly, diamond armor offers a great deal of protection, and diamond swords deal 25% more damage than iron swords, but since they're only useful in combat, there's a serious risk of losing them long before their unparalleled durability runs out, especially when diamond armor provides not much more protection than iron, which is plentiful. Diamond is found deep within the earth, usually near lava, and is even rarer than gold. It can still be worth using with proper branch mining techniques, but it is time-consuming to hunt for. The introduction of the Mending enchantment reduced this significantly. Ender Pearls. Endermen drop them when killed but they are difficult to kill quickly due to their Teleport Spam and the drop rate of the pearl is low. Throwing a pearl will teleport the player wherever it lands (but hurt you when used to prevent people from spamming the pearls nilly willy), making them excellent tools to climb hills or to cross large gaps, but since the pearls are not common, players will either store them up and never use them or wait for the worst possible scenario to happen before using them. On top of that, an ender pearl can be combined with blaze powder to create an Eye of Ender, and you'll need up to a dozen every time you want to activate a stronghold portal to The End, not counting however many you use up trying to locate the stronghold. For bonus points, as of 1.9, they are the only way to traverse the End to find End Cities—you can't even get to the portal that sends you between the mainland and the islands without one. Sure, the End is full of Endermen to kill for more pearls if need be, but considering how hard they are to fight, do you really want to make yourself go through that? Enchanted tools and armor. You can get some nifty effects for your items, such as setting mobs on fire or increasing the diamond drop rate. However, the enchantments you receive are pretty unpredictable, and the experience cost increases quadratically with the enchantment level. You'd have to kill 77 hostile mobs for level 10, 651 hostile mobs for level 30, or 1785 hostile mobs for the maximum, level 50. Furthermore, enchanted items can't be repaired without stripping the enchantment. They basically have all the drawbacks of diamond equipment taken Up to Eleven. Fortunately, later updates made several changes that made them more practical: The level required for maximum enchantments was reduced to thirty, they consume only a portion of the experience required to unlock them, and they can be repaired on anvils. A new enchantment called Mending was also added which allows the item to be directly repaired from collected XP. Although this enchantment can only be acquired from trading with villagers or from treasure chests, it effectively allows an item to last forever as long as you're careful not to use their last hitpoint or drop them in lava. Potions are risky to use at most. Health and regeneration potions are handy to have since they can directly restore your health regardless of your hunger level, swift potions boosts your speed, strength potions gives your damage a boost, and fire resistance potions makes you immune to fire and lava. However, most of the ingredients needed are difficult to find and the majority of them are found in the Nether where the most difficult monsters are found and hold drops needed to craft the potions. Once you actually get the ingredients and craft the potions, you may be tempted to not use them at all in fear of wasting their effects if you get killed.

Depending on your playing style, the blunderbuss from Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare may qualify. Hands-down the most powerful gun in the game, it blasts zombies into a fine pink mist with one shot (several of them if they happen to be in a tight cluster). The ammo is made from dead zombie parts (ribs, eyes, ears, and tongues according to the RDR Wiki ) and it takes ten zombie parts to make one unit of blunderbuss ammo. However, if you blast the undead apart with the blunderbuss you can't loot their bodies for ammo ingredients, which forces you to kill zombies normally. If you can kill 10+ zombies with conventional weapons you probably don't need the blunderbuss anyway. On a similar note, the Explosive Rifle from Red Dead Redemption may qualify as well; it is a powerful, experimental, single-shot rifle added to the game by a DLC pack. It takes a shitload of money to buy, and while it is available for half the price, this feature only comes when the player has a high enough honor (meaning they have to play throughout most of the game not taking advantage of Video Game Cruelty Potential). Furthermore, the rifle can only be purchased in the final region unlocked in the game. And if the player does get the rifle, they will find it to be an overpowered beauty which completely annihilates any enemies and animals, removing the ability to loot them, and has a maximum bullet limit of 15 bullets. Sure, they can expand this to 30, but to do so, the player requires the purchasing of an additional item-the bandolier. Thankfully, this item is available near the beginning of the game and is relatively cheap.

