Death Of A Thousand Cuts / Video Games

• Advance Wars has this. In fact, "infantry spam" is a slow-but-effective strategy for succeeding in any ground war. The other advantage of an infantry swarm is that, at most, a unit can destroy one other unit per turn (there are ways to attack multiple units, but none of these in any game can actually destroy that unit). Only the most powerful units can one-hit an infantry unit from full health, so it can be quite tricky to fight back the wall. The only problem to using only infantry, as opposed to infantry meat shielding artillery and rockets, is that it takes just as much time and structures to build an infantry as a MegaTank (just much more cash). A Mechanized Infantry rush (Mechs can do considerable damage to any land unit if they strike first) is generally more effective (especially against very large units, where the mech can move up, do a small but notable amount of damage, and get gunned down to make way for more mechs).
• Age of Empires:
  • A large enough number of guys with swords can storm a castle. Age of Empires III has all characters who can damage a building use a separate siege attack — an inexhaustible supply of torches. There's even legends being passed around about an archer who was the only survivor of an invading army headed for the enemy's town. He was forgotten about and later discovered by the second wave of attackers, who have found that he shot arrows at the town's stone walls, dealing 1 damage per arrow. The wall had already started crumbling before him.
  • Spearmen and Pikemen are more effective against War Elephants than Swordsmen; they get a bonus against cavalry, and the fact that in this case the "cavalry" are pachyderms isn't factored in. One will hurt an elephant pretty badly before he dies, and three or four will kill one.
• Age of Mythology: The Titans makes this necessary, as nothing in the game can kill a Titan in one shot. Not even the instant-kill god power Bolt, which only takes out 1300 of the Titan's 8,000 HP. Typical human units do about 10 points of damage to the Titan and try to wear it down, heroes being better at damaging them.
  • Even more so, fighting the enemy's army with your Titan will generally lead to your large titan being wasted. Target their buildings, or expect to lose your Titan to Scratch Damage. It bears reminding that, while very powerful and resistant, the Titans can not be healed.
    • Especially so if your opponent is Egyptian, remember that heroes deal extra damage to mythical units, Titans ARE Mythical Units and that Egyptian priests are considered heroes... Add that to the fact that Mythological Age Priests have a very good range for attacks and a decent attack rating, as well as being decently cheap... Well, let's just say that an army of old dudes could very easily kill Cerberus.
• Sarevok, the Big Bad from Baldur's Gate, naturally takes quite a few hits to take down in the game. Well, in the cinematics at the beginning of the sequel, he's shown in a flashback as having died with about fifteen arrows and four larger implements still sticking out of his chest. These aren't small injuries, mind; presumably he was just that tough. Poison weapons, which do repeated single points of damage, are also a good strategy for taking on spellcasters, whose spells are interrupted every time they take damage.
  • General rule is that, in the same timeframe, having more attacks is always better than one devastating attack, both for pure damage dealing and to compensate missed rolls (unless we are comparing non magical clubs to an Infinity +1 Sword). This is particularly true from mid-Shadows of Amn onwards, when major enemies start to bypass anyway your armor class, shields become almost useless and pure damage dealing grows in importance. Besides class and weapon proficiency, there are three common ways of achieving high attacks per round (APR): 1) invest points in dual wielding weapons; 2) use spells like haste, potions like oil of speed or high level abilities like whirlwind; 3) wield weapons that grant one additional attack per round, mostly enchanted small swords. Now combine all these factors into one single character who dual wields in the off hand a weapon that increases attacks per round (the effect is applied to the main hand too which is big) like Kundane or Belm, then cast improved haste. Enjoy the sheer amount of damage you cause to your opponents in a room of seconds. While all the various instances and weapons in game are usually viable even with suboptimal battle setups, high level characters and their innate powers can be micromanaged to broken results, ending spectacularly into this trope when abusing of the greater whirlwind ability.
  • It works also for missiles. The Tuigan Shortbow and the Light Crossbow of Speed are the ingame equivalent to machine guns and are regarded among the best ranged weapons in game - until very late game when you need at least +3 weapons to hit bosses.
• In Battlefield 2142, heavily-armored battlewalkers have a Weak Spot that can be attacked with everything but your combat knife. Unless it's an actual anti-vehicle weapon, each hit will do Scratch Damage. Fortunately for the walker pilot, no applicable firearm can wear down the walker in one salvo: all non-machine guns have limited rounds per magazine, and all machine guns suffer from overheating.
  • A better example would be the Titan battleships. Once its shields have come down, its vital components can be attacked with, again, everything but knives. Granted, it takes more bullets than any one player carries at one time to wear down everything, but it's entirely possible to take down a Titan by shooting enough lead at its tender spots.
• Battle for Wesnoth suffers from this at times to time. For example the Undead faction has a unit called Walking corpse, which the main purpose is this trope.
  • Plus, even though your unit can have a 100% resistance against a particular type of attack, the attack will always deal 1 damage. So you can nibble that target to death with 1 dmg, assume that there's no way for that target to heal and the attacker don't die first.
  • The experience mechanic on the other hand serves to partially counter this. Trying to nickel and dime a tough enemy unit to death can backfire because the target gets a small amount of experience for each attacker engaging it, potentially resulting in a Level-Up Fill-Up undoing all the previous effort.
• Black & White 2 went out of its way to avert this by basing its combat on its physics engine, its developers specifically citing the "thousands of spears bringing down a brick wall" scenario as what they were trying to avoid.
• Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King: Nothing in this game does more than a half-heart’s worth of Scratch Damage, but it is possible to get hit a lot in a very short period of time if you aren’t careful.
• Bonfire: Due to Maximum HP Reduction being built in to all attacks, tanks such as Hildie are likely to suffer this. They may only take Scratch Damage from most attacks, but taking more hits means their max HP gets worn down faster, eventually preventing them from recovering.
• In Borderlands you can knife any of the vehicles until it explodes. Hell, Brick can PUNCH a car to make it explode.
  • In addition, a major part of boss fights is making sure you have enough ammo to kill them.
  • On Mayhem 4 for Borderlands 3, any boss you could marginally take in a satisfactory time period gets 800% HP and 1000% Armor and Shields, so... you're gonna be shooting for a while. Those big numbers might as well lose a whole digit off the end for all that matters on 4.
• The Call of Duty franchise is mostly known for this, usually the later games like Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3, as well as the current CoDs such as Modern Warfare (2019), Black Ops Cold War, and Vanguard.
  • Survival Mode in both Modern Warfare 3 and Modern Warfare 2019 gnaw on this trope like a juicy bone. The damage output of any and ALL weapons is decreased as the waves progress, and terrifyingly, damage output reduction doubles, tripples, and even quadruples basically making most, if not all weapons become a lot less effective damage wise. This technically means all players will be fucked hard when they get to wave 20 and go from beyond that.
  • Many Call of Duty Games tend to play with hit markers a lot. This usually ties to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, World At War, and other later titles that contained hit markers. There are a lot of weapons throughout the franchise that received numerous complaints due to being "hit marker machines" which was caused by the low damage many of them did. It's not known exactly how many complaints were actually true, though, Chaos usually confirms many complaints when it comes to various Call Of Duty weapons and equipment.
  • Averted with the I.M.S in Ghosts. In fact, this Strike Chain award literally kills players and dogs instantly just by them being near it, entirely resulting in just ONE hit marker. The player that placed it? Oh, he/she doesn't die whatsoever, though justified technically. This is usually one of the many things that can easily lead to a near instant Rage Quit and even results in an almost unignorable Hilarity Ensues 10-Fold whenever it does, and just to top it all off, results in the I.M.S deploying player puppy-guard a building or other area that would make it very difficult for enemy players and bots to so much as get close to kill the puppy-guarding player without dying.
• In Castlevania, the Iron Golem enemies have maximum defense and will only take one damage from any attack. At this point, strong techniques and spells are nearly useless because the enemies have such thick skin. Weaker moves that hit quicker, however, suddenly become much more useful.
  • The Iron Golem in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow takes 9999 hits to kill... assuming you normal attack it. But using a certain soul can swap its monster HP with its almost nonexistent MP, killing it in well... one hit.
  • The Knife item crash. Knives/daggers are usually pitifully weak and a waste of Hearts, but throw dozens of them... Some of the crashes don't even take Hearts, but use constantly regenerating MP. Very good in Harmony of Dissonance and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; the latter features Richter Belmont shredding even Galamoth with it. Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin fittingly calls it something like "1,000 Blades".
