Whip Beetle: Using Rolling Armor and the Sunstalker to make Whips Viable (Patreon)

So, Whips are one of those weapons which I absolutely adore, however it is no secret that they are underwhelming due to a combination of weak stats on the whips and a very vanilla mastery that fails.

However, the specialisation is very good and the mood manipulation that Whips brings can be a life saver vs. certain monsters. Also, whips give bonuses to a fair few hunt events. So it's something that; if you can overcome the drawbacks, becomes very powerful and interesting. 

I'm going to run through a few builds, and explain why I'm using the parts I am.  There are two reasons why I want to base my whip users in Rolling Armor.  The first is because Rolling Armor has no locations, so I can add in the Cycloid Scale Jacket and Scale Sleeves in order to get access to the Sleeves ability of gaining Sharp.  Sharp is massively important, because all the early game whips are very low in strength.  

The build above is one of my prefered ones, it is a pure Tank/Bruiser style of character, however it is worth noting that this build is very light on evasion, so it's best used on a character who isn't the primary tank or who has a lot of natural evasion.  It also doesn't bring that much support/utility outside of the Whip's natural abilities.

The next version removes the Silk Whip and uses the Hunter's Whip instead.

We now have a flex spot, which could be a shield or some utility item as long as it gives that extra half green affinity (monster grease for example), so it's a bit more supportive for the average hunt party. Outside of that, it's very similar to the original build.

However, when we get to the Ring Whip, which already has Sharp, we can abandon using the Cycloid parts and we get more slots to fill with other things.

However, there is one serious drawback with the Ring Whip as a weapon, it has Early Iron.  In order to be able to negate that issue we need to get the Rainbow Wing Belt active, which will allow us to reroll the first set of 1s we get.  In order to be able to do this, we need 2 down red affinities.  The cheapest way to do this is with a Skull or White Lion Helm and a Scrap Dagger.  But if resources are no object my preferred build is:

You can easily replace the Feather Mantle with the Beetle Bomb (DBK), any piece of (non-head) armor with a down red affinity, a Gorm Life Potion or a number of 

When you have an Oxidised Ring Whip you don't need to activate the Rainbow Wing Belt, so you can then drop the Helm and Mantle for more utility stuff.  Also these builds all get a lot tougher when you oxidise the Shoulders and Greaves.

What you can probably tell from all of this is that it's quite hard to make Whips work. There is another way of doing it, using Sunstalker Gear, that's a lot easier and probably faster, but even when you do, it's clear that Whips need to be a lot better when the new expansions come out. We have good early game whips, but nothing for the mid game and a very unreliable late game whip (except for in People of the Lantern). So it's a hard weapon type to train and support.