I use a lot of different techniques depending on what's happening.

When characters are just walking along I use a motion tween. In the fighting sequence almost everything is frame-by-frame and tiny 3-4 frame tweens for partial movements.

You can see how I animated some things in the Playkit. It contains 2 scenes from McDiddy's 2 including a lot of the fight on top of the eclipse blocking machine.

I don't ever use guides. I don't know how to get them to work. I use a lot of masks, though.

Here's the timeline from some of the fight scene (the layer names don't really match):