You call that a Knife? Why the Dragon King Fails as a Quarry Part 2 (Patreon)

You can find the first part to this here. I am afraid there are no card images in this post, there is an attachment with pictures of them however.

We have already pushed through the first part of this critical analysis of the Dragon King as a quarry and I've noted that while the showdown is a very well designed piece (and I love the model and the character of the Dragon King as a whole); the Hunt and the Gear falls well behind the rest. To surmise, it would be fine to have a punishing hunt if the rewards were worth it. They are not; and I'm going to go through the remaining gear (armor was in the previous article) and break it down a bit. Not only should this help you analyze gear in general, but it should also help if you decide to design your own quarry monsters in the future.

Before we begin, I want to write a little about the gear lifecycle in this game, because that's the core part of the complaint with the Dragon King gear. I think it's also a useful thing for anyone to internalize because understanding it gives you the tools to evaluate gear cards quickly.

So, in essence the idea of KD:M gear is the same as any monster hunter style game, you are going to (in general) leverage your gear to be able to beat the next tier of monster and then craft better gear from them. For example in the core game for spears you will move from King's Spear to Finger of God to Lantern Glaive/Lance of Longinus to Oxidised Lantern Glaive. So you're progressing from Tier 0 (Bone Smith) or 1 (Catarium) upwards and you would expect the higher level monsters to provide gear that better than the stuff in the previous tier. 

Now, we have some serious abberitions in the tier trees for the core game; Support Gear is often at its best in Tier 0 (Organ Grinder), armor trees are skewy because Rawhide is so powerful that it is hard to give it up for your support character and some of the weapon progression in the game peaks in really odd places (Counter-Weighted Axe is one I often cite as being a problem, I won't repeat that here).

What this means specifically for the Dragon King is that the weapons and gear you get should be suited for the game between its arrival and LY20+.  All the monsters who arrive between LY7 and 10 are in essence the mid to late game content for KD:M - The focus of the game should be on progressing up in the levels of hunting these guys, there should be a good reason to go after the L1 and then move up to the L2 and L3, risk vs. reward and so on.  

What this means in general terms is that the L1+L2 Dragon King gear should be better than the stuff you can get from the Weapon Crafter and Leather Worker and anything you get from the L3 Dragon King should be on par with Blacksmith.  You can see this design in the Sunstalker's weapon progression; all of the gear is either better than the generic equivalents or unique enough that you'll want it anyway and the incentive for hunting the L2 and L3 Sunstalkers is very unique and powerful weapons in the Axe, Sword, Grand Weapon and Bow categories. So the Sunstalker is the gold standard for how Node 3 monster gear should be designed and the Dung Beetle Knight is another great example, but in a different direction. However; as mentioned in the previous article the DK seems to be modeled around the Phoenix - which is a pretty serious failure overall as it has very few desirable items.

That preamble is over, let's move on to the gear. We'll start with the good stuff!

There isn't any. Seriously, there is not a single gear item from the DK that I'd class as 'good' or better. I'm sorry to write this here, but I thought 'I'll start with the good stuff to showcase that it's not all bad' and I couldn't find anything.

Now onto the average stuff.

Shielded Quiver

The Shielded Quiver is one of two quivers in the game and it has a relatively powerful ability. It will allow you to activate your arrows one additional time. This means that many of the useful arrows like the Claw Head Arrow become far more powerful. 

There is an issue with this; arrows take up precious grid slots, as does the quiver - but in order to get the most out of the Shielded Quiver you should be carrying as many arrows as possible. What this means is the Shielded Quiver is not very effective on any survivor who needs armor, so you end up using it on either Crystalline Skin or Wayline Walkers almost exclusively.  

However, the Shielded Quiver is inferior to the Sunstalker Quiver in a campaign where you have both, because the Quiver requires at least 2 arrows in your grid (meaning your bow takes up 4 slots total with no affinities) whereas the Sunstalker Quiver gives you a passive range boost and 3 additional slots to hold arrows in.

Dragon Bite Bolt 

The Dragon Bite Bolt features a solid ability in Devastating 1; however it has an annoying feature with Knockback 5 (you can utilise this well in an all bow party however) and pretty awful stats (1/6+/6) for its type. You would think that an arrow from a monster which is 2 tiers above the White Lion would warrant better accuracy and strength, but apparently not.  This is an item that's situational, there are a lot of core game arrows that are better and that is a shame.

And it's time for the bad:

Dragon Chakram

Poor stats (2/6+/3) and poor weapon type (Thrown) combined with a good ability and a reasonable  range of 3 does not make for a good mid-game weapon.  

The major issue that this one has is the same all Thrown Weapons have, there's no weapon mastery for picking Thrown as your proficiency, so you're left with a utility weapon that gives the monster -1 evasion on a hit (once per attack).  There is some interesting design in Blood Paint  + Dual Chakrams to give the monster -4 Evasion per turn and then other survivors can utilise weapons that are normally harmed by low accuracy. But this is not something which needs exploiting in the game.

With a higher strength and a Thrown Weapon Mastery we would have a very competent weapon, but as it stands right now this weapon is just not worth the time - it doesn't even have the cool factor.

Talon Knife

Not a Knife for a starter. This Katar has a terrible stat profile combined with one of the most counterintuitive abilities possible. It's a paired weapon that becomes weaker when you use it paired.  

About the only good thing that this weapon has is the affinities, which "repair" the gap in the Dragon Armor by activating the waist and chest piece abilities at the same time.  

However, that's not enough and this weapon needs to be taken back to the drawing board for a new ability and/or a rehaul to its stats.

Blast Shield

This one is almost interesting, however it has no space in the game at all because of the power of the Leather and Beacon Shields. This is a problem that happens to a lot of shields (Feather, Scrap) - there is such limited design space that shields need something unique to make them stand out - for pure protection it is hard to beat leather and beacon. 

