Non-Damaging Status Infliction Attack

Status Infliction Attacks, because of how powerful Status Effects can be, sometimes do not deal damage themselves. In theory any of the Status Effects tropes can fall under this trope, as well as more traditional Debuffs for stat lowering. But "Harmless" tropes like Harmless Freezing are especially likely to be a non-damaging attack.

Some status effects are so powerful that making them do no damage is a Necessary Drawback to keep it from being a Game-Breaker. For example, an ability that can immobilize the opponent are also likely to give the caster Extra Turns and increase the accuracy of follow-up attacks, two things that are already very strong on their own.

Hitting your opponent with this kind of attack alone may not have any meaningful impact on the battle, especially if the target has a resistance to or is impervious to the afflicted status. In these cases, this will overlap with Useless Useful Spell. Trick Bombs with special Status Effects tricks, such as a smoke screen, may also overlap so long as they don't inflict damage and are guaranteed to inflict the status. A Master of Illusion may use these kinds of attacks to inflict confusion on a target, since illusions aren't physical.

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Examples:

Action Game

• Grid Warrior has the Arc Angle weapon, which doesn't deal damage but allows your Attack Drone to shine a cone of light that slows all enemies caught within and reveals Stealthy Mooks. The first upgrade for the ability however allows you to perform a Charged Attack that shoots homing light bullets to all enemies caught within.
• In Horizon Zero Dawn, Ice ammo doesn't damage targets, unless the bow or sling shooting it is specially modified, but enough of it will turn an enemy slow and brittle, at which point all damage dealt to it is amplified. Players are intended to then switch out their weapons and start wailing on the target.
• Titan Quest: The Freezing Blast skill deals damage via a Damage Over Time effect from "Encas[ing] enemies in ice" instead of dealing damage all at once and immediately.
• Transistor: Switch() is a Charm Person inflictor. Charmed Processes can't be damaged by the player, and will switch back instantly if hit a second time.

Card Battle Game

• Fate/Grand Order: While Noble Phantasms have the ability to do damage, some of them instead provide various buffs or debuffs. How effective they are varies by character, and how well they synchronize with it:
  • Zhuge Liang's NP, Unreturning Formation, reduces the enemies' NP gauge by 1, inflict them with a curse aliment (does some damage by each turn), reduces their defense, and has a chance to stun them.
  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Mozart's NP, Requiem for Death, has a chance to decrease the enemies' attack and give them the curse aliment.
  • Musahibou Benkei's NP, Pilgrimage of the Five Hundred Arhat, inflicts the stun and curse aliments on the enemies, and it was later upgraded to remove their buffs as well.
  • Florence Nightingale's NP, Nightingale Pledge, reduces the enemies' attack and NP damage while healing the party and removing their debuffs as well.
• Legends of Runeterra: Several cards in the game can grant various status effects on allies and enemies alike. For example:
  • Frostbite saps away all of a unit's attack power.
  • Vulnerable allows allies to select an enemy unit to target during the attack phase.
  • Stun completely puts an opponent out of commission for the round while doing no damage.

First-Person Shooter

• The BioShock series has mind-control attacks which only affect their targets' mental states, and doesn't harm them directly, instead using them to attack others and get harmed by it:
  • The first game, BioShock: Certain plasmids:
    • "Enrage", toss a chunk of red goo at an enemy to get them hunting for something to kill, instead of just pacing about.
    • "Hypnotize Big Daddy": Gets Big Daddies to defend the user, instead of not caring when the user's hurt.
  • BioShock Infinite: The "Possession" vigor, turns enemies to the user's, a.k.a Booker's, side. An upgrade causes the possessed to kill themselves once the effect wears off.
• Borderlands 2: Maya's Phaselock usually doesn't deal damage when immobilizing her enemies, unless it can't work on them, in which case it does deal damage. Or if it's upgraded to deal damage.

Fighting Games

• Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate feature the Gust Bellows, a pickup item that blasts gale-force winds at your opponents. It doesn't do any damage but can blow them right off the platform.