  • In Castlevania: Judgment Grant has two attacks that launch several knives at your opponent.
  • In Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, it's possible to kill Menace with paper airplanes.
• "One Thousand Cuts" is actually the name of the final power of the Dual Blades powerset in City of Heroes. Though the animation seems to indicate it is only a couple dozen slashes at most, and the power only deals twelve separate ticks of damage, those ticks of damage are individually lower than most other slashes in the powerset yet add up to become the strongest power in the set.
• In the original Civilization, one lucky roll could allow a warrior with a spear to beat an armored vehicle. Later games in the series expand the rules to make this far more unlikely, but it's still possible.
• Command & Conquer is the classic "Riflemen killing a tank" example, offset by the fact that a tank can usually save itself by running the infantry over. A particularly bad example is found in Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge, where the Hero Unit Boris is capable, when powered up, of killing heavy tanks in two or three bursts of his AK-47. Same for deployed GI troops who can in groups of 5 or more decimate pretty much anything non-air.
  • One of the add-on packs for Red Alert featured a mission with a Soviet Super-Soldier who was ridiculously tough and did twice as much damage to anything he fought as they did to him. This reached an absurd height when you had him take on a battleship and win easily.
  • The Toxin General of Generals - Zero Hour. Massing chemical troopers could wear down anything on the ground, especially with the Anthrax Gamma upgrade. Yes you read that right - it was possible to destroy steel-and-cement structures by shooting poison at them.
• In Clonk, thrown objects such as rocks deal Scratch Damage. Throwing dozens at a monster from somewhere it can't reach you is a viable tactic.
• This is the basis of "A Thousand Deaths", a 50-hit Branch Combo belonging to one of the most powerful combo trees in Cross Edge.
• This is almost always the fate of the player in Crush, Crumble, and Chomp!; no matter how good you play, eventually the human forces will overwhelm you with attacks faster than your ability to heal/recover.
• In Dark Souls, every single enemy in game (with the small exception of A certain scaleless dragon the first time you meet him) can be killed even with the weakest of weapons, yes including your bare fists, meaning that if you have the skill and patience for it, literally every enemy, including other players can be eventually killed by a Death of a Thousand Cuts.
  • One of the final bosses, Manus the father of the abyss was once a normal human being who was unlucky enough to be caught in an endless cycle of being agonisingly tortured to death and being revived and healed to perfect health so he can never have the mercy of death. Manus uses this to his advantage by desperately punching a foot thick solid brick wall with his bare hand until his arm was broken; being healed to perfect health every day and the faintest most desperate promise of escape meant that all it took was for him to keep doing it for years and years on end. Eventually the wall broke and Manus was free, with nothing but an endless pit of hatred for humanity.
• In Dead by Daylight, most of the Killers take off one health state from the Survivors when they attack, either making a healthy Survivor injured or putting an injured one in a dying state. The Trickster has an unique "laceration meter" mechanic to go with his huge reserve of throwing knives: multiple hits are required to fill up the laceration meter and inflict damage on the Survivor, but this is made up for by being much more spammable compared to other ranged Killers' powers, having a larger ammo pool and no cooldown between throws.
• Implied in Deadly Rooms of Death in which the Stalwart Captain nearly sentences Beethro to "die the death of a thousand stabs." This is superfluous of course, since almost everything in the game is a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
  Beethro: Wouldn't one stab be enough?
• Descent: Freespace allowed a player's guns to do damage to capital ships — very slowly. Freespace 2 didn't: fighter guns could only do a certain amount of damage to capital ships, which had to be killed by either torpedoes or other capital ships.
• Normally, you can't do this in Desktop Dungeons. If you injure an enemy, then retreat to heal up, the enemy will also heal. However, Poison in this game cancels regeneration. So a very viable strategy is to attack an enemy until the next hit would kill you, cast APHEELSIK (the Poison spell), then retreat until you're at full health and resume. This is how the Assassin (the class that unlocks APHEELSIK) works.
• In Destiny, this is usually how most bosses are brought down, with constant gunfire from your primary weapons, supplemented by secondary and heavy weapons. It usually takes at least a few hundred and upwards of thousands of bullets to down most strike bosses, at least once whatever defenses they have active are removed. Raid bosses often require more complex techniques to expose them before they can be taken down... but they still in general require lots of concentrated gunfire to bring down.
• In Deus Ex, the toughest single standard enemy is likely the military bot. These are like fifteen feet tall, and have chainguns and rocket launchers. Destroying them usually requires multiple hits from a rocket launcher. But one thing: they can only shoot forward, and they turn slowly. So it's not only possible, but easy to destroy one with a combat knife, as long as no other enemies are around: stand behind it and attack continuously for a few minutes, walking in circles to stay behind as it turns to face you. Eventually it will blow up. If you're not careful you'll lose a limb, admittedly, but at least you won't have wasted any ammo.
• In Devil May Cry 4, Nero's Blue Rose allows you to do this against most bosses. Yes it will take forever to kill them and you won't get any significant stylish points, but constantly spamming them with your infinite ammunition revolver will eventually take them down. Notably, this is a valid option against Credo who is very difficult to land hits on with anything else (he also counterattacks your sword slashes), but he is completely indifferent to the damage taken from gunfire. Trying this tactic against Dante will have him shoot your bullets out of the air with his instead.
• In Dicey Dungeons, the Thief's starting primary weapon — and probably the most consistently effective one he gets — is the Dagger, which is infinitely reusable but only takes dice showing 3 or below. A Dagger build Thief wins by doing many, many attacks that hit for Scratch Damage (which means the Thorns enemy status, which deals damage back to him each time he attacks, is his Achilles' Heel).
• In Disgaea, certain characters (the Prinnies come to mind) perform multiple weak attacks instead of one regular-powered attack. But when linked into a combo, the attack value of each hit goes up. Put a Prinny at the end of a multi-character combo and watch every hit (and they land about ten) deal a squidload of damage...
  • Same for the Ninja-class units, that see their evasion rate go nigh 100% against any attack from any enemy that isn't more than double their level. A level 1000+ Ninja can easily clear a whole Item World on his own without getting hit once.
• This is the Necessary Drawback of the Onion Knight and Zidane in Dissidia Final Fantasy. Both of them are extremely fast and agile, but the majority of their Brave combos (unless they grossly outmatch, in levels, equipment, or both, the opponent) will deal single-digit damage per hit. However, their combos have a lot of hits, and they move really quickly, meaning that this isn't necessarily as nonviable as it may sound at first. Interestingly, despite both relying on the thousand cuts strategy, according to the people who make tier sheets one is very high-tier while the other is extremely low-tier.
• Time consuming as it may be, it is possible to kill a Cyberdemon in Doom with nothing but your bare fists (and without resorting to the Berserker pack). Very difficult due to the Cyberdemon's persistence combined with its HP. Doom II on the Xbox 360 recognizes this feat and will actually award the player an Achievement for doing so^note Though it actually doesn't care how you get there, just that the killing hit is scored by a punch..
• In Dragon Age: Inquisition, the Rogue class specialization Tempest has an ability literally called Thousand Cuts. It involves the rogue zipping around between all enemies in range, attacking them a number of times that depends on how high the Focus meter currently is. While not actually a thousand attacks are made, at tier 3 Focus, it's 38 attacks at 300% weapon damage which adds up to the equivalent of 124 regular attacks done in 2 seconds, enough to take about 1/3 off a High Dragon's health bar. Bonus points for the ability expending no Focus resource at all when combined with Flask of Fire, meaning it can be used about once every 30 seconds which makes it a complete Game-Breaker.
• Optional in Dragon Age: Origins - the game's Superboss Flemeth starts neutral and must be toggled. If the player stockpiled on traps, they can fill the area up with traps, then aggro the boss. This causes all of the traps to go off at once and can even kill the boss by Cherry Tapping.
