Blood Paint Clarifications (Patreon)

So, you may well have seen, but after Italics prodded the bear on Boardgamegeek we got another round of confirmation from Poots that Blood Paint works with activated abilities on weapons.  Which is like... Duh! Of course it should, just because it's badly worded doesn't mean that it should be so limited in function.

But there was also another ruling that is pretty cool, interesting and potentially huge.  Poots has allowed F&T to work with Blood Paint.

I'll run through three examples and then show you two builds that take advantage of this.

Example 1: Weapon + Shield aka The Bruiser

This is a classic Hybrid build and is how we have been using Blood Paint since Poots's original ruling on this back in 2016.  The 'These are two separate attacks' text is really badly worded (classic Poots), you can't force an activation to be an attack if you have other ways to activate the weapon.  This becomes even more obvious with the next example.

Example 2: Open the Blast Sword, Open the Blast Sword!

It's very clear here that you can activate to gain the Block 1 on the Blast Sword.  We just have some shitty wording on Blood Paint.  It really should read 'These are two separate activations' if the first line says 'Activate weapon gear....'

This variant is more offensively capable than the Bruiser btw, you don't get the benefit of Shields, but you have two weapons you can attack with.  In the late game the Oxidised Lantern Sword will work very well.  You just need to make sure that both one handed weapons have different names because of the silly 'duplicate weapon' rule.

Example 3: Kung Fu Hustle

Twitter user Caleb Kester (@calebkester) asked this question during the blood paint query and Poots decided that it's so clever that it has to be allowed.  So now you can technically have a 10 'gear' grid with dual weapons if one of them is fist and tooth.  This is pretty big if you get a Monster Claw Fighting Art, but it's also pretty big in combination with certain builds and here are two of them.

Build 1: Sharp Fists (Sunstalker + Dragon King)

I didn't have the time to set this up properly, but this is one example of what you can do to take advantage of having Fist and Tooth activated by Blood Paint.  The Cycloid Sleeves give you sharp in the blind spot, so your fist and tooth attacks will be very powerful.

The other weapon could be anything, I chose the Nuclear Knife here because it can be stacked on deadly with the Power Core.  Obviously this makes the build very late game. 

You can instead go with any other one handed weapon you desire, and if you have the Dung Beetle Knight you could even build this with a Digging Claw and Rolling Armor + Cycloid Sleeves (because the sleeves will work with full Rolling Armor).

For a more reserved look at what you can do, here is the new early game F&T DPS Build that I would recommend you use.

Build 2: Jackie Charm - Core Game 

It's very cheap, low requirements (needs Paint) and this means you can have a hunt party of 2 Katar users, plus a Spear, plus a Bow or Shield and train up Fist and Tooth with some regularity. 

If you pick Graves as your principle and get the +1 Luck, I'd recommend that survivor gets this build.  Critting with your fists on a 7+ is pretty strong.

So there we have it, a quick look at Blood Paint, confirming it works the way I have always played it and also giving us an exciting new way to use Blood Paint by being smart with the grid layout.  You should be able to take this from here!