) and it takes ten zombie parts to make one unit of blunderbuss ammo. However, if you blast the undead apart with the blunderbuss you can't loot their bodies for ammo ingredients, which forces you to kill zombies normally. If you can kill 10+ zombies with conventional weapons you probably don't need the blunderbuss anyway. Terraria has the Star Cannon. Shot for shot, it's the most powerful weapon in the game, and it can be crafted fairly early. The catch is that it uses Fallen Stars as ammo. Fallen Stars are dropped at a very low rate at night (you'll get maybe ten or twelve if you scour the earth), are used in many other crafting recipes (including the essential Mana Crystals), and can't be reused once fired. Furthermore, the Star Cannon has a ludicrously high rate of fire, so even with armor that reduces your ammo consumption, you'll end up burning through your star stockpile at a fairly quick speed.

Mercenaries: World In Flames has this issue with its various Airstrikes/Supply drops. If you had a strike available you need only aim at the target area, and call down the thunder/goods. They can even be found at a decent frequency. But you are constantly in paranoia that your large mortar strike won't be as useful here clearing out a random enemy outpost, as it would there... the next enemy outpost. There's only one instance where an airstrike is necessary, and you use a nuclear bunker buster for that one. Aside from that, players are likely to have enough large munitions stocked up to support a small army.

Missile launchers in TerraTech are the most versatile and among the most powerful weapons in the game, but they are also expensive and prone to blowing up after a few hits. Players tend to hoard them until they have enough to bulldoze anything in their path.

Non-video game gaming examples:

Board Games

The queen in Chess verges on this, at least in the beginning of the game. A common piece of advice to beginners is to never bring your queen out too early, as while it is the most powerful piece, that actually makes it vulnerable in the opening due to the fact that it can be chased around and trapped by less valuable pieces. Of course, there are always exceptions to this.

The Admiral in the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame gets 2 nuke tokens he can use to demolish entire space sectors and have a high chance to destroy the incredibly dangerous cylon carrier basestars in one quick attack. But you only got two, and it can be a 4 hour game. There might come a situation where they are more needed than right now. Better hold on to them I guess. The Exodus Expansion brings in a skillcard for every skill deck that has a value of 6, more than any other skillcard. So it is incredibly powerful to play into skillchecks. But all of those cards also have a very powerful Action printed on them. So you are torn apart between keeping it for some skillcheck or using it for its awesome powers. The engineering skillcard of that tier allows that player to build an additional nuke...



Card Games

Some cards in Magic: The Gathering are specifically designed to invoke this trope, by giving you a small cheap effect and/or a large expensive effect. Good players will know when getting it out now is more important than making it more powerful; bad players will not. One such example is Kavu Titan; when they were playtesting Invasion and someone lent now-head Designer Mark Rosewater a deck to use without mentioning that the Grizzly Bears (a basic 2-mana card with two power/toughness, similar to Kavu Titan without its kicker) were supposed to be proxies for Kavu Titans. Mark went 4-0 the first week, and then upon being told that they were actually Titans, he went 2-2 the next week, wanting to hold back to use the Titan's improved version rather than just pouring on the aggression. Another example is the Chaos Orb, a card which is tossed from a specified height onto the gaming table and destroys any card it ends up touching. It is now banned entirely from tournament play, but in the early days a story went around about some players came up with the clever idea of tearing up the Chaos Orb card and scattering all the pieces across the opponent's side of the table. This was eventually deemed illegal, but anyone with the cojones to pull a stunt like that with an extremely valuable out-of-print rare deserves to get the win. This urban legend was referenced in a joke card as Chaos Confetti . There are also the Planeswalkers, which often have a small ability that keeps them alive, and more powerful abilities that can often kill them or leave them near-death, and they can use only one per turn. Garruk Wildspeaker, in particular, gets this treatment: "Do I untap two lands or Overrun?" is a legitimate question.

