The world of Avatar is positively littered with some truly incredible benders. While there are some truly powerful benders throughout the series, it takes someone truly special to create something new with their bending.

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Powers like lava-bending, metal-bending, blood-bending, and flight are all-natural evolutions of the basic bending forms, but none of them would have been possible without the powerful benders that pushed their elements to the limits. The Avatars may have been the ultimates when it comes to mastering the various elements, however, there are certain skills that take a certain specialization to truly grasp.

Updated By Amanda Bruce On August 31st, 2020: Between Aang and Korra's stories, there are so many incredible benders that we just can't leave it at the top ten benders. Now, even more of the most powerful benders in the Avatar universe have been added to demonstrate some truly awesome feats.

15 Ming-Hua

Ming-Hua might be a villain, but she's a truly impressive water-bender. Water bending is often seen to be dependent on the movement of someone's appendages. Katara initially has trouble when she can't get her hand motions exactly right. Ming-Hua perfects water bending without the need for those hand motions.

That's because she doesn't actually have arms to utilize. She manages to truly make her element an extension of herself, using water in place of her arms for a more fluid method of attack altogether. It's no wonder people have such a hard time besting her.

14 Zuko

Prince Zuko from Avatar: The Last Aibender standing in flames holding swords

Zuko doesn't get a lot of screen time as a bender in The Legend Of Korra, but the audience gets to steadily watch him improve (in more ways than one) in the original series. He's able to eventually master every technique his uncle teaches him.

Zuko spends the bulk of his young life training and perfecting his technique. He even accepts, eventually, that he won't be able to master every technique because some fire-benders just might have more raw power than him.

13 Azula

Azula with smoke coming out of her fingers in Avatar: The Last Airbender

One of those fire-benders with more raw power is his own sister. Azula might be unhinged, but she's an incredible fire-bender. She's one of very few benders in the entire franchise to be able to use lightning.

Bending lightning takes even more concentration and power than bending fire. Even Avatar Kyoshi isn't able to bend lightning during her 230 year lifetime. It also takes the combined force of Zuko and Katara to finally defeat her.

12 Jinora

jinora

Jinora is a surprisingly strong bender. She's not someone the audience would expect to be so powerful when she debuts in Legend Of Korra, but she grows to have some serious skills.

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Jinora has the honor of being one of the youngest air bending masters - ever. That's quite a feat considering her grandfather became the Avatar. It's not just her air bending that lands her here. She has strong power outside of her command of air; she's incredibly young to be able to communicate with spirits and enter the Spirit World, but she's able to lead Korra through the experience.

11 Kyoshi

kyoshi

Kyoshi is the Avatar two generations before Aang. Though she's not the Avatar Aang communicates with most often, she is definitely one of the most powerful.

Born an earth-bender, Kyoshi commands all elements, but it's truly earth where she excels. She does, after all, use her ability to break off a piece of a continent, further separating the two pieces of land with lava bending, to create Kyoshi Island. She's the only Avatar we know of who created her own island.

10 Kuvira

Earth-benders are already an incredibly tough bunch. With the fortitude of the earth beneath them, they are able to unleash devastating attacks while standing their ground and rooted in the earth beneath them. Kuvira takes these principles to the extreme. She is incredibly tough as one of the strongest metal-benders alive during the time that Korra is Avatar.

With this great strength, she takes control of a faltering Earth kingdom and pushes the Avatar herself to her very limits. Kuvira is cold, impenetrable and only made malleable through great force and external pressure, just like the element she uses with devastating efficiency.

9 Bumi

King Bumi earthbending in Avatar

Bumi is another truly impressive earth-bender that uses his element like few others throughout the course of the two series. While he has a personality much like that of an air-bender, Bumi is one of the most powerful earth-benders around during Aang’s time as the Avatar.

Audiences may only get a peek at his elemental prowess as they are only introduced to him when he is over a century old, but that only makes the spritely Bumi more impressive. He may not have the body of his younger self, but even with his aging body, he’s still able to show the fire nation (and Aang) what earth-bending is really about.

8 Zaheer

Zaheer flying in The Legend of Korra.

Zaheer may not have been an air-bender for very long, but during his brief tenure he was able to not only take down the Avatar, but he was able to accomplish what few air-benders before him could, flight. The air-nation may have been devastated by the fire nation long before his time, but even so Zaheer perfect embodied the spirit of the air nation.

