Weapon of Choice: Assessing Gear Cards - Part 2 (Patreon)

So in the previous article I sort of glossed over one part of weapon assessment which I originally wanted to go into with some detail.  

Strength

While it is true that you want as much strength as possible, it is also important to understand what the minimum amount of acceptable strength is.  

A good way to gauge this is by understanding the interaction between the Catarium weapons and the Level 1 White Lion.

It has a total of 8 strength. Which means with a founding stone (1 strength) you will typically wound on a 7+ (40% of the time), however with a King's Spear (3 strength) you will wound on a 5+ (60% of the time).  a 20% increase is significant in the wounding steps. This is very noticeable when you start fighting the White Lion with the 3 strength weapons - and that is why some people are hooked on the overly expensive Bone Axe.

So we have our baseline, in general you want to be wounding at least 60% of the time.  Now this means that survivors with a lot of personal strength can be more effective with weapons that traditionally have low strength.  You can actually take bone daggers against many monsters in the game if you are strong enough!  

This means that vs. the various Toughness 8 monsters in the game you want a weapon + survivor strength with a total of at least 3, and hopefully more.  Against a Toughness 10 L1 monster you want a total of at least 5 strength.

This works for level 1s. However level 2s ramp up in danger considerably because they get +1 Speed and +1 Damage.  This means that you want to be more successful against L2s than you need to be against L1s.  For example a L2 White Lion has 10 Toughness - which I've previously listed as 5 strength, but you really want to be rocking a higher success rate - ideally 70-80%.  So I'd say you want a total minimum strength of 6 or 7 if you can manage it.  This is why people graduate to the Zanbato over most other weapon crafter weapons.  It might be slow, but at 6 strength it has the power needed to handle L2 Lions and Antelopes.

Keywords:

Keywords are a minor part of all gear cards, but they can have some very unexpected and dramatic effects.  The Heavy keyword, for example holds some serious downsides in a wide range of different scenarios - however in People of the Stars you want multiple heavy weapons (or Clubs) for your showdown fights against the Tyrant.

Some of the most notable keywords that you need to pay close attention to because of their potential upsides/downsides are: Consumable, Heavy, Fragile, Stinky, Noisy, Soluble and Flammable.

In addition we also have a few other keywords that are more involved with the mechanics of the game.  Material keywords (Metal, Bone, Fur) etc matter for the Outfit keyword, weapon keywords matter for certain fighting arts/SFAs/FAs/Abilities/items, armor/set matters for defense and the lantern keyword matters in People of the Lantern.

As time passes you'll learn which ones hurt on which hunts/showdowns. But until then, be very, very careful with noisy gear.

Special abilities

Special abilities are those wonderful (sometimes bold) text things that sit near the bottom of your weapon, most of these are positive (Deadly, Sharp), some are negative (Cumbersome, Vespertine Foil), some are obscene (Black Sword) and some are confusing and overly complex (Savage).  In general terms the very best abilities are the ones that increase the strength of your weapon, increase your critical hit range, or provide a unique ability.  It can be very hard to assess which ones are absolutely worth the time and effort.  

There are no real hard and fast rules in respect to special abilities, but the short version is, abilities which are automatically on or easy to trigger are the very best and the ones which are hard to trigger need to be very powerful.  A good example of the first type is the Lion Beast Katar which automatically has Deadly, it's really powerful to be able to get Deadly early on and the weapon also has very good stats for what it costs to get.  A good example of the second type is the Green Ring from the Spidicules expansion (requires 3 green puzzle affinities) or the Black Sword from the Gorm expansion (requires Sword Mastery).  Both of these are super powerful once unlocked, but require jumping through hoops to get.  The Phoenix Placart's ignore one hit ability is another excellent example of this.

In contrast to these we have Nuclear Knife, which requires three puzzle affinities (one of each colour) to get a marginal ability (Devastating) - and as such I will take the time to quickly note that the Devastating ability is one that is sometimes a benefit and sometimes a hindrance.  You always want it active vs. Nemesis monsters, but against quarry monsters that give you benefits like resources for critical hits you don't want it, because you want to be scoring as many individual chances for critical hits as you can manage.  It's something you'll get used to over time - the L3 DBK? You'll want devastating.  The L1 Lion? Probably not.

So there we are the final part of this will dive into affinities and resource costs and I'll bring everything together with an explanation on why (in my opinion) one weapon is fantastic, but another one is weak.  Until next time!