Certain cards in Munchkin: high-level monsters, particularly nasty curses, cards that empower enemies, etc. that are usually reserved until someone reaches high levels, at which point the other players unleash Hell to stop them from winning.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Creature of Havoc: The Crystal Club delivers a single automatic One-Hit Kill and then shatters. It's also the only way to defeat the Big Bad in the final confrontation Player Character didn't waste it on some random rhino-man...

Player Character didn't waste it on some random rhino-man... Deliberately enforced with the Sunstone in the eighth and final GrailQuest book, Legion of the Dead; it can either give you an obscene amount of gold or a massive amount of LIFE POINTS over and above the possible maximum, which then becomes your new permanent total, but it is the only thing that can defeat the titular Legion and if you use it before the Boss Battle with them the game becomes Unwinnable. When you get it, you are warned to resist temptation and save it for when you meet the Legion.

Tabletop Games

Dungeons & Dragons: Asset management is a large part of the game, so this is common. The Wish spell (starting from Basic D&D), and its divine counterpart Miracle (much later) can do almost anything. In a normal campaign, however high-level, no-one will ever cast them, unless suicidally desperate. The cost and having to deal with possible twists simply aren't worth it. First edition encourages the Dungeon Master to be as much of a jerkass literal genie as the wish wording allowed. Second and third edition restored some balance by adding "safe" uses of the spells, making them quite useful. For example, they can be used to imitate any other spell below certain levels, even granting access to spells that the character would otherwise never be able to cast. Taken Up to Eleven in 5th Edition, where instead of an xp cost, there is a 33 percent chance every time you cast it of never being able to cast it again, meaning on average a caster will only be able to cast it 3 times in their entire life. Spellcasters are limited by the number of spells they can cast throughout the day. Some players tend to underuse their high level spells, holding back just in case they get into another combat before they can recharge. Magic items, including scrolls, potions and items with charges, are often underused by most players, particularly in campaigns that where magic items are particularly rare. 4th edition attempted to avert this trope: Encounter powers are usable once per encounter, so it is a waste NOT to use them, as if they go unused you gain no benefit at all. Action points (which give you an extra action, though some characters can gain other uses for them) are restricted to being used once per encounter, you gain one every second encounter, and they reset after the adventure, encouraging players to use the resource. Sadly, many newbie players don't understand this and play this trope straight until it is explained to them; the optimal strategy tends to be to use all of your encounter powers straightaway, and to either use an action point in the encounter immediately prior to gaining another one (so the 2nd, 4th, ect.), as well against any sort of boss, or to save up for the first two fights, and then use an action point in the third, fourth, and fifth fights (assuming a standard 5-encounter adventure). Daily powers play this straight with many players as well; because they are usable only once per day (though they do reset), they tend to be saved for bosses. At low levels, you only have one, and thus often save it for the boss fight. At higher levels, you will have four daily powers, and possibly some daily utility powers as well, meaning that if you save them all for the final fight, even if you use them every single round in the fight, you still may not run out of them and will likely overwhelm the boss with insane firepower. Interestingly, many high-level monsters seem to be designed with the assumption that you'll drop a daily power in every fight, which is actually probably a good idea, because it helps you conserve healing surges for later in the adventure. In 5th Edition, this can actually be an Inverted Trope if the DM and players are somewhat experienced and/or the DM gets "meta" with the players. Once the party gets past level 3 or so, a fully-rested party with all of their abilities can usually tear through an appropriate-level challenge if they're allowed to go all in on an enemy, so DMs that want a challenging final fight (without resorting to going way above the party level) may try to get PCs to use up some abilities by doing a fake-out of encounters left so PCs will use up some of their abilities before the fight or will make the fight initially seem easier than it is so the PCs can get lulled into complacency before the DM springs the trap. Played Straight with Hit Dice though, as it is usually best for PCs to travel around near full health, but the rules only allowing 1/2 of max hit dice to be restored upon a rest can make players hesitant to heal fully during a Short Rest lest they have less resources for the following day. In all editions of D&D, many limited-use magic items such as scrolls, potions, and wands may become this. Players save them, and then eventually realize that they have saved them so long they have become useless. Interestingly, in 3rd edition D&D, because almost all magic items can be bought or crafted pretty easily, this sometimes got reversed for cheap magical items; one of the most common accessories for experienced adventurers was the so-called healstick or curestick, a wand of cure light wounds which had 50 charges and thus could heal massive amounts of damage between fights at an extremely low cost. Once players got wealthy enough, they would start every fight at maximum hit points as a result, which lead to 4th edition allowing characters to simply heal for free between fights, and for limited-use healing items to heal using the same pool of healing as natural healing used, making them more of a convenience than anything else. All editions of D&D suffer from the "5 minute workday" issue to varying extents in order to subvert this trope; essentially, the players unload ALL of their best daily abilities up front, and then immediately go rest, so that they can spam them every single encounter. This was a much worse problem in earlier editions of D&D, where there were many ways of hiding in a safe space under pretty ridiculous circumstances.

