Assessing Armor: #3 Gorment Armor (Patreon)

Our other early game monster based armor set is an unusual one that's tricky to use, but has one of the most interesting designs in the game. Gorment is unusual because it's a 4 piece set which has an upgrade option to add a fifth piece. It's honestly nearer how more armor sets should have been designed in this game, but it's not ideal. At some point in the near future we're going to discuss the problems with the design of armor in this game and explain why it's problematic and shapes the meta so much.

Gorment Mask

Resource Cost: 1x stout hide, 1x handed skull

Assessment

Efficiency: This piece of armor requires two resources from the Gorm, one of which is a single one of in the resource deck. So the cost is efficient, but it's not straightforward to gain. However, for the price, you get a phenomenal piece of gear which boasts some serious protection - the biggest issue is the stout hide, that resource is heavily used in making Gorment.

B

Defense: Not only does the mask offer 2 base armor, it also provides protection from intimidate actions when the ability is activated. 4 courage makes you immune to most intimidate actions, and 5 courage even protects you from the legendaries (who intimidate a lot because of their small AI deck size).

I cannot stress strongly enough how powerful this piece of gear is defensively, it's a massive amount of protection from brain damage - if you have this mask, you're basically only using your insanity to protect against events and unusual things like the rare reactions/traps that deal brain damage.

S

Abilities: I've written a lot already in the defense section about how powerful this ability is. You should be looking to activate the mask in every Gorment build without exception.

S

Affinities: Up Blue half-affinity is rare, however it doesn't have that many good gear items to pair with. That written, the Gormery provides not one, but two solid options for the down blue half-affinity in the armor spikes (cheap) and the Gorn (top tier). The down green half-affinity isn't as important, but it does combine well with the leather shield to get you to two green affinities to turn on the sleeves survival saving ability. It can be tricky to squeeze in enough to get Monster Grease active as well on this set however, and that is an issue.

A

Score: One of the best pieces of gear in the Gorment set, it's generally my build priority to get this one constructed as quickly as possible if the handed skull is drawn and it's one of the best helmets in the entire game and I'm hopeful that it becomes a part of hybrid armor sets in Campaigns of Death.

A+

Gorment Suit

Resource Cost: 3x stout hide, 1x stout kidney

Assessment

Efficiency: To the uninitiated, this cost can seem very steep for an early game piece of armor as it's 4 resources for one piece of gear. However, the suit is body and waist pushed into one slot, and that has both benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are gained in efficiency, no other armor in the entire game is as efficient as this piece of armor, 4 slots to complete an armor set is way more flexible than 5. So at least on the efficiency front I have to give this one the highest score possible.

S+

Defense: Not only does this piece protect waist and body with a base 2 armor points (before set bonus), but it also provides one of the more powerful defensive abilities in the game when combined with a shield. 

S

Abilities: Guard is an immensely powerful ability with a lot of uses. The most powerful of which are in bruiser or ranged builds. Essentially, if you have the Harvestman fighting art (easily gained on a male survivor via the Spidicules innovation Choreia) then you can combine guard with a reach weapon, a shield and dash to kite most monsters into uselessness because their movement isn't high enough to get you. 

However, Guard is not that easy to gain, you're devoting 1-2 slots in your build towards getting that red affinity, because the armor set provides zero red in its natural slots.

It is worth noting that Guard becomes weaker in the late game because it always gives you Block 1 regardless of the shield you have, but you should not be using Gorment to guard, you should be using it to kite.

S

Affinities: This is where the Gorment Suit falls down. You spend two hit locations on your armor to gain a single left green half-affinity, now that fits well with the gloves to gain a green easily, but it has no way of helping the set achieve it's blue or red affinity. 

Honestly the Gorment Suit could have done with an up half-green, down half-blue or any half-red affinity to make it more flexible and useful. As you can see from the picture above, you're very limited in the positioning of non-Gorment gear and you absolutely need to squeeze a shield into that (and the late game shields, apart from Cheese-board, lack affinities at the moment).

In short, this piece of armor is very demanding on the affinities it needs, without providing enough affinities to support it's requirements.

C

Score: Despite the affinity issues listed above, this piece of gear is amongst one of the most efficient in the game and I sincerely hope that in the future we see more armor pieces that provide protection to multiple locations (waist + legs, body + arms, head + body etc etc) because they free up the pressures on the gear grid and give you more options.

Sadly I can't give the Gorment Suit overall the S tier because of the immense affinity pressures it puts on builds, but it's still very solid.

