Neutering the Butcher (Patreon)

So while I was working on the Butcher Seasoned Hunter article I pieced together the final part of the puzzle on The Butcher, and rather than wait until the L2 and L3 articles come out I thought I'd write about it here as a piece of content for everyone. 

This is how to farm the Butcher, creating a situation with virtually no risk where you can beat the Butcher over and over again and farm it for resources. Even the L3 Butcher can't stand up to this.

This is a core game only strategy; it uses nothing rare, your survivors can be absolute newbies and you only need 5 different pieces of gear - all of which you will normally build during the average game.

So here's what you need.

3 to 4 x Screaming Helm, 4 x Fecal Salve, 1+ x Whisker Harps, Some x Counter-weighted Axes and optionally 1 x Bandages.

Surge helps for the initial setup - and if you plan to prune the AI an Arc Bow + an active Rawhide Headband can be very useful.

Everything else can be whatever you like, probably some armor to build up protection as a safety blanket, Shields and alternate weapons if someone is training a non-axe proficiency. However, my preference is just to go in with 4x newbies and let them all become axe masters.

Understanding how this works:

The Butcher has a very exploitable AI pattern; it has 21 AI cards total and they break down for targeting as follows:

• 2 - No target Moods
• 1 - All survivor Brain Damage Mood
• 1 - All survivors Intimidate
• 1 - All survivors in AoE Range
• 1 - Furthest Survivor
• 1 - Random Survivor Mood (Lantern Frenzy)
• 14 - closest threat, facing -> closest threat

And it has it's menace instinct, that will deal * brain damage to the closest survivor.

This means that most of the time (and eventually) the Butcher will target the closest threat. Lantern Frenzy is something of an exception to this, and that is why we bring the Whisker Harp - because it will allow us to remove that mood and 'reset' his behavior.

What matters most of all here is the menace.  The Butcher will menace the closest survivor for * brain damage if there are no threats (most of the time). While this does not end its turn, it does not have to target the same survivor over and over - as long as they are all equidistant.

What does this mean?

If we have 4 survivors who are not threats; then the L3 Butcher will Menace and that's all it will do for most of its actions. Occasionally it will do something else, and you will have to mitigate that with appropriate defenses (evasion, shields, Whisker Harping and so on).

I'll walk you through the scenario.

3 survivors have Screaming Horns + other armor, along with all the other required bits listed above and the Tank has some form of tanking set. Survivors go first. They will advance up towards the Butcher, standing in a 'bucket formation' and activating their Fecal Salves + surging to activate Screaming Horns. 

A bucket formation is as follows:

So what this does, is it gets the Butcher to be equidistant between all survivors after its move, so it will never be forced to menace just the same survivor over and over. Instead you can make it flip between different survivors and menace them in turn - spreading out the brain damage and avoiding rolls on the trauma table.

Because the survivors are not a threat, most of the time the Butcher will menace, and because the survivors have 3x Screaming Horns all survivors will have 3 insanity a turn. Which means that menace doesn't cause brain trama, instead it will give 3 lunacy tokens when the brain damage is received and trigger Frenzy on the survivor - which gives them +1 speed, +1 strength and 1d5 Insanity. They'll also lose the ability to surge (which is why surge isn't essential).

So, most of the time now 3 survivors are going to get frenzied each turn (because the L3 Butcher has 3 AI cards drawn each turn, and most of the time it is going to menace). This situation can go on pretty much forever; especially if you use an Arc Bow and Rawhide headband to prune out the cards which can stop this happening.

This frenzy gain will go on, and on, and on, and on. With the survivors accumulating endless strength and speed tokens. Under normal circumstances this would mean that you'd reach a point where you can't hurt the Butcher without ranged weapons because of scoring too many hits.

However our good old friend 'the most broken weapon in the game' doesn't care about that.

Lets demonstrate.

You've run a hypothetical loop on this where you've handled the unusual issues, pruned the annoying AI cards out of the deck and you've now got to a place where your survivor has 658 Speed tokens (this is actually possible a lot faster than you'd realise once you start getting decent rolls on Frenzy)

If they attack with the Counter-weighted axe, then they will roll 658 attack dice, scoring on average 66 Perfect Hits.  This will deal on average 66 wounds to the Butcher. Even taking into account the problems with invincible (50% mitigation), this will one shot most Butchers.

You can actually do it on a much lower number than this, because all survivors can take a step backwards when you attack, which negates most of the Trap's problems (and you can ignore every other hit location card in the deck because you'll almost always hit the trap). 

That's without considering that you'll have 1-2 other survivors also waiting with Counter-weighted axes and they can swing for similar numbers.

So basically, by abusing the Butcher's AI and wonky targeting in combination with its instinct, the unlimited Insanity gains that the Screaming Horns present and the overall bonkers design of the CW-Axe you can make beating the Butcher a very safe, if boring experience for all and farm the heck out of the Butcher to get those axes, scrap, axe proficiency and that foresaker's mask.

This isn't a 100% perfect strategy, Lantern Frenzy, Lantern Hunger and few other cards can cause wrinkles in the ointment (you can "prune" some of these with a Rawhide Headband + careful attacking from a Slow Bow if you want). I haven't completely worked out all the kinks yet - but it's easily the safest way to kill the Butcher and it requires very little set up because all the items are commonly used and relatively cheap.

Fecal salve is a really good item by the way!