• Dwarf Fortress gives us the nightmarish player character, MEATGOD. Meatgod was a player who wore adamant armor, and carried a little bronze hammer. Because Meatgod liked to get to know his enemies as he slowly beat his enemies to death with a dinky little hammer, he became legendary for his horrible actions (there's a MEATGOD achievement on the forums, for killing a megabeast with a no quality weapon). He once took on seven giants over a period of several days. The first couple of days, the giants would go at him, and he'd pound them until they collapsed from exhaustion. Then he'd leave and come back the next day. After a couple of days, they started running away at the sight of him. A couple days after that, they couldn't run anymore, due to having broken legs. On the last day, they didn't even try to struggle anymore, either due to exhaustion, blood loss, and painful injuries, or perhaps just that after several days of slow and torturous beatings, they welcomed death with open arms.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In series' lore, the province of Morrowind did not historically have the presence of dragons prior to their "extinction". Why? They were driven away by Cliff Racers... Yes, those weak but hideously annoying creatures that are the bane of players everywhere were able to drive out powerful Aedric (quasi-angelic) beings who could command elements into existence with a few words simply through sheer numbers and persistence. Come the 4th Era, after Cliff Racers had been driven away and after Red Mountain's eruption, a surviving dragon finally came to lair in the smoking ruins of Vvardenfell.
  • On a larger scale, this would be the downfall of Uriel Septim V's attempted invasion of Akavir. Due to space restrictions on his fleet, his forces were underspecialized except for the Battlemages. In nearly every direct confrontation with the Tsaesci forces, Uriel's legions routed them easily. However, he could not replace his losses and his army tended to suffer the heaviest losses to Tsaesci mounted raiders while they traveled or made camp due to his own lack of cavalry. Eventually forced to withdraw, Uriel would perform a Heroic Sacrifice to cover the retreat of his legions.
  • In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, this is the only way for a Dragonborn to defeat a dragon, unless they have a few powerful poisons or powerful damage-amplifier potions in inventory.
• Enter the Gungeon has a weapon called the Origuni whose description is literally "Thousand Cuts" — a reference to the related expression "death of a thousand paper cuts". Because that's what it does: hurl paper planes at enemies. It's only slightly more powerful than your starting pistol, so attempts to take out bosses with it are going to invoke this trope. And it has enough ammo to get the job done against nearly all bosses, provided you never miss. More generally, any low-damage weapon can do chip damage to any enemy, and it's at least theoretically possible to complete a run with just the starting pistol.
• Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City: The popular Ikkitousen / Warrior's Might skill allows for a great number of hits, and can be used to kill even bosses in one turn with the right setup.
• EVE Online:
  • Alarge enough swarm of completely expendable small ships can destroy a flagship costing millions and billions of ISK. This is generally considered good strategy in the game: frigates (the smallest ships in the game) are also generally the fastest. Cruisers and larger ships have guns that are designed to track and shoot cruisers and larger ships...which move much more slowly than a Frigate. A properly piloted group of frigates can pummel a cruiser all day and not get hit. You need a lot of them in order to inflict enough damage, but...
  • Much of small gang gameplay revolves around this tactic. Although often it evolves into a Death of a Thousand Nukes when both overwhelming force ''and'' overwhelming firepower is used against the poor unsuspecting victim.
• In Fairune this seems to be what the protagonist, Hope Girl, does to (most of) her enemies.
• In Fallout:
  • In 1, 2 and Tactics, final attack damage is calculated first by subtracting any Damage Threshold offered by a character's armor from the attacker's rolled damage, then subtracting from any leftover damage the character's Damage Resistance, a percentile: for example, Powered Armor in the first game had 12/40 protection against normal damage, making the sniper rifle the only weapon guaranteed to cause damage outside of critical hits. Bethesda's Fallout 3 eliminates DT and only uses DR for armor, meaning that even the toughest hombre wearing heavy-duty powered armor can still be stabbed to death with a kitchen knife.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • Though DT was reintroduced in the base game, all attacks now have a minimum percentage of damage that 'leaks' through armor, no matter the Damage Treshold. Thus one can still kill a Tougher-than-tough Alpha Male Deathclaw or a Brotherhood of Steel Paladin in shiny near impregnable armor, with a straight razor...
    • The Gun Runners Arsenal DLC adds an optional challenge that can be done for an XP reward. It involves killing five Deathclaws using Silenced .22 Pistols, Boxing Tape, Recharger Rifles, Switchblades, or Dynamite. All of these are the weakest weapons of their respective categories, so a Death of a Thousand Cuts is inevitable unless you have some kind of ridiculous sneak attack bonus and/or take enough drugs to OD the entire population of the Mojave. Even then, these weapons are so weak that this would probably only lower it to Death of 750 Cuts at best. Of course, given that the game only checks that the killing blow was delivered with one of the respective weapons, you can further reduce the number of cuts by weakening the Deathclaws with a stronger weapon first.
  • Given rather odd forms sometimes with the ability to target specific areas on your enemies. The Deathclaw's weakness (in the first game) are its eyes, but it's a tough enemy to beat even if you know that... so you'll end up shooting and hitting it in the eyes and severely damaging them again and again for several minutes before it actually has any effect (and the creature dies).
• Final Fantasy:
  • As a general rule, invoking this is the easiest way to get around the damage caps in various Final Fantasy games. The hardest hitting abilities inevitably run into these caps and thus peter out in the late game, so it is instead better to use abilities that have weaker individual hits but that add up to amounts that can significantly bypass the single hit cap.
  • Nearly every installment from Final Fantasy VI onward features a monster called the Cactuar. It uses a Fixed Damage Attack called "One Thousand Needles" that deals exactly 1,000 HP damage to your character in really fast 1 HP increments. In some games, there also exists a Jumbo Cactuar, which uses a "Ten Thousand Needles" attack that kills a character outright (since the HP cap in most FF games usually tops out at 9,999, and you take one needle too many).
    • In Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy IX, and Final Fantasy XII, you can add "One Thousand Needles" to your arsenal of skills. As Fixed Damage Attacks ignore defense by their very nature, this skill is most helpful against enemies with high defense or defense-enhancing abilities.
    • In Final Fantasy VIII, you can contract the Jumbo Cactuar as a Summon Mon, and its attack (1,000 Needles) deals 1,000 HP damage PER 10 OF HIS LEVELS. So by the end of the game, once you've finished leveling your Cactuar Summon to level 100, it can break the damage cap by dealing exactly 10,000 damage. Essential to killing some of the strongest bosses out there, including the Red Giant in the final boss castle. Plus, since this attack deals a completely fixed (and guaranteed!) amount of damage, getting Cactuar to level 100 is usually a VERY good idea.
    • In Final Fantasy X, a difficult-to-earn ability in the late game raises the HP cap of your characters from 9,999 to 99,999. Alas, one Optional Boss, the Cactuar King, can nullify this advantage with its signature move: 99,999 Needles.
    • In Final Fantasy VII Remake, Cactaur appears as a DLC Summon with '1,000 Needles!' as its only summon ability and '10,000 Needles?' as its ultimate attack.
  • Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Gilgamesh's sword Excalipoor inflicts one damage per hit, but he makes up for this by swinging it several thousands of times per attack.
  • Final Fantasy VIII: Zell has a Limit Break that involves inputting different commands to use a combo and then a finisher, which ends the Limit Break. However, if you want to deal the maximum amount of damage possible, just keep inputting the same two starting combo commands over and over — the attacks are the weakest out of all of his moves, but they can be implemented incredibly quickly and keep the combo going as long as possible, ultimately dealing far more damage total than the actual combo finishers. Under favourable conditions, Zell can hit an enemy over 60 times and continually reach the damage cap, potentially dealing over 500,000 points of damage this way.
    • Similarly, Irvine's "machine gun ammo" limit break can do a lot of damage this way. The machine gun ammo is the weakest per shot, but it's cheap and easy to obtain and you can pump out a lot of shots per attack, ultimately doing more damage than you do with his more expensive and more powerful, but slower, types of ammo.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics: Dancers have an ability that does piddling damage (even in jobs that grant better attack stats than Dancer), but since it is activated based on its own speed and not player speed, this damage adds up over time, especially in battles where it takes a couple of turns for the enemy to reach the player. Bards invert the concept, having an ability that provides full-party healing at about the same rate - not enough to pull someone from the brink of death right away, but enough to keep them from getting that low in the first place.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fighting a dragon by slashing it over and over for 1 damage each.
  • This is a good tactic for any weak unit going through the arena with a sleep sword. Anything that falls asleep stays asleep for a set number of turns — but turns don't pass while in the arena. The only thing preventing this from becoming a downright game breaker is the fact that you can only do the arena so many times.
  • Fire Emblem Gaiden is notably the only game in the series where minimum damage is 1, so you can take down enemies with far more defense than you have attack through sheer attrition. Case in point: Desaix in Zofia Castle, where he has a dracoshield that increases his defense and resistance by 13. No one in your army can damage him significantly at that point, and he recovers 5 HP each turn. You don't have to defeat him, but you get his shield if you do.
