Armored, but Frail

5 Following

• BattleTech: Conventional ground vehicles can fall into this, especially heavy tanks, since they can potentially possess ten times more armor on a location than internal structure. The Alacorn Mk VII, for example possesses 112 points worth of frontal armor but only 10 points of internal structure in that location (and a total of 40 points in the entire vehicle). Once the armor has been breached, it will die in only one or two hits from most weapons. By comparison, the Nightstar assault mech is the same tonnage as the Alcorn but has 30 points of internal structure in its Center Torso alone.
• Champions:
  • A Player Character or Non-Player Character can be created with very high defenses against certain attacks such as PD (Physical Defense), ED (Energy Defense) and Damage Reduction, but with very low Body (the Champions version of Hit Points). It takes a tremendously powerful attack to get through their defense, but when it does, the target will go down quickly.
  • An object can be created of very strong materials which gives it a high Defense but also have a low Body. Any attack against it must overcome its Defense, but any damage that gets through reduces the Body. Thus, such an object is immune to low damage attacks but vulnerable to high damage attacks.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • When she first appeared in 1st Edition Advanced D&D products, the drow deity Lolth had an Armor Class of -10 (which is incredibly hard to hit even for a deity), but only 66 Hit Points, which is very low for a deity. Almost all deities of that period had at least 100 Hit Points, and some had up to 400.
  • In 3rd edition creatures of the Construct, Undead and Deathless types are immune to many forms of attack, but also lack a Constitution score (high Constitution provides bonus Hit Points at each level) and are destroyed instantly at 0 hp rather than gaining the dying condition. While some compensation is offered (Undead and Deathless have d12 Hit Points per level where most creatures have d8, while Constructs get a fixed number of bonus hp based on size), it still means that creatures known for their ability to soak damage tend to be much worse at it if transformed into undead.
    • Averted by Zombies, who are instead Stone Walls (due to having double the Hit Dice of the creature they were created from), as well as undead with the Unholy Toughness ability (which lets them use Charisma for anything normally based on Constitution).
  • In 5th edition, AC combines dodging and blocking hits as per the GM's description and does nothing to reduce damage, so it's entirely possible for the party tank to die to some high-damage attacks that got past his AC and the Squishy Wizard to survive being attacked by a giant monster because of a low roll. The Random Number God is a cruel one.
  • For a specific example, there’s the armorer artificer. They gain access to heavy armor, and infusions can boost their ac to ridiculous levels. However, they only have a d8 hit die and can go down fast if their ac is bypassed.
• Heroscape: The Zetti Combine Soulborgs have extremely high defense values, but only one life. Meaning if anything manages to get past their defenses, the Soulborg will explode. This actually has ramifications in the lore as their Arch-Enemies, the Omnicrons, have become crack shots in order to exploit the weaknesses in their enemies' armor.
• Lancer:
  • The SSC's Emperor has about as much HP as some unarmored humans, and little in the way of genuine armor. But just about everything it can do grants Overshield to either itself or an ally (and it gains some Overshield of its own every time it gives an ally some), meaning enemies will have to tear through a large stack of constantly-regenerating temporary health just to get at the real deal.
  • Harrison Armory's Genghis has the highest regular armor in the game (tied with the IPS-N Drake), but also packs barely more HP than the aforementioned Emperor, meaning any damage that gets through will sting.
  • The HORUS Lich is a weirder example, in that it doesn't exactly have proper armor, but it does have the properly atrocious HP (on par with the Emperor) to fulfill the trope. Rather, its armor is in its highly esoteric, time-abusing capabilities: With its unique abilities and Core powers, the Lich can basically "rewind" anything that happens to it, and even straight-up killing a Lich doesn't always work as it gets to retcon itself back into existence once per scene. This turns a nominally-papery Support into a nigh-indestructible menace that soaks up everything meant for its allies and just keeps getting back up like nothing happened, because there's nothing you can do to it that it cannot undo.
  • Inverted with the HORUS Balor, which has zero innate armor and a Core Power that inflicts Shredded on itself when used, meaning any armor or Resistance acquired would be useless throughout. However, as a worryingly huge pile of grey goo masquerading as a war machine, the Balor has a hefty HP pool and is the only mech in the game that actively regenerates each turn (25% normally, half its HP bar with Core Power on) by way of slowly devouring the surroundings. As a result, anything you throw at it will hit without obstruction, but you better hit it hard or it will just eat it up, walk up to you and have you for dessert.
• The Pokémon Trading Card Game has a few examples, most of which are based off of Pokémon which have high defense but low hit points in the video games.
  • Jungle Mr. Mime has only 40 HP, but its Invisible Wall Pokémon Power lets it block any attack that deals more than 20 damage.
  • Fossil Kabuto has a mere 30 HP, but it also has the Kabuto Armor power, which halves the damage it takes from all attacks. Ironically, this makes it better at taking damage than its own evolution, Fossil Kabutops, which has 60 HP and no Pokémon Power.
  • Shedinja cards always have very little HP, with some having the absolute minimum HP of 30, but usually have an ability which negates damage in some way to make up for it. For example, EX Dragon Shedinja is immune to damage from evolved Pokémon and Pokémon-ex.
• Sentinels of the Multiverse has Iron Legacy. While he has an immense amount of protective Ongoings that reduce, redirect or heal damage, underneath that he has the lowest HP of any non-gimmick solo villain (appropriately enough, the same amount as his Good Counterpart). If you can get the Ongoings out of play, it often only takes one or two good hits to bring him down.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Space Marine Dreadnoughts are huge armored sarcophagi on legs outfitted with heavy weaponry, each containing a Space Marine too critically wounded to survive outside of a Healing Vat. If anything manages to get past the armor, the Marine inside can't do anything to defend himself (one depiction of a Marine interred inside a Dreadnought shows that they've been reduced to just a head and torso), and so in the fluff they're considered just short of Too Awesome to Use, instead sleeping for centuries between battles so their experience can benefit the Chapter.
  • Any non-Space Marine in Powered Armor (such as certain Inquisitors and the Sisters of Battle); while they keep the armor's protection against all but the heaviest firepower, their average strength and toughness of 3 compared to the Marines' toughness of 4 makes them less effective in close combat and even more vulnerable to mid-strength weapons like Assault Cannons or Autocannons and Heavy Bolters.

