One Finger Death Punch - A Look at Fighting Arts (Patreon)

I have decided that in order to tie in with the release of the square Fighting Art reference cards, this week will be Fighting Art week.

So we will spend the next few posts talking about fighting arts in general, I hope to have this in two parts, but there are 49 fighting arts in the game right now (not including strains), so it's a lot of material to go through.

Fighting Arts are gained through a wide variety of sources, and it tends to be a somewhat haphazard way that you get them (usually via aging). However there are some which have repeatable methods of acquisition like Rhythm Chaser and Synchronised strike.  

You can also enshrine one fighting art for your settlement permanently via the sculpture innovation, you can improve the quality of Fighting Art draws through the Romantic principle (best principle) and the excellent new partnership 'Enduring Legacy' allows you to pass on a fighting art to a child.

However, on the whole you do not have much control about what fighting arts you are going to get on a survivor, so the main aim with them is understanding what benefits/role a Fighting Art offers to a survivor quickly so you can determine what kind of job they will perform for the settlement, be it on the showdown board, hunt phase or even in the settlement.

I am going to briefly review each fighting art and frame some ideas for how it can be used in the game, you should be able to use this as a springboard for other assessments of the Fighting Arts and come up with your own unique strategies from combinations.

If you need to refer to a specific card to remind you what it does, I have attached the reminder cards pdf to this post.

Abyssal Sadist

Given to you by the Manhunter's introductory event 'The Hanged Man', this fighting art has two effects. The second of which allows you to ignore two of the most crippling disorders in the game. But, it's the first one that most people gravitate towards, the gaining of survival and insanity each time you wound the monster each attack is an intensely powerful ability because of how it combines with offensive survival actions like Surge and Overpower.

Rating: 5/5

Acrobatics

Essentially this ability reads, as long as you are adjacent to the monster you can always be in the optimal position. 

In truth this fighting art is very difficult to make use of and generally relies on other fighting arts to become optimal. There are very few monsters where your actual position matters outside of being in the blind spot or in front of it (Gorm, Phoenix, Dragon King come to mind) and most of the time Dash is just as effective at performing the same manoeuvre. 

However, in a situation where you cannot innovate paint, such as a unique campaign that provides a different tree over the art one - Acrobatics could become very powerful.

It depends what the future holds, but for the moment Acrobatics is relatively weak.

Rating: 2/5

Ambidextrous

Paired is... not very good. However, Ambidextrous, if you can meet it's stringent conditions, can create some relatively good combinations.

What you are looking for is a non-heavy weapon with good stats that benefits from being paired.

Personally I think that the Gaxe from the Gorm expansion is the best example of a good weapon to pair.

Pair this and you get a 3 speed, Savage axe with a solid triggered ability and a lot of unusual position red affinities to connect up.  2-3 Speed is one of the best speed categories in the game, so it's completely worth doing this.

Rating: 2/5

Berserker

Activation to bash yourself and frenzy can be very powerful on the right kind of survivor. This is one fighting art that works well with support from other survivors and gear. Leather armor cancels out the Bash and having Red Fist on a fellow survivor gives you ways to use survival actions despite being frenzied.  Also weapons like the Rib Blade can become incredible if you Frenzy holding them as they double in effectiveness.

Otherwise you can just trigger this when you're out of survival and want a boost to try and finish up a fight; or when you are low on insanity (It's also a great FA for the Xmaxe/Gloom Katana). So this one is always a useful fighting art because it can bail you out of a lot of situations. It's just not strong enough to build around all the time.

Has very powerful synergy with Immortal.

Rating: 3/5

Blotted Out

Oh dear.  This one was allegedly intended to work as unbreakable for brain trauma (gain bleeding tokens instead of brain trauma). However, what we have instead is one of the only almost purely negative fighting arts in the game.

I could go into this with more detail, but essentially it's a duff fighting art for campaigns - except the ones that include the Slenderman. When you have Slenderman in your game, this fighting art becomes one of the core ways you get Spiral Ganglia, which will then allow you to get a Gloom Man online. This means that it's very powerful and the negative nature of the fighting art is justified then.

1/5 normally but 5/5 as a non-combat way of getting a Gloom Man in Slenderman campaigns. Yes, Gloom Man is that good.

Burning Ambition

Ignoring 'Skip Next Hunt' is an alright ability, nothing special (outside of hero modes) and this fighting art is just something you keep around until it is time to replace it.

There are a few limited instances where you can do something to a hunter survivor that would normally cause them to skip a next hunt during the settlement and make use of this, but on the whole this passive ability FA is below average.

2/5

Burning Focus

This fighting art becomes more powerful depending on your playstyle, survivor build and survival limit.

It is, essentially, almost unlimited survival, but you will only have 1 survival per turn to spend. So you will need to be very effective and measured with its use.  At its most basic, this is a free surge, dodge or dash every turn - but it is only one of those - so choose wisely Indy.

Settlements with shallow survival pools will very much appreciate Burning Focus, as will survivors who often lose all their survival during the hunt phase.

4/5

 
Champion's Rite (Dragon Trait)

This is probably the least sexy of the dragon traits, but it is still a very powerful and useful one. Most of the time, this trait gives you one attack with 2+ accuracy once per showdown. That's solid, however it can be used in combination with other fighting arts and abilities to guarantee that they succeed. The classic example would be using it in combination with Momentum's attack - that FA activates on attack (aka before rolling to hit), so at times your huge strength/luck hit can whiff.  

