Mixed Sets #4 Farewell to Arms (Patreon)

 Part 1: General Principles, Limitations and Foundations 

Part 2: Head Piece Choices

Part 3: Body Pieces 

Arm pieces are one of the more interesting design concepts in the suite of armor gear pools. They vary from doing very little, to nothing at all to all the way up to being absolutely incredible and meta defining. However, when it comes to mixed set arm pieces, you don't have as many great options as you do for other areas, often you're just looking for a good 'glue' piece.

Before we start, if you want to read about Gorment Sleeves, White Lion Gauntlets or Cycloid Scale Sleeves, they were assessed together with their linked body pieces (here). As they do not do very much without their associated body piece to activate their abilities.  I consider all three of them to be interesting, but it is the Cycloid Scale Jacket/Sleeves combo that's incredibly powerful and is something you'll consider for most damage dealing mixed set builds.

For reference here they are. For the details, please see the previous article (here).

+2 Accuracy and Sharp is very powerful for damage dealing survivors indeed.

Screaming Bracers

These were buffed in 1.5 from the following design:

So the original arms did absolutely nothing (outside of affinities and protection) and we'd only have been talking about them in combination with the body piece (even then the ability would be marginal and not worth the effort). 

However, the new arms are incredible, as I wrote about back in Dancer armor and Screaming Armor articles, the return on investment you get from building the screaming bracers is incredible. They are one of the few gear types that pay for their resource cost over time (weapons, especially deadly ones are the other main type because of crit farming). 

The armor level on this isn't that high, so you're not going to want them on a front line character (full screaming, dancer or warlord is a better choice for that), but for a doctor style support character, Screaming Bracers gives you access to the Dried Acanthus so you can rush it up to your injured team mates. 

Also the Screaming Bracers give you bonuses to all terrain interactions, which means that your support survivor can generate lots of extra stuff for you in between AI control and HL manipulations.  All of this makes the Screaming Bracers an excellent choice for a mixed support set.

Leather Bracers

Solid, cheap, dependable and a good source of survival gains with an affinity that combines with Monster Grease. Leather Bracers are a decent filler piece of gear for mixed sets that haven't found an ideal arm piece and would like a bit of extra survival when departing. 

There's not much more to say really, they're like the leather set in general, dependable, tough and cheap.

Gloom Bracelets

While these Slenderman based arm bracelets are technically an accessory, they are durable enough to be a serious contendor for your arm gear on a mixed set without anything underneath them. Not only do they give an astronomical 6 armor points, but they also provide insanity on departure and have a huge amount of affinities for arm pieces. 

However, these bracelets are one of the few pieces of gear that can break when you suffer a severe arm injury and interactions between this + unbreakable/Dried Acanthus are not entirely clear. If you have ignored a severe injury, have you suffered it? This is just one of those areas where the rules for KDM get fuzzy and only Adam Poots Games LLC can clarify (something they are notoriously slow and inconsistent at doing).

So you'll have to decide yourselves if you can use this item + unbreakable/dried acanthus to prolong its life. Personally I think that's fine because it's an inventive and limited method, but your mileage may differ.

Spidicules Rings

These beautiful powerhouses are some of your premium choices for the arm slot, one of the main goals of mixed sets in general and also an absolute trek to achieve. I think that many things in the Spidicules expansion could have been done better, but the unlock route for these three rings is not one of them - the entire experience is an absolute delight, requiring planning, strategy, tactics and skill to execute. There's a reason you don't see these three Rings mentioned often, it's because not many people have made them.

The Red Ring is not a good part of a mixed set, this is because it's a combo weapon and you can read about how it can be used to defeat almost every single monster in the game in my old article on it here.  

However, the Blue and Green rings provide a huge amount of damage mitigation/protection and they make for incredible centerpieces for your mixed sets.

The Green Ring is the more overt and obvious piece of gear. It's essentially +3 armor to all locations on the first turn of the showdown and another +3 armor to all locations every time you're the monster controller. It's basically an absolute beast of an item for a tank to have and it's easy to see its power, even if you're not manipulating the monster controller token with the Gloom Hammer.

The Blue Ring on the other hand has the ability to mitigate even more damage than the Green one, but rather than providing armor points, it's instead giving us the ability to rawhide headband when the monster targets. This is a really, really powerful ability, I can't stress enough just how powerful and hard to assess this ability can be. It's always difficult to total up the numbers that never happen because you prevented them in advance, but the damage and lethality you can stop via the Blue Ring at times exceeds the Green one.

So I consider the rings to be the premium arm slot pieces, even though they are an accessory.

Lantern Gauntlets

Lantern Gauntlets are a tricky piece to really recommend in mixed sets because generally you want the most powerful options possible. The gauntlets are not that powerful, the best part of lantern armor's club synergy comes with the set bonus, however for a Riot Mace user this is an interesting option - and it also has metal synergy with the Lantern Cuirass.

However, I think for the most part that this is too expensive to make a permanent part of a mixed set and it's more of a transitional item you use as you're moving your way towards a full set of Lantern. If you want a metal mixed armor option I think that there are better choices.

Silk Wraps and Dragon Gloves

And here are the Silk Wraps (excuse the variation in size, I wish Patreon had better picture functions with sizable images etc).

So these two items are glue filler pieces, they have no abilities themselves, but they have reasonable armor points and relatively low costs. The Dragon Armor is one of the toughest non-heavy armor sets in the game, and with its metal tag it combines well with the Lantern Cuirass. It also has a relatively low price point (1x leather, 1x iron, 1x cabled vein, 1x husk) and a rare combination of affinities.

The Silk Wraps are very similar, they're a tough, light, non-metal suitable for the silk body suit and they have useful affinities that combine with powerful weapons (especially the Counterweighted Axe). 

And that's it for arms. Honestly there's not a huge amount of options overall and most of the time when I'm not enjoying the arm/body combo pairings I find myself using Leather, Dragon, Screaming or the Rings. Arms tend to be filler and powerful abilities are rarely put on them outside of the combo items.