Heat (DDS2) vs Airy (BD): I never did get up to Heat in DDS2. Shouldn't stuff like Dark Reflector get as much respect as the Tentacles? Seems like the same "defensive gimmick that translates really well in a duel format"
This is very late and pretty much irrelevant, but Heat's tentacles work quite differently and are far more potent than Dark Reflector is. For starters, while the tentacles are individually fragile, they block every attack until they both die, and they usually take closer to a round of MT to put down than being deflected by any poke - not to mention they get individual actions themselves while they're up. In fact, they already -are- scaled because they have HP scores, and those get adjusted accordingly to HP and average scaling methods.
Heat's tentacles also translate better because he double-acts, so he can put them back up every round - and he doesn't spend much time in-game without at least one of them up in general. In practice, they're at the very core of Heat's entire design. In Dark Reflector's case, it uh sometimes cancels one damage action out of four and not even necessarily so, since multi-hit offense exists in Lufia 2 and that punches through it easily. Daos is also slow, so at best he usually catches... a Guy turn, oh no. Tentacles are the heart of the Vritra fight in DDS2. Dark Reflector is a waste of a turn.