Roguelike

• Darkest Dungeon has a few, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule:
  • The Bounty Hunter's "Mark for Death" attack inflicts the Mark status on the target as well as decreasing its defense. While marked, an enemy takes more damage from many attacks.
  • The Bounty Hunter's "Flashbang" stuns the enemy for a turn and shuffles the order that the enemies are in.
  • The Arbalest's "Sniper's Mark" inflicts the Mark status and massively decreases the target's evasion. The Musketeer, being a reskinned Arbalest, has the same attack renamed to "Call the Shot".
  • The Houndmaster's "Target Whistle" inflicts the Mark status and reduces the target's defense.
  • The Plague Doctor's "Blinding Gas" stuns the farthest two enemies for a turn. Her "Disorienting Blast" does the same thing in addition to shuffling their order, but only effects one enemy at a time.
  • The Hellion's "Barbaric YAWP!" stuns the closest two enemies for a turn, but decreases her own damage and speed.
  • The Man-at-Arm's "Bellow" reduces the evasion and speed of all enemies on the field as well as increasing their chances of taking critical hits.
• Some attacks in Dicey Dungeons only inflict Status Effects such as Matchstick for Burn (which burns your dice, which hurt you if you touch them), Buzzer for Shock (which disables random equipment, which need dice to be unshocked), and Slime Ball for Poison (which causes Damage Over Time).
• FTL: Faster Than Light:
  • Ion weaponry stops shields and systems from recharging some amount of energy for a time, but cause no real damage.
  • Stun bombs stun all crew inside a room for 15 seconds, and deals a single point of ion-type damage.
• FTL: Faster Than Light Multiverse, Zoltan Monks have a ship "armed" with a repair tool to, ostensibly comply with their vow of non-violence. In reality, it's so their mercenary friends can loot a fully-intact ship.
• Slay the Spire:
  • The Defect's "Bullseye" gives the target 'lock-on' status, increasing the amount of damage they take from orbs.
  • The Silent's "Piercing Wail" significantly decreases the strength of all enemies on the field, though the card is exhausted after one use. "Leg Sweep" gives her additional defense while decreasing the attack of an enemy.
  • The Ironborn's "Disarm" reduces the strength of an enemy. "Intimidate" applies the 'weak' status to all enemies on the field, and "Shockwave" applies weak and vulnerable.
  • There are also several colorless attacks that deal no damage: "Blind" applies weak, "Dark Shackles" reduces strength, and "Trip" applies vulnerable.
  • The Chosen enemy can do an attack that deals no damage but applies 'Hex' to your character- every time you play a card other than an attack, a useless Dazed card is added to your draw pile.
  • Sentries can use an attack that does nothing but adds two Dazed cards to your draw pile, which starts off harmless but quickly becomes maddening the longer the battle goes on.

Real-Time Strategy

• Red Alert 3:
  • Cryo weaponry uses its non-lethal nature as a selling point in-universe (Cryocopters fire a high-intensity beam that freezes a single target, Cryo Legionnaires a wide-angle spray that takes a while to work but affects multiple targets, the Cryo satellite power freezes anything that stays in its target area long enough), to the point where they can't gain veterancy levels. Subverted by the fact that cryo-turrets will ice up and instakill any flying unit that stays in its beam long enough.
    There's also the fact that frozen targets essentially have HP to 1 and can be killed by a single attack, no matter how weak or ineffective (e.g. killing an Apocalypse tank with a shotgun, or a huge factory with a sniper rifle).
    • The Cryo Legionnaire's ability is a rocket jump that in theory is only used to knock down enemies or escape danger. In practice, it's used to perform a One-Hit Polykill on enemies after freezing them (and Futuretech actively recruits the kind of sociopath who'd do that for fun).
    • Cryoprisons are represented in-game as prisoners under continuous attack from cryo-turrets.
  • The Carrier's Blackout Missile makes vehicles and buildings completely unresponsive for a long time without damaging them, perfect for an engineer rush.
  • The Guardian Tank can switch from using its main gun to a laser designator that deals no damage but increases the damage taken by the target.
  • The Tesla Trooper's secondary mode makes it unable to move or attack in exchange for inflicting the same on any vehicles that gets close. Parking one on a factory exit essentially shuts down the factory as new units are trapped inside.
  • The Terror Drone's alt-fire immobilizes surface vehicles (land and sea) and usually outranges them.
  • The Apocalypse Tank has a Magnetic Harpoon that drags target vehicles towards it without damaging them... at least, until it's close enough to activate its massive grinders to "eat" the victim. It can also be used on ships to drag them ashore, one-shotting them if they aren't amphibious.
  • The Rocket Angel's Paralysis Whip prevents ground targets from attacking or moving.
  • Infiltrator units don't deal physical damage to the buildings they go into. They do, however, prevent those buildings from producing, shut down power grids, or turn off radar (which only affects human players).
• Warcraft III: The Pandaren Brewmaster's Drunken Haze ability doesn't damage enemies, only making them more liable to miss. Following up with Breath of Fire, however, makes them take extra damage from the fire.