• Absented Age 2: Ghostbound: The final story Summonstone character, Mika, has this as her stat build and playstyle. Her defensive stats are high and her Stone Barrier heals her, negates up to a certain amount of damage, and causes her to automatically counter any attack that's vertically, horizontally, or diagonally aligned with her. She can also resist knockback due to her increased weight from being partially petrified. However, her HP growth is surprisingly low and she stops passively regenerating HP once she has over 65% of her HP, meaning the player can't rely on her defensive stats alone.
• Armory & Machine: All the common enemies in the Laboratory have insanely high shielding but an extremely low 500 health — less than the enemies in the second area. The Hunter skills which deal shield-bypassing penetrating damage thus makes short work of them, especially Ballista which will One-Hit Kill them.
• Avalon (1998): The Rattlesnake is a boss with only 5 hit points (when you have previously fought bosses with thousands of HP). However, its defense stat is higher than anything else in the game, so, at best, your attacks will only be able to do 1 HP of damage at a time to it. What makes it really annoying, though, is that it has the chance to use a health kit, boosting its health into the hundreds and making the fight effectively unwinnable. You just have to hope that you can kill it before that happens.
• Baldur's Gate:
  • Any mage can be this, by casting defensive spells like stoneskin, mirror images, deflect spells, fireshield, globe of invulnerability, invulnerability to X-type weapons, resistance to Y-type damage etc. even if (s)he has awful constitution and health points comparable to a kitten. In the sequel this goes to such an extent that it is the main cause of why characters end up in a Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards situation (if it were just by simple damage output, warriors would still prevail). Many hard opponents are in-fact wizards that can in all comfort destroy you in a thousand different ways just because you can't damage them... unless you bring your spell-piercing abilities. What makes the trope become blatant is the cheap Game-Breaker tactic of leaving the wizard if possible (e.g. by going to another room) and simply wait for the defensive spells to expire, since all magic is time-limited.
  • Druids and clerics in Baldur's Gate II definitely become this when they level up enough to unlock powerful spells like ironskin (the former) or globe of blades (the latter, which however can also wear normal armor).
  • Any character could potentially become this if he or she can wear armor while having low constitution. Armor and other defensive gear/items decrease the armor class, which in turn makes enemy attacks less likely to score a hit. You want to have the lowest armor class possible, which initially is the best attribute for tanks against conventional enemies rather than the simple amount of hit points (magic ignores armor class). However, by the end of Throne of Bhaal, you will either face Elite Mooks that are not a problem or bosses that can hit you anyway even with ridiculously low armor class, thus damage resistance (elemental or even physical) and hit points are much more important for your tanks.
• The Battle Cats:
  • Metal enemies have very low HP, but only take 1 damage from most attacks. Critical Hit attacks will bypass their defence, however; most Metals will go down after one critical attack from most cats, and even the bulkiest among them won't survive more than a few from stronger critters like Waitress Cat. Metal Cat and Glass Cat have this ability as well.
  • Some starred Alien enemies have low HP, but a very tough Barrier that only the strongest of cats can hope to break without the Barrier Breaker ability. Examples include Le'Solar, Ribbo, and UltraBaaBaa. Similarly, certain Aku enemies, such as Aku Doge and Miz Devil, have low raw HP, but a tough Aku Shield that functionally gives them much more HP.
• Battle for Wesnoth: Ghost and its advancements have great resistance against every damage type except for arcane and fire and have good evasion everywhere, but they have relatively low HP compared to units at the same level. This makes them particularly vulnurable to wizard units like Mage and Dark Adept who have fire and arcane attacks whose chance-to-hit don't depend on enemy's evasion.
• Sharing a lot of DNA with the tabletop game of the same name, BattleTech has this for ground vehicles: they have strong armor, but their internal structure is relatively low. In addition, they take double damage from melee attacks: the weakest melee attack is 25 points of damage from a Locust or a Flea (with even more damage from larger mechs, up to 100 points of damage from Assault mechs), and with the exception of heavy tanks, most ground vehicles have 40-60 points of armor per facing and 1 structure point: any attack that breaches armor will likely cause the ground vehicle's death. Superheavy tanks, like the Demolisher, compensate by having a ridiculous amount of armor...on the front.
• The Binding of Isaac
  • Soul, Black and Bone Hearts act as temporary HP, and there are various items and characters that revolve around a playstyle of shielding your low or even outright non-existent pool of normal health with a plethora of Soul Hearts.
  • The Lost is a character that has absolutely no health and dies in one hit. Donating enough money to the Greed machine in Greed mode gives him the Holy Mantle, a divine shield that blocks all damage of one single hit, at the start of every run.
• Bloons TD 6: Dreadbloon has the lowest health out of all the Boss Bloons, but possesses multiple defensive layers to make up for it. Each quarter of its health is protected by a ceramic layer of shield that absorbs damage, and once that layer is broken it has Lead bloon properties. Not only that, Dreadbloon has complete immunity against one category of towers (Basic -> Military -> Magic -> Support) that cycles with each quarter health lost. It also has a passive -1 damage reduction against all hits. Furthermore, at half health, it starts spawning Rock Bloons that can Draw Aggro away from towers that have its targeting priority set to Strong.
