Even if you wanted to kick this dog it wouldn't achieve much.
There are​ enemies. There is ​Scratch Damage. Logically, some games may combine the two. Meet the Scratch Damage Enemy, a type of enemy that only takes Scratch Damage. Common targets may include Metal Slimes or a Killer Robot. Sometimes both.
Scratch Damage Enemies typically come across as a Kung Fu-Proof Mook or Puzzle Boss, especially if enemy health vastly increases as a game goes on. Scratch Damage Enemies often come with an Achilles' Heel of certain attacks ignoring their ability. The usefulness of this can vary from being a couple more points of damage to a One-Hit Kill. An Armor-Piercing Attack or a source of Non-Health Damage might also bring them down.
Subtrope of Damage Reduction, Scratch Damage, and, if covering a boss, Damage-Sponge Boss. Overlaps with Armored But Frail if the actual vitality underneath is relatively low. Compare Death of a Thousand Cuts which can commonly be a viable, and occasionally the only, strategy for dealing with Scratch Damage Enemies and One-Hit-Point Wonder which also takes singular hit points of damage but only due to having a singular hit point of health.
Examples:
- ANNO: Mutationem: The Giant Rock Crab at Freeway 42 is heavily encased in stone and metal, receiving only a mere point of damage when struck with normal attacks or using a handgun. The BFS is what's capable of piercing through its armor until it becomes weakened enough to be stunned.
- The Battle Cats: Metal enemies only take one damage from all attacks. This is fine early on when they only have about 80 health at most, but when even Metal enemy health gets into tens of thousands, Cats with the Critical Hit ability WILL need to be used if you don't want to spend hours fighting a single foe.
- Bloons Tower Defense: In the sixth game, the elusive Golden Bloon only takes 1 damage from every attack. Combined with its high speed and later plentiful traits making it nearly impossible to it, it can be a brutal enemy to defeat. Luckily, the rewards are excellent and it goes back for a moment whenever damaged.
- Brave Hero Yuusha: The Metal Slimes Oozie Prince and Slick Oozie. They have a high EXP payout but they run away often and can only be hit for 1 damage unless using a Fixed Damage Attack.
- Bug Fables: Downplayed. The Golden Seedling can only be damaged by the first hit of most attacks and takes ten percent of that attack's damage, rounded up. Due to the small-numbers nature of the game, where dealing ten damage with any single-hit attack is quite the rarity, this means it functionally takes only one point of damage from any attack except under extremely specific builds.
- Bungo to Alchemist: A certain type of ink bottle monsters only receives 1 damage point if hit by a normal attack, and dies immediately if taking a critical or special attack. The issue is that the player cannot control their attackers and battle is completely random, so these monsters frequently cause failed battles through no fault of the player's.
- Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow: The Iron Golem has maximized hit points and defense, where attacks would normally inflict 1-2 damage. It's vulnerable to the ability that swaps HP and MP.
- Chrono Trigger:
- Downplayed with Jugglers, which are enemies that switch between very high physical and magical defense depending on what hit them last. Their appearance in a New Game Plus marks the point where you can no longer rely on Berserker Rings to automatically plow through battles swiftly and efficiently.
- Downplayed as well with Lavos' final form is a vaguely humanoid thing with two floating pods next to it. One of the pods takes less damage than the other two, because it's the real Lavos, killing it ends the fight while focusing on the other two lowers its defense until they get revived.
- The DS remake adds the Wonder Rock, which plays this straight, as it a Metal Slime enemy that takes Scratch Damage from everything, runs away from battle, and is only found once per playthrough. Fortunately, Marle's Venus Bow (which always deals 777 damage) gets past this limit, though not always fast enough to kill it.note
- Dragon Quest: Metal Slimes in the series, at least the literal ones, are always these. Luckily for you, various actions and equipment can deal increased damage, notably the various types of Metal weapons and the Metalicker skill.
- Etrian Odyssey Nexus: Unlike in their previous appearances in the series, the Hexgourd FOE has honed its melee and elemental resistance to the fullest extent, so any attack from those fronts (stab, cut, bash, Fire, Ice, Lightning), will at best inflict only 1 HP of damage to the monster. The player is supposed to inflict curse or poison damage, or use a special attack that can somehow bypass the enemy's immunity stats.
