Stone Wall - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Meat Shield; Party Tank

Totally stationary. No attack. Enough defense to tank a Breath Weapon made of lasers.

If the Glass Cannon believes that the best defense is a good offense, the Stone Wall tries for the reverse. His offense is nothing to write home about, if it even technically exists. But he's tough. Really, really tough. And if anything can put him down, odds are he's quick enough on the recovery to get right back up for round two.

Depending on the game, a Stone Wall may use one or any of three basic strategies:

Berserking — Throws himself at the enemy without a thought for defense. Relying on his inherent toughness to keep him alive, he uses suicidal tactics to improve his dismal attack power. This is especially common for Stone Walls whose toughness is completely automatic, rather than something they need to work at.
Turtling — The complete opposite tack. Does nothing but defend, defend, defend, with maybe the occasional attack when the enemy least expects it. The fight becomes a patience game — either a battle of attrition to see who tires out first, or a waiting game until the whistle blows. If his defense is something he physically constructs and builds, he can win a fight by slowly expanding outward until he leaves the enemy without a foot to stand on.
Shielding — A teamwork strategy. Interposes himself between the enemy and an ally. By keeping the enemy occupied, he allows allies with greater attack strength but poorer defense to kill the enemy without getting killed. Characters who do this are called "Meat Shields" or "Party Tanks."

Distinguished from the Mighty Glacier in that the Stone Wall is even tougher to hurt, and not necessarily slow, clumsy, lacking in range, or whatever. The Mighty Glacier is much more balanced in his offense and defense. The Stone Wall only hits as hard as the Fragile Speedster, or perhaps weaker. Contrast the Lightning Bruiser, who can attack as well as he can tank.

If the Stone Wall's defense is evasion-based as opposed to toughness-based, the line between this archetype and a defensively played Fragile Speedster blurs, if it even exists. But toughness is the norm.

Fighting Games rarely (if ever) have this of character. Fighting games usually have more than enough defensive options for all characters already. Further, it would require a huge disparity in the defense-to-offense ratio for such a character to be viable (i.e. take 1/10th the damage while dealing 30% less), which, in turn, would pretty much wreck the balance.

This trope partly takes its name from a real-life example: Confederate General Thomas "Stone Wall" Jackson won the battle of Bull Run due to his strategy to not retreat from his line, no matter how bad things went for him. And for a while things went pretty bad.

A subtrope of Competitive Balance.

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In Yu-Gi-Oh, the rock type is mainly geared toward Turtling play, as rocks tend to have low attack and high defence, as well as quite a few of them having the ability to flip into face-down defence position. There was even a rock structure deck at one point built entirely on building an uber-strong defence.
- However, there are also cards like Spirit Reaper (Zombie) and Marshmallon (Fairy), who simply can't be killed in battle, but have some of the worst stats in the game (though they both have some damaging effects, with Spirit Reaper's attack-and-your-opponent-discards effect, and Marshmallon doing 1000 damage when attacked face-down).
Walls and other creatures with Defender in Magic The Gathering are essentially this — by the very definition of the ability they can't attack and many deal little or no damage to enemy attacking creatures that they block. On the other hand, they can be very tough for a relatively low cost; the actual Wall of Stone card is a good example. It's worth noting, though, that the game also features a number of subversions and that these may be becoming more common since the defender ability was formally introduced and divorced from the 'wall' creature type (the original rule being simply that 'walls can't attack').
- Among creatures that can actually attack, this is the defining trait of treefolk. Indomitable Ancients is the most extreme example: It can dish out 2 damage but can take up to 10 and has no other abilities. The card Doran, the Siege Tower is specifically designed to turn such creatures into powerhouses by making all creatures deal combat damage equal to their toughness instead of their power, a windfall for most treefolk.
- Throughout Magic's history, there have been entire decks dedicated to turtling, creating an immpenetrable defense that allows them to win at their own leisure. Snow White and Project X both sought to gain absurd amounts of life through combos, ensuring your opponent will never take you down to 0. The classic UW control decks had hardly any win conditions, but tons of removal and permission spells to keep them alive. And then there's...
- Turbofog, everyone's least favorite Lorwyn-era tourney deck! It had very few creatures, defensive or otherwise, but stuffed itself with damage prevention, counterspells, control, life-gain, and just a few cards to recycle itself and increase its runtime. Its only win condition was to last so damn long that the opponent's deck ran out of cards, an instant lose, or more likely that the opponent simply lost patience and accepted his (eventual) defeat.

