Assessing Armor: Bonus - Speculating on the New Hybrids (Patreon)

As it feels like it's going to be forever and a day before the Gambler's Chest is released, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the three upcoming hybrid sets and review the baseline parts of each set. 

One of the hardest parts of building new hybrid sets is making sure that the parts fit together in a meaningful and interesting fashion. If you mess it up, you end up with something like Brawler Armor, which is a mess that I really liked at first, but after multiple plays with it, I ended up avoiding it at pretty much every turn.

Now, two of these armor sets are missing at least one gear piece, we don't know what value the armor is going to be set on, and we do not have clear details on the set bonuses. But we can look at the armor pieces which are available right now and consider the limitations, benefits and options they provide.

Sprinter Armor is the cleanest set to try and figure out at the moment, it consists of the following known gear pieces:

• Screaming Horns
• White Lion Coat
• White Lion Claws
• Screaming Skirt
• White Lion Boots

Which gives us this:

I am assuming that the twin Katars are for the look of the sculpt, and not part of the set. It would be very bad if they were just part of the set

Additionally the set bonus is described as:

Sprinter Armor gives the wearer an ability that lets them cancel their attack and roll away!

So that's pretty well defined, and unless it's changed at all we can surmise that either it allows you to entirely cancel your attack after you've drawn the hit locations or the more powerful version which would let the survivor hit some locations and then roll away from the unfavorable ones (Trap will trigger as normal in either case). The second option is the one that would make this armor powerful and worth using, the first option is probably what we're getting.

The gear grid itself suffers a bit because it's using white lion gear. The gloves do nothing without the coat and the coat has the worst of the 'monster charge' abilities, so it's also a bit eh.  

The legs are (as always) an absolute disaster to try and work with and the waist from the screaming set doesn't really do anything to help the situation. Sure, +1 movement is super powerful, but going from 5-6 movement isn't the break point that matters, it's getting to 7-8 movement that allows for kiting. Honestly, at this point I'm close to giving up on making the boots from the White Lion set be relevant at all, they're so awkward to do anything with.

Overall, Sprinter Armor is going to need a solid armor level and some additional bonus apart from the cancelling in order to justify making it. You shouldn't normally be building White Lion armor parts and what we see of this set so far does not change that.

We don't know what the set bonus for this armor is going to be, all we have so far is the usual Poots hyperbole that it is "totally busted" and "need(s) to be balanced and refined". I'll remove my cynic hat on that matter once I see it Adam; my apologies, but your sense of what's busted and powerful in this game isn't entirely correct a lot of the time.

The pieces of the armor seem to be:

• Beast Hunter Helm
• Phoenix Placart
• Phoenix Faulds
• Screaming Bracers
• Screaming Leg Warmers

The helm seems to be a combination of Phoenix and Antelope parts, so it shouldn't require too much extra effort, and it's also nice that the Phoenix is getting a push further towards ranged builds, because the phoenix is lowkey a serious supply of ranged gear. (Sadly it's nothing when compared to the Sunstalker).

Lets look at the grid now:

When you look, you can see the gear theme of this set is once again based around activating the Phoenix Plackart, you have a lot of insanity gain on arrival. However, just when you use the Phoenix and Brawler sets, the Phoenix Faulds are screwing up the build because of their lack of affinities. We have 3 gear pieces in addition to the placart and only the bracers provide a relevant affinity. Assuming that we get a down blue on the Beast Hunter Helm (most likely situation), we're going to be putting the Arc Bow on the left of the Plackart to activate it - or relying on something like Bird Bread (as always) to get the job done.

Ultimately, it's the Phoenix Faulds' lack of affinities that I have issue with. Everything else here looks solid and interesting, but I am concerned that without affinity support for the Plackart, this set is going to rely entirely on the Beast Hunter's Helm and set bonus to do anything interesting.

Finally we have the set that is hardest to speculate on, the Imitation Butcher Armor. 

It appears to be:

• A modified Leather Mask with Forsaker Mask flair
• Lantern Cuirass/Pauldrons
• Leather Bracers
• Lantern Mail
• Leather Boots
• 1-2 Butcher's Cleavers

This set seems to be super hard to build, because it requires the Mask and at least one Cleaver to work. That sets the armor at the late game (it has lantern pieces, so that's fair). But, I think it is very important to note that it's very possible to have this armor set built after the second butcher fight. Players have got very good at deathblowing the Butcher for extra resources, especially the L1 and L2 versions.

There's some interesting questions surrounding this armor set, it will hopefully not require both the Forsaker Mask and a Butcher's Cleaver to construct, because that's a bonkers amount of random gear items to try and gain and I'm hoping that it just requires at least one cleaver and a defeated Butcher.

Also, there are problems with this set being linked to having 1-2 Butcher Cleavers - the Butcher's Cleavers lack affinities and have nothing other than an OK early to early-mid statline with a crazy pair of irreplaceable and sentient downsides. 

There's a reason I don't often talk about the Forsaker Mask or Butcher Cleavers and that's because they're kinda hard to build around. You just archive the mask asap and you use the cleavers occasionally if you randomly get them. 

It's hard to get excited about these weapons when they're so awkward to use and also lacking in strength.

We'll see. Here's the gear.

Now I've had to speculate a bit on the lantern parts because the Imitation Butcher armor clearly uses the waist and pauldrons from the lantern set, but the pauldrons are not an armor piece, they're slotted into the cuirass. (Also the waist art includes a mail shirt for some reason).

When I look at the cuirass however, things get very concerning, there's no way that the armor set could want to have that as its body piece, it's going to make you slow and ponderous without providing much benefit. Maybe the aim is to turn your survivor into a Jason-a-like, slowly plodding towards the monster until it's in range and then a flurry of slashes and blood everywhere. Who knows?

Ultimately, I feel that the Butcher Imitation Armor is the one that could be the most troublesome to build and the least worthwhile to use. We're getting a set that has a lot of downsides and no way to negate them that uses weapons that are woefully underpowered at a basic level. Perhaps the set bonus will give the survivor using the Cleavers a huge strength bonus? Who knows.

So, that brings us to the end of this speculative bonus article for this week. I hope it's been fun for you and given you a bit of insight into why hybrid armor sets are hard to design!