• In Freelancer, it's not rare to find yourself taking out entire fleets by yourself with just your guns, enough repair supplies, and the will of the Holy Spirit, and this is thanks to each shot dealing at least a little bit of damage. In fact, a popular Self-Imposed Challenge in one of the late missions involves destroying 3 battleships, 5 cruisers and 6 gunships.
• In Video Game/FTL, the first variant of the Kestral starts with 4 single-shot lasers. Nothing fancy, no missiles or bombs, just four laser blasts per barrage. You won't need to replace those lasers until you start running into enemies with 3 shield layers; as it turns out, getting hit four times by four rapidly recharging weapons that inflict a single point of damage each is devastatingly effective.
• Ginormo Sword. While the object (sorta) of the game is to boost your weapon of choice to levels at which it covers the entire screen, the strongest monsters can still take hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of hits to suffer any sort of dent in their HP — even when your strength stat is in the thousands.
• In the Grand Theft Auto series, punching (with bare hands, no less), kicking and stomping on a car enough times will result in denting, windows breaking, doors and body panels falling off, and eventually, the car exploding. In that order. Never mind that the characters should have bruised, cut and fractured hands doing so — they're perfectly healthy even after punching three trucks to explosion.
• In Gratuitous Space Battles, this is how fighters not armed with torpedoes kill cruisers, by swarming over them firing lasers and rockets at point-blank into their hulls. Heavily-armored cruisers can be nearly immune to this abuse, as their plating will be so thick that enemy shots will just deflect off, but every shot has a chance to inflict a "lucky shot" that does some damage to the enemy ship's armor. Once the armor is stripped away by enough lucky hits (or heavy weapons like torpedoes or cruiser beam weapons) the cruiser will be vulnerable to fighter weapons. At that point, watching the ensuing assault by fighters is akin to watching piranhas tearing a body to bits.
• In Half-Life, you can shoot down helicopters using machine guns. In the PlayStation 2-only Expansion Pack Half-Life: Decay, you have to. Half-Life 2 was much more sensible about this, with vehicular enemies only vulnerable to explosives.
• Halo:
  • In Halo: Combat Evolved, it is possible to bring down most Covenant vehicles simply by shooting them enough with small arms and grenades.
  • You can also, at least in theory, do this to any vehicle in subsequent games, though getting enough ammunition to pull this off takes some time, and vehicles are much better at killing infantry than vice-versa. Of course, your own vehicles are vulnerable to this too.
  • Ghosts are your friend. It's possible to take out EVERYTHING DESTROYABLE in that game with these nimble machines. Problem is, they're not too durable themselves... but you can take on a Phantom and disable ALL of its guns without dying.
  • Halo Wars:
    • You can do this with the Elephant Tank. This tank can train its own infantry, allowing you to set up small bases of power independent of your main base. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your mood), most players just park a handful of Elephant Tanks near the enemy and use their production capabilities to feed cannon-fodder into the nearest battle, conveyor belt style.
    • Alternatively, it is possible to upgrade the standard marine squads into ODST squads at which point you can rain them from the sky onto any location not covered by fog of war.
• In Heroes Of Annihilated Empires, this is a pretty good way of taking out hero units, since although they can have defenses of over a hundred, all attacks cause at least one point of damage (and you typically attack with several hundred at a time).
• In Homeworld 2, several ships are built especially to inflict death of a thousand cuts, particularly the bombers and the Vaygr Laser Corvettes. Actually, most small ships can overrun the big guns when given time.
  • The first game's expansion, Homeworld Cataclysm, has the drone frigates - ships that have no weapons themselves, but have onboard factories that quickly generate large numbers of drones. Each drone is armed but with one small gun and is practically insignificant by itself, but deadly in large numbers.
• Impa in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity absolutely fills this role. It's one thing that she's the game's kunoichi with lightning-fast combos and ninja signs, because then you'd expect her to be fast and impressive; but once you fill all three symbols to generate ''eight'' clones of herself, she can wipe out entire battlefields just spamming the standard attack combo. You don't even need to focus on breaking the weakness-gauge, enemies just melt when she's on the field.
• In Jade Empire, the Player Character can learn a style called "Thousand Cuts," which unsurprisingly emphasizes speed and many fast, light hits. Due to the way the game works, however, the execution of a series of attacks with Thousand Cuts takes about as much time as any other unarmed style.
• It is theoretically possible to destroy a tank with small-arms fire in Jagged Alliance 2 v1.13 thanks to some armor-piercing rounds (like heavy sniper calibers) having the "Damage Tanks" flag. Fortunately, it is extremely unlikely to survive the tank's retaliation if it manages to interrupt any of your attacks.
• Blue Eco weapons in Jak and Daxter series. They have lower damage than Yellow Eco weapons per shot but their rate of fire allows them to defeat enemies quickly. This is especially true for Needle Laser in Jak 3: Wastelander, where one tiny laser doesn't do much, but an entire barrage of them is another matter. Too bad it eats ammo like there's no tomorrow.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future averts this trope. If you continuously block hits while not having a Stand out, you will suffer Scratch Damage until your health reaches zero, at which point you will stop taking Scratch Damage. This prevents you from dying by this method, although it's relatively easy to get past one's guard in this game, so turtling is still not an option.
  • Both of the Touhou Project fighters do this as well. Making this even more annoying in the first fighter is the fact that certain moves explicitly cannot kill a blocking opponent even if that block is incorrect and the blocker is guard crushed.
• Jurassic Park: Chaos Island includes many playable characters from the movies, and also assistants you can recruit for menial tasks. If you face a T-Rex, you can send in your stronger characters, and risk getting them killed- or send an army of assistants, who all have weak attacks. If you do this, the T-rex will be confused and spin around without actually attacking anyone. It takes a while, but eventually the weak assistants will be able to kill it.
• This can end up being a default strategy for Disco Bandits and Accordion Thieves in Kingdom of Loathing. Since these two classes focus on Moxie (the stat by which your chance-to-dodge is calculated), it's entirely possible to be so smooth as to be completely untouchable, but your own damage-dealing capabilities are somewhat under par, so it's just a question of whether or not you have the kind of time it takes to beat the bugger.
  • DBs do have Moxious Maneuver to resort to, though.
• Kaiju Wars: The titular kaiju typically start a battle with dozens of hit points, while the player's units generally die in a single hit and deal 1-2 points of damage per attack. Even if you optimize the placement of your units to do as much damage as possible per turn, it's still going to take a while to bring one of the kaiju down.
• Kirby has this in all the games with blocking. You can block attacks, but many enemies (and all bosses) will do a tiny bit of damage through the guard, unless you have certain abilities. Depending on the duration of an attack, guarding can sometimes cause Kirby to take more total damage due to the lack of Mercy Invincibility.
• In Left 4 Dead, your weakest attack is a shove and is meant to be used as an emergency maneuver if you get swarmed by zombies (only the Tank and Witch can't be shoved). Each shove does a little bit of damage and you can eventually kill zombies this way with the exception of the Tank and Witch since they're immune to melee damage. The sequel added a shoving fatigue mechanic to discourage players from shoving everything to death.
• In Little Busters!, a number of the weapons count (though the 20-turn limit prevents extreme cases), but the best example is Rin's cats. Although they won't hit for very much each, as the game goes on and she trains with them more and more, she can be hitting over 10 times every turn. It's precisely because of this that Rin becomes very hard to beat by the end of the battle segments.
• The early PlayStation game Lone Soldier has the eponymous beefslab soldier being able to destroy tanks, walls, armoured bunkers and the like with the default infinite ammo-laden Uzi. By spending several minutes firing at anything destructible in the game (and making it flash to make the player aware of it's status of being hurt) a torrent of 9mm bullets could make buildings not only be destroyed, but destroyed in a giant plume of flame.
• In MadWorld, bosses that seem to not sustain much damage from regular attacks (including being sliced with a goddamn chainsaw) can eventually be worn down if you just keep on punching them, although for most there's quicktime sequences you can initiate to damage them much more efficiently.
  • Also, one of the finishers with the daggers has you literally stabbing your enemy in the chest about a thousand times.
• This is evident even in fighting games such as Marvel vs. Capcom 2, where certain characters can spam multiple-hitting special attacks repeatedly. Even if the attacks are blocked, they still inflict minor damage. After enough attacks, you may find yourself in a position to be cherry tapped. Most likely you will lose from cheese (death from block damage in Street Fighter is evidenced by a cheese-wedge icon), as your opponent revs up a Super Combo, because There Is No Kill Like Overkill.