• Borderlands 1: Eridian Guardians have very powerful shields that can take almost every attack like a champ... unless you're using a Shock-elemented weapon/attack to quickly wear down their shields and expose their laughably low hit points. After that, a few hits will kill them, even if your attacks don't land a Critical Hit on their small heads. In fact, there are ways to bypass the shields, such as Mordecai's Trespasser skill. They still have this weakness in The Pre-Sequel and 3, and it's even worse in the latter, as the Guardians gain a new weakness: radiation. While it's not to the degree of damage of shock, it's still enough to wreak havoc on shields.
• Breath of Fire II: A few enemies in the game have very low HP, but enough defense that it requires a couple rounds pounding away with Scratch Damage to take them out conventionally (and such enemies are generally entirely immune to magic). However, item-based attacks (such as consumable attack items or spells cast from equipment) and the special ChopChop skill can easily cut through their defenses.
• Bug Fables: Pumplings have extremely high armor, enough so as to only receive scratch damage from the very strongest attacks and completely negate everything else, but have only five hit points beneath it. This makes them particularly vulnerable to Vi's armor-piercing attacks and to Kabbu's Spiky Bod badge, which deals an unavoidable point of damage to any enemy whose melee attacks he successfully blocks.
• Cassette Beasts: The Hauntome monster from the Pier of the Unknown DLC has mediocre HP and Ranged Defense. Its unique Hardback sticker, however, halves almost all damage it takes, with the exceptions of Critical Hits. Hardback also makes all incoming Fire-type moves critical hits, even negating the Wall buff an Air-type like Hauntome would normally receive from such moves.
• Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow: The Iron Golem has a mere 50 HP, but its defense is so absurdly high that any and all attacks against it deal a whopping 1 point of Scratch Damage, making lots of rapid-fire attacks the optimal strategy against it.
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: The "In Media Res" picto inflicts this on any character that equips this, giving them 3 shields at the start of a battle, but halving their maximum health. However, this can be somewhat mitigated by equipping the character with other pictos that drastically increase Vitality.
• Crimsonland: The "Highlander" perk makes you have a 95% chance to No-Sell an attack when you're hit. The other 5%? You instantly die.
• Crysis 2 and Crysis 3: The nanosuit soldier that you play as actually dies after only a handful of assault rifle hits, being not that much tougher than an average Call of Duty protagonist. However, you have an Armor Mode that hardens your nanosuit and lets you shrug off a couple dozen assault rifle hits before taking any real damage, though this drains your suit's energy reserves.
• Darkest Dungeon: The Sea Maggot has enough Protection to cause attacks against it to be reduced to a fourth of their damage, but even the toughest variant just barely scrapes double digits in hit points. Notably, its Protection doesn't reduce Damage Over Time effects in the slightest; Blight is particularly good at cutting through its measly health pool.
• Deltarune: When fought on the Weird Route, Spamton NEO activates his Desperation Attack, [Bluelight Specil], at 10% HP. At this point, his body is a smoldering wreck with only a few hundred HP left, but he reduces all damage from physical attacks so much that Kris can barely deal 10 damage to him per attack, while he can heal much more than that per turn. However, Spamton's defense offers him no protection against magical attacks like Noelle's ice spells.
• Descent: Due to the way the health system works in the game, the player's own Pyro-GX ship can be considered to fall into this category. Its shields can give it up to 200 hitpoints, but if the shields are reduced to 0, then one hit from even the weakest source of damage will kill you.
• Dominions: Ethereal units are usually this. Any ethereal unit has a 75% chance to have any non-magical damage pass through them but most of them have little to none protection, meaning that any damage that does get through won't get much reduction from armor. Dominions 6 doubled down on this by introducing the spiritform trait, which makes a unit unable to take on certain buffs that increase protection like Ironskin or Barkskin.
• Maxwell from Don't Starve has only 75 hit points, but starts out with the best armor in the game.
• Doom II: The Icon of Sin has only 250 health, far less than the Cyberdemon's 4000 or the Spider Mastermind's 3000. However, it only takes damage from rockets fired into the weak point on its forehead, with the rest of its body being invulnerable.
• Dota 2:
  • Anti-Mage boasts a high Agility growth, giving him lots of armor in the late game, and a passive ability that heavily increases his magic resistance, letting him shrug off both physical and magical damage easily. However, his actual health pool is fairly poor, making him vulnerable to Pure damage which isn't affected by either armor or magic resistance.
  • Medusa is a particularly extreme version of this: she has zero base Strength and Strength gain (and Strength is the stat that determines a hero's HP, so she has almost no actual health beyond what her items give her), but she compensates for this with a Mana Shield ability that redirects virtually all damage she takes to her mana pool.
• Metal Slimes from the Dragon Quest series, on top of being absurdly fast and running almost instantly, are only capable of taking 1 point of damage from attacks, but their HP is always somewhere in the single digits. The advanced forms downplay it, but still have incredibly low HP compared to other monsters you'd find them with (though it's still high enough you'll probably need a critical hit to defeat them before they flee).
