Guide to Defend
All credit goes to benderboyboy!
Introduction
In all honesty, this guide was written out of spite for all these new players (and old players) who keeps banging on about how low clash power makes the game hard, without understanding how important defense skills are.
If you’re having trouble clearing stages in any of the game mode because you keep losing clashes or think you don’t have enough clash power to clear a level, that is 100% a skill issue. Every case of these complaints I’ve seen are from people who do not utilize defense skills. And higher tiered players I’ve spoken to utilizes defense skill constantly.
So this guide is to teach people how and when to use defense skills.
Why Defend?
Con
- You get hit.
Pro
- Because defense scales.
Unlike coin power which largely remains static, the power of defense skills – aside from evade – scales with the level of you Sinners. In Mirror Dungeon, defensive skills – aside from evade – are as powerful on the 1st floor as they are on the 5th. They will never lose their value.
Evade
While many sees evade as the best defense skill because success negates all damage, it is actually the worst. Unlike the other skills, evade is incredibly situational and doesn’t scale with character levels, because it works on coin power instead of potency.
A single evade coin is flipped against ALL of the opponent’s coins. If the evade coin fails once, it will fail the remaining coin flips.
Pros
- Completely evade individual damage of coins
- Affected by coin up
Cons
- Does not scale with potency
- Relatively low coin value
- Single failure cascades
- Reliant on sanity
- Usually on IDs with low HP
- Can fail on coin toss
When to use
- When in sin resonance for the evade skill
- Against low sanity opponent with low minimum/max coin power
- When attack skills are hopeless and attack cannot be redirected
Guard
Perhaps the most consistent – and therefore the best – of the defense skill. The shield generated scales with potency, meaning the higher the ID level is, the stronger it becomes. And as ID level cap increases, while coin power will remain the same, the guard power will only become stronger.
Guard generates a temporary shield that lasts the entire turn at the start of the attack.
Pros
- Scales with potency
- Versatile
- Generates shield
- Shield lasts for whole turn
- Usually on IDs with high HP
- Activates on use so never fails
Cons
- No offensive capabilities
- Can take damage shield breaks
When to use
- When attack skills are neutral or below
- When an attack redirection is needed
- Against powerful attacks
- When being targeted by multiple weak attacks
- At high health against fatal/weak attacks
- Not near stagger against normal/weak attacks
- Practically anytime against endure/ineffective
Counter
While not as good as a pure guard, counter is a personal favourite, because there’s really nothing cooler for me than watching your little bean of a sinner dodge a strike and return it.
Unlike evade, which activates on coin toss, or guard which activates on use, counter activates only after surviving an attack, which might seem unintuitive in saying it is the second best defensive action. But like the others, there are scenarios of when to use it, and why it is so powerful.
Pros
- Looks cool
- Deals damage
- Usually on IDs with high damage or…
- on IDs applying debuffs
- Damage scales with level
- Usually on IDs with distant stagger value
Cons
- Takes HP damage
- Must survive attack to use
- Not good against finishers
When to use
- Against low damage attacks
- When sinner is not near being staggered
- Against normal/weak/endure/ineffective damage types
- To redirect attacks when there are not enough clash advantages
- When sinner can survive/not get staggered by the attack
P/s: DPS units have 3 Thresholds (usually at 65-35-15%), while Tank’s threshold is at 50%.
For example, W Don is the unit that most people use to Evade. She has +0 in Evade Level, which means it will unlikely to +1 Final Value when clashing, then -1 on Personal Defence Level, means you receive more damage, and 2 Stagger Threshold to spike the damage received to 300%.
Meanwhile, Dieci Rody has +5 in Guard Level, +5 in Personal Defense Level, and only 1 Stagger Threshold. If her Guard rolls a 20, then it can block an S3 entirely if the damage resistence is normal.
Btw, Mexinclair is the best Evader with 10+5 roll,+5 Evade Skill, and 1 Stagger Threshold at 50%. His only problem is with 2-3 Speed, no enemies will gonna attack him.
