Having a Ball: How to Remove the Legs from your Spidicules (Patreon)

So, it's time to take a quick break from talking about armor, and use the posting of the Silk Armor assessment in order to go into something I've been meaning to write about for a long time now. "Balling" the Spidicules.

So, this is a mechanic involved in the Spidicules fight where you get to cut its legs off one by one. This is involves three cards, one trait and two hit locations:

Spidisisyphus is the event where you get to roll a legless Spidicules home and it is how you get access to the 'Legless Ball' innovation, which is required for crafting the three rings. Which are the three of the five best items that you can get from Spidicules (Silk Body Suit and Amber Poleaxe are the other two). So making a legless ball at least once in a campaign is an essential skill to learn (twice if you want a Grinning Visage, but it's not very good).

So all of these gear items and that innovation are locked behind this exercise, and I'm going to run through the strategies that are involved in getting it.

Basics:

In order to achieve this, you have to cut off all 8 limbs from the Spidicules. Now if you look at the number of AI cards that the Spidicules has, you can see the margin for error you have:

Against the level 1 Spidicules, you have 10 wounds, so 8/10 wounds have to be on the legs. The level 2 has 14 wounds so that's a more reasonable 8/14 and the Level 3 has 8/22. However, the L3 has a bunch of other issues that can make getting all 8 legs in a reliable fashion very irritating, fatiguing and dangerous. But both the L2 and L3 versions have a fairly large spawning rate for the Spiderlings, so if you're geared up for the L3, you might want to do that.

Now I'm afraid that for that weird faction of people who hate on Hit Location manipulation (Circlet, Wisdom Potion, Necromancer's Eye, Trash Crown), getting a legless ball is something that is going to be pure chance (and they'll need to go for the L3 to achieve this), but for the rest of us, it can be done easily against the L2 and occasionally with the L1.

There are two main mechanics you're going to be wanting to employ, the first is the set up and sever and the second is the sweep (clearing unwanted trash HLs).

Set up and Sever

Essentially, you will need 2 survivors doing this, one of them digs through the HL deck to get the legs to the top and the other attacks them. The single best type of weapon for this job are Grand Weapons, specifically the Zanbato and Rib Blade - but anything with 1 speed, good accuracy and high strength is acceptable. This is because you want to achieve the wound on the leg location with as high a chance of success as possible. As you can see, the two relevant hit locations do not have critical wounds, so luck/deadly doesn't matter. It's purely a slow + strength endeavor. You need to be accurate and powerful to cut of a leg without damaging areas of the Spidicules that you shouldn't be harming.

The other half of the operation is just good old fashioned hit location manipulation. My preference for the job is actually the Trash Crown, because it helps with the Sweep portion of this exercise. But the Circlet/Eye are both very acceptable, the Wisdom potion works as well, but it's less efficient.

(It's still not clear if this is supposed to be an accessory or not).

Sweeping

The sweeping job is undertaken by all survivors who have the window to do so, but there will almost always be a dedicated sweeper.

Sweeping is the act of hitting locations without aiming to wounding them, this will get them to drop out of the deck and into the discard pile without causing one of your limited precious wounds. 

This action becomes more and more important as the fight drags on, because the leg hit locations get removed from the deck, which increases the percentage of non-leg locations and lowers the chances of finding the legs. Initially 8/20 of the cards are legs, which is a 40% chance of a single given card being a leg. But by the end it's 1/12 (8.333% recurring) and that's the same odds as the trap. It's also worth mentioning that there is one permanent injury in the deck, and if you can remove that, say with an axe master, it improves the odds a bit more while also giving Spidicules -1 toughness.

So we've talked about why sweeping is important, but how do you do it?

Well you want a high speed, reasonable accuracy, low strength weapon, generally the speed wants to be 3, because that will let you clear off three crappy locations that the Circlet is stuck on. The Bone Dagger is one such item, but it's accuracy is pretty trash (6+ in the blind spot). So it's not the most efficient choice. 

The best weapon in my opinion is either the Sonic Tomahawk (3/5+/2), or the Feather Shield (3/7+/0 and it's a shield so you can help with tanking). Plus the Phoenix is always available in the current campaigns, so they're easy to get. I know, it's crazy but these two weapons are the best choices because of their bad statline. 

Other good choices come from the DK expansion (, or the Spidicules specific rare weapon 'The Weaver) which can be found from a hunt event.

Also a survivor with negative luck and negative strength is amazing for this job, break them ribs!

Spiderling Slaying

Finally the last survivor has the most important, but boring job in the fight, they need to cull the Spiderlings and keep the population down to an absolute minimum. Spiderlings are Spidicules' primary way of dealing damage and status effects, plus they junk up movement by blocking spaces and cause a lot other issues. 

However, this is pretty much a normal part of the Spidicules so I'm not going to go into detail about it, just have an accurate, high speed, strong weapon and go nuts (late game I often use the Black Sword for this job).

Finally there is one other part of making a Legless Ball that should be paid attention to, and it's the set up. You will need to hunt other Spidicules before hand in order to get hold of the resources for the rings. To remind you, these are the costs:

Each one of those resources is a maximum once per showdown fight because they are all singleton resources. So when you get these resources you want to be saving them up, this can get tricky if you have the Gorm in the campaign as well, so make sure you deal with Gorm Climate before you start hitting the Spider. (However, your first Spinnerets should always be spent getting the Silk Body Suit).

This is why, a campaign that involves Spidicules tend to be dominated by Spidicules fights. In an ideal world you're fighting Spidicules at least 6 times in a campaign, but more likely you're fighting it 8-10 times and that's a huge portion of your hunts. Which is why being as efficient as possible matters! Every year counts!