Deflect & Guard explanation

[Steven Silverheart]

If somone wanna explain this to me :

In the tutorial it says that when i deflect i will gain some spirit but in the stats screen it talks about deflection spirit consumtion. By guarding i get it, im loosing spirit. Thats fine.

When i succesfully deflect an attack i gain some spirit i've noticed. So what do they mean by consuming spirit when deflecting? Also, the Water stat talks about "Spirit consumed by deflecting" wich i dont get since i thought i was gaining spirit while doing perfect deflects. Even the tutorial tells me that this is the case. To even make me more confused the Earth stat says that it increases the "Spirit gained when deflecting".

I really dont get this so i would be very glad if someone explained this to me. And while your at it you can also tell me what the "Deflect Difficulty" stat on weapons mean!

Thanks!
Have a nice day! Best answer gets a award <3

[Farkus]

To be honest I don't fully understand it myself, but I did notice that doing a single press dodge/deflect gives you a little bit of orange spirit. So it could be referring to that. Spirit gained when deflecting probably refers to the blue spirit you get when you successfully deflect an attack.

Deflect difficulty refers to the amount of orange spirit you get when you try to deflect an attack (as mentioned in the paragraph above). It might also affect the double tap dodge as well, but I am not certain.

I find the best way to think about spirit is as a slider that starts at 0 and can go from -100 (all orange) to +100 (all blue) so anything that consumes spirit subtracts from your total and anything that gains spirit adds to it. And so you always want to gain spirit and have your foes lose spirit.

[L.Kaldwin]

Deflect means when you hit the deflect button. It will consume a bit of your spirit, but you can do that even if your negative spirit (red) is full.

When you deflect, your spirit goes down a bit. if you deflected successfully, you will gain more positive spirit (blue) than you lost (most of the time). If you deflected a critical blow (red attacks), you will gain tons of spirit.

Deflect difficulty means the amount of spirit consumed by a deflect.
Any % lower than 100, deflect will consume more spirit and vise versa.
Heavy weapons have low deflect difficulty, while light weapons have higher value.

Water will lessen your spirit consumption when using deflect. This can help lessen the spirit consumption of heavy weapons.
Earth will increase your spirit gain from a successful deflection.

If you invested into Earth and Water, and use a light weapon, your deflect will consume a little bit of spirit and gain alot more back from successful deflection.

The game basically tells you that guarding is a very defensive play that won't benefit you in the long run because the disparity between your negative spirit and the enemy positive spirit will get larger and larger the more you guard.

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Bonus Round : Overall Armor Weight and Agility also play a role.

The heavier your armor, the lower your agility which goes by ;
A - less than 30%
B - less than 70%
C - less than 99%
D - 100%

The lower agility you have, deflect and dodging will consume more and more spirit. You will have slower and shorter dodge range.

The geneal rule of thump is keeping your agility at B by investing into Earth if you want to use heavy armor or some heavy parts for higher defense.

This video explains better than me about this matter.

https://youtu.be/cwCHrjLfpik

[Read Tiasmoon Post below for a longer and more in-depth explanation]

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Originally posted by Baron01:

Just to add a bit more advice to above post that is already very informative.

You should get to a habit of pressing guard while you try to deflect. This will not prevent damage if you deflect too early but it will negate damage if you are too late. This works especially well when learning timing windows of attacks on new enemies or bosses.

[D. Flame]

When you hit the deflect button, it consumes spirit.

If you successfully parry, you get a bunch of spirit back.

If you whiff, you get no spirit back.

[En.Ki]

"a lot of random stats we dont understand"

[Baron01]

Originally posted by Menrva:

...
The game basically tells you that guarding is a very defensive play that won't benefit you in the long run because the disparity between your negative spirit and the enemy positive spirit will get larger and larger the more you guard.
...

Just to add a bit more advice to above post that is already very informative.

You should get to a habit of pressing guard while you try to deflect. This will not prevent damage if you deflect too early but it will negate damage if you are too late. This works especially well when learning timing windows of attacks on new enemies or bosses.

[L.Kaldwin]

Originally posted by Baron01:

Just to add a bit more advice to above post that is already very informative.

You should get to a habit of pressing guard while you try to deflect. This will not prevent damage if you deflect to early but it will negate damage if you are too late. This works especially well when learning timing windows of attacks on new enemies or bosses.

This is a very good advice. Can I quote you in my post?

[Tiasmoon]

Note:

Deflect consumption is fairly low compared to how much spirit you can gain from a Deflect. For example you might consume -100 spirit for a deflect, but gain 250-400~ spirit. As a result its more efficient to increase deflect spirit gain rather then reduce deflection spirit cost. One succesful deflect gives enough spirit for several additional deflect uses.

Here are some tests I did in the past, to give some more specific examples on the differences:

Guard = same spirit drain regardless of Agility, so save to say weight does not effect this

Deflect: (A, B, C Agility differences)

A -77 spirit | spirit after = 389
B -96 spirit | spirit after = 369
C -135 spirit | spirit after = 331

Difference in loss is comparable to difference in gain from deflect. So it appears Agility or weight effects spirit loss on deflect, but not gain from succesful deflect.

Note: [deflect] spirit cost is equal to [dodge] spirit cost.
Note 2: Magic cost was not effected by Agility.

So if we consider B to be baseline:

A agility gives:
-20% reduction in Spirit Attack cost
-20% reduction in Martial Arts cost
-20% reduction in Deflect cost

C agility gives:
+40% increase in Spirit Attack cost
+40% increase in Martial Arts cost
+40% increase in Deflect cost

A agility vs C agility then is 80% vs 140% or almost twice as much/less

As you can see, because of how much spirit is gained from a succesful deflect, even the difference in Agility class ends up not mattering much.

But this is also effected by how much Earth Virtue you have. Earth Virtue caps at +50% spirit gain, and it effects a much larger base number of spirit gain.
In example, about + 465 Spirit [gained]
Compared to Water Virtue that caps at -25% and effects a smaller base number of spirit cost. In example, about -77~135 spirit [lost]

As you can see, spirit gain is far larger number then spirit lost. So makes more sense to boost the former.


This means that Earth Virtue is a lot more useful for increasing spirit then Water Virtue is.

[Baron01]

Originally posted by Menrva:

Originally posted by Baron01:

Just to add a bit more advice to above post that is already very informative.

You should get to a habit of pressing guard while you try to deflect. This will not prevent damage if you deflect to early but it will negate damage if you are too late. This works especially well when learning timing windows of attacks on new enemies or bosses.

This is a very good advice. Can I quote you in my post?

Absolutely, I read it somewhere on these forums and it made my life a lot easier. The more people know about this, the better.

[L.Kaldwin]

Originally posted by Baron01:

Absolutely, I read it somewhere on these forums and it made my life a lot easier. The more people know about this, the better.

Thanks!

Originally posted by Tiasmoon:

This means that Earth Virtue is a lot more useful for increasing spirit then Water Virtue is.

This is also a great post. Very in-depth and informative.