Measure

Damage breakpoints

You might say: damage breakpoint, HP breakpoint, shots-to-kill breakpoint, threshold

A damage breakpoint is the minimum effective damage, attack, penetration or armour value that changes the required whole-hit count by one. For target health H and desired n hits, the post-mitigation damage must reach at least H/n before the game’s integer rounding is applied.

What it does
Turns a smooth damage formula into explicit lethal thresholds and explains why small integer stats tune coarsely: ceil(H / damage) stays flat between thresholds, then jumps.
Ask
What is the smallest attack, armour, health or condition change that removes or adds one hit?
Typical
for H health and n hits, minimum applied damage = ceil(H / n); solve the divisive formula backward, then verify the actual min-1 and rounding pipeline
Trouble
A +1 stat has no effect for many cells and then suddenly changes HTK; cover or flanking can move the same roster across several thresholds at once.

Connections

Sources

  1. GameDesign.gg, Weapon Design: The Feel, Math, and Balance of Guns, The Core Numbers: Damage, Fire Rate, and Time-to-Kill; Damage Falloff and the Range CurveThis discontinuity is the single most important fact in weapon tuning. Damage does not scale smoothly; it scales in steps at every breakpoint where the shots-to-kill count flips.
  2. StatGarden, Time to kill (TTK) calculator for shooters, What this calculator does; Working out whether a damage buff matters; Worked examplesThe extra two damage per shot buys nothing at all until it crosses the threshold into five shots.
  3. Kernel_, R&D's manual to M1000 Classic (Haz 5+), Introduction; Important thresholds; Vanilla BaselineDetermines how many shots are required to kill a target, factoring in effective HP with damage reduction taken into account (and separately armor). The ceiling function forces discretization.

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Damage breakpoints" (htk-breakpoints) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/game-design/ against my project

Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.

An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal