The Dragon King: Gear - Welcome to the New Age (Patreon)

As it is going to be a while before we see a community edition version of the Dragon King gear (I'm working on it); I thought it would be good in the meantime for us to look at what you can do with the Dragon King's gear within the limitations of the current design.

This is actually an important part of putting out fixes and/or building new monsters. If you don't try and thoroughly understand the limitations and variations of the gear design, then you will end up missing either important mechanical, balance, lore or design reasons for something being the way it is. 

Let's start with the armor set.

Its benefits are as follows:

• Non-Heavy Metal armor
• 5 armor in all locations
• +1 to severe head injuries
• Ignore shattered jaw severe head injury
• Do not get knocked down by heavy injuries
• Start the showdown with maximum survival
• +2 movement during your act
• (Move) + (Activation) for Leap attack - move 5 spaces in a direct line and then activate a melee weapon with +2 accuracy and +5 strength.

Here is the typical layout for the armor set, which activates everything apart from the Belt (belt ability is marginal) and the Mantle. You should try and get the Mantle active if you can.

There is no doubt at all that the Dragon Armor set is an offensively orientated set, suited for damage dealing characters over tanks. 

Costwise it's a relatively reasonable amount for its tier:

• 2 x bone
• 2 x organ
• 4 x iron 
• 1 x leather 
• 2 x horn fragment
• 2 x husk
• 1 x cabled vein
• 1 x hardened ribs
• 2 x veined wing
• 1 x king's claws

That's 9 generic resources and 9 monster specific ones without too much iron required, plus the Dragon King tends to generate a lot of Iron while fighting/hunting it as well.

So how can we make the best use of this armor set? 

Well it is clear that the strongest ability that it has, outside of a general increase in your durability and relative lightweight nature, is the Leap. So that is what Dragon Armor survivors should focus around.

Leap is the following:

Now that is a huge boost in attack power onto a weapon, but at the cost of being hard to position. You can only move in a straight line and you must move exactly 5 spaces.  With most monsters that means you're going to be spending a lot of time moving into position before leaping. Which removes a big part of the power of the armor set.

However, there is a way of getting around this. Well two ways. 

The first is to use 'Reach X', Reach 2 increases your effective threat zone (the area you can attack) from 8 squares to 24 squares and Reach 3 increases it to a ridiculous 48 squares. You should be able to catch most monsters within that kind of zoneage with ease.

This means that reach 2 weapons like the Nuclear Scythe, Greater Gaxe, Spears, Lantern Glaive and so on are ideal to use with the armor set. So you should be considering Dragon Armor for offensive based Long Axe or Spear characters (or the flagship Dragon King weapon - the Nuclear Scythe).

There is also a Reach 3 weapon in the Sunstalker expansion, it is the Sky Harpoon and while it has only a respectable 5 strength, that climbs to 10 strength when you Leap. The weapon also has Savage and a once per showdown automatic wound ability. This makes it one of the really powerful choices for this armor set.

The second option is also a Sunstalker based weapon. However it will need the support of a second gear item before it becomes incredible.

Here is the combo:

The key part of all of this is that the Sunshark Bow is a melee weapon, and I have written about this before in other articles, but I think I should officially announce that I believe that the Sunshark Bow is actually the best bow in the entire game at the moment.

Given how close the affinities in the Dragon Armor set align with the quiver; in combination with the Quiver & Sun String, the Sunshark Bow allows one to have an effective threat range of 24 spaces, plus a sharp weapon that has a baseline strength of either 5 or 9 (depending on how you set it up). You also get to carry 3 arrows outside of your gear grid.

This is honestly one of the best archer builds in the game right now, sure it's very short range, but when you have the durability of Dragon Armor you are very much capable of being at that distance. You also have a huge amount of mobility (7 movement normally, 5 when leaping/dashing), so you are a force to be reckoned with.

So that is the place where Dragon Armor shines, it is the armor set of Reach weapons, and I think that is a good place for it to be, even if it does compete a bit with Screaming Armor.

Onto the weapons!

We'll start with the two flagship weapons, the Nuclear Scythe and Nuclear Knife:

So I think you can see immediately that the issues with these two weapons are very similar. You have a weak statline considering the stage of the game they are in (mid game) combined with a hard to "pre-train" weapon type (impossible in the case of the scythe) and an activated ability that requires incredible levels of insanity or other ways of handling brain trauma.

These weapons are modular and are designed to be enhanced by the cores:

However, getting these cores requires beating the L2 and L3 Dragon King and they take up a precious slot in your gear grid.  

I can go on record saying that the Blue Power Core is straight up worth the slot. The Scythe benefits a great deal from Deadly 2 as it's specialisation ability triggers off critical hits. However the Red Power Core is a bad version of the Cycloid Scale Armor set's way of giving Sharp out. 

And that is how you make the Nuclear Knife work well, if you wield it while wearing Cycloid Scale Armor then you get an immensely powerful dagger that is worth using with the mastery. However, Daggers as a whole remain weak and this is one of the few decent uses of it outside of Acid-Tooth Daggers and Oxidised Lantern Daggers.

Apart from putting the Nuclear Scythe onto Dragon Armor, it is also very potent when combined with Screaming Armor, this is because this armor set is very self contained and the Slam ability helps the Nuclear Scythe wound more easily.  Plus the Blue Power Gem fits nicely into the top left corner of the gear grid where Screaming Armor leaves a space and the Lucky Charm fits in well also - which gives you Scythe Crits on a 7+. Solid!

What about the rest?

Well the Blast Shield and Blast Sword are both middling to average items that don't have much going for them beyond Block 1. If Leather Shields were not so cheap and easy to make the Blast Shield, with it's once per showdown ability of "provoke" and reasonable offensive stats would have a place in the game as a mid game tank shield, but in truth the best thing you can use it for is training Shield Mastery asap because it has 4 strength.  (If you have not rushed beacon shields that is).

The Talon Knife is in a similar position, it has an incredibly rare affinity pairing (Left Blue, Up Blue) but well lets just put the image here so you can appreciate this backwards piece of design.

So, this weapon could have been an excellent late game Katar (something the game lacks apart from the Digging Claw) except that its strength is too low.  So you want to use it with Monster Movement Armor (Dragon, Phoenix) in order to get its strength up enough.  

However this 'if all of your attack rolls hit' ability is just bonkers. Paired is a pretty weak ability as it is, but when you have something that triggers only if you hit with all your attack rolls, well you want to be rolling 2 dice (~25% chance of success) and not 4 dice (~6% chance of success).  Yes with the Dragon Leap ability the odds go up a bit because you have 4+ accuracy, but still that's a neat way of making sure that players (except for risk junkies) don't want to pair your weapons.  Have I mentioned that Zach B apparently designed the Dragon King gear? WUTFACE

It does however fix the affinities on the Dragon Armor, so it has uses and a single Katar Dragon Armor survivor is not a bad build when you add in some extra strength stuff like the Monster Teeth Necklace and a Lucky Charm!

I really don't want to two-parter this one, so we're going to skip past the Chakram because it's not going to be relevant until we get a thrown weapon proficiency and just acknowledge that the Dragon Bite Bolt is powerful, but falls off when you face off against the higher level monsters.

This is so we can look at the Shielded Quiver in a bit more depth.

The Shielded Quiver is one of two Quivers we currently have (the other being the Sunstalker's Quiver & Sun String) and in a campaign where you have access to the Sunstalker, there is little reason to use it. However if you are not using the Sunstalker, then the Shielded Quiver can be a very good way of getting more utility out of your grid, it effectively doubles each ammo you add in your gear grid.

However, unlike the Sun String, which effectively reads +1 gear slot for +2 arrow slots, the Shielded Quiver still requires you to keep arrows in your grid, so you will need to be as efficient as possible.

Leyline Walkers or Crystaline Survivors are absolutely the best choice for these kind of builds, because they do not derive their protection from armor so they have an extra 5 slots over the typical survivor. If you have access to these, then you can load up with the strong utility arrows, especially the ones that reduce the monster's stats.  While the Claw Arrow (White Lion) is an obvious one because it can potentially give everyone +2 accuracy by reducing the monster's evasion, you should not overlook other arrows like the Hollowpoint or Gloom.

Also, if you ever want a good laugh, try out 4x bow survivors, with hollow point arrows and shielded quivers.  That's a total of -8 movement if every arrow hits.  Not many monsters are going to be a threat after that.

So the shielded quiver absolutely has its space in the game, it's just more limited than the overall power of the Sun string.

So there we are, hopefully some food for thought and maybe you can figure out some other cool things to do with the Dragon King's loot. Because it's not a bad monster to hunt, it's just not a great one - and he deserves better.