While he may have been much more serious than many of the air-bender that audiences were introduced to, he took their teachings to heart and used the free-flowing air nomad teaching to enact his plan to destroy that Avatar.

7 Katara

Avatar-The-Last-Airbender-Katara

Katara may have just been a young water-bender when audiences were first introduced to her, but throughout the course of her time with Aang, she evolved nearly as much as the Avatar himself. From blood-bending to healing through the power of her bending, Katara embodied perfectly what it meant to be a water-bender.

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Much like the greatest water-benders throughout the series, Katara was able to perfectly balance the offensive and defensive capabilities of her element. She may not have always been up for a fight, but she was always there to help out or clean up the pieces afterward.

6 Toph

Avatar Toph

While there have already been some incredibly impressive earth-benders mentioned in this article, Toph is perhaps the greatest earth-bender to have ever lived. Not only was Toph a natural when it came to moving the sturdiest of the elements, and not only was she taught by the badger-moles (the original earth-benders), but she was also able to take earth-bending to its natural evolution, metal-bending.

As the creator of the metal-bending technique, Toph takes the top spot when it comes to earth-benders across the entirety of the series. There may have been many after her who would follow the steps that she had laid out, but Toph is the girl who opened the door to an all-new type of bending.

5 Iroh

Iroh may have been the older brother in line for the throne before Ozai forced his way in, but he was never really one to hold that kind of power with much regard. The Dragon of The West as he was called during his heyday, Iroh was an incredibly powerful fire-bender.

While he earned the title of Dragon by his well-known ability to breathe fire and (supposedly) killing a dragon, Iroh was much more in harmony with the true roots of fire-bending than his brother and most of his peers. Ozai and others like him may have been beholden to the rage that the used to fuel their fire, but Iroh was able to see through that charade and find a path toward the life that fire-bending was truly attached to.

4 Wan

The first avatar both in this article and in history, Avatar Wan was capable of some truly incredible feats. After releasing the dark spirit Vaatu from his eternal fight with Rava, Wan traveled great distances to visit the lion-turtles of all four elements in order to free the world of Vaatu’s chaos.

While he had become the most powerful bender of his time and ushered in a new age where humans would live free of the lion-turtles, Wan was not able to broker a peace between the spirits of his world and the humans who were now capable of fighting back. He may have made many mistakes, but Wan fought for peace with all his might until the very end.

3 Korra

From a very early age, Korra makes it abundantly clear that she is going to become an extremely powerful bender. Although Korra may be naturally very gifted when it comes to manipulating the elements, she has a tough time coming to terms with responsibilities as both one of the few remaining air-benders and as the Avatar.

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As the link between the spirit realm and the physical realm, Korra is pushed to her limits time and time again by benders that have taken their element to the very furthest reaches of its power. While Korra is able to control all the elements with great power and precision, her adversaries routinely push her past her breaking points. Yet, somehow, she manages to keep going.

2 Firelord Ozai

Avatar-The-Last-Airbender-Ozai

While Ozai’s fire-bending prowess and utter ruthlessness make him a truly terrifying adversary (and father) to oppose, they aren’t the only factors that make Ozai such a formidable opponent.

Ozai’s fighting prowess in a one-on-one battle is certainly something to beware of, but what makes Ozai one of the most powerful benders to have ever lived, even more so than his own strength, is the fact that has the complete faith and trust of an entire nation of powerful fire-benders watching his back. And why wouldn’t they? His family has led the fire nation through prosperous times for generations now. That kind of loyalty and trust isn’t something that just anyone can command.

1 Aang

avatar aang

And last but not least, Aang, quite possibly the greatest Avatar (and greatest bender) to have ever lived. Not only was Aang able to master the four elements with relative ease and take down the fire nation, but he was also able to do so without compromising who he was as a person.

Time and time again, Aang was told that the only way to end Ozai’s rule would be to end the Firelord’s life. But even as a child, Aang was able to see that there had to be some other way of doing it, some way that would keep his hands clean of the blood everyone expected him to shed. Finally, having exhausted all other options, Aang unleashed the power of soul-bending (taught to him by the wise lion-turtle, of course) and was able to safely end the tyranny of Firelord Ozai without taking his life.

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