• This is one of the core mechanics of Mass Effect. Shields, which many, if not most enemies have at least a bit of, reduces each pellet of damage by a set procentage. This makes weapons like Sniper Rifles and Heavy Pistol less efficient against Shields, but fast-shooting weapons generally just ignore this percentage through volume of fire.
  • In Mass Effect 2 on Haestrom, Kal'Reegar mentions that standard procedure for fighting a geth colossus is to "kill it with bug bites".
• Wanna know what's the best short-range weapon in most if not all MechWarrior games? The machine gun. You're supposed to mount one or two to fight infantry, because they do piddling damage individually, but stats-wise (that is, considering ammo load, heat generation and damage) they're the most efficient weapon in the game. Take a large ballistic-weapon-based Mech and load as many machine guns as it can take, and you make it into the ultimate close-range brawler. If more range is needed, small autocannons like the AC2 work well.
  • Ironically, the heavy weapons are more effective on light mechs, as the things are often too agile to keep a bead on, but it's usually fairly easy to get them in your sights for the split-second necessary to hit them with a PPC or similar weapon.
  • It usually doesn't pay to choose superheavy mechs (such as the Atlas) in the new MechWarrior: Online game, unless you're a pro who actually knows how to use them. They're powerful and heavily armored, but very slow both to move and turn, which means all that armor simply delays your death when, inevitably, a bunch of light scout Mechs start walking around you and peppering you with light lasers until they erode it all away.
    • On the other hand, said heavy mech's best weapon against light mechs is the same thousand cuts, by spewing out a constant stream of laser, or light autocannon fire, to simply make it so that at all times there's something firing, and to then wave the cursor in large sweeps, dealing minimal damage each time, but to a Light Mech they're still notable, and can't be dodged.
• Prior to getting the Mega Buster chargeable Arm Cannon, several Mega Man (Classic) games had a weapon that was no more effective in damage than the normal gun, but had such a fast rate of fire that players would use them exclusively unless they were out of power or not effective against a given enemy. Examples include the "Metal Blade" (Mega Man 2, aimable) and "Needle Cannon" (Mega Man 3, full-auto in three round bursts).
  • Similarly, one of the Beast Out powerup forms gave you a rapid-firing buster, at the cost of not being able to charge your shots. While normal charged shots can deal around 10 damage at the beginning, Beast Out lets you fire more than 10 bullets in the same time it took to charge, resulting in a flurry of bullets raining down on your opponent (in some cases can even make certain battlechips obsolete).
  • Model HX in ZX turned out to be a Game-Breaker because of this. One of its moves is to create a tornado that sits in one place and attacks 16 times. The final boss was (of course) a One-Winged Angel, and its stationary damage point was just asking to be tornado'd to death.
  • Similar to Model H is the very first of Mega Man X's Power Copying attacks, Storm Tornado, considered a Game-Breaker due to the fact that one use can score multiple hits on multiple enemies.
    • A literal example can be performed with Zero in the fourth, fifth, and sixth games in the series. The first hit of his basic Z-Saber combo, while weak, doesn't cause Mercy Invincibility against most of the bosses and can be canceled with a dash then immediately performed again. The amount of hits you can land in the span of a second is practically limited only by how quickly you can alternate the attack and dash buttons.
  • Mega Man Zero 3 has the 1000 Slash learned from Deathtanz Mantisk, which sees Zero performing countless stabs with the Recoil Rod so long as the button the Rod's equipped in is pressed several times (it has the drawback of Zero remaining immobile). In Zero 4, the Ice Javelin can also score several hits due to the nature of the projectile.
• Metal Slug: Sure, there are weapons like the Rawkit Lawnchair and the Heavy Machine Gun, but it's definitely possible to take down any boss (be it tank, alien, robot, or even a battleship on treads) with enough shots from a regular pistol.
  • Not just possible - often required. Being rather Nintendo Hard for most players, it happens more often than not that a boss will kill at least one of your lives. When that happens, a replacement weapon for your new life is not at all guaranteed, often leaving you stuck with the pistol. 6 and 7 would mitigate this by having one of its characters (Marco) be able to do more damage with his pistol.
• Planet Forte from Meteos was Nerfed heavily for Meteos Wars, turning its competitive approach from Lightning Bruiser into a combination of Stone Wall and this. Meteos is a Falling Blocks Puzzle Game where blocks removed from your side manifest as garbage blocks on the opponent's side, but Forte has by far the lowest garbage block output of any planet in proportion to the number of blocks cleared, meaning it can only send tiny amounts of garbage blocks at a time. However, Forte is also one of the fastest planets in which you can clear the screen, meaning in the hands of a skilled player, those tiny amounts will invade the opponent's side at a rapid rate. At the same time, the fact that Forte can clear the screen practically at will means it can shrug off opponents' garbage block attacks, making its strategy a slow but gradual death of the opponent.
• This is how blasters and blaster rifles end up working in Might and Magic VI and VII. Their base damage isn't that impressive for the latter part of the game (when you get them — they're Lost Technology), especially since it can't be improved (the associated skill only increases the bonus to hit things with them, and unlike other weapons they can't be enchanted). Their rate of fire, on the other hand, is very high, and so is their ability to actually hit things (outside the blast being blocked by walls). Combine with a unique damage type that no monster is resistant or immune to, and bombarding enemies with dozens of blaster shots becomes a valid (even necessary, in one case) end-game tactic.
• In Minecraft most players' main ranged weapon will be the bow, as the crossbow is less practical due to taking a very long time to load. It takes quite a while to gather the resources and experience to enchant a bow to a point where it's properly dangerous; until then, the only viable option for dealing ranged damage is to farm chicken for feathers, craft lots of arrows, and turn mobs into pincushions as you laboriously whittle their healthy away.
• In MOBA games, there are some characters who specialize by Cherry Tapping people a bunch of times. Especially if they are dependent on Attack-speed or spamming their abilities really fast.
  • Ezrael in League of Legends basically does this with his abilities. He is capable of bursting, but oftentimes he does just this.
  • Juggernaut and Fiora have Omnislash as their ults in DotA and League of Legends, respectively. When there are groups, they jump from enemy to enemy rapidly striking them. When they are alone with their target, however, they stick to them like glue and grind them down with a rain of blows.
• The Monster Hunter series has the Dual Blades, Dual Wielding daggers; each individual hit might not do a lot of damage, but they're the fastest-hitting weapons in the franchise (especially when you're in Demon Mode), which has lead to players nicknaming them "Murder Blenders". Sword and Shield is this to a lesser extent, being the second fastest weapon type.
• In Nexus Clash, attacks always do at least one point of damage, unless you're immune to the damage type. This makes mundane forms of damage something of a Lethal Joke Item - it's easy to reduce damage from mundane weapons with armor, but impossible to become immune to them, so even the mightiest of characters can be pinged to death with a pipe wrench. It's especially dangerous when combined with Summon Magic, since summoners can throw so many damage-dealing pets into a fight.
• One Step From Eden gives the player access to cards that create Kunais - they cost 0 energy, do 40 damage apiece, and with a bit of setup, you can create a deck centered around generating tens of them every time you cycle through, giving you a quick-firing barrage of weak but hard-to-avoid attacks to whittle foes down with.
  • Fire-generating cards count for this too. Basically, they set panels ablaze for a short time, and deal a small amount of damage to anyone who moves onto that panel or stays on it for more than a tick or two. Covering an opponent's field in them will rack up a lot of damage pretty quickly that they can't dodge, allowing you to focus on evading their attacks without having to line up your own.
• Overwatch:
  • D.Va uses a Mini-Mecha with a weapon that does, at best, 5 damage per pellet, and that's at point blank range... Good thing that those weapons are twin fully-automatic Gatling shotguns with infinite ammo.
  • D.Va and Mercy's backup pistol looks meager and weak, but they have no damage fall-off and are 100% accurate, so even dedicated damage dealers can die from not taking them seriously.
  • Winston is the epitome of this concept. His Tesla Cannon does meager damage out the bat, but it's constant over a wide area and has a large magazine, so if you manage to stay around for long enough, most smaller heroes will break down under the cuts.
  • The most damage Genji can do with a single hit outside of his ultimate is 50, but his strength lies in his ability to rapidly stack numerous hits on top of each other while his mobility and small frame make him an insufferably hard target to pin down.
