How would you handle magical attacks specifically geared to pierce armor and shielding? I ask because one character of mine, a Focused Practitioner with Ritual (Crafting) geared toward combat items is based on another character I have from another setting whose big power is an armor piercing shot. For this, I had imagined it as a 5-shift, one shot Enchanted item, which acts as Weapon:3, and ignores up to Armor:2, but on creatures without armor, is just a Weapon:3 attack.

I realize, of course, that he'd get more mileage out of just a solid Weapon:5 attack, since it'd do more damage to all enemies that way, but I tend to let the concept dictate rather than what's optimized sometimes.

How has anyone else handled this, if it's ever come up?

So, two questions about possible defenses:

1. Can a Warden Sword be used, with its 6-shift counterspell ability, to parry or otherwise defend against magic spells using the Weapons skill?

2. This springs from a Mega Man X-based game I ran using an adaptation of the Dresden rulebook. One character was a slow, big, but heavily armored fighter who had a Toughness power and high Endurance. Since she didn't have much of an Athletics score (especially with the penalty from Hulking Size), I allowed her player to defend using Endurance instead, on the basis that she was "bracing for impact". But since this would involve her still actually being "hit," instead of treating successful defenses like normal, I ruled that a successful defense would still count as being "hit", with the defense shifts being stacking with her normal armor to lessen the impact, so defending with a roll of 5 (with her Armor:3) against a roll of 3 (with a Weapon:7 attack) resulted in 2 shifts of stress--much better than, say, the 6 shifts she was likely to take by trying (and failing) to dodge. To compensate, there were compels involved when the player tried this against particularly powerful attacks (she couldn't, say, hunker down and take a train to the face), or when it involved her Catch.

Another character was a gooey shapeshifter who would similarly use Endurance, with the justification that he was letting shots harmlessly pass through him--though once in a while there was a compel involved when he tried this against things that involved his Catch.

Does this sound Kosher?