• Player gargoyles in Dungeon Crawl have natural armor and a number of innate resistances, but they have significantly reduced maximum HP to compensate.
• Elden Ring:
  • Crystalians have the most extreme armor values in the game. Everything except blunt weaponry will do pitiful Scratch Damage, and they're completely Immune to Flinching. However, after you break their stance a single time, their crystal bodies become cracked for the rest of the fight, causing them to take normal damage from all sources and flinch with every hit, letting you stunlock them to death very quickly since they have a very low amount of health.
  • Midra is an inversion. He's a skinny old man who wears basically nothing, and his poise is correspondingly miserable... but to compensate for that, his HP is insane (the Fire Giant and Ancient Dragon Senessax have less health than he does, and the only one to beat him is Rykard, a Puzzle Boss who also takes correspondingly high damage from the Serpent Hunter), meaning he can shrug off multiple crits from the player.
• The Gray Pixel enemies from Epic Battle Fantasy 5 have a base HP stat of only 1.11, but make up for it by having a whopping 999 base stat in both defense and magic defense. For reference, most enemies have a base stat of 4 to 8 for their defensive stats.
• In the original PC version of Far Cry 1, on higher difficulties, your armor durability remains the same but your health decreases dramatically. On the hardest difficulty your armor can take about the same amount of hits as Normal difficulty, but your health goes away in just a couple of shots.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Astos, a boss in Final Fantasy I, has surprisingly little HP for the point in the game he's fought at, but can still take a lot of punishment due to his high defenses.
  • Skull Eaters from Final Fantasy V have a grand total of 1 hit point, but have extremely high defenses and are almost impossible to take out when they're first encountered.
  • Cactuars, first appearing in Final Fantasy VI, tend to have very little HP, but high evasion and enough defense to reduce incoming attacks to 1 damage.
• In FreeSpace, the Shivans seem to follow this philosophy with their fighter and bomber craft, relying on thick shields to protect them, and having relatively weak hulls. The other races tend to balance the shield and hull strength of their strikecraft.
• The GM in Gundam Evolution has the lowest level of hit points, but protects itself with a sturdy shield. Unlike its Gundam counterpart, GM's shield doesn't have a cooldown or prevent use of its primary weapon, so they'll have it up much more often.
• Elites in the Halo series typically have strong energy shields, but relatively low health (in most games their health is usually 1/2th their shield strength, with Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo: Reach, and Halo Infinite being the only games where they can withstand a decent amount of firepower even without shields). Unshielded Elites do benefit from resistance to plasma weaponry, but bullets mow them down quite quickly.
• Halo Infinite: Elite bosses have very powerful shields but are relatively squishy once those shields are down (though they do have somewhat more health than regular enemies). Brute bosses, in contrast, have average shielding but can survive multiple rocket launcher shots even with their shields down. Elite bosses typically are faster and utilize cloaking devices to compensate.
• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft: Divine Shield ignores any amount of damage once, then breaks. Cheaper minions with Divine Shield tend to have low health to compensate for the effect.
• Heroes of the Storm:
  • Fenix has the lowest maximum health of all Ranged Assassins in the game. However, his Trait gives him a large shield that regenerates while out of combat. Combined, he actually has the highest total health for a Ranged Assassin, though a large chunk of it can't be recovered in the middle of a fight.
  • Garrosh's trait grants him Damage Reduction based on his missing health, reducing incoming damage by 1% for every 2% of Health he doesn't have. This makes him resilient to poke damage and quite hard to finish when he's nearly dead, but makes him totally defenseless if he takes a large hit early on. He also has the lowest raw health of all main tanks (though, in practice, it's 50% larger due to the effects of that Damage Reduction).
  • A number of other main tanks — E.T.C., Mal'Ganis, Anub'Arak — pack powerful Crowd Control stuns, sleeps, roots, silences and such... but, in compensation, have comparatively few Hit Points. Their "armor" in this case is all their abilities, which render them essentially invulnerable... but which wear out after a second or two, at which point all the tank has left are their HP pools, which like Garrosh's are fairly low.
• In Iron Harvest, the Saxonian SKS 156 "Wotan" is a mech-destroyer that has Heavy armor, which causes most attacks to deal reduced damage to it. However, its health is lower than its competition, so anything that can pierce its armor will kill it relatively quickly.
• According to the lore of Hollow Knight, the Kingsmould enemies' pearly white outer armor hides their frail Living Shadow bodies, owing to their nature as golems made out Void. Upon defeat, their armor is destroyed and their bodies fall to the ground, which straight-up melts into nothing shortly after.
• Kirby:
  • Kirby & The Amazing Mirror: Mega Titan's first form only has 40 HP, when most other bosses have between 60 and 80 HP. However, it's invulnerable to damage from anything except electric attacks, such as Beam, Spark, or its arena's electrified walls.
  • Kirby Star Allies: The Guard enemies have strong shields that can withstand a lot of damage, but they have only one hit underneath.