A 

Gorment Sleeves

Resource Cost: 1x stout hide, 1x bone

Assessment

Efficiency: The sleeves are the most cost efficient part of the armor set, requiring just one monster specific resource and a bone (the least valuable of all resources) and providing 2 armor. It doesn't get much better than this, especially when you consider the other benefits gained from the sleeves.

A

Defense: Pretty impressive, not only does it provide a base 2 armor points to the legs, but it also gives you a way to activate Guard every turn without having to drain your survival. That's a huge defensive upgrade.

A

Abilities: Gaining the ability to Guard without spending survival is huge and it's what makes the Gorment set so viable for kiting and ranged classes. Spending your time out of range of the monster is so powerful in Kingdom Death: Monster, it's in fact the single strongest way to avoid damage available.

The only downside to the gloves is they do nothing without the Suit.

A

Affinities:  

While it's only 1 affinity, the right green half-affinity is exactly what the armor set is looking for. It fits perfectly with the Suit and is the best affinity layout in the armor set.

A

Score: This one could be better, but it doesn't need to be. It's a simple, but powerful piece of armor.

A

Gorment Boots

Resource Cost: 1x stout hide, 1x bone

Assessment

Efficiency: The need for only one Gorm Specific resource is great, this armor is pretty efficient for the cost and I have no complaints about it here. It's not the cost that's the problem with the boots. It's something else.

A

Defense: Very vanilla and simple, it's 2 base armor to the legs. Not bad, but not amazing.

B-

Abilities: This is a marginal ability that has some tactical use, but it's rare that it'll matter that much because most of the time your survivors should not be that close to the Gorment Armor user.

C

Affinities: N/A

Score: Easily the weakest part of the Gorment set, the boots have an almost irrelevant ability, but there are times where it will save lives. I would have scored the boots a lot higher if they provided some red half-affinities to help with the Suit's needs, a down blue half-affinity for the mask or a green up or right half-affinity to combine with the mask or monster grease. 

D

Gorment Armor (4 Piece)

Resource Cost: 1x handed skull, 1x stout kidney, 6x stout hide, 2x bone

Assessment

Efficiency: This set requires ten resources to complete, and the single most awkward part of this is the sheer amount of stout hide required. As anyone who's played with the Gorm can attest, the stout hide is one of the main bottlenecks in this armor set (along with Gorm Climate making it awkward and risky to save your stout hide from one year to the next, go SotF!) The requirements for stout hide in the armor set are one of the main reasons why the Greater Gaxe is preferred over the Gaxe (the Gaxe uses stout hide) - you just can't spare the stout hide on anything else.

So considering the effects of Gorm Climate and the Gorm resource deck as a whole (there is less stout hide in it than you'd think), this set isn't efficient to build because of the time investment it requires. There's a lot of chance involved in getting a full set.

B+

Defense: Alongside Dancer the Gorment Armor is one of the premier kiting sets in the game, and kiting is one of the strongest defensive styles you can gain. Additionally the armor set provides solid choices to get to triple green affinities - especially when combined with a Zanbato or Arc Bow.

On top of that, the Set Bonus enables a whole new style of tanking that is very potent when combined with the Tough and Unbreakable fighting arts, and Guard can carry you through most of the early game tanking with ease. Especially if supported by the Knuckle Shield/Steadfast Potion combo.

S

Abilities: The abilities provided by the Gorment Armor are almost all top tier defensive ones.  Guard is a powerhouse ability that's unique and the mask ability is one of the best in the game at preventing brain damage. 

S

Set Bonus: You get a standard +1 armor to all locations, which is average for armor gains and puts the armor at white lion tier for pure armor. However, the non-armor portion of the set bonus is not that great, while I mentioned you can work on a solid "wolverine" tank build, affinity pressures make it hard to fit everything you need onto one gear grid, so you're often very reliant on Tough/Unbreakable instead of using a Life Elixir (which is clearly what the designers intended).

C

Affinities: You get a total of 1 green affinity, 1 up blue half-affinity and one down green half-affinity. It's not very good to be honest, especially when you consider how inflexible the combination of the mask and suit/gloves is. You can't ever put the body/gloves on the same column as the mask if you want to get access to the powerful mask ability.