Role-Playing Games

• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The series throughout has spell effects that lower some other stat instead of Hit Points, or have other effects instead of dealing damage. Examples include the various Damage/Drain Attribute (Strength, Intelligence, etc.) spells as well as spells which create a "Weakness To" a spell type, like the Fire, Ice, Lightning trio, which causes those spells to deal extra damage to those inflicted.
  • Morrowind has "Levitate", which makes the target float in the air. It can also be used offensively by casting it on enemies, breaking their AI since they aren't programmed to handle the effect, and become a sitting duck for the spell's duration. For it's numerous game-breaking applications, it has not been available in any game since.
• Final Fantasy: Most status spells are of this type. In addition, there will be a plethora of spells used by enemies that inflict no damage but will inflict negative statuses on a party member in a given game. For instance:
  • Lilliputian Mages will often cast Tiny on your party members, shrinking them down to nullify their physical damage.
  • The Malboro enemies have a signature attack called "Bad Breath" which afflicts any unlucky party members with every negative status effect in the game.
• Iji: Passive Mode weaponry cannot deal damage to enemies. Instead it will blow them away or stun them.
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect, on Feros, you are given a choice of how to deal with colonists by mind-controlling spores: shoot them or use special grenades a scientist gives you to neutralize said spores — a riskier, but more humane option. Mechanically, the special grenades are lobbed just like any other grenade type, but do no damage to regular enemies, only rendering any infected colonists within blast radius passive for the rest of the battle.
  • In Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, the Engineer's Cryo Blast dealt no damage to the target (though certain weak enemies would be instantly killed by it, this was because they automatically died when inflicted with any status effect). Unprotected enemies in both games would be subjected to Harmless Freezing but be more vulnerable to damage from other sources while frozen, while the third game added an addition effect called "Chilled" that would be inflicted on enemies protected by armor, barriers, or shields that caused them to move slower, be more vulnerable to damage, and (in the case of armored enemies) have their armor weakened.
• Pokémon has three digits' worth of these, and they are a key part in getting the edge in battle. Some of them include:
  • From Pokémon Red and Blue onwards:
    • Growl: Lowers attack.
    • Tail Whip: Lowers defense.
  • From Pokémon Gold and Silver onwards: Attract, which only works when used by gendered Pokemon, on Pokemon of the opposite gender, to infatuate them and reduce the chances that they're able to attack.
  • From Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire onwards, there's:
    • Odor Sleuth, which removes the effects of Evasion Status Buffs and allow Normal and Fighting attacks to hit Ghost-types.
    • Will-O-Wisp, which inflicts the Damage Over Time status, "Burn".
  • Pokémon Emerald has the only instance where one of these can inflict Frozen, and it's technically an event, not a battle. In the Battle Pike, A Gentleman's Dusclops can run up and try to freeze your Pokemon with an "Ice Beam", although not dealing the damage of a regular one. The trainer claims it's easily startled due to its Timid nature.
  • Pokémon Diamond and Pearl: Darkrai's Dark Void, which has a 80% sleep chance on its targets.
  • Pokémon Black and White: "Bestow" gives the attacker's held item to the target, provided the attacker's not carrying Mail or some other special items.
  • Pokémon X and Y: Kelfki's Fairy Lock attack stops all Pokemon from leaving the battle for a turn, unless they faint or by moves / items that cause it.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon: The Spinarak line's new signature move, Toxic Thread, which inflicts poison and lowers Speed by one stage.
  • Pokémon Sword and Shield: Grapploct's Octolock:
    The user locks the target in and prevents it from fleeing. This move also lowers the target's Defense and Sp. Def every turn.
  • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet:
    • Scovillain's Spicy Extract will raise the target's Attack by two stages but also lower the target's Defense by two stages, making it both this and a Status Buff.
    • If any opposing Pokémon makes contact with a damaging move to Spidops while its Silk Trap is up, the attack has no effect, and the opposing Pokémon's speed is lowered by one stage.
  • Pokémon Colosseum and Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, have an Anti-Debuff move called "Shadow Shed", which works as a non-damaging Defog (Safeguard and Mist clearer) and Brick Break (shield clearer) simultaneously, and has a single PP which never runs out. The only downsides are that [A] it's a Shadow move, and [B] it hits your group as well.
  • Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness: Only Shadow Moves are unique in this game. Some that count for this are:
    • Shadow Down: lowers opponents' defense by 2 stages.
    • Shadow Mist: lowers opponents' evasion by 2 stages.
    • Shadow Hold: Prevents both foes from switching out.
    • Shadow Panic: Confuse all foes.
    • Shadow Sky: Damage Over Time for non-Shadow Pokemon for 5 turns.
• Prayer of the Faithless: The Magic "Flash" doesn't have a damage type, so it doesn't deal damage, but it hits all enemies with a Medium chance to blind them.
• Remnants of Isolation: The Elemental Break type of Combination Attack, applies a weakness to the element used to combine into the attack instead of involving the elemental attack itself.
• Science Girls!: The "Hypnosis" attack, which just puts enemies into a Forced Sleep, taking away their turn.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: Status spells named for the status they inflict, only inflict that status, and deal no damage. Confuse, Sleep, Poison, and Silence, for instance.