• Several The Legend of Zelda enemies have some kind of (often completely invincible) armor that can be removed with the right item (usually the Hookshot/Grappling Hook/Clawshot or its analogue), exposing or stunning them so they can be taken out with a single sword slash.
• Legends of Kingdom Rush has the Dark Knight Companion (as well as their enemy variants in a special encounter). For a tank unit, they have a huge amount of Body Armor as Hit Points which makes melee attacks much less effective on them, but only have 4 starting HP which means that magical or true damage (both of which bypass armor) will make very short work of them. Their description even mentions that they resort to wearing heavy armor to compensate for their poor constitution.
• Cube from Live A Live has very high defenses, with 96 physical defense and 99 special defense (the highest any non-HP stat can be is 99). However, they're stuck with only 240 HP unless the player gets lucky and encounters some enemies during the final chapter that can drop Robotic Enhancements to boost it.
• Magical Starsign:
  • Soldier Ants and Magician Ants are as fragile as you'd expect for mooks found near the start of an RPG, but their defenses on one side (against physical attacks for the Soldier, and magical attacks for the Magician) are so high that they only take 1 damage from attacks of that type. According to the bestiary, the Magician Ant got that way because it knows so much about magic.
  • At the other end of the game, the Gramples found in the final dungeon have only 500 HP, when enemies at that point can easily have over a thousand, but their extremely high defenses, especially against magic, make it feel like way more.
• Mario & Luigi series:
  • Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga:
    • Jojora has a crazy high defense stat (with 999 points dumped into that stat), but her health is a measly 50 as compensation. Hope you have advanced Swing Bros. to get whatever items she's got if you aren't inclined to knock her out (which is possible).
    • Boos have a mere 10 hit points but a crazy high defense stat.
  • Mario & Luigi: Brothership: Seedlusas are Seedle lookalikes with a small hit point maximum (only 32), but they have a high Defense stat, so you'd better use multi-hitting attacks when these guys appear. Additionally, they take more damage from the Surprise Iron Ball Battle Plug, which has Anti-Armor properties.
• Mass Effect 1: Tali has low health and limited armor options due to being a quarian, but she compensates for this by having good shield strength that only gets stronger as she levels up her Electronics skill, to the point where she can survive most of the game wearing the same suit she started with. However, anything that can pierce shields, like rockets or acid attacks, will drop her very quickly.
• Mega Man:
  • Metools have Nigh-Invulnerable helmets that they hide under to block attacks. When they expose themselves to attack, they usually fall in a few basic buster shots. Certain weapons that Mega Man copies from Robot Masters ignore the armored helmet while often doing enough damage to one-shot them.
  • Some robot masters with the ability to block damage fall under this trope, as well. Heat Man is invulnerable to damage while on fire, while Top Man and Magnet Man are invincible when they’re spinning or using magnetism, respectively. However, all of these bosses take double damage from the Mega Buster, and go down even faster to their weaknesses.
• Patrol Robots from the Metal Slug series. They're immune to damage from the back thanks to their heavily armored shell, but their front-mounted laser projectors are a very flimsy weakspot and a few basic pistol shots there will destroy them.
• The ankylosaur enemies in Miku'n Pop is normally impervious to all attack. However, if you stun them (either by headbutting them from below or with the Quake item), they have surprisingly low health and go down quickly when attacked.
• Paper Mario:
  • This is part of the Game-Breaker "Danger Mario" build, which involves lowering Mario's maximum hit points to 5 in exchange for higher stats in other areas, then equipping him only with items which increase his attack and defence while at 5 HP or less.
  • In Paper Mario 64 and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door there are certain families with bodies of stone, like Clefts and Bristles, with small HP counts but high defenses. If you don't want to go all in on power to overcome their defenses, you'll have use defense-bypassing techniques like the Quake Hammer or items like the POW block.
• In Persona 4, the Steel Machine has only 65 HP, which is rather low for this point in the game, but resists all elements and only takes Scratch Damage from most attacks. The best way to kill it is to use an item like a Firecracker that inflicts elemental damage, and does 50 HP of damage due to being a Fixed Damage Attack. After that, the enemy should go down in a few attacks.
• In Plants vs. Zombies 1, several zombie variants use armors and shields to tank damage, but are only as tough as a basic zombie without them. The Magnet-Shroom is useful because it can take away the armors, making the zombies much weaker. Fume-Shroom's fumes and the Pult plants can also bypass shields wielded by the Screendoor Zombie or the Ladder Zombie, so they can kill them without needing to destroy the shields.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time
  • Armored zombies like Coneheads, Bucketheads, and Pharaoh zombies have high armor, but low HP without their armor. Poison-based effects such as Shadow-Shroom, a Level 5+ Stunion, Goo Peashooter or Puffball ignore armor completely, making them much easier kills.
  • The Shield Zombie in the Far Future projects Deflector Shields in front of it that covers three lanes, blocks most attacks, can take a beating, and regenerates shortly after being destroyed. The Shield Zombie's vehicle itself can take far less punishment and is especially vulnerable to piercing plants like the Bloomerang or Laser Bean.