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Super Robot Wars Original Generations gives us the Giganscudo, a Super Robot piloted by Tasuku Shinguji. While the Giganscudo has a reliable offense, it's really nothing special compared to other Super Robots like Dygenguard or the SRX; its' true strength lies in its' massive defensive power and Tasuku's Defense Support skill, which allows him to cut in during an attack and take hits for adjacent allies. The mech is most infamous for being the Immovable Object that stopped the Unstoppable Force of Sanger Zonvolt's Zankantou, proving that yes, there is something the Colossal Blade cannot cleave.
In City Of Heroes and City Of Villains, one defensive choice for Tanker/Brute is Stone Armor. There's a power in that set called "Granite Armor", which turns you into a special character model (a living stone statue type of thing). While you have that active, you have somewhere between 15% and 25.2% Defense against all but Psionics, 37.5% and 63.7% damage reduction against all but Psionics, and high resistance to all status effects. The tradeoff is that you do 30% less damage, take three times longer to recharge across the board, run less than a third your normal speed and cannot jump.
- The basic playstyle no matter the powersets for Tankers (and some Brutes) is the 'Shielding' variant of this. Since Tankers can take darn near anything thrown at them, their abilities are geared towards getting the attention while the Squishy Wizard and Glass Cannon shoot from behind. Scrappers (and all the other Brutes) don't care.
Mario's Tanuki suit has a mode that turns to stone. You can't be hurt, but you can't act.
The Metal Slimes from Dragon Quest. Spins the trope slightly by making them extremely fast — a rare combination of Stone Wall, Fragile Speedster, and Glass Cannon. In the Mons spinoff games, Metal Slimes on your team do not run, making them excellent healers, mages, — extremely fast, great MP, immune to offensive magic, and takes almost no damage from physical attacks.
Berserker from Fate/Stay Night mostly qualifies. Berserker's certainly got a powerful conventional offense, but the other Servants in the war have powerful, magical super-attacks. Instead, his special magic is Godhand, an ability grants him immense protection and multiple regenerations from total death. But it's a Worf Barrage defense. In true Worfing fashion, it serves to make him an impressive mid-boss and Stone Wall for the heroes or other villains to knock down, to show how awesome they are. (He only mostly qualifies as a Stone Wall because he really does have a super-attack — he just can't use it because his Master is keeping him permanently insane. He never gets to use it in any route.)
Rock-type Pokemon are all about this (Steel and Ground types a bit less). Shuckle currently holds the status for highest defenses, but lowest attack strength and speed (and horrible HP, which makes it useless against moves like Seismic Toss). Generally divide among those that use regular attacks or Standard Status Effects (Tanks) and those that just take hits to stall (Walls)
- Rock-type Pokemon are becoming more of Mighty Glacier since Gen IV, with moves such as Head Smash, Rock Wrecker and Stone Edge.
- Strangely Shuckle becomes a Glass Cannon when it uses Power Trick.
- The best-known example is Blissey, who has absurdly high Hit Points and Special Defence, as well as healing moves, but a strong enough physical move can KO it instantly.
  - Blissey personifies this, except with a little Staff Chick blended in. Yes, her baseline defense is the lowest of all fully evolved pokemon in the game, but a Max Defense Blissey takes neutral about as well as Spiritomb, who has no weaknesses at all. A well EV'd Blissey can sit there all day eating unboosted earthquakes, or dragonclaws, or even unSTABed fighting moves like focus punch, and softboil off the damage, all the while wearing you down with Seismic toss or toxic, or whatever other attack she's carrying.
- And then there's Cloyster, who has one of the highest defense stats of any Pokemon, but only average attack and below average speed.
- There's also Deoxys in its Defense form.
- In the anime itself, Paul's Torterra teaches Ash's newly-evolved Grotle a lesson in how to effectively turtle.
- Sometimes, however, a would-be Stone Wall is undermined by a type combo that gives it crippling weaknesses. A Rock/Steel with very high defensive stats on both sides sounds nigh-unkillable, right? Not so much when that type combination takes Quad Damage from Fighting and Ground, two of the more common attack types.
- A bizarre case which is actually a penguin: Empoleon, with one of the longest Resistances lists in the game.
- Bronzong is also a nice candidate. High HP nice Defensive stats, moes that boost its defenses, stop the enemy from retreating when it has a good matchup, a typing that only gives it two weaknessess, and a choice of two Abilities, each of which eliminate one of the aforementioned weaknessess.