B

Score: The limited set bonus, positioning and affinity requirements cause this set problems, but it is well compensated by the fact that this armor set requires just 4 pieces. However, the requirement to get a red affinity from your other pieces of gear and the awkward way that the mask needs puzzle affinities to activate means that you're left struggling to fit everything in. So the armor is very limiting in how you use it, which is surprising and sad considering that it's the only 4 slot armor set in the game at the moment.

The difficulty involved in getting monster grease fully active hurts this armor set a lot as well.

A-

Now its time to look at the 'high level' version of this set and see if it's worth going through the effort of getting the Regeneration Suit or not.

Regeneration Suit

Resource Cost: 1x stomach lining, 1x jiggling lard

Assessment

Efficiency: While it's just two resources for this item, one of them can only be gained from 

B

Defense: 2 armor to the body, on an accessory (so it can be used with any armor set) is very good, and it also has a defensive ability that negates most severe injuries from being permanent.

A

Abilities: The ability is very powerful if you don't die, you can take any number of debilitating serious injuries and just heal them right up. However, you're going to need to build in ways of avoiding death in order to make the best use of this gear.

Affinities: This piece of gear provides an up, right and down green half-affinity, which seems powerful, but when you look at the gorment set as a whole (see the picture at the top) it's actually only 1 useful affinity, the up green - and that can be covered just fine with a leather shield, so... who cares?

Ultimately these affinities are stronger when the regeneration suit is used elsewhere, on builds that don't want armor. So I have to split the score on this one, the first one is for the regeneration suit in general and the second one is for when it's used with Gorment.

B+/C

Score: This one is better when not combined with the Gorment Armor set, except for the silly aforementioned "Wolverine build" (which I might put a full build article out on if you want).  It could have been top tier if one of the right or down half-affinities was moved to the left hand side. This would have allowed the set to have synergies with monster grease in the late game without additional outside help.

A/C

Gorment Armor (5 Piece)

Resource Cost:  1x handed skull, 1x stout kidney, 7x stout hide, 1x stomach lining, 2x bone 

Assessment

Efficiency: Compared to the 4 piece set, you do not gain that much when you move this armor to a 5 piece one. Essentially the regen suit will permanently sit below the mask in the grid and you still need 3 specific gear items to get the down half-blue and red affinity you need (you can go for 2 gear items if you're happy to use a Red Charm or you're good enough to get the Lion God gear)

B-

Defense: While the defense of the armor moves up to 4 to all locations and 6 on the body, it comes at a rather large cost of gaining a piece of armor that fails to properly integrate with the rest of the armor. Now the main reason for this fault is honestly the Life Potion, which is clearly designed to work with the armor set by preventing your first death, but it has zero affinities (it should have a whole red affinity imo). 

The biggest problem here is that this armor set is late game and supposed to be tanky, but it's sitting on just 4/6/4/4/4 for it's locations. Hopefully it is addressed in Campaigns of Death, because if Cycloid is going to 6 in all locations (according to the latest update). Gorment needs to be pushed up to something like 8/10/8/8/8 to make it viable.

B

Abilities: Outside of the gained regeneration suit ability, most of the other abilities remain potent, however there is a problem in the late game where monsters move faster and faster, which makes kiting difficult to impossible. Additionally Guard providing just Block 1 makes the armor set fall off hard against L3s.

B+

Set Bonus: I've written a lot about it already above, it's not good enough and it's going to need revision in CoD in my opinion.

C+

Affinities: There's not much of an improvement on the affinity front, the set goes up to 2 green, 1 half green, 1 half blue and a half green that's usually buried into a dead end.  If this is supposed to be the late game version of Gorment Armor, it's way behind the other options out there.

B-

Score: Honestly I used to be very excited about the upgrade to Gorment Armor that came with the Regeneration Suit, but over time I learnt that it's just not enough because the regeneration suit provides little direct benefit to what the Gorment Armor is already trying to do. You should be abandoning this armor set once you transition to the late game, not "upgrading" it with the regen suit.

C+

Summary

It's absolutely fine that the 4 slot Gorment Armor falls off in the mid game when monster speed/movement increases to the point that guard kiting stops being super effective. Likewise it's fine that guard's Block 1 becomes weak when you're on the harder monsters - and the awkward nature of the affinities is also interesting.

What's not fine is that the upgraded version of Gorment Armor, something that can only be built after you've killed a L3 Gorm (which is no slouch), is so underwhelming. The Regeneration Suit's design is off from what it needs to be, and the affinity slot demands of the suit are so high that it's really hard to fit things like the Life Potion into the grid.

I love Gorment Armor, but it is really limited in where it works and its focus.