Talk:Defend

I'm not going to simply re-edit in that deleted paragraph, that would feel like an edit war, lol, but I feel that a practical analysis does seem warranted in this article. Here is my analysis, re-phrased (since I did write that last paragraph quite badly). If others still feel this constitutes a "terrible understanding" of the game, I'm more than willing to hear any criticism, but in lieu of a valid counterargument, then I will put in back in eventually as there is nothing wrong with what I wrote (in principle at least), but I'll leave it here for right of reply first:


 * As a command, defend is almost always an undesirable option to use in battle, as a defending Adept cannot preform any other action and thus will not be able to aid the party on that turn. While the effect (reducing the rate of HP loss) is useful, defend is almost never the best choice, as increasing the rate of healing is almost always a much more effective tactic as healing items and Psynergy are plentiful and, with a few exceptions, will heal much more than 50% of an enemy's attack. However, for example, if the party cannot afford to loose any members and one or more Adepts do not have enough HP to survive a full hit, but the enemy acts first, then stalling until healing can be performed, by setting the endangered Adept(s) to defend, is potentially desirable. However, in this case, other defensive options (such as the Mars Djinni, Flash) are almost always better choices, as they offer greater protection and target more Adepts. Thus, the best time to use defend is when stalling is needed (it need not be waiting to restore HP, it could be Djinn recovery or status effects, such as Seal, etc), but all superior defensive options have already been consumed. Obviously, this is a niche situation that is both statistically and strategically unlikely to occur, and as such, it is far more likely that an Adept will simply be forced to use defend by default when an Adept's target in invalidated due to the monster being felled earlier in the turn. Slax01 00:00, November 28, 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't see how thats unreasonable to have, maybe give it a heading saying "analysis" or "strategy". Cheeseo is a little too condescending, but whatever, I think it's fine to add it back in personally. --Caasi 01:03, November 28, 2009 (UTC)
 * I'd just like to note that something else I've always used defend for is when attempting to defeat single remaining enemies with the Dark Panther method of Djinn attacks to maximize EXP/coin/drop gains; Defend is useful for when you don't want your faster Jupiter adept to kill the enemy before your slower Mars Adept can unleash his offensive Mars Djinni on it, for example. So I think that should be integrated into there. Erik Jensen (Appreciate me here!) 02:06, November 28, 2009 (UTC)