"The best defense"

The only defensive skill I've ever seen make itself 'useful' is Ice Mirror, and that's only because of its secondary ability of boosting the damage Fjorm does in return.

They're just not as good as outright doing extra damage. It's why those and the hp recovery specials (Sol and Noontime) are some of the least used specials in the game.

There's really no point in using defense skills because they only prevent some damage. Skills like Bonfire are more useful because it takes a unit's already high defense and uses it as extra power, whereas skills like Pavise don't do that.

Sure, I could use it on my Lukas, but Bonfire is much more useful. Defensive skills (aside from Ice Mirror) are just outclassed.

I run them on a couple of dancers but that's it. Oh, I also run Shield Pulse Hawkeye... *Spoilers* He usually dies anyway.

In theory, they could be useful on a hyper offensive unit to buy them one more engagement (Minerva use to pull this off) but in practice offensive specials are preferable. One reason is that they're limited to protecting from ranged OR melee.

I personally been thinking of ways to use defensive passives, Escutcheon in particular because of it's 2 turn cooldown, and i concluded that I needed a melee hero with:

- Slayer Weapon (to reduce charge by 1)
- High Atk & Spd (so I wouldn't need to depend on specials to kill, and needs to double for this plan to work)
- Really Low Def (to make the most out of the special)

With this setup, the plan is to be the one that engage a fight and be able to perform follow-up attacks, which in turn causes Escutcheon to always be ready when the foe attacks.

Base on random calculations, a unit with like 20 Def is now like a unit with around 30ish Def instead.

I use them on a lot of my dancers. Probably not optimal, but I'm not typically interested in doing damage with my dancers. I do use Ninian as a sword deleter/debuffer with Swordbreaker/Dark Breath, and Pavise helps her survive the debuffed melee units on the enemy phase that were close to my target.

Maybe they should change the %,
From 30 to 50
From 50 to 80.