ROB from Super Smash Bros Brawl could count as this. Thousands of Smashers already complain about ROB players' campy styles, throwing projectiles around, using a quick damaging move when the enemy gets close and using the time gained to switch to the other side of the field and repeat. He even has a back-aerial attack with considerable strength that can punish anyone trying to pursue him. Unlike monsters like Toon Link, he doesn't have great strength and speed in most of his standard moves and can't outrun most characters, while being very heavy and having an extremely good recovery move.
- Pit in the same game also deserves a mention, despite being lighter than ROB. He has only one projectile, the arrows, but it's more abusable than both of ROB's combined. Anybody who even tries using projectiles on him will have the Mirror Shield to answer to, and he can also fight back against anybody who does break through the arrows. Keeping him close to prevent this projectile from being abused long enough to kill him is easier said than done, as it is a war of attrition at best, given that he can also use his multiple jumps to maneuver, and he even lacks any notable weaknesses except low attack power.
In Command And Conquer 1 and Red Alert 1 games, the Armored Personnel Carrier has heavy armor, but is only has a light machine gun. Though it is meant to carry troops around the field, it is almost always used as a stone wall unit.
- In Red Alert 2, the war miner, though mainly a resource harvester, is armed with a small machine gun, but has enough armor to defeat tanks on a one on one battle. Same with slave miner in the Yuri's Revenge expansion pack. Also in the YR expansion, the Allies have access to the Battle Fortress, which is the the most heavily armored unit in the game and is armed with a light machine gun, though it can be garrisoned with five infantry, who can shoot out of the vehicle, making it one of the best units in terms of armor and firepower, hence turning it into a Mighty Glacier.
Paladins from Final Fantasy XI fit this trope to a T, although "berserking" is normally only seen in merit parties. Ninjas are Fragile Speedsters that can (and do) function as turtling Stone Walls through evasion and illusion. Warriors don't actually count, as they possess significant attack power right out of the box.
Many dedicated tanks in World Of Warcraft fall into this category, especially Warriors and Paladins. Depending on their primary talent tree, that is. Both classes have the choice to be either a Mighty Glacier or a Stone Wall (Paladins can also focus on healing, which still makes them tough as nails since their abilities allow them to survive easily three times as long as any other class). Bear druids don't count, as they still have decent damage output thanks to the hybrid nature of the feral tree (not to mention being able to switch to a Fragile Speedster type).
- Death Knight tanks rely more on evading and parrying incoming physical attacks, but they are excellent at mitigating spell damage (and do have talents that allow them to temporarily reduce all damage taken by 50% or increase their armour value).
In the bizarre 3rd-person Real Time Strategy game Sacrifice, this is the schtick of James, God of Earth.
In Skies of Arcadia Gregorio is known as old Iron Wall, sporting a massive shield, although we never see him fight. His fleet sports high defense and is often more reserved when it comes to firing the cannons, saving up for ram attacks.
While having some decent offense, Big is best used as a tank in Sonic Chronicles. Second highest armor value in the damn game (only Omega is better) + Taunt + Feel No Pain = that tickles!
Estelle from Tales Of Vesperia is a mix of this and Staff Chick, having arguably the highest defense (and worst offense) in the game. Many of her skills focus on defense and healing.
- This may be because she was the only playable character who thought to bring a shield.
- Mix her defensive abilities with this equation: Force Field + Eternal Support = Invincible
Ace Combat 6's A-10A is essentially this in in air-to-air combat but a Lightning Bruiser against ground targets.
- Even worse in the Air Force Delta series, which has RPG-like stats on any difficulty mode except the hidden one. Much like the 3.5 example above, unless you're escorting ground units, it's best just to ignore A-10s. It takes anywhere from 6 to 11(!) missiles to down ONE.
Q from Street Fighter III is considered one of the low tier characters, but his Taunt raises his defense by one-third, a benefit given up to three times; that means he can effectively double his (already high) defense, which flips the balance curve. Playing as Q involves jumping back, taunting three times, and then using his Dashing Punch to make the opponent cry.
Before there was Q, Several Fighting Game characters made use of Counter Attacks to act as pseudo-walls, usually to make up for otherwise bland movesets.
