Description
Reduces the affected unit's outgoing damage by a percentage for a duration. Distinct from Sunder (Armor shred) and Shred (Magic Resist shred) — Weaken taxes the target's damage output directly rather than reducing a resistance stat.
No champion, trait, item, or augment on this site currently uses Weaken.
See also
Frequently asked questions
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What is Weaken in TFT?
Weaken is the standardized keyword for an enemy damage-reduction debuff. While Weakened, the affected unit deals a percentage less damage for the duration — the reduction is a multiplicative tax on the target's outgoing damage, not on its stats. Riot introduced this keyword as the rename of the older "Dazzle" effect, with the goal of making the tooltip language clearer about what the debuff actually does. The reduction percentage and duration are tuned per source, so read the tooltip on the effect applying it rather than assuming a single number.
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Isn't "Weaken" just "Dazzle" with a new name?
Yes. A keyword-vocabulary pass consolidated the terms — "Dazzle" became "Weaken," "Chill" became "Slow," and the "spells can critically strike" phrasing collapsed into the new "Precision" keyword. Mechanically nothing changed about how the damage-reduction debuff is applied; only the label players see in tooltips moved. Older guides and wiki pages still reference "Dazzle" interchangeably, which is why both terms keep showing up in community discussion — they describe the same debuff at different points in TFT's history.
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How is Weaken different from Sunder and Shred?
All three are damage-tilting debuffs but they tax the fight at different layers. Sunder reduces the target's Armor; Shred reduces its Magic Resist — both make incoming damage hit harder by lowering a resistance stat. Weaken sits on the opposite side of the math: it directly cuts the affected unit's outgoing damage by a percentage, regardless of what the attacker's armor or MR looks like. Practically, Sunder/Shred boost your damage; Weaken cuts theirs. They're complementary, not redundant — running both layers on a frontline target stacks the effects.
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Does Weaken cut all damage types, or just attack damage?
The keyword as defined by the patch notes is "enemy damage reduction," with no carve-out for damage type. The historical Dazzle tooltip read "Reduce damage dealt by X%," and "damage dealt" in TFT terminology encompasses both basic-attack damage and ability damage. The practical takeaway: Weaken trims the target's outgoing physical damage, magic damage, and true damage alike. That's the single most important way the keyword differs from a pure attack-damage debuff — it cuts every line of the target's damage output, including spell casts and on-hit effects.
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If two sources Weaken the same target, do the percentages stack?
Multiple Weakens on the same target stack multiplicatively, not additively, following the same convention League uses for damage-reduction layers in general. Two 20% Weakens leave the target at 0.8 × 0.8 = 64% of its starting damage (a 36% total reduction), not a flat 40%. Each fresh application also refreshes the duration window for that source. Stacking Weakens therefore has diminishing returns at the percentage level, but overlapping durations from multiple sources can keep a hyper-carry throttled for the entire fight — which is usually the bigger lever.
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Does the standard CC-immunity item block Weaken?
Treat this as not officially confirmed for the current set. The standard CC-immunity item's tooltip lists immunity to crowd control only — it doesn't name Weaken or damage-reduction debuffs. Riot did once briefly give that item the ability to block attack-damage-reduction debuffs (the family Weaken belongs to), but a hotfix days later reverted it, restoring crowd-control-only blocking — which is why some older guides still claim it blocks Weaken, and why the live tooltip lists CC immunity alone. So the safe read is: assume CC-immunity sources prevent CC keywords (Stun, Slow, Knock-Up) and don't assume they prevent Weaken unless the source you're using explicitly says so.
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Why did Riot rename "Dazzle" to "Weaken"?
Riot framed it as a clarity pass on TFT's keyword vocabulary. The patch notes lead the keyword section with "we're tweaking some keywords used in TFT to make it clearer what the intended effect is," then list three renames in a row: Chill → Slow, Dazzle → Weaken, and the new Precision keyword replacing "spells can critically strike." "Dazzle" had become opaque — it didn't communicate that the affected unit deals less damage — while "Weaken" reads on the tin. The underlying effect didn't change with the rename; the goal was to make tooltips legible at a glance.