• Pikmin: It doesn't matter how much HP that gargantuan monstrosity has, there's no foe that can't be vanquished by throwing more Pikmin at it and letting 20+ pairs of tiny fists do the work for you. Alternatively, you can attack enemies directly if your captain doesn't have any Pikmin available for tossing by punching them, which does only marginally more damage then a hit from the weakest of Pikmin. Regardless, it's actually a viable tactic against some foes (As long as you have time to spare), as a number of them are completely incapable of harming you, but can do a number on your Pikmin. Pikmin 2 even offers an upgrade to your captains' punching power.
• Pirates (NIX) have your default weapons being two flintlock pistols with Bottomless Magazines, that you can use to destroy buildings. The first stage in fact have you levelling a small town full of enemies with those pistols!
• Plants vs. Zombies: Armored zombies such as Conehead and Buckethead Zombies (and even Zombonis) can be killed if you have enough rows of shooting plants.
• One strategy for beating some Gym Leaders in the Pokémon games, especially with underleveled Pokémon, is to spam moves like Growl or Sand Attack with one's lead Pokémon, or Defense Curl, etc. with the strongest (though still underleveled) Mon on the team, or perhaps X Attack or X Defend. After that, it's usually a matter of slooooooowly taking down the leader's first Pokémon, and repeating Attack-stat debuffs when the next one comes out. This is notably used on the first Gym Leaders who use Rock-types: Brock, Roxanne, and Roark. It can be used later on but gets extremely frustrating as later gym leaders tend to whip out Max Potions and Full Restores more often.
  • Shedinja can safely use this as a valid tactic at times, due to its Wonder Guard ability making it immune to attacks that don't hit it for super effective damage, thus allowing it to potentially chip away at the health of a much higher leveled Pokemon that lacks a means of harming it. After gaining the ability to use Will-O-Wisp in later generations, it's not quite as tedious of a process due to the percent based damage the burn caused by said move inflicts.
  • This joke page detailing Kakuna's uses in the Metagame plays this trope for laughs.
  "With Bug Bite, Kakuna is not walled by the likes of Steelix and Steel-type Arceus. As a matter of fact, Bug Bite's addition lowers max HP / max Def Steelix from a 94-hit-KO to a 36HKO. Max HP Steel-type Arceus is now a 25 HKO, while min HP/Def Psychic Arceus is a 22HKO."
  • The video game adaptation of the Trading Card Game ran into a problem of this nature. Because the coin flips in the game have predetermined outcomes, nothing is actually random, and so chains of heads or tails come up far more times than chance allows. Thus, if a Pokémon has a paralysis-inducing attack, there is a much greater chance that the player can paralyze the opponent every turn until the Defending Pokémon is knocked out — even if the attack is very weak and the defense has a lot of HP.
  • You can kill Champion Lance’s Dragonites this way with a low level Mankey in Gen 1 because due to Artificial Stupidity, the A.I. will only use super effective moves. The Dragonites only have Barrier for Psychic-type moves, which is non-damaging, and will spam it against fighting-types.
  • In a more traditional sense, there are moves like Fury Swipes, Icicle Spear, and Rock Blast that hit for small amounts of damage multiple times per turn. In most cases, these attacks are unreliable because they hit a random amount of times, between 2 and 5, per turn. Generation V introduced an Ability called Skill Link, however, that guarantees these attacks will always hit the maximum 5 times, making them useful when used by Pokémon with Skill Link.
• Human military soldiers have to do this in [PROTOTYPE], because they simply can't do that much damage. It's a different story if they have grenade or missile launchers, but generally the rifle-carrying soldiers will just pour bullets into you until you stop moving.
• This is one of Aht's two main methods of attack (the other being a Trap Master) in Radiant Historia. Her physical attack is puny, but most of her physical skills involve throwing multiple daggers at an opponent. Unlike most examples, though, this isn't intended to kill an enemy by attacking it multiple times, but rather to set up Combos with other members of your party, since the more hits an enemy takes in a combo, the more damage they take from later hits in the combo (meaning Aht can hammer an enemy with multiple weak attacks to rack up the combo, then another character can use one massive attack to finish them off).
• Ragnarok Online's battle system takes into account how many enemies are attacking you at a given time. If the number of enemies you are fighting goes above a certain threshold, your DEF and FLEE get reduced by a certain amount per enemy. Therefore, it is possible to have a sufficient number of Porings handily trounce a level 99 knight.
• The Dual Vipers in Ratchet: Deadlocked are this. They start with 200 ammo and 10 damage; compare to the Magma Cannon, the other starting weapon, which begins with 20 ammo and 60 damage. It's telling that while other weapons get at minimum a 20 damage increase when they level up (the Magma Cannon uses this number until the 8-9 transition; leveling to 9 and 10 give 50 damage each), the damage increases for the Vipers rarely leave the single digits (leveling to level 8 is a 12 damage increase and the level 10 upgrade also increases the damage by 10). In the end, the V99 Vulcan Cannon, the Magma Cannon at the highest level, has a damage stat of 567. The maxed Dual Raptors? 168.
  • This is in general the case with the pistol weapons in the entire series, with the possible exception of the Blaster, due to how damage system worked in that game. They all have ammo capacity in hundreds of shots, but single shot rarely kills anything than the weakest anklebiters (if even that). This rarely changes even when Mega-upgrades become available.
  • This trope applies to other weapons as well, usually to sentry guns/bots before they upgrade. For example Miniturret Glove/Launcher places a turret that shoots at enemies, and which single shot does pitiful damage, but continuous spraying from one or more of them is capable of wiping out a small group of monsters. Not so much after it upgrades, when it starts shooting rockets or lasers, depending on the game.
• In Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, it's possible to use any punch an unlimited number of times if you have enough stamina. If it's fast enough that the opponent can't block the second after the first connects, you can get a knockdown using only that one basic low-damage punch. This not only is the most effective strategy in the game, it's pretty much the only way to get knockouts in Gold class, as your opponents will simply block all your high-damage shots. The most blatant example is Damien Black, a huge demon with a pulverizing 5-hit combo and a simple right to the body that takes off a massive chunk of life. And a boring little jab. Guess what he's going to be doing all the time once everything else stops connecting. Ready 2 Rumble Round 2 subverts this somewhat, as it's no longer possible to do unlimited fast punches and Rumble Flurries are more effective, but you'll still get far more mileage out of simple jabs and straights than any of the specialties (many of which now do barely more damage than the basic punches anyway).
• With its pitiful damage output and painfully slow attack speed, the Combat Knife of Resident Evil fame is typically regarded as a Joke Weapon and tossed in an item box at the first available opportunity. The exception to this rule occurs in Code: Veronica, in which, for some reason, the knife registers multiple hits per swing. All those minor-damage hits stacking up over a short amount of time results in the knife becoming one of the most surprisingly effective weapons in the game.
  • Resident Evil 4, however, makes it possibly the most valuable weapon in the game since it doesn't take up inventory slots and it's a godsend against unshielded/helmeted Ganados. Plus it's a godsend against Krauser.
  • Also true in the PC version of Resident Evil 2's HD remake. The knife hits multiple times per swing tied to the game's framerate, so on a beefy enough gaming PC you can disable the frame limiter and stunlock numerous bosses into oblivion by just hacking away at their weak points.
• Rimworld: Due to the way the damage system in the game works, even seemingly harmless creatures like squirrels or rats can easily inflict fatal injuries with several minor bites and scratches in a row, as the bleeding effect of each attack stacks on top of each other until your colonist begins suffering catastrophic blood loss.
• Robot Alchemic Drive forces you to do this in one mission, where your giant robot is locked into its transformed mode and can't effectively attack. Thus, you're forced to chuck grenades at the enemy giant robot's ankles for 10 minutes before it goes down.
• Scribblenauts: Given enough time, it's possible to kill a dinosaur with a spoon or any similar weak weapon, provided it doesn't eat you first.
• One of the most resilient examples occurs in the Battle of Skyhook in the Shadows of the Empire game. At one point in the battle, a Star Destroyer shows up and starts unleashing TIE fighters. It is possible to damage the Destroyer with your single ship's lasers and unlimited missiles, but the damage is hardly noticeable: it takes pounding on it for 55 minutes before the damage registers from 100% to 99%, which means it'd take almost four nonstop days to kill it. What happens if you do kill it is unknown: the collective knowledge of the Internet doesn't have this information. Considering how obsessed gamers can get, that nobody ever tried is telling.