Shoot 'em Up

• Chippy is chock full of these. Certain bosses can temporarily knock back, confound, tether, web up, petrify, or freeze you, but the attacks they use for such cannot directly harm you.

Simulation

• In the X-Wing series, some ships are equipped with ion weapons, which can disable a ship without damaging it. They're typically used for missions in which you're trying to capture a target, but they're also handy for quickly taking enemies (even capital ships!) out of the fight to be mopped up at your leisure. Later games introduced other status-affecting weapons, like mag pulse missiles that could bypass shields and temporarily disable the target's weapons.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Command & Conquer:
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2:
    • Allied Chrono Legionnaire's attack doesn't deal any real damage. It just stunlocks its target in stasis and after a certain period erases it from existence.
    • Yuri's Mind Control units don't deal any damage by their "attacks". They instantly convert enemy units to your side for as long as the mind controller is alive or doesn't mind control another unit.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3:
    • Cryo weapons don't deal any damage to the target, only freezing it in place:
    • However, frozen units have HP to 1, so even basic infantry attacks will instakill them.
    • The Cryo Legionnaire is designed to exploit this: its main attack slowly freezes enemies in a cone, and it can use a jump pack to trip up infantry units. But jumping onto frozen units instakills them.
    • Loading the Cryo Legionnaire into an IFV gives it a cryo beam that slows and freezes targets. If a flying target stays in the beam too long, it will drop to the ground.
    • The Guardian tank's alt-fire is a Laser Sight that disables its gun, instead making the targeted unit take more damage from attacks.
    • Loading an Attack Dog or War Bear into an IFV replaces the IFV's attack with an anti-infantry stun.
• In the Fire Emblem franchise, negative status effects are typically inflicted only by staff units, using staff weapons that cannot deal direct damage to foes. Examples include the Sleep, Silence, and Berserk staves, which inflict those respective conditions.
• For the King: Various physical and magical weapons grant special attacks that inflict specific status effects on a perfect attack roll. Some of those attacks are pure debuffs, like the lose-a-turn effect of a Fire Wall or a Disarm.
• Ring of Red has the Mechanic unit's "Wire" ability, which fires a bolas at an enemy walker to trip it up and stop it from moving. It's upgraded version, "E-Wire," adds Sub System Damage in the form of breaking its legs (which, due to how the game handles subsystem damage, actually does no HP damage).
• River City Girls: The A Handful for an Eye of the Entitled Jerks does no damage, but stuns the target for a time.
• Worms: Armageddon has the "Shove!" attack, which does no damage but moves the enemy 10 feet away. Ideally, off a ledge or into a booby trap.