Avalon Hill's Third Reich (both the table-top and computer versions) has elements of this: The double move: With a little judicious spending, it's possible to move twice in a row, which can be a huge advantage. The only problem? It tends to set up the other side to do the same exact thing, so most players will never use it unless they can be pretty certain of knocking a major enemy country out of the war. American units: These are the best Allied units in the game, but they have a drawback. American units that get eliminated have to be rebuilt in the United States and then initially deployed to Britain (or France, in the unlikely event that France is still standing), but the United States can only initially deploy six units per turn, and those units cannot be strategically redeployed to any place outside of Britain until the next turn. So there's a temptation for the Allies to let the British carry the brunt of the fighting, since any British casualties can return to the front a turn earlier than any American casualties. French and British units in the Mediterranean theater: This is the same principle as the previous point. British units are generally stronger than French units, but British units require two nine-factor fleets to be transported to the Mediterranean front, whereas French units require only one (assuming the French navy has been based in Marseilles). So if the war in North Africa heats up while France is still standing (granted, it usually doesn't), there is a temptation for the Allies to let the French to bear the brunt of the fighting there.

Magic items in the earliest edition of The Dark Eye could easily end up being this, since with the single exception of the eponymous "dark eye" all example items listed in the rulebook, from the obligatory healing potion over a belt that would temporarily boost a character's strength to a key that could open any lock, were single-use only. (The dark eye itself was limited in a different fashion — it was a crystal ball magically tied to the site of its creation, so even if you ever found one you couldn't take it with you.)

In Warhammer 40,000: Several armies, most notably the Dark Eldar and Inquisitors of the Grey Knights faction, have weapons or items which are "one use" or "One Shot". They usually have a disproportionally high power compared to a reusable weapon/item of similar effect (such as a weapon that can simply negate something's existence as opposed to a really good, but still avoidable anti-tank weapon). However their one use means that you have to pick and choose your moments and, on top of that, because of the dice-based nature of the game you run the risk of having it not do anything at all. Certain items are also force multipliers, meaning you'll be trying to squeeze all your troops into it's area of effect before setting it off, but this runs the risk of squeezing your army into one neat and tidy ball for your opponent's massive weapon. Averted in the case of combi-weapons. Popular wisdom is to send a squad loaded with combi-weapons on a suicide drop to eliminate a big threat, fire the one-shot mode immediately, and not to worry about the inevitable retaliation. In-universe, the Custodes for the Imperium. They are bar none the mightiest warriors in the Imperium, even stronger than the Space Marines. However, the Bio-Augmentation process used to create Custodes is so taxing that each Custodes is a huge investment for the Imperium. As a result, the Imperium can't risk losing a single one for any reason save defending the Golden Throne itself. In-universe, Imperial Titans take centuries to construct, due to the veneration given to them by the Adeptus Mechanicus (The revered Emperor-Class Titan is implied to take a millenium or two to actually make, or sometimes Lost Technology outright). As a result, even though a single titan can turn the tide of battle in the Imperium's favour, they're seldom used outside of defending their Forge World homes, so the act of deploying even a single Titan Maniple (which consist of only three titans) is considered a Godzilla threshold just under that of Exterminatus. This also means that the Imperium will go to absurd lengths to recover even parts of a Titan, as repairing one is far quicker than building a new one. The only aversion to this are Imperial Knights, who are specifically created as cheap, mass produced versions of Titans for use in "small" scale engagements.

