Making Guard Skill Viable

I use a common status effect called knocked down. Guarding removes it. Hope this gives you an idea for your game.

@Aesica and @bgillisp have good simpler solutions too. Guard really can work by default if the enemy can cast a powerful move on X turn and you learn that turn. Also just giving it something simple like a bit of healing or recovering a bit more TP maybe can do enough to make it useful as well.

You could also do what @lianderson said and have it remove a very common state effect, if that state effect is used quite often in the game. I never thought of that one, but that too it simple but effcient.

I also think @Milennin idea, when balanced well it quite creative and good too.

I think that all shows it can be kept simple and doesn't have to be complex, but there is also nothing wrong experimenting it further and either differentiating it between certain actors or all classes. In different games, even in some of the same games, both options could work best. At least, that's what I believe.

guard is useless for easy games.

when potions are cheap and restore more health than guard would protect.
when MP is practically inexhaustible and healers restore more than guard would protect.
when normal monsters barely scratch anybody.

you dont have to change guard for it to be useful your game might just be too easy to ever need to utilize guard.

@atoms : Right on. In my game there's a boss which gets mad when you won't fall In 2 rounds that it goes "Ok, then, let's see how you like this nice spell scroll of Armageddon!". And to survive it, you need to guard as it is so powerful it will take off all your health even at full HP then.

Though to make sure the player didn't miss the hint, I had a party member tell you to guard NOW. Just in case.

You know though, with some of Yanfly's scripts in ACE, there are a few other neat tricks you can do with guard. For instance, you can make it that guard gives you damage protection which blocks say the first 100 HP of all damage. Or you can make it so that guard removes all damage that is above say 50% of your max HP. Or you can even make it so that guarding makes you immune to KO (state resist KO). There's all sorts of ways to get creative with it if you wish.

In fact, one idea I might try in my next game is making it that if you guard you are immune to all status ailments for that turn. Though I'd have to use state rate * 0, else it will remove any you already have too. Though that might be a viable option too, let Guard remove your status ailments. Hmmm.....

Make guard have interesting effects other than "defend", my current test project makes guard give reduced damage, chance to flee and a counterattack up chance, which can be stacked with the mc counter attack buff skill.

Im making use of TP as a resource to either refill a small mp pool or use special attacks and guard/counter is the fastest way to refill it.

Im also using yanfly weapon unleash, making accesories that change guard behavior, giving some customization options to the player in case they dont like the normal guarding, well maybe a barrier or passive heals will suit their tastes.

Ive realized a funny mechanism...

Set a character to act twice..apply substitute then guard. Bonus points for high agility, counter and or magic reflect.. would be a fun interaction to design around. id suggest lower def bonuses to the auxilery effect items to avoid making other def items pointless

edit: new guard update.. make it 100% protection but cost TP. easy mechanic to build around...

I know what your saying about guard being useless if potions are cheap and you can gain MP easily too, but actually even then it depends what you do with guard because it could still become useful. For instance, if it buffs the character stats then that is one example on how it can still be useful if you aim to make a super easy game.

I don't think having cheap potions and MP restoration means guard has to become useless, but I agree with you if the game is easy and you change the difficulty then guard instantly can become more of a use.

Also with the actor acts 2 turns idea, perhaps having the actor act once but does both substitute would work better, unless all actors have 2 turns or something since it'll be harder to balance and prevent that single actor being overpowered otherwise. I suppose if you reduce there stats enough then two turns would work, but that sounds more work then needed if all you want is the actor to first use substitute and then guard half the damage. If you do want one actor with 2 turns on any action or skill then that's harder to balance but ok and could turn out quite fun.

@bgillisp

I like all those ideas! It may be easier to do in VX Ace, but I'm sure there are ways to do them in other engines too. For example in MV, Yanfly absorption barrier can block out 100 HP on guard easily.

It's still good it's easier to do the other features in VX Ace with Yanfly scripts. If you are using Ace to experiment with that idea, then it sounds good trying to see if you can have it working well in your next game. Best of luck.

when I say useless i don't mean in an absolute sense I'm exaggerating to a certain degree to express how little utility guard would have compared to other defensive options which would give you more. kind of like how you could cut down a tree with a butter knife given enough time but you choose to use a chainsaw the assumption is the player will play to the best of their ability and ignore inferior methods.. (well you'd like to hope but if attack spam works.. )

if you put actx2 on a weapon with about 1/3 your standard weapons attack power (id recommend 2-handed) the character gets 2/3 of the damage per turn but 2x chance for applying states or landing a crit or the ability to split their turn between attacking and defending. id probably only make one of these to prevent the tedium of acting twice for everyone from becoming the most effective strategy

also notably my substitute works a little bit different in its single target rather than cover all you pick one person to protect. someone here helped me set it up.. was a recent thread you could probably track it down

Let's hope attack spam hardly ever works, because battles became very tedious in games that do this. I could cope with a couple of starting battles with just attack but anything more really reduces the enjoyment factor. It's been discussed a lot here and the conclusion solid advice is to try and avoid this unless you have some exception where strategy is increase through it.

I just meant, if you want an actor to substitute as well a guard, you can do them both as a single guard skill and that'll be easier. Having two turns would require more work to balance and get the right stats and such, but I'd agree with you, it could turn out ok and quite fun if handled well with proper thoughts in numbers and formulas too. Your examples of higher chance for critical and stats being applies are some possible good ways on how you could handle that feature.

Ah ok. With that type of substitue where it only protects one person, if you have at least four party members and it lasts one turn I'm not sure how good of a skill that'd be? I'm guessing you'll make it last mutiple turns? Or, how are you planning for that to work? You are right, both can work. It can make sense to give an actor the option to substitue, with and without guard, so long substitue doesn't become too rare to be useful in the battle and guard still has use.

The plan is for substitute to have lots of different uses and guard would be one of them. For me its only a one turn effect since i intend to have it mitigate most if not all damage dependant on the situation.

@Countyoungblood Ok, sure, just try to make sure the substitute still occurs often enough for the skill to be of use for the player, you can go about making that happen anyway you like, but you'd want to make sure the skill truly has a use even if it's only a turn. In my own mind though it seems odd to have it only effect one party member, just because if the party member doesn't get any hits done the substitute doesn't cover them, so if this happens often then it isn't as helpful. Maybe I'm misunderstanding or not seeing something obvious.

Just make sure to have a solution to the issue and it should be good to go!

well, off the top of my head situations that might fit.. telegraph a move that would kill the healer yet the tank can survive. attach a +target rate state to powerful magic..(so you can guess whos going to be targetted) remove revive items entirely so low healer health becomes a dire situation..create a super move that renders the user defenseless... specialize a rogue to be pure damage low/zero defense.. buff the blockers normal attack and counter.. create a "metoo" spell that adds the covered status without the cover making the tank cover two targets

I've got the seed of an idea, but I haven't implemented it yet. The idea: make Guard restore a small amount of MP. Remove MP-restoring items so that this is useful. Then use stackable buffs to make enemies get stronger as the battle goes on, so that the players have to balance the benefits of guarding and regenerating their MP with the benefits of slaughtering the enemy quickly while they're still weak.

This would be most effective in a game with long dungeons and/or frequent encounters. I need to do some math to find out how many encounters it would take before regenerating MP becomes critical, and base some things around that. Ideally, I want the player to sweat over resources, but not curse my name to the tenth generation. Which is always a balancing act.

Sounds difficult..id like to play it.