- The first example of this version is arguably Geese Howard, who contrary to later form, is a Lightning Bruiser SNK Boss who made up for lack of a noticible anti-air attack with a counter throw that was presumably included to fill in an otherwise glaring defensive hole that would have made it significantly easier to beat him... however, the CPU somehow always knew how to time it perfectly.
- Four years later, Variable Geo gave us Judoka Kyouko Kirishima, whose normal attacks were very conventional and lacked the punch of those of the other characters. However, she took somewhat less damage than most characters, and was balanced out with an array of high-power counters.
- Another four years later saw SNK make a true "Counter Wall" in the form of Seth. Low-output, unimpressive normal and special attacks made up for by a noticible amount of defensive and high-output counters... Among which is a counter-based Limit Break which hits hard.
- Arcana Heart's Millie Avalon is both this AND a glass cannon. Your only hope is the fact that she sucks bad at close-range combat. It's actually a time when button-mashing combos will work well for you.
In Battle For Wesnoth, the Dwarvish Guardsman line has pretty poor attacks, but good resistances and an ability that doubles their resistances on defense. User created content provides an even more extreme example; the Steppe Shieldbearer line from the Extended Era is unable to initiate combat, but has very high resistances.
The Golem monster class from Ogre Battle tends to have extremely high defenses, but isn't very useful as a tank due to its low HP.
- Undead units (Skeletons and Ghosts, particularly) are brick walls that shrug off almost every form of attack... except for holy spells, which dust them in one hit (Vampyres aren't instantly dusted, merely highly vulnerable).
There is an enemy in the game Adventure Quest that is simply a giant rock. It has thousands of Hp and, when weakened, it attacks by allowing chunks of its rocks to fall on you.
Defense Of The Ancients: All-Stars vividly demonstrates the downside of Stone Walls. Heroes of this type, like Centaur Warchief or Treant Protector, have one key team-aiding skill and lots of health. However, when said skill runs its course and the enemy team is still in good straits, they will proceed to target the more dangerous Glass Cannon rather than the tank that poses little threat, defeating the purpose of being a tank. In earlier versions buying the Radiance item allowed them to provide meaningful DPS, but with the Metagame shift towards shorter game lengths and further encouraging ganking, Radiance has become harder to get. Not to mention that some heroes have percentage-based skills that deal more damage to targets with more health, and you see how hard Stone Walls in DotA have it.
Plants Vs Zombies has the Wall-nut, Tall-nut and Pumpkin of the shielding variety. These plants solely exist to do nothing but take damage for your easily-killed attackers as well as impede the zombies' advance. However, all three plants sure do a good job at it.
This is the default strategy for Peco in Breath Of Fire 3. He has the highest natural HP and Defense totals in the game, with average attack and low speed and magic. Oh, and he recovers about 5% of his max HP every combat round. So he's already very difficult to kill, and most people will apprentice him to Fahl, who gives the best level up gains for, as you might guess, HP and Defense, making him Nigh Invulnerable (the fact that Peco starts at level 1 and can therefore give himself the aforementioned level up gains right off the bat helps a lot too). Also, place him at the point of the attack formation and at the cost of a noticable decrease in defense (33%) he gains a 75% increase to attack and an increased reprisal rate, which starts out the highest of any character (50%), along with a higher chance of enemies attacking him. Game Breaker anyone?
EVE Online Drakes....just Drakes, for shield tanking (80k+ regenerative). While Domis are pretty good for armor with reppers.
Many of the prime or once-prime farming strategies in Guild Wars revolve around adjusting certain characters' HP until Protective Spirit (reduces damage to 10% of the character's hit points; a powerful defensive buff) meshes with various healing skills, making the character difficult to kill. The player then aggros as much as is feasible and has various Smiting buffs deal damage back to the opponents each time the player is hit.
The Engineer in Team Fortress 2 has relatively low firepower, but can quickly construct sentries that, while poor-to-decent on their own, can be continually be healed by the Engineer, as long as he has metal. He can also construct dispensers that give him an effectively infinite supply of metal. This allows an entrenched Engineer to whittle enemies down to nothing in seconds, creating an immobile obstacle that's basically impassable unless the enemy has a good Spy, Demoman, or a Medic with an Ubercharge.