Warhammer A good number of one-use-per-game magic items that a player must carefully choose the right time to use. Frequently these will end up going unused in the hands of a cautious player, who is saving them for a later that never comes, just in case. Perhaps the most common such item in the 8th edition of the game is the Dispel Magic Scroll - a scroll which automatically dispels an enemy spell and stops it from working before it is cast. In previous editions of the game the Dispel Magic Scroll was ubiquitous — pretty much the only magic item that could be duplicated. This led to many players loading down their wizards with as many of the things as they could cram in, then using them liberally, to severely curtail the enemy's magic phase. This was rarely fun, especially if both sides were doing it, so in 8th edition the Dispel Magic Scroll has become a one-per-army item like everything else. Now that it represents your army's one chance to automatically counter a key enemy spell (other dispel attempts require the rolling of dice, and can fail) it has become a precious resource indeed. So precious that they frequently go unused nowadays. There's also an abundance of arcane items similar to the dispel scroll that either expands upon it's functions (such as dispelling all magic that phase) or does something equally effective to the enemy wizards that effectively shut them down for one turn. They're usually done so in such a way that they cost much higher than what the dispel scroll would be worth, even if the effect was technically worse; this is because the writers know that the simple fact that these item exist would unbalance the game, after all it no longer becomes a question of "which one to use" (as is the case with Magic Weapons and Armor) but rather "how many can I cram into my list". And indeed every such item is squeezed in alongside the dispel scroll whenever possible; even sometimes at the expense of actual troops. But since they too are one-use only, they seldom see use unless the perfect opportunity comes along. The most notable example is the Hellheart, which can nuke several enemy wizards in a large radius, but the owner would try to maneuver the holder into such a position, while the enemy (as they would be allowed to know if a Hellheart was taken and who has it) would try to lead him on a merry chase, invoking this trope so that he might not loose even a single caster to it.

Fellow Games Workshop game, Chainsaw Warrior has the Laser Lance. This weapon is the most important item in the game, he'll always start with this (in contrast everything else he has is random, even his chainsaw might not appear). It's the one weapon that NO ENEMY is immune to and in the iOS game sequel - the Laser Lance has an Armor Piercing capability that rivals a multi-rocket M-T-M Rocket launcher and the massive Bartlett X600 Sniper Rifle. However few people use the Laser Lance unless it's a real emergency or they're fighting the last boss, the Darkness. The kicker? The Laser Lance has mediocre accuracy and only 3 shots. The Darkness can only be killed by two weapons, the Laser Lance and the Implosion Vest which also kills the wearer, making the Laser Lance the only safe choice.

Defied in Numenera: Limited-Use Magical Devices called cyphers are found all over the place, but PCs are only able to carry two or three or a time safely. So regardless of how awesome a given cypher is, the system encourages you to burn them and grab new ones after every encounter.