Meanwhile, with Guard, you have to tank the hit, and be infected by whatever effects the skill has. This is why Guard Skills will have value as a S3, while an evade has a value as an S2. And by the way, Counter is just trash though, except when you use Fox Cliff. If you do not play specific comp that use Counter like the Envy Comp, never touch it. Just tank the hit instead.
The reason why you think Evade is worse than Guard simply because most Evade units are DPS units, meaning they will have 2 Stagger Threshold that greatly amplify enemies’ attacks if they manage to pierce through your Evade, and low Personal Defense Level and even the Evade Skill’s Level is low as well. It’s understandable, since you can reuse Evade skill, making it a high-risk-high-reward Defense option.
Second, the reason you think Defense Skill scales because it works the opposite way, Defense Skill makes the opponent’s offense skills NOT SCALE ONLY WHEN CLASHING. So, at MD2F5, you can see the enemy’s clash value spike to 20, but when you use Defense Skills, it goes back to base, this is the reason.
Butttt, please do remember that this fact doesn’t do any thing with the damage you received, which is calculated by you Personal Defense Skill (-4 on N Sinclair).
Third, this is the reason why of all Defense Skills, Evade is the GOAT. Since Defense Skill neutralizes clashes, you only need to worry about Sinner’s resistences and Personal Defense Skill. Evade skips the whole 2nd part and just say, ‘as long as you dodge everything, nothing matters’.
I think you get the defense system in Limbus Company wrong. Like, defense doesn’t work like this.
First, Defense DO scales. They are the little Shield icon in your character sheet opposed to the Sword, called Defense Power. Just like Attack Skills, Defense Skills gain 1 Clash Power for every 3 points Defense Power above enemy’s Offence Power.
By the way, when you increase your Sinner’s level, both of your Offence and Defense Power increase by 1. Then, its value will change depending on the plus/minus of that ID (for example, N Sinclair gains +5 Offence Power to his Offensive Skill, while having -4 on Defense, and +2 on his Defense Skill (Enough…).
I think downplaying the fact that Evade negates on-hit effects is doing them a disservice. A significant majority of the enemies status effects are [on-hit] and a good chunk of them are a bit too debilitating to consider just taking to the face
Also also is the fact that unlike the other defence options; as long as they don’t get hit, Evade can be reused indefinitely. This fact shines through the most when a boss is targeting one Sinner multiple times. Use an Evade on the first (or fastest) attack and watch a boss be too busy trying to hit that one mother rucker to fight back while you beat their ass into the ground with one-sided attacks.
But all that is negated by the important caveat; “as long as they don’t get hit”. You are completely at the mercy of RNGesus. One bad flip and all the benefits are gone.
But I think my favorite time to use them is during [Unclashable] attacks and watching them wiff there big special move (looking at you kqe-1j-23)
I don’t know what part of the game you’re on right now, but from personal experience, once you reach high-level play, you just cannot rely on evade consistently. I did not once touch evade during my sub 150 RR2 run, nor can I effectively trigger it consistently on MD2H level 5. Like the evade from LoR, while it can last forever technically, it’s entirely reliant on coin power.
KQE is an exception, not the norm, because it is the only abno right now designed to specifically be evaded. Unless you’re going to keep retrying a level just to get the RNG, there’s just no consistent way to use evade right now.
Mmm, for some extra opposing points:
Evade Pros: mitigates most damage against low base power multi-plus-coin skills. Against 3+5+5+5 for example, first check is just 3+5, then 3+5+5, then 3+5+5+5, where a clash checks against the maximum 3+5+5+5 first.
Defend Cons: procs on-hit effects for enemies. Stagger, capture, paralyze next turn, etc.
Counter Cons: only the newest IDs actually have good counter skills. All the old IDs have ones that barely do anything… some of the newest are awesome though, true
IIRC, evades DO scale with potency, might wanna re-test that one
The defense stats scale, but it’s coin base, so it doesn’t affect the defense potency.