Close to Greatness. Wallowing in failure: Why the Dragon King fails as a Quarry (Patreon)

A while back I wrote about why the Flower Knight is an abject failure as an expansion despite it having one of the best themes, showdown fights, model and aesthetic in the game. The short version is that the Flower Knight's mechanics are shallow and play up to fueling the most broken parts of the game. Meaning that the Flower Knight's position in the game is a crutch for newer players and a resource farm for those people building Green Armor.

Today I want to look at the Dragon King in a similar fashion. Now it's no secret that The Tyrant is one of the best designed monsters in the game and People of the Stars towers over the other two campaigns in every aspect (mechanics, theme, enjoyability, difficulty, style etc etc). However the Dragon King (DK) as a quarry is pretty lacklustre, it's not bad, but it's just way below average. Where the Dung Beetle Knight and Sunstalker are easily 9/10 and 11/10 quarries for a campaign, the DK lands very close to the Phoenix in its usefulness, balance and risk/reward ratio (i.e. it's really hard to justify hunting it unless you decide to cut out all the other quarry monsters of a similar tier so you have no other option).

Why is this?

The Hunt

Hunting the Dragon King is an incredibly punishing experience. There are very few neutral to good hunt events and some of them are the most awful ones in the entire game. If you roll a 1-2 on the Lava Flow card (and every survivor must roll on this) then unless you have enough courage you fall in the lava and die AND archive all your gear. This is even worse than the Phoenix writing inexperienced survivors out of the game and it means that no Dragon King hunt party can ever include survivors with less than 2 courage.  However, even when you follow that rule you can still end up with a dismembered arm, Marrow Hunger evil Dopplegangers murdering each other, loss of evasion, massive brain damage or more besides.  There is one well designed card in the Cultivated Crypt, which gives you more resources if you are willing to make the DK more dangerous (excellent mechanic), but most of the time you're just running a gauntlet of awfulness.

The Showdown Fight

Actually, the showdown vs. the Dragon King is pretty amazing. It's one of the showpiece fights of the game and while it's not Dung Beetle Knight level (what is?) The fight is still interesting and lively, with survivors moving about to avoid the DK's (mostly) predictable meltdown mechanics and gigantic fists.  More than anything else in the game this showdown feels like tiny people battling a huge monster and it's wonderful for that. I have no complaints about the fight at all, it's excellent and one of the reasons why I wish that the DK quarry overall was better.

Gear

Here's where the actual problem is and where the bulk of this article is going to be located. The Gear for the Dragon King is just not very good for the risk and costs. There are a few standout items, but on the whole the experience is very similar to the one where you craft from the Phoenix. You go in there and get a few neat things and then get the hell out. So I'm going to look at most of the pieces separately and explain why they fall short (or succeed).

Dragon Armor

Costs: 20 resources total including 4 iron, 2 leather and 9 monster specific resources. Steep!

Dragon Armor almost, almost makes the cut as being a genuinely solid armor. It has better affinities that Phoenix armor, but worse defensive capabilities (i.e. almost none). It's also the fourth monster armor in the game with some 'move and activate a weapon' ability (White Lion, Screaming Armor, Phoenix and DK). So there's a massive amount of redundancy in its use on that front for what is a rather marginal ability. Most monsters are not large enough to be able to make regular use of the Leap ability, so you are very reliant on reach weapons when you are using Dragon Armor. But I will admit that this ability is the best of the 'monster charge' abilities we have available to us because of that additional accuracy.

The layout you see in the picture above is the most typical one used and it highlights the next problem with the Dragon Armor. This armor is very dependant on a left blue, up blue piece of gear in order to get two of its abilities active. There are precious few items that match that, one of them is the Talon Knife and the other is the Nuclear Knife (more on those later as to why they are failures) - so often you're either putting a dead piece of gear in your grid just for affinities, or you are sacrificing the activation on the waist piece because it's not worth the hassle. My opinion here is that the waist activated ability just isn't powerful enough to justify it requiring 2 puzzle pieces.

The +2 Movement on the Boots is very powerful and interesting, however because the Leap ability has a fixed distance you move at, having 7 movement isn't that useful. BUT! That written it does mean that Dragon Armor is one of the best armors for wearing while wielding the Steel Shield, if you do happen to get your hands on it (the chest piece survival gain helps also).

Other issues include the general lack of defense on this armor, it doesn't provide anything other than survival and weak anti-knockdown/shattered jaw cancellation and the affinities are badly laid out for Monster Grease. So often you end up moving the waist and helm down to the bottom row so you can fit in monster grease to get some protection (5 armor per location does NOT cut it against harder monsters).

Ultimately the Dragon Armor is almost good enough, with a few adjustments it could have become one of the premier mid to late game brawler sets. However as it stands, it's sort of an OK purchase for a settlement that's light on Iron. But when you consider that Lantern Armor only requires 7 Iron and generic resources, it's hard to justify making Dragon Armor instead.

There are also problems with the armor sets lack of synergy with power cores and nuclear weapons, but I'll discuss those when I talk about the specific items.

So! I'm going to wade into the rest of the expansion's gear next time because there's a lot to unpack and the nuclear weapons in particular are an interesting topic. That'll be a bit later this week, so until then remember: 

Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure!