Parrying, Blocking and Guard Timing

A block that always works is not a decision. Sword Quest's guard solves that in an unusually clean way: blocking always stops the blow, but only a guard raised in the moment pays anything, and a guard raised too early gets knocked down by the hit it stopped.

Three outcomes, not two

When something reaches you in Sword Quest, one of three things happens, and which one depends entirely on the state of your guard.

If the guard went up within the last fifth of a second, it is a parry: no damage, 120 points at perfect quality, and the combo advances. Defence becomes score.

If the guard was already up before that, it is an ordinary block: no damage either, but the blow knocks your guard down. You have to release and raise it again, which takes a moment and costs you the coverage in between.

And if the guard is not covering the angle the blow came from, it is a hit: health gone, combo reset, and nine-tenths of a second of invulnerability while you recover.

The parry window is 0.18 seconds

That is the number. The guard takes 0.04 seconds to actually come up, and for 0.18 seconds after that, anything it stops counts as a parry.

A fifth of a second is short but it is not reaction-speed short, because you are not reacting to a swing animation - creatures in the arena damage you by contact, so the thing you are timing against is a creature closing the last few pixels. That is visible for as long as the approach takes.

This is why the parry is learnable rather than lucky. You are not waiting for a hidden cue; you are watching something walk toward you at a fixed speed and raising the guard as it arrives.

The practice method from the timing guide applies directly: raise obviously early five times, obviously late five times, then aim between.

Why holding the guard loses

There is no guard meter and nothing drains - which sounds like holding it permanently should be free. Two things stop that.

The first is that a raised guard cuts your movement speed to 45 per cent. A turtled knight cannot cross the arena, cannot reach the next arrival and cannot escape a closing ring, which in a game where waves spawn all around you is fatal on its own.

The second is the knockdown. A guard that was already up when the blow landed is dropped by it, so a held guard does not even give you continuous coverage - it gives you one block and then a gap, exactly when several creatures are arriving.

Between them, the two make the timed guard strictly better than the held one, which is the whole design goal stated in a sentence.

The guard covers a cone, not a circle

The guard protects roughly two radians - about 115 degrees - centred on the direction you are aiming. Anything arriving outside that arc is not blocked at all, however well timed the raise was.

This is the detail that connects defence to positioning. In a circular arena with creatures arriving from every compass point, a guard is only ever an answer to one direction at a time, and choosing which direction is the actual skill.

It also explains a frustrating-feeling death that is entirely fair: you raised the guard, you were not hit by the thing you raised it against, and something behind you walked into you anyway.

The lesson is the same one the positioning guide arrives at from the other side. Work around the ring in one direction so that the arc you are covering is the arc that matters.

When to dodge instead

The dodge is a separate system on its own timer: 150 pixels of travel over 0.24 seconds with invulnerability throughout, and a 0.8-second cooldown before you can use it again.

Because it costs no stamina and no meter, the only real cost is where it leaves you - which makes it the right answer whenever the problem is a position rather than a single blow.

Dodge when more than one creature is arriving at once, because a cone cannot cover two directions. Dodge against bats, whose sine path makes the arrival moment hard to time. Dodge to cross the arena, since 150 pixels in a quarter-second is faster than walking and safe while it lasts.

Guard when there is exactly one thing arriving and you can see which way it is coming from. That is the situation the parry was built for, and it pays 120 points every time you get it right.

Defence against the six creatures

The bestiary is shared, so these answers hold in every game that uses it.

• Goblin - parry. It runs straight at you at a fixed 128 pixels a second, which makes the arrival moment the most predictable in the game.
• Bat - dodge. At 158 pixels a second on a sine path, it is the hardest arrival to time.
• Slime - attack. It has two health and splits on death, so the decision is where the halves land, not whether you were hit.
• Wraith - dodge. It phases in and out of invulnerability on a visible cycle, so exchanges with it are unreliable.
• Golem - avoid. Six health, 2 contact damage and only 52 pixels a second: it is the one creature you can simply walk away from.
• Dragonling - close it down out of turn, moving laterally. It fires every 1.8 seconds inside about 420 pixels.

The over-defence trap

The most common way a defensive player loses is not by being hit. It is by running out of time.

Castle Defender has a gate with health and a wave schedule that does not wait. Sword Quest only ends a wave when the wave is dead. In both, a player who defends perfectly and attacks rarely loses slowly rather than quickly, which feels like improvement and is not.

The correction is to treat every successful parry as an obligation to attack. You have just stopped a blow at zero cost with the creature in reach and your guard still fresh - that is the cheapest swing you will get.

Defence is how you buy the opening. It is not the plan.

Frequently asked questions