The Blast Shield gets close, it has an OK offensive statline (1/7+/4) plus 1 Armor to all locations, Block 1 and the Priority Token on the first block each showdown. But that package isn't enough - this item costs a King's Tongue plus  1 Iron - compared to 1 Leather, 1 Bone and 1 Hide for a Leather Shield that's a pretty awful deal.

In a world where the Leather Worker doesn't exist, the Blast Shield is interesting. However, we're not in that world, so this is another gear card that will stay in the box.

Blast Sword

This weapon should be something phenomenal, it's a sword with a built in block and interesting Affinities (up green and down red) which should allow for incredible Blood Paint Builds. It also has Block 1 and when you Block with it you gain +1 survival. So it allows for some interesting Blood Paint Builds (normally blood paint screws up your affinities somewhat).  However it has a statline of (2/6+/4) and that is just not sufficient baseline strength for a sword of this tier - it's weapon crafter level power, when it should be sitting somewhere between Weapon Crafter (3) and Blacksmith strength (4 to 13). A change to the weapon's strength would give it a space in the game.

Last of all we have the ugly

This is essentially the nuclear "package" that is supposed to be the showcase part of the Dragon King. It's a really unwieldy set of items that could have been something really special. The nuclear weapons try to emulate 'gem slotting' from games, by giving you a base weapon that can be upgraded. In theory this is a great design idea, however in practice problems soon raise their head because of the limitations of the gear grid mechanic plus issues with the Nuclear Gear and make the experience less enjoyable than it should be.  When you have only 9 slots available, devoting 2-3 to a single weapon is not a good experience.

Also the Radiant Heart has a mind boggling drawback when it's collected. It kills the survivor who picks it up on a 3+ (which seems like a typo, it's reverse of all mechanics we've seen elsewhere in the game, I don't understand if it's meant to kill on a 1 or a 2, which would make more sense and be more balanced).

Nuclear Scythe

At the moment, this is the only scythe in the game, so it is the only way of training the weapon mastery. That means that you cannot really consider the nuclear scythe without also considering the weapon spec/mastery as being a part of the weapon.

The scythe's weapon specialisation is based around using critical hits to refresh the hit location deck and the mastery is about gaining a free surge to use the scythe. It's genuinely a very powerful weapon class - however the scythe itself is a bit of a tricky customer to use.

It's statline is (2/6+/4) with Reach 2 and a R/R/B (all puzzle) affinity ability which you can activate to suffer 3 brain damage and gain devastating 1 for your next attack (limit once per round). I don't think it takes much to realise that the ability there is pretty awful, the cost of an activation plus 3 brain damage is a LOT to spend for a single attack with devastating 1.  When you compare it to other Devastating weapons in its class (Calcified Zanbato, Denticle Axe) and you begin to see just how far behind this weapon is and how much work you need to do to make it worthwhile.

I do have builds for this weapon however, and we'll look at them next time.

Nuclear Knife

Every advantage that the Nuclear Scythe has going for it, the Nuclear Knife lacks. Its statline is worse (3/6+/3) with the same activated ability (G/B/R puzzle affinities required) and as is well observed by the community Daggers have a pretty awful weapon specialisation/mastery - you can make it work, but why would you?

This weapon can come to life when combined with the right setup, but honestly it needs Cycloid Scale Armor to become worthwhile (something that every single Dagger in the game requires) and when you're relying on another expansion armor set to fix your shortcomings and you are a weapon which is hard to make, you're not worth the price of entry.

Cores

The two Power Cores are the 'incentive' to hunt the L2 and L3 Dragon King (along with the Radiant Core and more resources), they are essentially 'socketed gems' for your nuclear weapons. Giving your weapon Deadly 2 or Sharp - which lets the nuclear weaponry slide into the late game powerwise. The issue is that the cores take up precious slots, you end up dedicating 2-3 slots to your weapon and as mentioned above, the baseline weapons are rather underwhelming when not combined with leap, charge or similar +strength abilities. 

Summary:

So as you can see, there's not much incentive to hunt the Dragon King outside of scythe builds. The weapons are universally meh and the armor set is nothing particularly special.  However, I will note that when you play People of the Sun the Dragon King becomes far more useful because People of the Sun's strengths play into the Dragon King's gear weaknesses (they have more strength than normal and appreciate abilities like the Scythe Mastery). 

Ultimately, the risk/reward of this is around the Phoenix in tier (i.e. worse than Tier 2's Leather/Weapon Crafter) and this shows a fundamental issue in the early design understanding of Kingdom Death.  There seems to have been a thought that the "Node 3" monsters should be around the level of the Tier 2 generic stuff; but the difficulty design of the monsters was a lot higher than that. The tech levels in the game should have been.

T0 - Bone/Skinnery/Organ Grinder

T1 - White Lion/Gorm

T2 -Screaming Antelope/Spidicules

T3 - Leather/Weapon Crafter

T4 - Sunstalker/DBK/Dragon King/Phoenix

T5 - Blacksmith/Barber Surgeon

However it works out more like this (approximate, things actually slide around a lot for individual weapons i.e. The Black Sword is Tier 6):

T0 - Bone/White Lion/Spidicules

T1 - Barber Surgeon

T2 - Phoenix Weapons/Dragon Weapons/Spidicules

T3 - Phoenix Armor/Gorment Armor/Dragon Armor/Gorm Weapons

T4 - Screaming Armor/Leather Armor/Weapon Crafter

T5 - Blacksmith Armor/DBK/Sunstalker/Rawhide/Organ Grinder

It's a mess.

All of this written, I'm going to take a look next time at how we can actually make use of the various parts of the Dragon King's arsenal as it stands, because a CE fix for this monster is a while away.