Wide-Open Sandbox

• Dead Rising: Most of the Joke Item weapons: the stuffed teddy bears, and the water pistol. These have the exact same effect: they make zombies flinch. Nothing else.
• Minecraft: Splash and Lingering Potions of Poison, Weakness, Slowness, and (exclusive to Bedrock) Decay all do what you'd expect when thrown at a mob/player, but the bottle itself inflicts no damage.

Non-Video Game examples:

Anime and Manga

• Dragon Ball has "Taiyoken" (lit. "Solar Fist"), a technique first shown in the classic series by Tien Shinhan, which creates a strong light that can blind the opponent and makes them harmless for a seconds and open to an attack or to escape. This move was taught by Tsuru-Sen'nin (Master Roshi's rival), but later when Tien has a Heel–Face Turn, he teaches this technique to his friends Krilin, Son Goku and Roshi.
• In one episode of Slayers, Lina uses a Light spell to blind Zelgadis to get away from him.
• Rurouni Kenshin: During a flashback to the Boshin War, Kenshin tangles with a group of pro-Shogunate assassins who had planted his wife Tomoe as a Honey Trap for him. Each successive assassin fails to kill Kenshin in combat, but as they go down they use various tricks to weaken him: setting off a bomb inside a cave deafens him, a flash bomb blinds him. This leaves him severely weakened when he gets to the assassins' leader.

Literature

• Faunelle "Faun" Muranaka from Tasakeru uses a lot of Trick Bombs, such as using a glue bomb to defuse a Bar Brawl by sticking the three lunkheads causing trouble together.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition:
    • Special attacks such as tripping or disarming opponents, sundering weapons and armor, and grappling and pinning can all be used by martial characters to weaken opponents without inflicting actual damage. These normally incur an attack of opportunity by nearby enemies unless the user spends a feat on the "Improved" version of the attack.
    • Many low-level spells such as color spray, sleep, hypnotic pattern, and cause fear inflict no direct damage, but can immobilize entire groups of enemies at once. Since the damage dealt by spells tends to be dependent on caster level, such "save-or-suck" spells are often a more efficient use of limited spell slots than throwing fireballs around.
    • Clerics can Turn Undead, generating divine power to frighten off hordes of zombies and skeletons. At higher levels this ability can instantly destroy weaker undead monsters.
  • Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition:
    • A character can replace one of their attacks with a special melee attack that does no damage but inflicts a hindering status affect. These are Grapple, which if successful reduces the target's speed to zero for as long as you're holding onto them, and Shove, which either knocks the enemy prone and means all melee attacks against them have advantage, or moves them 5 feet away from you (potentially into a spell's area of effect, or off a cliff, if the conditions are right).
    • The optional 'Disarm' rule in the Dungeon Master's Guide allows a player to make an attack that does no damage but can knock the target's weapon out of their hands.
• Fabula Ultima:
  • The Sharpshooter class's Warning Shot skill, and the Weaponmaster class's Bone Crusher Skill, both allow them to forgo inflicting damage on a successful weapon attack to instead inflict one of two status effects. The former can inflict Shaken or Slow, while the latter can inflict Dazed or Weak.
  • The Spiritist class's spell list contains three spells which do nothing but inflict status effects to their target(s).
• Pathfinder:
  • Trips, disarms, dirty tricks, feints, grapples etc. are placed under an umbrella called the "combat maneuver" and given a unified pair of statistics to work from, Combat Maneuver Bonus and Combat Maneuver Defense, which work much like Armor Class and Spell Resistance in that a character rolls a d20 plus their CMB to overcome the target's CMD. The game also inherits D&D 3rd Edition's slate of non-damaging "save-or-suck" spells and adds several of its own.
  • The Witch class specializes in save-or-suck spells, getting few that inflict direct HP damage but many designed for inflicting status effects or ability damage. They also have the "hex" as a core feature, which can be used on an unlimited number of creatures once per day per creature. The Slumber hex, available at 1st level, is a single-target Forced Sleep effect that is considered almost mandatory for Witch PCs.

Webcomics

• Adventurers!: The party's Spoony Bard is hit by one such attack, which rolls "slow" and "attack down", but it downs him anyway because he's just that fragile. Played for Laughs.

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