  • Likewise, trying to take down an AT-AT in the first level with your Snowspeeder's lasers alone can be done, but it'll take a long time (especially on higher difficulty levels) and you'll have no choice but to do so if you happen to run out of harpoon cables.
• Sleeping Dogs (2012): Included in the Triad Enforcer DLC pack is a bonus mission of the same name. It consists of an endless wave of enemies (the Definitive Edition caps the number of enemy kills needed to win at 30) wielding cleavers that inflict a poison debuff that gradually lowers Wei's health, accomplishing the nature of this trope. In exchange, Wei is given an indestructible golden cleaver, and with every 10 kills, he regains some health. Death (original) / Victory (DE) nets some money and Triad XP.
• In Spiral Knights, there are several weapons lines that do this. One is the Autogun line, which shoots 6 weak bullets at a time. The fully upgraded Blitz Needle is considered one of the most powerful weapons in the game.
  • Another is the Striker line, which consists of very fast hitting jagged blades with weak attack power.
• Starcraft: This trope is the whole point of Zerglings. One Zergling? Not a threat to anything, really. One hundred Zerglings? A significant threat to ground troops even very late in the game. There's a good reason that there's a tactic named after them.
  • For the Co-Op mode of Starcraft 2, most Co-op commanders like Alarak, Zeratul, Kerrigan, or Nova have decent attack values in the 50s to 100s that can sometimes be further augmented, which makes Tychus and his piddly 18 seem very weak... until you realize his fire rate is 0.3, meaning he deals 18 damage every one/third of a second, which can be further dropped to 0.18 if you spec him correctly. This means within a single second, with no attack upgrades and just fire-rate upgrades, Tychus can deal 100 damage a second in comparison to most commanders who will deal that much with an attack cooldown of sometimes 1.5 to 2 seconds.
• Star Ruler: With enough guns and ships, you can take out planets and stars. Yes, swarms of very small ships with railguns can blow up a star. It will take a long time, but it's possible.
• This is effective in Stars! (1995) , a 16-bit 4X space empire game, due to limitations in the variable handling. An attack always causes at least 1/512th damage to a stack of ships, which means a full stack of huge battlecruisers can be destroyed by a large number of scouts with a single torpedo each. Invoking this intentionally is often considered cheating, but there's a fine line between abuse and effective use of small ship tactics. It's not terribly hard to defend against, however.
• In Star Wars: Empire at War you can take down AT-ATs^note The big, four-legged ones from Hoth. with squads of blaster-pistol-wielding infantry.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga: near the end of the game you fight Jojora (some kind of ice fairy) and her friend. You have to defeat the friend (a giant snow-doll creature), but it's not necessary to beat Jojora. Many players believe it is actually impossible to kill her; she has the highest defense in the game and every attack only does 1 damage (plus, if you knock her wand out, she leaves the fight for a couple of turns). However, the designers actually intended vigilant players to be able to beat her - she only has 50 HP. A multi-hitting attack will wear her HP down in no time, and she drops a rare item and gives decent experience for your trouble.
  • Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time has the Gold Koopeleons, which also have the highest defense in the game. They only have 10 HP, and every attack, again, only does 1 damage, with the exception of counters and First Strikes, which can do considerably more, for some reason (even killing them instantly at high enough levels). These enemies have a high speed rating, so they usually move first at normal levels when you first reach them, and they have a high chance of running from battle. However, they drop the most coins of any enemy in the game (80 in most versions and 100 in the American version), which can be doubled, or even TRIPLED with a certain badge. They usually appear in groups of two or three, and if only two appear it is possible to run from the battle and re-engage them, and three might be present! A multi-hitting Bros. Item such as a Red Shell can defeat all three of them in one turn (in the hands of a skilled player); hence it is highly recommended to come back and defeat these creatures once the player's speed rating is high enough to always move first — the rewards are very worthwhile. Using the aforementioned coin-tripling badge, this is easily the fastest way of earning money in the game.
  • Paper Mario 64: Goombario's Multibonk attack only deals one damage per hit. However, it keeps hitting until the player misses an action command or the targeted enemy dies, and with good reflexes and a good bit of patience it can stack up enough damage to bring down even a powerful foe.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door averts this, as damage is small enough that the calculation by subtracting defense from attack (used in some other RPGs such as Dragon Quest) is a big deal, and thus attacks that do many weak hits (like Yoshi's stampede) do no damage to enemies with any defense unless their base attack value is boosted. Still, each multi-hit does less damage than the previous, but as long as the first one does damage, the rest will also do at least 1 HP worth of damage.
  • Super Paper Mario: There is one room near the end of each Pit of 100 Trials that is filled with Goombas. This appears to be a breather, except that these are Headbonk Goombas, meaning that they'll jump and headbutt Mario as soon as they spot him. The Goombas are very weak, but their endless attack can KO Mario in seconds. In the Flipside Pit, they can be picked out by their irregular color, but in the Flopside Pit, they look the same as any other Goomba.
  • Paper Mario: Color Splash:
    • The game makes use of this in the Sacred Forest — the enemies have been shrunk, but blocking attacks in this game will still do at least 1 HP. Swarms of tiny Goombas will do a LOT more damage than you might expect.
    • If you're not prepared in Toad Trainworks, the group of passengers who take out their frustrations on Mario can also be this. Yikes!
• Shin Megami Tensei and Persona has the recurring Yoshitsune whose Secret Art is Hassou Tobi, which hits the area 8 times and is typically learnt as its last and most powerful skill...except it's damage per hit is described as light to medium. However, each hit has Critical applied to it if the first hit did, and his stats are so high that this will likely rend to oblivion whatever he was aiming at.
• The Silent in Slay the Spire gets a plethora of cards that create Shivs - weak, zero-cost attacks that can be created and replenished in surprising number, and even get some nice damage buffs with supporting Power cards. With some luck on your side, you can create a build that whittles down opponents with a barrage of relatively weak Shivs.
• System Shock has the Flechette, a weapon which fires pellets that are weak individually (dealing even less damage than the needle gun you find at the beginning of the game), but it makes up for that with high armor piercing capability and a truly ridiculous firing speed. It's quite good at killing even heavily armored cyborgs and robots for this reason.
  • In the Remake, the minipistol gets a burst modification that shoots three bullets extremely fast. While the minipistol is the weakest ranged weapon in the game, three bullets smacking into an enemy does a surprising amount of damage. The Skorpion submachine gun works on the same principle: it does the same amount of damage as the minipistol but is fully automatic. With the extended magazine modification, you can take down everything but bosses with sustained fire.
• In Total Annihilation, a fun but useless attack is to build hundreds of "Fleas" and sic them on the enemy. A more useful attack is the "Peewee rush" in which dozens of Peewees can obliterate a base in mere moments.
  • Some players eschew building heavy bomber aircraft altogether and just build swarms of fighters. Their missiles do piddling damage to ground units, but enough of them *will* eventually destroy anything and they're so fast most defences will have a hard time targeting them. Indeed, if the battle conditions are set so that the death of the enemy Commander wins you the game, one of the most effective strategies is to just build as many fighters as you can - a couple hundred, preferably - and a bunch of scout planes. Send the scouts on suicide exploration runs and as soon as the Commander is spotted mass-select all your fighters and attack the Commander. Game over.
  • Also, a couple of dozen Construction Aircraft given orders to recycle can quickly erase enemy structures and units from the map. About the only thing they can't wipe out is the enemy commander, and that's only because he can blow them all up with one shot from his Disintegration Gun.
• The modus operandi of Meta Knight in Super Smash Bros.. However, some of his moves have a lot of knockback, particularly his Final Smash.
• An odd version was present in War Craft II, where gold mines could be destroyed, though their HP was as high as the game's engine would allow for a unit or structure. This led to interesting sights, such as a group of footmen hacking away at a mine... until it collapsed.
• In theory destroyers from Sword of the Stars can take out dreadnoughts. In practice, it's not a good idea because you will lose many destroyers to the dread-user unless the other guy was Too Dumb to Live by either equipping his dreads with only anti-capital weapons or rushed them out without getting better weapons. Furthermore, the dread is likely to just lumber through the defensive fire to start glassing the colony behind.
• Tales of the Abyss: If you dare to fight the Unicerous on Unknown Mode, your party will have this effect, even the ones who can use the kind of magic that the Unicerous is weak to (Dark). Jade is unquestionably the worst, doing one damage since most of his special attacks are wind-based and the Unicerous is immune to Wind and Light. It's not impossible, and it IS possible to do more damage, provided you're at a much, much higher level.