Destiny points and, to a lesser extent, Force points in Star Wars: Saga Edition: Destiny points are extremely powerful character attributes: they can be spent to make any attack an automatic Critical Hit or any enemy attack an automatic miss (even after the dice have already been rolled and the results announced); they allow your character to act out of turn or take damage; and they can be converted to three less-powerful, but still useful Force Points. The downside? You only get one at each level up, with no way to obtain more. Due to their extreme power, players tend to stockpile them and not spend them unless the situation is truly desperate. Some GMs houserule a hard cap on how many destiny points a character can have at one time in an attempt to avoid this (and to prevent the players from taking out the campaign's final boss by using destiny points to score 5 critical hits before said boss can even act). Force points allow a character to activate some special abilities, add 1d6 to nearly any d20 roll, and turn a fatal blow into a merely incapacitating one. That last one ensures that players always keep at least one on hand at all times. Because Force Points only regenerate at each level up, players usually stockpile a couple for emergencies and refuse to spend them until they're close to levelling up. An alternate, optional rule sees players get a far lower number of Force points (one for Levels 1-6, two for levels 7-12, and three for levels 13+) but have them regenerate daily. Though the game suggests using this rule for a campaign that uses Force points more frequently, the end result often sees less Force point usage, to the point where players under level 7 frequently won't use any Force Points at all, lest they be caught without one when a strong attack drops them to 0 HP.



Non-gaming examples:

Anime and Manga

Mobile Suit Gundam Wing gives this status to the Wing Gundam Zero, which was actually developed before any of the Gundams that appear earlier in the show, and is more powerful than all of them combined. The team of scientists who designed it decided it was grossly overpowered for what they wanted to use it for, and instead split up to each make their own Gundam based off some aspect of Wing Zero's design.

In Kantai Collection, Yamato is by far the most powerful ship girl in the entire fleet, wielding a massive array of BFGs capable of a One Hit Multi Kill. However, her power makes her an even larger drain on resources than Big Eater Akagi, forcing the Admiral to keep her in her base and out of combat unless it becomes absolutely necessary to field her.

Izuku Midoriya of My Hero Academia eventually realizes his issues controlling the Super Strength of his power stem from this trope and the Centipede's Dilemma. Having only gotten his power in his teens, he viewed it as something special while his classmates, who have had their powers since kindergarten, used theirs as freely and naturally as they breathed. Midoriya begins to feel that to gain better control he has to use his power more often, rather than think of it as a trump card.

Outlaw Star: Caster gun shells certainly qualify. Because they are either rare or expensive (often both), Gene will go through his conventional weapons and cheaper/more plentiful caster shells before resorting to the more powerful variety of techno-magic in his arsenal... unless a specific threat demands otherwise.

Fan Fiction

Inverted when the All Guardsmen Party are given a small nuclear bomb during "The Xenotech Heresy". Deciding its too awesome not to use, and swearing that they'll detonate it no matter what happens.

In Carving Out a Future , most of the crew of Serenity are reluctant to use the new table Xander made for them because it was "too pretty to eat off of".

, most of the crew of Serenity are reluctant to use the new table Xander made for them because it was "too pretty to eat off of". In The Havoc Side of the Force, Harry Potter is very reluctant to use any of his potions since he's stuck in a galaxy far, far away from anywhere he could restock, making them irreplaceable. Early on, he ponders saving his Felix Felicis since it's something he only wants to use for emergencies, given how hard it is to replace normally. Then he realizes that emergencies don't get much worse than being in an unknown time and place where he can't communicate with anyone.

XCOM: RWBY Within has Strike Team One and later Strike Eight who are the best of the best which makes command leery of using the entire team for one mission in case they're needed for another critical mission comes up when they're still on their mandated downtime. Also, until they develop a device to use Aura all the time, Strike Eight's members use a device that allows for Aura and Semblance usage for only ten seconds and only has a single use. All of them hesitate to use their device on a mission because they might need it more later before they can head back to base.

Izuku in My Hero Playthrough is wary of spending his Talent Points in case a situation arises where he needs a specific Talent that he hasn't purchased yet. Though sometimes his Chronic Hero Syndrome makes him go the opposite way and spend his points needlessly such as panicking and spending two points on American and Japanese sign language to apologize to the furious Cassandra Cain.