- Final Fantasy IV: Downplayed. Flans take only 1 damage from physical attacks but they take regular damage from magic attacks.
- Ghost Hacker: Slightly downplayed; Avatars take a maximum of 2 damage per hit. This makes them extremely resistant to Mighty Glacier towers, but fall very quickly to Scratch Damage and Damage Over Time towers.
- Hearthstone:
- The Steel Sentinel
is a boss in the League of Explorers adventure with the gimmick that it only takes 1 damage from all sources. On Heroic mode, this extends to all of its minions as well. Defeating it awards you with Animated Armor, which causes your hero to only take one damage at a time while it's in play.
- Moonfang is a legendary minion that only takes one damage at a time. She's already tough to bring down at her default 3 health, but buffing her health can make her nearly unkillable.
- The Steel Sentinel
- Hunter: The Vigil: "Masks" are a type of supernaturally enhanced Serial Killer, in the vein of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, that become Made of Iron — any direct attack against them only deals one damage. However, this doesn't apply to indirect harm like a Booby Trap.
- Iron Marines: Raad Portals do not have usual health, but rather take 20 hits from any attacks to die. This makes rapid-firing troops very effective against them, while high-damage, single-hit attacks are near-useless at beating them.
- Kid Radd: Radd is the protagonist of an 8-bit platform game, where he can only take four hits before dying. But when he leaves his game and starts interacting with characters from other games, he realizes his programming actually makes him surprisingly resilient. Because he only ever took one point of damage at a time in his original game, he registers all attacks in the outside world as just a single "hit", whether it's contact damage from a goomba or a Wave-Motion Gun from an RPG's final boss. Also, Crystal included a sprite with this attribute in the collection of sprites she gathered to Chimerize with. The Seer gets this ability when taking over Crystal's Chimerized form, along with a much larger health bar, requiring nearly ten thousand hits to kill him.
- Kingdom of Loathing: Downplayed. Ghosts take only 1 damage from physical attacks but can be harmed by elemental attacks.
- Magical Starsign: The Totem Bombs are a Mini-Boss that don't have HP in the traditional sense. Instead, they're totally immune to magic, and only take 1 damage from physical attacks, shown as the attacking character sending one of the segments of the totem pole flying away. They also do 1 damage to themselves each time they attack, since their only attack consists of the topmost segment leaping onto a character and blowing up.
- Mega Man Battle Network: Rush appears as one of these, taking only 1 damage from any battle chip, and the fight basically works like a game of "Whack a Mole", needing Rush to take 10 hits as it reappears from three holes, and failure to hit will cause it to run away.
- Mewgenics has an inverted example in the small rocks found strewn around battlefields. They are inanimate objects that can be kicked around to launch them at targets dealing one damage to the rock itself in the process. Where this fits the trope more clearly is when a Tank's Pet Rocks leap to life and start charging enemies on their own, still taking only a single point of damage from almost any attack.
- Miitopia
- The Rare Snurps and the Very Rare Snurps have low health but only take 1 damage from all normal attacks and almost all abilities. The only ways to deal more damage are by using Hyper Sprinkles increasing the damage to 3 while the Hyper Sprinkles' effect lasts, letting them attack a vampire that has the ability "Curse", which deals a portion of the damage back to the attacker, and a low enough defense stat as well as the ability "Spicy Dish" and "Spicy Dinner" of the "Chef"-class which will always deal 4 damage.
- The Fiend, Terror Fiend, and Red Fiend have the same high magic stat as the Rare and Very Rare Snurps resulting in them only taking 1 damage from any and all magic attacks.
- Mother 3: The Mystery Metal Monkey only takes damage from direct attacks and only one per hit. Because it runs quickly, the only way to beat it is to get a perfect 16-hit combo on it.
- NieR: Automata: In later runs, gold-coated versions of Machine enemies will appear that behave like this, taking minuscule damage from almost every attack aside from 9S' hacking ability.
