This may sound strange but I have never broken in a pack. I take it and do a full blown discharge on it but all my pack use is done for testing purposes. I have never messed around with trying softer cycles at first so I can't comment on that. I know allot about packs and cells but have never really tested the difference between soft cycling and hard cycling on a new pack. I think allot of this comes back from the early days of Lipos when IR was high and maybe a few easy cycles helped but the IR has dropped allot in the recent years so I'm not sure if this still applies.