Originally Posted by
Xuvial
I wouldn't call water OP, you apparently missed the episodes where they were all stuck in a desert and Katara wasn't exactly a huge help. She was fairly helpless in Omashu as well, as I would assume her to be helpless in most of the Earth kingdom (mostly mountainous/barren lands). Blood-bending is WAY overpowered but balanced out by the fact that only the most gifted waterbenders can pull it off, combined with only full-moon nights would make it a 1-in-a-million thing. Amon and his family were the equivalent of mutated freaks so they don't count :P
If you look back through quite a few episodes you will notice that the water comes out of nowhere. It's just sort of there for Katara to use, but never explained where the hell it came from. That, or there's always some convenient fountain/pond/lake nearby which really doesn't make sense because water features aren't all THAT freaking common. The reality would've been that every now and then Katara would've found herself with no water to use other than her water-pouch. I'll still admit it is very strong, if not right up there at the top because of the ability to heal and freely change states...something no other element can do.
Fire was shown to be weak because...I hate to say this, but it was a PG show on a PG channel. If they brought reality into things, once you've been attacked by a firebender you would be in fucking hospital suffering 3rd-degree burns. Take what happened to Zuko's eye and apply that to the whole body. In the show the only thing fire could do was knock over people/objects (which doesn't even make sense because fire in itself can't apply physical force).
Also you don't need to be close to someone, see Zuko at the end of Book 2. He was pretty much firing long-range fireballs and that massive "pyroblast" style move, followed by what looked like 25-meter long dual flame whips. Those moves had incredible range! Lightning is a very easy way an expert firebender can beat a waterbender, just electrocute the water and sparks will fly. Redirecting lightning is also quite dangerous to the person who does it.
Earth wasn't shown to it's true potential, I'll agree with that. The Dai Lee were pro not because of their hand-rocks, they are professional earth-benders as well...the hand-rocks act as handcuffs because they are basically police. If you want to see the truth power of earthbending look at Aang vs Ozai (final eps), he uses the super-dense earth ball shield thingy which looks almost impossible to break through (had it not been for the comet giving Ozai all that power) followed by the avatar state gattling-gun style method where he compressed the rocks to ultra-high density and the fragmented them like bullets. Holy shit that move was nuts. But regardless of whether you find earth weak/boring, fact of the matter is that where there are people there will be earth...99% of the world's population lives on land. That's more than enough leverage towards that element :P
Air - this is a tricky one. It's true the element seems to have like zero offensive moves, being mostly about avoidance/evading and hitting enemies with wind blasts (which barely hurt them). But the show tries REALLY hard to compensate because during most of the first book Aang is pretty much unstoppable, he appears to have the "god" element lol. Case in point - he shits all over Zuko in every encounter, beat Toph on their first encounter and it would've been interesting to see him fight a waterbender.
There is quite a bit of talk that an airbender could make the air in an enemy's lungs blast, or quite easily suffocate enemies, or use a whirlwind to throw them 50 feet into the air and let gravity take care of the rest...but unfortunately none of those moves were used. The "mastery" form of Airbending is also completely unknown. Water > Blood, Earth > Metal, Fire > Lightning, Air > ???. Lookout, it could be something pretty crazy :P