- Rune Factory: Played with with the Mineral Squeek enemy. They have only 5 HP in a series where numbers in the thousands are typical. They die in one hit to almost any physical attack. However, they drop extremely rare crafting materials every time they're hit. Crafting a weapon that only deals one damage to it per attack will make it drop five rare items instead of one, incentivizing players to fight it by dealing one point of damage per hit instead of simply one-shotting it.
- Runescape: Several slayer monsters become this if the player doesn't have the correct method of executing them when their HP is depleted; they take minimal damage and don't actually end up dying. For instance, gargoyles require a rock hammer to be shattered, and desert lizards need to be exposed to a cooler filled with ice.
- Slay the Spire: The Intangible buff makes whatever entity that has it only take 1 damage from all traits. Both enemies and players can use this trope.
- StarCraft II: Downplayed. The Protoss Immortal's shields reduce all damage to 10 at most while it still has shields, making it a good counter to Mighty Glacier-type enemies like Siege Tanks (high damage, low attack speed). Attacks that deal less than 10 damage aren't reduced, so it's meant to be countered by Fragile Speedster-types like Zerglings or Marines.
- Star Ocean: The Second Story has Metal Scums (or Scummys, depending on the translation), who have 999 HP, only take 1 damage from any attack, and will run away if you don't stunlock them with endless attacks (which can only be done one at a time, while any other Metal Scums will run away). However, there is a special weapon quality called "Scumbag Slayer", which will instantly kill said enemies with one hit, along with an actual weapon called the same thing which is quite weak, save for that insta-kill quality.
- Super Paper Mario:
- Fracktail has 9 hit points and takes only one point of damage from all attacks. Wracktail works similarly but with 30 hit points.
- The Megabite is a flying skull enemy that spawns in certain areas after you spend enough time in them and periodically swoops down at you. While they only have 4 HP, they only take one point of damage per hit. This extends to its more powerful variants, the Gigabite (found sporadically but consistently in a few places in the second-to-last world) and the Dark Megabite (which is only found in the Flopside Pit of 100 Trials), who have 6 and 8 hit points respectively.
- Subverse: Downplayed. Blythe's Loyalty Mission has her go on a Mushroom Samba dream trip with the Captain, which turns bad towards the end, and Blythe has to fight him. During this fight, the Captain has 95% damage reduction from all sources because they aren't actually fighting, so much as hallucinating about fighting. This is also so that Blythe cannot accidentally kill him, as the objective of the fight is for her to survive five turns until the Captain cools off and stands down.
- Terraria: The Dungeon Guardian has a ridiculous defense and health of 9999, meaning even the Zenith can't deal more than one damage to it. Justified, as the enemy solely exists to keep you from accessing the dungeon until the Skeletron is defeated. Its defeat isn't even needed for 100% Completion.
- Xena: Warrior Princess
- The golem enemies encountered in Hell take a single, barely significant point of damage from all of Xena's attacks (sword, kick, chakram, the Hand of Zeus, literally everything). The first Golem is a boss whose health stretched from one end of the screen to another, but luckily it's a Ring-Out Boss who's defeated when Xena pushes it into a lava river. Later two more lesser golems attack Xena in a narrow tunnel, where they can be killed... after nearly half an hour of mashing the slash and kick button, though a better alternative is to simply fight them until there's an opening, and run to the exit.
- The five Ogre Guards of Mount Olympus are as durable as the golems and can withstand all of Xena's attacks with a tiny fraction of health damage, and again Xena needs to fight them all. Again, the best way to defeat them is by pushing the ogres over platforms to their deaths.
- Xenogears has an enemy in the Shevat shafts called the Gimmick, which takes 1 damage from any physical attack and is immune to magical damage. However, their 6 HP means a combo of 6 light attacks from any character will kill them in a single turn.
- Yakuza: Like a Dragon: Invested Vagabonds function near-identically to Metal Slimes, as one of the game's many, many references to Dragon Quest. This makes multi-hit skills, such as Joongi's Rapid Shot, very useful against them. Skills that have a high chance for a crit are also useful, and the High Frequency Ruler's Armor-Piercing Attack makes it able to take them down in a single hit.