• Pokémon:
  • Shuckle is an extreme example, with the highest Defense and Special Defense of any usable Pokemon (230 for both) protecting a mere 20 base HP, one of the worst in the game.^note Shuckle is tied for second-lowest HP of any Pokémon that isn't Shedinja.
  • Shedinja is a literal One-Hit-Point Wonder, whose Wonder Guard ability prevents any damage from an attack type that it isn't weak to. However, Wonder Guard also does not protect it from Damage Over Time like poison and burns, from damage inflicted by weather or entry hazards, or from Pokémon with abilities like Mold Breaker, an ability that bypasses Wonder Guard.
  • Toxapex has a low base HP of 50, but it compensates with its excellent 152 Defense and 142 Sp. Defense, with several recovery options at its disposal, such as Recover and Regenerator as its hidden ability, which restores 1/3 of its max HP upon switching out.
  • Several Pokémon invert it by having low defenses but absurdly high base HP. For instance, Regidrago sports one of the highest base HP, at a colossal 200. However, both of Regidrago's defenses are abysmal, at 50. For reference, Normal Forme Deoxys, a Pokémon renowned for being a Glass Cannon, possesses the exact same defenses as it.
• Punch-Out!!: In the Wii game's Title Defense mode, Glass Joe wears a helmet that protects his head from punches. However, underneath the helmet, he's still got the same glass jaw as usual — knocking off the helmet with a star punch lets you damage him heavily, and landing 50 jabs over the course of the match will instantly knock him out.
• Quartet (RPG): Alexandra has good defensive stat growths and the ability to set up a HP barrier, but has low HP growth.
• In Shining Force II, you can recruit a character named Kiwi. Kiwi has by far the worst HP growth in the game, but his defense is so high that very few enemies will ever do more than a single point of damage to him. However, he has no defense against magic or Fixed Damage Attacks, meaning his usefulness decreases by the end game, when these types of attacks are very common.
• In Shin Megami Tensei IV, the Mitamas in the Item Farming DLC Challenge Quests take very little damage from most attacks, and outright No-Sell Almighty attacks. However, they only have about 30-40 HP, so a few strong hits are usually enough to defeat them before they run away.
• Slay the Spire:
  • One event takes away a large percentage of Max HP in exchange for adding Apparition cards to the player's deck. These cards reduce all damage to Scratch Damage, while they last.
  • The Spheric Guardians that begin appearing in the second act are another example — they start with impressive amounts of block, can easily increase their block, and possess the Barricade trait to allow them to retain their block between rounds. Find a way to bypass their armor, though, and you'll cut through their mere 20 HP with little effort.
• Sonic in most Sonic the Hedgehog games is a One-Hit-Point Wonder who uses rings and occasionally shields as a damage buffer. If he's caught without rings, he's a dead hedgehog, but as long as he can catch at least one of the rings that fly out of him upon damage, he's effectively invincible.
• Soul Hackers has the Frost Five. They reflect every element except Almighty, but have only 55 HP, meaning that any Almighty attack will probably take them out in one hit.
• Soul Knight:
  • The Paladin starts off with exactly 1 HP (which can be boosted to 2 as he levels up). This is mitigated by his extremely high armor of 8 and his skill, Energy Shield, which grants him temporary invulnerability.
  • The Interdimensional Traveller is saddled with a piddling 2 HP and 3 armor, but starts with a unique passive buff that makes him invulnerable at regular intervals.
  • Costume Prince's defenses aren't that great, with 4 HP and 5 armor, but all of his skills summon a costume that can absorb much more damage for him.
• Spyro the Dragon: Spyro is a One-Hit-Point Wonder, but his partner Sparx will take the hit for him if he's damaged. Sparx can take 3 hits before disappearing, leaving Spyro alone unless he can find butterflies for Sparx to eat.
• StarCraft:
  • Zerg Larva have the highest armor value of all units in the game outside of custom maps but have a mere 25 Hit Points. Also, this armor provides relatively less protection from attacks that emphasize quality over quantity. Notably, Siege Tanks and Reavers can kill them in one hit.
  • Zig-zagged with Archons. They are Protoss Energy Beings with dense Deflector Shield (350 hp, more than twice as strong as shields found on Protoss Carriers who have 150 hp) and an absolute pittance in Hit Points (10 hp vs a puny Zergling at 35 hp).
    • In StarCraft I, their shields made them take full damage from all damage types, which meant Terran vehicles could quickly and cost efficiently melt through their shields. Even cheap units like Terran Vulture bikes can efficiently strip away those shields with their Anti-Infantry grenade launcher.
    • In StarCraft II, Protoss shields were changed to be affected by unit attributes which (due to their unusual attributes) ended up making them weak to no damage type instead of every single one, but they remained vulnerable to EMP (it now only removes 100 shield points per shot instead of all).
  • Protoss Immortals in StarCraft II were the first game's Dragoons, retrofitted with special plasma shields that reduce all damage to 10 or less as long as they have shields. While this lets them counter hard-hitting units like siege tanks (and weak to Zerg Rush, which relies on lots of weak attacks) and they aren't nearly as vulnerable as Archons without shields, their actual hull isn't well armored against scratch damage. Immortals invert this trope completely in Legacy of the Void where they lose the hardened shields in exchange for a 3-second barrier that simply absorbs 100 damage and has no armor bonuses at all. Unlike Archons, Immortals are also Armored and Mechanical so they have additional weaknesses from Anti-Armor and Anti-Vehicle weapons as they did before.