Though he's generally better off being played as a Lightning Bruiser with a little less lightning, it is possible and in some cases advisable to play Paladin!Cecil from Final Fantasy IV as a shielding/turtling Stone Wall in the somewhat-more-customizable DS remake. Start with his already excellent defense and HP stats, give him some Infinity Plus Or Minus One Armor (which generally only he can equip), and give him an ability set including Draw Attacks, HP+50%, and Brace. Draw Attacks means that every monster with a single-character-hit move will use it on him instead of the other, less-well-defended characters, HP+50% is Exactly What It Says On The Tin, and Brace, when active, reduces all incoming damage by 75%. For the remaining slot, you can give him an offensive option with Counter, which will automatically attack any critter or boss dumb enough to use their physical attack on him, or you can stick him with White Magic, which allows him to cast buffs on himself and heal the damage the takes. As if this wasn't enough, you can also stick him in the back row, which will reduce his offensive output if you care to go that direction, but will also even further reduce the damage he takes. Combine all of these and the man is Nigh Invulnerable, which can be quite useful as that game can be Nintendo Hard, especially in the endgame or bonus areas.
Stephanie Morgan in the Backyard Sports series has amazing defense in every game because of her experience at shortstop. Her offensive abilities are terrible.
In House Of The Dead, fat zombies tend to fulfil this role; they usually don't do any more damage than their skinnier counterparts do (occasionally less, because they don't hit as many times as a skinnier zombie would before you put them down), but they can also usually take more shots. In House of the Dead 2, a hefty zombie can take an entire clip or more of handgun bullets to the torso before dying.
The Dragonute/Dragonewt in both Shining Soul games. In the first game, he was more of a Mighty Glacier, as there weren't as many defensive talents you can specialize in other than weakening enemy attack power and increasing magic resistance of a particular element, and he hit the hardest physically of the four characters, but had very bad lag.
- However in the sequel he is now a full stop tank, having skills that increase defense gained from armor equips, the mentioned aura that decreases enemy attack power from the first game is back, a shield skill that increases the defense gained from shield equips and provides the P Cs a chance to block a physical attack - decreasing the damage taken to 1, the resistance skills from the first game have been combined into one talent in this one - meaning the dragonute will have the highest base resist of all the characters, and a skill that makes the character counter attacks do hit him with a fiery breath wave with great knockback, allowing breathing space for potion use.
  - All this combined with the fact that it can equip the strongest armors and shields... and that the dragonute wields the most powerful weapon types in the game (Axes and Flails) and you get a character that can laugh at most attacks, while easily pummeling them to death with his weapons thanks to his 'Break Armor' skill. The only things preventing the character from being a walking Game Breaker is his slow run speed, the mentioned attack lag, and that the axe Charged Attack often puts in danger of more mobs and/or their attacks.
In Fire Emblem, particularly the eighth one, this Troper remembers how he managed to win a level by taking two generals and putting them in a narrow doorway. The generals never got touched and everyone else on the team got bored.
- Same here, but I used Titania and eventually Oscar (who promoted really early because of this tactic) to block, say, a door I already knew enemies would spawn from. After that I started putting Mia and Nephenee in front to see what would happen, after which they promoted, too.
- Fire Emblem Generals/Armors can't really be called Stonewalls, to be honest, because they also tend to have very powerful attacks (Nothing quite like watching Bromm wreck wave after wave of enemies). Their only real disadvantage is their slow movement speed (which is why they are great on small maps or maps with obvious chokepoints, but are terrible in open fields), so I would call them Mighty Glacier material instead. The Dragon Laguz are probably the closest thing that Fire Emblem has to a Stone Wall; their breath weapon doesn't impress, but they have a frickton of HP and aren't so much as tickled by anything other than Thunder magic.
Exdeath is one of the Turtling variety in Dissidia Final Fantasy, given that his moveset revolves mostly around counter attacks. Could possibly also be considered a Mighty Glacier as a result of his incredibly slow movement speed.
In Luminous Arc 2, Gaston have ridiculously high defence and special defence, but generally wasn't that useful due to his slow speed and 3 MOV.

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