  • This applies to most bosses on Unknown Mode. Arietta, Dist all three times, Abaddon, and many more can only have their tens of thousands of health slowly whittled down, one hit point at a time, even if you use 10x experience on New Game Plus to be at a much higher level than normal.
• In Tales of Graces, Cheria's level 3 blast caliber is this with knives.
• The Minimum Damage skill in Tales of Vesperia forces this by reducing the damage of every hit to one. Equipping this skill to certain characters (Such as Yuri or Rita) along with other skills allows for infinite combo-chains with each hit only doing a single point of damage. Combos are a MAJOR factor in determining how much grade you get at the end of a battle. Equip these skills, go to an area with low level enemies, and gradually pummel the poor bastards into oblivion. In less than an hour you'll have more grade than you'll ever need.
• Every character in Third Strike has a Practical Taunt, but only a portion can connect as weak attacks. While such taunts can be used as a finishing move, they can also wear opponents down with enough hits. For example, Necro's tongue.
• In Undertale, the hardest boss of the game has attacks that technically do only 1 damage. The trick is that the attacks completely ignore Mercy Invincibility, meaning that they do 1 damage PER FRAME. And it's a Bullet Hell. And every hit applies a Damage Over Time effect. And he can attack you in the combat menu during your own turns. Have fun!
• In Unleash the Light, Peridot uses her Ferrokinesis by firing 20-30 tin cans at multiple enemies, each dealing 1 damage.
• Vega Strike has Subsystem Damage probability per hull hit, so once armor is broken, shield-piercing weapons become very efficient, even if weak on raw damage (and most are).
  • Mini Drivers has good effective range and mediocre rate of fire, but lower damage per second than for any other Medium or even Light weapon, except Micro-driver (it's at least faster and thus useful against missiles). So low that the weakest Deflector Shields stop 2 hits at once and the shield-bypassing part needs 100 hits to breach the weakest armor — then it's more likely to break shield generator than kill the hull outright. Even shuttles not armed with anything better got much stronger shields, while balls aren't very fast and miss anything maneuverable as often as not. The main weapon of "Redeemer" are two mini-drivers, the purpose of which seems to be inciting the hatred of Luddites: an encounter almost always ends only in paying for armor repair. Yet the communicator logs show kill messages by Redeemers, sometimes against fairly good ships.
  • In a less emphasized fashion, lasers: they are weak, but got long range and shield-piercing, so a ship opens fire earlier and kills gradually by strafes rather than going in for an overwhelming barrage.
• In Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, the armour types system means that most basic infantry are not supposed to scratch the toughest armour types. In practice, however, Scratch Damage still occurs. Nevertheless, fans have made mods that indeed make buildings impervious to small arms.
  • In a later Relic game, Company of Heroes, rifles may indeed do light damage to armored cars or scout vehicles, they will do NOTHING to a tank, even attacking their weaker rear armor. Strangely, this doesn't carry entirely over to the critical hit table: infantry dealing enough dakka to the back of armored vehicles may eventually deal engine damage, even if the vehicle's HP is full.
  • This trend was continued with the sequel to Dawn of War, with the notable exception that some common weapons really are powerful enough to do light damage to tanks — the Space Marine bolter fires high explosive rockets, and Ork weapons aren't too much weaker than that, especially since they bring More Dakka.
  • In Warhammer 40000 Spacemarine, the most dangerous opponent in the game is the humble Chaos infantryman. Their lasguns don't do a lot of damage, but their numbers and rate of fire mean they can swiftly whittle your health down to nothing if you don't get rid of them quickly before you have to focus on the more individually threatening Chaos Marines and Daemons.
• In the original Wing Commander, it was possible for even the weakest fighter to destroy any capital ship if you could shoot it enough times. Later games alternated between large capital ships being invulnerable or vulnerable to everything except special "torpedo" missiles.
• Most high level raid bosses in World of Warcraft die this way, especially those from before the expansions.
  • Archimonde at the climax of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. He's killed by thousands of wisps, nature spirits and the Night Elves' basic worker unit, with an ability called Detonate, which sends them suicide bombing on summoned units. Guess how Archimonde got into Azeroth?
  • Back in the classic version of the game, Shaman had windfury weapon, a self-enchantment that had a chance to proc an extra hit instantly, though this has since been changed, it had no internal cooldown, thus with a stroke of luck, it was possible for winfury to proc off of windfury which procs off another windfury which keeps proccing, if the stars aligned, a raid boss could be taken out in one hit by a storm of lucky windfury procs.
  • Also from classic the Paladin talent reckoning can lead to this: each time you gain a critical hit, your next hit gains an extra attack. Now what happens if you don't fight back? The buff of reckoning just counted upwards. So a crafty player got a rogue friend to attack him with daggers for hours to receive as much critical hits as possible, that alone may count, but then he runs up to Kazzak back in the days one of the hardest bosses around and Unleashed the Reckoning Bomb in one Attack, also each Paladin attack procs another attack from his seal, doubling the attacks again: so he killed one of the hardest bosses in the game with 3600 hits within a few seconds. For reference see here. Also note this talent was hotfixed in the next day after this video to only stay for 8 seconds and can't build up for hours.
  • This can also be invoked by players. One version happens when a high level player goes AFK with their PVP flag on. As long as the lower level player can do more DPS than the other's natural HP regen, it's only a matter of time before the higher level player dies. Another method is to send a swarm of noobs at the higher level player, in the form of a noob raid.
  • Official in the Multistrike stat, which gives all abilities a chances to hit for a second time. This includes healing abilities.
  • The concept of kiting strong enemies relies on this, particularly for hunters, frost mages (which slow enemies), and fire mages (which have the best mobility of all casters). Simply hit the enemy and keep running in a circle until they eventually die.
• In the X-Universe series, the Kha'ak Destroyer is one of the most fearsome ships you can face, having a whole lot of shields and hull points, and a full loadout of nigh-hitscan beam weapons. However, there's a small spot behind the engine where its turrets can't reach. You can't kill it with a light fighter, because the shields recharge faster than light weapons can bring them down, but a suitably armed heavy fighter can park itself behind the behemoth and pour laser - or better yet, bring a load of Mass Drivers and their ammo - fire in it until it dies. Assuming, of course, other enemy ships have been dealt with beforehand.
  • The player risks being on the receiving end in Kha'ak and Xenon sectors. Such sectors will spawn enemies without end, which will eventually wear you down.
  • Drone spam. Stuff a freighter or frigate with fighter drones (you can fit thousands in a small freighter, and tens of thousands in a large), then eject them all at once. There is no way for the computer to respond to that.
• In Xenonauts, this trope is the default tactic used against stronger Sebillians, especially before advanced weaponry is researched.
• In the X-Wing series, a fighter can kill any capital ship with just its laser blasters, though avoiding the capital ship's own turbolaser turrets is a problem. A fighter's ion guns can disable even a Star Destroyer in a few shots, if the shields are down. TIE Fighter and later installments even allow you to destroy subsystems on capital ships, so once you clear away enough guns and disable the engines you can literally park your fighter beside the ship, put a rubber band around the trigger, and go get coffee while the Star Destroyer or Mon Calamari Cruiser slowly dies.
  • In the Star Wars universe, fighters are considered a major threat to capital ships if they use mass-fire tactics with missile weapons. In fairness to the trope, their lasers are usually depicted as too weak to deal any major damage to a capital ship, but the point stands that Rebel fighters were such a threat to Imperial capital ships that a special ship design composed mostly of a hull and a metric buttload of laser cannons, the Lancer-class frigate, was made just to kill fighters.
    • Which proved too slow, costly, and manpower-intensive for wide deployment, and was helpless against other capital ships. Most admirals eschewed it in favor of expendable TIE screens.
    • Having a TIE screen around was pretty much vital for most Imperial ships. Without their fighter screens, they were vulnerable to Trench Run Disease—the types of tactics that eventually destroyed the first Death Star. Granted, most Star Destroyers didn't have an exhaust port that led straight to the reactor core, but they did have exposed shield generators and the same type of turbolaser batteries. The tactics that win in the video game above? While not as effective in the EU, given enough time and the right conditions, they would eventually kill a Star Destroyer.
• ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal: Fielding a fairy that has an elemental advantage against your opponent usually means you are safe from defeat.... unless the enemy fairy has a lot of HP and uses a spell that charges much faster than yours, in which case it can kill you with its weak but fast jabs before you can inflict enough damage to it.

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