  • The Terran Thor and Protoss Colossus are an inversion: They're well protected with hit points, and have powerful weaponry, but have only one native armor point for balance reasons. This means that even hits from Scratch Damage will be absorbed with almost full effect, making them vulnerable to swarming unless supported. The Thor is explicitly meant to be vulnerable to masses of light ground units with it's clunky but extremely high dps single target attacks, while the Colossus is a financial Glass Cannon due to its steep resource costs, and even more vulnerable thanks to being tall enough for any anti-air weapons to potentially makes huge dents in their hit points including the Thors' High-Impact Payload system that is tailor-made for fighting massive units.
• Super Robot Wars:
  • Leonard Testarossa is a rare boss who completely averts Health/Damage Asymmetry and only has the same amount of HP that a player unit would. However, his Reality Warper-grade Lambda Driver cuts all damage he takes by 90% and can't be bypassed in any way, even by effects that would otherwise pierce barriers, so that 10,000 HP is really 100,000.
  • Suzaku Kururugi is a player-side version: thanks to his Curse of Geass forcing him to take any action necessary in order to survive whatever situation he's in, he gets a built-in Critical Status Buff that in some games stacks with the existing Potential skill that provides the same buff. In Super Robot Wars 30, where Potential is changed so that level 9 provides a unit on the last 10% of their lifebar with 90% damage reduction, Suzaku's Curse of Geass stacks multiplicatively and gives him 99% damage reduction, making him practically invincible. However, he pilots a Knightmare Frame, one of the most Fragile Speedster unit types in the series, so actually getting him down that low is a risky prospect and means his HP is low enough that if he actually is in critical range, even attacks that are only hitting him for scratch damage might eventually kill him.
  • Inverted with Giant Invaders, STMC, and Anti-Spirals, who have absolutely massive HP counts compared to any other unit type, but also much lower Armor than their size and HP might suggest. They pair this with coming in great quantities to give the impression of battles with them taking place at a much bigger scale than normal stages.
• Super Smash Bros. 64: Metal Mario is so heavy that he often can't be knocked off the stage until he's taken well over 200% damage. However, he is almost completely unable to recover once he does get to that point because his weight also makes him the fastest-falling character in the entire series. If he's off once, he's finished. His home stage^note officially named Meta Crystal has disproportionately huge K.O. boundaries compared to the tiny stage size because otherwise he'd be out too fast to even attempt to come back.
• Tactical Nexus: The boulders in EX Chapter 2-3 "Tactical beach" have only 1 HP each, but thousands of Defense. The player has to use a combination of raising their Attack and collecting Rock Blessings that reduce their defense in order to break them, since no damage, not even scratch, is dealt if the player's Attack is less than the target's Defense.
• Warhammer 40,000: Gladius: Ranged damage reduction is a very commmon trait on many units (without even getting into Geo Effects), and heroes have even more general damage reduction to compensate for their naturally low HP.
  • Stealth battlesuits are a particularly strong example: try to gun them down while they're in cover and you'll still be at it in half a dozen turns, but sic a melee unit or one that bypasses damage reduction and watch them get one-shotted.
  • The Chaplain is a subversion, having so many damage reducing traits that one Steam guide says giving him an item that adds 3 HP is equivalent to 20 HP on any other unit.
• Warframe:
  • Corpus units tend to heavily rely on their Deflector Shields to survive punishment. It's fairly easy to mod for gas damage to bypass it completely and quickly mow down their meager health. This is particularly noticeable in sortie missions where their shield capacity is greatly increased: they won't take that much longer to kill because they'll choke on poison gas regardless.
  • Hildryn is a Warframe that relies on her shields for protection and to power her abilities. As a result, her shield pool is enormous compared to other Warframes, but her health is pitifully low by comparison. This forces her to micromanage her shields and constantly replenish them by stealing it from her opponents.
  • The Grineer Nox units wear a heavy armored suit which grants them a large amount of damage mitigation and Overguard. However, they're vulnerable to headshots, which can break their suit's glass visor. Trying to take them down with body shots can be an exercise in futility unless you're massively overleveled for the mission, but a few headshots will have you hearing their death scream in no time.
  • Culverins found under the control of The Murmur can take some serious punishment for a generic Mook, and lack a head to blow off for increased damage. What they do have, however, are two large "shoot-here" canisters on their arms that blow their arms off when popped and trigger their self-destruct when both arms are blown off.
• War Robots:
  • Any weak robot with a Heavy weapon slot can be equipped with Ancile, a shield generator that withstands physical damage and can regenerate 3% of its durability by the second. However, it can be worn down by shotguns like Thunder or machineguns like Avenger, and they're useless against energy weapons and flamethrowers.
  • Shenlou's Chain Blink ability allows it to not only teleport behind enemies up to three times after being activated, but bestows it with a stackable Aegis Shield for every jump. However, the Shenlou has low HP under those shields and can be destroyed mid-ability if attacked from all sides.
• 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.