In Playing Our Roles , the Self-Insert in Roman Torchwick's body tends to hoard the stat points he gets from leveling up if there's anyway he can improve a stat without spending them. By the time he decides he has to spend them, he has one hundred twenty-five to use.

Films — Live-Action

In This is Spın̈al Tap, Nigel Tufnel has a six-string Fender bass guitar, still in wrapping, which has never been played. He says to Marty DiBergi: "Don't touch it! Don't even point at it!" Truth in Television: that instrument is a Fender Bass VI, of which only some 300 were ever made. They are Too Awesome to Use even in Real Life. Only two are known to exist in that Sea Foam Green colour scheme.

of which only some 300 were ever made. They are Too Awesome to Use even in Real Life. Only two are known to exist in that Sea Foam Green colour scheme. Krull: the hero receives an awesome magical glaive weapon in the beginning of the film, but his mentor advises him not to use it until he needs it most. It sits on his saddle for the rest of the film until he faces the Big Bad.

Literature

Live-Action TV

In Auction Kings, one seller brought in a motorcycle with only a couple miles on the odometer. This was the only time in the entire series that Paul was unable to test-ride a vehicle he sold.

Battlestar Galactica 2003: In the second-season episode Flight of the Phoenix, Chief Tyrol builds a specialized fighter with parts and carbon plating that make it invisible to DRADIS sensors, both human and Cylon alike. It gets used for a grand total of two missions (being piloted once by Kara, and once by Lee, and both times revolving around a plan to destroy a Resurrection Ship) before it's destroyed via a piece of debris that impacts it. For the rest of the series, Tyrol never bothers to make another one, even though it was mostly cobbled together from spare parts and gave the crew a morale boost.

The Dutch version of The Mole introduced "jokers" in the later seasons that players can use to nullify incorrect answers on the test that determines which one of them will be executed, and they typically can hoard them to use on future tests when the margin of error is smaller. Many contestants have ended up executed when they still had a joker or two (or three or even four!) in their pockets because they either thought they were safe and didn't need them or wanted to save the jokers for when they'd really need them.

The Amazing Race introduced the Express Pass in Season 17, which allows the team holding it to skip one task (or neutralize a U-Turn used on them) anytime in the first 8 legs of the Race. It generally averts this, as teams will use it the first time they think they're in danger of elimination (or on the 8th leg if they still have it at that point). However, in Season 22, Jessica & John won the Express Pass on the first leg and were actually eliminated without ever having used it because John insisted on saving it even when it was clear they were in last place and there was only one other team still racing.

Survivor introduced the Hidden Immunity Idol in Season 11, which can be played at almost any Tribal Council to be safe if one feels they are in danger. Many a contestant has gotten voted out with an idol in their pocket when they mistakenly thought they were safe for that round and decided to save it for later. The most infamous example was in Survivor: China where one of the contestants, James Clement, was in possession of two hidden immunity idols and was blindsided with both of them in his pocket. It was regarded as the dumbest Survivor move ever, until next season.

This is the basis for being "sponge-worthy" in Seinfeld. Elaine's preferred form of contraception, the contraceptive sponge, is being taken off the market, so she buys all that are available. But since her supply is limited, she has to choose which men are really worth sleeping with. She breaks up with her current boyfriend after deeming him to not be sponge-worthy.