It's also great to save as a clutch ability to use when your crit based survivor spots a location they really want to hit. 

If in the future we get weapons that have an activate 'once per showdown' ability as well, then this fighting art will increase even more in power.

3/5 (5/5 in Stars)

Clutch Fighter

+1 strength and +1 accuracy for 3 bleed tokens is a decent FA to have, but it's nothing that you can heavily build around because it is relatively hard to bleed yourself to 3 tokens (Story of the Young Hero is one of the most obvious ways).

It is fair to say that this FA becomes more powerful when it is combined with Unconcious Fighter or Purpose (and bandages) because you have a larger buffer against being killed by bleed at that point. Without such protection, this FA is risky to keep activated - it's not hard to get 2 bleed tokens out of nowhere.

3/5

Combo Master

With the right kind of weapon, Combo Master is incredible. 

For example:

Also the CW-Axe (as always), and slow, devastating weapons like the Zanbato also benefit immensely from this fighting art.  

I'll take a quick moment to run you through something in respect of this fighting art and the speed of the weapons you want to use with it. You might be considering that you want to use weapons with lots of speed, because that's going to trigger more perfect hits and get more rolls. That's logical if, IF your weapon is like the Acid-Tooth Daggers above - they give you a massive benefit on the perfect hit trigger.  Just rolling a lot of dice is going to end up putting you in a situation where you are hitting lots but not doing much with those hits.

For example, if you roll 6 dice, score 2 perfect hits and have a total of 8 hits with a strength of 3, each hit is going to have only a 50% chance of success vs. your typical level 1 monster - you could eat a lot of nasty reactions or even the trap, while doing this and get badly harmed.

In contrast, a perfect hit on a Zanbato is going to give you an additional devastating blow with 6 strength. That's unlikely to hit a location with a negative reaction or trigger the trap. As always however, 2-3 speed is the sweet spot for attacking and Combo Master doesn't change this - I prefer it on 2 speed weapons or on someone with Acid-tooth daggers/CW-Axe.

Needless to say, Timeless Eye is fantastic with this.

5/5

Crazed

This is simply +1 insanity on a perfect hit, it's a pretty average fighting art in most cases as it provides a bit of extra durability for a survivor.

There are certain builds where crazed becomes solid, especially ones based around Timeless Eye or high insanity (Butcher's Blood/Perfect Hit). However, most of the time this is uninspiring but solid.

3/5

Crossarm Block

CAB is somewhat super seriously situational fighting art, when you have heavy armor on the arms, this can be a life saver.  So there are in essence two ways you can look at using this card.  The first is to build high armor on the arms (look at the Gloom Bracelets from the Slenderman or the Rings from Spidicules for a way to do this), and then use CAB to redirect hits to this heavily protected area.

The other way is to use this as just an emergency protection for other locations, if you are wearing Vagabond armor (for example) you might not have much head protection anyway, so you can move the head hits to the arms.  Or if you were out of head armor and facing a severe injury to the head (very fatal), then you could switch it to the overall less lethal arm location.

It's never a super impressive Fighting Art, but it might save your life once in a while. Definition of average.

Rating: 2.5/5

Carapace of Will

This is easily one of the king fighting arts in the game for a tank based character. If you are going to be sat right next to the monster and not spending your movement at all most turns then Carapace of Will should be on your Round Stone Training shopping list. 

While this is at its strongest on a tank or bruiser class of survivor, it is actually a very powerful fighting art on any survivor who does not move while attacking (excluding cumbersome users).

It also has some neat interactions with double dash, giving you an 'ignore one hit per turn' ability at the cost of being able to move at all. That's essentially a pseudo-shield.

Rating: 5/5

Defender

One of the staples of People of the Sun, this FA gives you a reactive encourage, but only for people adjacent to you. Additionally they gain +1 survival, so you essentially pass your survival to the knocked down survivor and they stand up. That strength token is very powerful in PotSun.

This means that two defenders adjacent to each other can effectively cancel out knockdown for each other almost permanently (as long as they keep 1 survival available). That is quite effective vs certain annoying monsters - for example, you can ensure that your survivors do not die to coup de grace vs. the King's Man.

Rating: 3/5 -> 4/5 in People of the Sun

Double Dash

Having the option to be able to move twice in a turn is a subtly powerful thing.  Yes, it does not appear to be as powerful as turning a movement into and activation on the surface. But in the world of Kingdom Death, movement is king.

One of the simplest examples of how you can make use of this is when combining it with Momentum and Dancer Armor to generate a lot of tokens quickly and have huge hits, but it can also be used for a host of other positional activities - such as reducing the amount of time it takes to gain salt during the Sunstalker fight (a key action for crafting gear) and similar.

Rating: 3/5 with potential for higher (4/5 in combination with Momentum)

Extra Sense

An extra dodge per round is amazing as long as you have the survival to support it. This one is very survival intensive and you'll need deep reserves or a way to replenish it, but it is very powerful when managed correctly.

I can't give this one a maximum score because it's linked to survival and drains it like crazy, but you should never 

4/5

That's the first 16/49 done, for my sanity's sake this will be in three parts - then there will be a release of the Secret Fighting Art cards and a look at them - including tips for unlocking each one!