• Mad Pierrot from the Cowboy Bebop episode "Pierrot le Fou" is a highly powerful assassin equipped with a personal force field that deflects bullets and other high-speed projectiles, rendering him invincible for most of his fight against Spike. He's also a Psychopathic Manchild with no pain tolerance, so a single throwing knife (moving slow enough to not be stopped by the shield — it only stops things moving above a certain speed) to the leg is enough to cause a complete mental breakdown and take him out of the fight.

Comic Books

• Marvel's Ultron once had this weakness. His outer body was made of effectively indestructible primary adamantium, but his internal components and mechanisms were not. The Human Torch once exploited this by blasting him with heat so intense that it overloaded his internal systems, causing him to collapse and shut down, even though his exterior was still completely undamaged. Later versions of Ultron would upgrade themselves to remove this weakness.
• While Wood Man from Mega Man 2 isn’t normally an example, he’s depicted this way in the comic books. His Leaf Shield lets him effortlessly deflect regular buster shots, but when Mega Man lures him in close and fires a charge shot point-blank, it rips through him as easily as you’d expect for a robot made of wood.
• In Annihilators, the Evil Sorcerer Doctor Dredd has surrounded himself with a magical field that gives him Absurd Cutting Power. This field makes him all but untouchable, and not even a cosmically empowered, Nigh-Invulnerable Flying Brick like the Silver Surfer can lay a hand on him without being sliced to ribbons. Dispel this magic field, however, and Doctor Dredd folds easily: Ronan knocks him out with a single blow of his hammer, and the Dire Wraith Queen fatally skewers him with her tongue while he's distracted.

Literature

• The heroine of Bofuri: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense. was a novice to VRMMORPGs, so when creating her character, she... Well, you read the title, right? But since she was more concerned about the physical pain of getting hurt, she only maxed out her Defense, but not her Hit Points. Fortunately for her, she also quickly gained an immunity to the usual video game weakness to such a build: poison.
• A Certain Magical Index: Accelerator is the world's strongest esper, with his control over direction allowing him to wrap himself in an automatic reflection field that renders him immune to conventional attack. However, due to growing up protected even from things like muscle tearing and ultraviolet light, his body is scrawny and underdeveloped: if anyone finds a way around his defences (such as Touma's Anti-Magic right fist) he goes down like a chump.
• In Stephen King's The Dark Tower, Roland tells a story of a heavily armored giant named Lord Perth who wants to conquer the world. Just as his journey starts a boy strikes him in the knee with a rock, knocking him over and killing him. Roland's friends compare it to David and Goliath.
• In the sixth Dungeon Crawler Carl book, Eye of the Bedlam Bride, Carl meets another group of Crawlers. One of them is heavily armored, to the point of ridiculousness, and is all but unkillable in his armor, but his actual hit points are relatively low (he is a high level character, so they're low in regards to other similarly leveled characters, but still quite high). It doesn't matter either way: he gets smited by a god and killed, something that's explicitly unsurvivable.

Live-Action TV

• Star Trek: Voyager: The Krenim Time Ship, which served as the main threat of the "Year of Hell" 2-parter, not only had a beam that could erase its targets from time, but was also equipped with temporal shielding that made it effectively invincible to any kind of weapons fire. However, once the shield was disabled, the ship was so fragile that it easily crumbled when Voyager rammed into it at a relatively low speed.

Visual Novels

• Valeria Trifa, one of the earlier antagonists from Dies Irae, is in possession of the Divine Vessel, a relic that is the Big Bad's physical body. This gives him defenses to the point of absurdity making him able to No-Sell pretty much anything. However should someone find a way to pierce it or take advantage of the fact that he has to open a metaphorical hole in it to use his most powerful move, then he tends to go down fairly easily. Unfortunately, the aforementioned Big Bad whom the body belongs to is nowhere near as frail should his defenses be pierced.

Webcomics

• The titular Radd from Kid Radd, being a platform game character whose mechanics followed him out into the comic's setting, has a measly 4 points of health. However, anything, from a light poke from a character with Collision Damage to a nuclear bomb, only does a single point of damage, and his Mercy Invincibility prevents enemies from chaining together attacks against him.

Real Life

• Shelled molluscs like clams and snails have a hard outer shell but very soft, fleshy, and vulnerable insides. Any predator capable of bypassing their defences will often make short work of them.
• Tanks are known for being hardy vehicles with strong armor, but anything that manages to get past that armor is liable to destroy vital components and shut the vehicles down due to how compact they are. Worse, Russian tanks traditionally feature a "carousel" auto-loader that is essentially just a giant wheel of ammunition directly under the crew. This is infamous for exploding once the armor is defeated and vaporizing the crew.
• Smartphones and tablets equipped with a protective case. The case helps defend against things that would otherwise heavily damage or outright brick the very fragile slab of plastic and glass, like being dropped, liquids, dirt, and other problems that would otherwise easily cripple something that's often designed with the screen taking up the entire front, and sometimes even the sides.
• An animal's organs are very fragile, requiring muscles and bone to protect against the outside. Unfortunately, they're also very susceptible to those same bones potentially hurting them if the bones break in a way to pierce the organs.
• Having good armor and having a good shield are mutually exclusive to some extent, resulting in this dynamic. For many people through time and space, body armor was still flawed, meaning warriors needed to deflect blows with shields — which in ancient Greece and Rome, could get pretty massive, covering most of the wielder, and even their allies in some formations. There was one time when the situation was inverted, and that's Europe in the Middle Ages and Early Modern era: developments in technology for armor, weapons^note such as the introduction of wieldable firearms and medicine^note the impact of a bludgeon can travel through most armor and mess up whatever's underneath, but medics of the time were proficient enough in treating blunt-force trauma, whereas they still struggled with slashes from bladed weapons, so the latter had to be prevented instead culminated in the adoption of plate armor (essentially an Armor of Invincibility) and of two-handed weapons; making shields little more than an encumberance on the battlefield. Instead, shields (especially the smaller but more versatile buckler) in Europe would still find usage in urban battles, where fighters were otherwise unarmored.