Magic Guard

Magic Guard is a 1st-job skill for Magicians, and a primary tool in the arsenal of any mage, serving to keep them alive even with their relatively small HP pools by passively absorbing a certain percentage of incoming damage as MP instead of HP while the skill is active. In addition, Battle Priests benefit offensively from the skill, as it allows melee attacks to affect monsters in a certain radius around the struck monster.

Skill description
Like usual buffs, Magic Guard is cast once by a player and lasts for a while before it has to be cast again. While under its effects, every time the player takes damage (from any source, including fall damage), a percentage of that damage (as determined by the level of the skill) is taken out of the player's MP pool, and the rest is taken out of HP as normal. Being a form of [server-sided] damage reduction, the amount of damage absorbed by this ability shows up in the blue parentheses when true damage is turned on. See the damage reduction article for detail about at what point the damage reduction takes place.

Whenever a Magic Guarded player takes a hit that would normally drain more MP than the player actually has left, all of the player's MP is drained, and the excess is taken out of HP as normal.

Magic Guard is somewhat unique in that it is undispellable, i.e. monsters that use a dispelling skill on a player with Magic Guard active will strip all of that player's buffs except for Magic Guard.

In addition, while under the effects of Magic Guard, players wielding a 1- or 2-handed blunt weapon will incur splash damage on monsters surrounding the monster that they hit with melee attacks. The splash damage that is dealt scales down linearly as the monsters being splashed are further away from the initially struck monster.

The maximum splash damage (hypothetically dealt to monsters in the exact same position as the initially struck monster) and minimum splash damage (hypothetically dealt to monsters that are only barely inside the area of effect) are a certain % of the damage of the initial strike, determined by the skill level. The splash damage has a maximum squared radius of 70,000, which is a [linear] radius of approximately 264.58.

Special interactions
As mentioned before, Magic Guard is rather unique in its inability to be dispelled. Additionally, Magic Guard interacts specially with the Infinity skill (4th job magician skill). When both Infinity and Magic Guard are concurrently active on a single player, damage dealt to that player is proportionately absorbed into MP as if the player had an arbitrarily large current MP value, but does not actually affect the player's MP value (i.e., only HP damage is taken).

Compared to vanilla v62 GMS
Beyond giving the ability to produce splash damage on all melee attacks with a blunt weapon, Magic Guard in IntransigentMS differs from its vanilla counterpart in a few ways:
 * Comparatively less powerful at absorbing HP loss as MP loss (61% absorption at max. level, vs. 80% in vanilla)
 * Undispellable, unlike vanilla
 * Interacts specially with the Infinity skill