Doctor Who: Ashildr, having been made immortal, is given a single second dose of her Immortality Inducer so she can give it to someone to accompany her though the ages. Eight hundred years later, losing her mind from loneliness and lack of purpose, she still hasn't used it because, well, you'd have to be really sure.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Borg became this for the show's creators. The Borg were so awesomely powerful (and impossible to negotiate with) that they only got used four times (6 episodes, because of 2-parters) over the entire 7 seasons of the show. It was just that hard to come up with a way to defeat the Borg without making them seem less awesome. Of those 4 times they face the Borg, they are saved once by essentially Divine Intervention, and once they are merely facing an individual drone and the challenge is to make him an individual (plus attempting not to tangle with the Borg ship coming for the rescue), not to defeat him. So the Enterprise crew only actually defeated the Borg twice during the run of the TV series. This averted the Badass Decay that the Borg did not encounter until they became staple enemies during Star Trek: Voyager

A first-season episode of Star Trek: Voyager establishes that the titular starship left DS-9 with 38 photon torpedoes and has no way to replenish them, suggesting that they have to be very careful with how they use them. Or not, as they go through their entire inventory and then some over the show's run, so they apparently did figure out how to make more of them.

Web Animation

RWBY: In Volume 2's finale, a horde of Grimm breach the city's defences and invade. Team CFVY help the heroes fight to save the city, but team-leader Coco refuses to allow Velvet use her weapon. Her weapon consists of a box she carries at her waist but which she almost never uses. Coco states that she's spent all semester working on it and it would be a waste to use it now. The heroes handily defeat the invasion and save the city, but a far more extensive and devastating invasion happens a year later at the end of Volume 3. This time, Coco calls on Velvet to use her weapon. The box is revealed to be a holographic projector that produces weapons made from Hard Light. Velvet's Semblance allows her to perfectly mimic the fighting style and moves of any warrior she's ever seen. Her weapon therefore creates holographic weapons of every weapon she's ever photographed. By using the correct weapon in combination with her Semblance, Velvet becomes a One-Man Army. The weakness of the weapon is that she can only use each weapon a single time and only for a short period of time, so a single battle could use up her entire supply of photographs and leave her with nothing. Once it's used up, she has to rebuild the holographic projector with a new stock of photographs. As a result, she has to be very careful about when she makes use of her weapon and even which photographs she chooses to use.

Web Comics

Web Original

The SCP Foundation has a pill bottle with cure-all pills. There's a limited amount of them, there's no way to make more of them (not perfectly, at any rate. It's possible to duplicate them with SCP-038, but the duplicated pills are much less potent), and the re-usable alternative can turn you into an eldritch horror.

There's a limited amount of them, there's no way to make more of them (not perfectly, at any rate. It's possible to duplicate them with SCP-038, but the duplicated pills are much less potent), and the re-usable alternative can turn you into an eldritch horror. Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation refers to this as the "But I might need it later" syndrome, and notes that with the advent of New Game+, "later" might not even be the final boss battle. So we have scenarios where you're sitting on a nuclear stockpile to shame North Korea and are throwing peas at a giant robot crab on the off-chance that there might be a bigger giant robot crab just around the corner. No game illustrates this phenomenon better than Mercenaries 2, or as I like to call it, Airstrikes 2: Hooray for Airstrikes.

Laura Bailey of Critical Role enacts a classic example when wondering whether now would be the time to use her Arrows of Dragon Slaying, whether it would be a "waste" to use them now... against Umbrasyl the Hope Devourer, an ancient dragon. Naturally, everyone at the table yells at her, and she ends up using the arrows. Attribute it to either Laura/Vex's legendary stinginess with loot, or the fact that Umbrasyl works with three other dragons they'll have to fight later...

Western Animation

Played with in The Transformers: The Movie. Each successive leader of the Autobots is the caretaker of the Matrix of Leadership, an ancient one-use-only artifact prophesied to "light their darkest hour" with its immense power. It turns out, however, that the artifact's holder cannot actually choose when it to use it, as the characters mistakenly believe at first. Later in the series, this is played straight when Optimus is forced to open the Matrix to eradicate the Hate Plague afflicting the galaxy; as the Matrix's accumulated eons of knowledge is what could ultimately destroy the plague, Optimus using it this way left it as nothing more than an empty metal container.

Parodied in The Amazing World of Gumball RPG Episode "The Console". Gumball doesn't want to use his one potion during the Final Boss battle because he thinks he might need it later.

Real Life