Assessing Armor: Lantern Armor (Patreon)

Heavy, durable, expensive, powerful. 

Lantern Armor is the toughest armor that the average player will experience, not because Green Armor is hard to make (spoiler, it isn't), but because many players do not move outside of the core game experience for a long, long time.

Lantern Armor is sat inside one of the tier 3 generic locations (T0 = Monster's Lair, T1 = Rawhide, T2 =  Leather Worker, T3 = Blacksmith) and it is only exceeded in sheer durability by the aforementioned Green Armor and fully calcified Rolling Armor.

This beast of an armor set is at its heart a 'club tank' class armor, and using it for other weapon types is something of a failure to realise it's full potential. But it is not just a one trick pony, there is an awful lot of amazing stuff jammed into this armor set - alongside some duffers.

Lantern Helm

Resource Cost: 1x Iron, 7x bone

Assessment

Efficiency: In a word: Poot, I mean Poor.  This is an extraordinarily expensive piece of head gear.  Did you know that if you have storytelling, hunt a DBK to get TOM on the quarry list and then trade in 1x organ, 1x bone, 1x scell & 1x beetle horn you can get the Green Helm?  That's 4 resources and an innovation prerequisite (a strong innovation if you have the White Speaker promo kit) for a WAY stronger metal helmet than this one. 

It's a victim of power creep that was not addressed in the 1.5 re-release.

C

Defense: Very high defense, hitting 8 points when used with the Cuirass and giving you protection against most noise based things. However if you choose to be deaf, you get all the downsides that represents.

S-

Abilities: Earplugs is a nice little nod of the head to Monster Hunter, and the ability here works in a similar fashion, You can choose to be deaf or not when you set up to depart. This protects you from a lot of nasty hunt events and many intimidates. The biggest combo you can use is combining this with another survivor with the screaming helm (say Warlord or Screaming Armor) and then you can stack up as much insanity as you want during a fight if you get the monster locked into a loop or are able to evasion/block tank it more or less endlessly by reducing its chances to hit to a 10+.

A-

Affinities: Down blue half affinity, whatever. It works with the lantern cuirass, but this armor set otherwise doesn't really care about blue affinities, it doesn't have enough for the Blue charm and you're not normally stacking deadly/luck at the time you get to this tier - the game becomes about devastating at that point.

B-

Score: One of the stronger parts of the Lantern Armor, there is a lot of combo potential in the helm because of items like the Screaming Helm in addition to it's durable protections both against physical and brain trauma.

 S

Lantern Cuirass

Resource Cost: 2x iron, 5x leather

Assessment

Efficiency: This is one of the few parts of lantern armor that really managed to justify the high costs involved. It's a lot of stats bundled into a single item, and as mentioned elsewhere it's good enough for certain metal mixed set builds as well.

A-

Defense: Really, really high. An interesting, and brilliant, design decision was made during the creation of lantern armor. The set's armor bonus is locked onto this piece of gear and made dependent on the metal keyword. That means for metal armor this piece of gear represents 8 armor to the body and an additional 12 points of armor spread across all the other locations. That's a total of 20 armor from one location as long as you can hit the metal keyword everywhere.  I actually believe that this is the way it should have been done with all armor sets. The Body piece providing +X armor to locations that match a certain keyword and set bonuses being instead other things - I think I'll write a piece on what I mean later this month as a part of the Designer Diary.

However, defense takes a hit because of the negative movement that the cuirass represents. Now this is the bit of the armor's design which I think isn't as good. If the -2 movement had been linked to the affinity ability as well you would have had an exceptionally interesting piece of gear where you can either grab a strong body piece for your armor without penalty (apart from the high cost) or you can activate it to get a huge bonus to armor at the cost of negative movement.

Regardless, the Cuirass is one of the two best pieces of gear in the armor set and you're going to seek to activate it whenever you can.

S

Abilities: I think we've pretty much covered the abilities in the defensive section, the positive one is a little awkward to activate and forces your grid into a very restrictive pattern and the negative one is always there harming you.

A-

Affinities: Lots of affinities, left green, right green, up and down blue half affinities. That's all great stuff. What's not so great is that the ability needs all of these connected to work, that means this piece of gear sits in slot 5, the middle slot, and that causes issues for the armor set as a whole, especially when you look at the other really good gear piece, the boots.

Score: The defensive heart of the Lantern Armor set, this hulking brute beating at the center of the metallic structure is one of the prime reasons why you'd push to get lantern armor and it's an example of one of the few armor sets where heavy is almost worth the costs.

S-

Lantern Gauntlets

Resource Cost: 2x iron, 6x leather

Assessment

Efficiency: So that's 1 iron and 3 leather per gauntlet and you get a situational ability and an affinity that is useful, but makes the layout awkward because of it's lack of secondary affinities? Ugh. Why?

C-

Defense: 5(8) armor points and a green half affinity that is in the same orientation as monster grease's. Not very good overall.

C+

Abilities: +1 accuracy to clubs is either an okay ability or completely useless - it's entirely dependent on the weapon you are using. It does push some weapons across thresholds into powerhouse levels of accuracy (especially the Scoopy Club). But it is such a small boost for such a limited selection of weapons. There are very few clubs in the game at the moment and even less of them are viable (Riot, Bone, Scoopy, Skullcap, Prism and Whistling in some situations). 

C+

Affinities: Even more than the Lantern Ring below, this piece of gear's affinity is completely awful. The slot that it's sitting in can be adequately occupied by Monster Grease, and if you're using Lantern Armor you are probably using Monster Grease because you're tanking. Sure it gives a self contained way to activate the Cuirass set bonus. But honestly, there are better options.

D+

Score: This one is only exciting for club users.

B-

Lantern Mail

Resource Cost: 1x iron, 5x organ

Assessment

Efficiency: Awful, just awful. You pay that extreme price for a piece of gear that holds no abilities, just armor points and a single affinity.

D-

Defense: 5(8) armor points and 1 half green affinity is terrible for a gear piece at this tier. The only reason this exists is to activate the Cuirass and to keep your junk protected.

B-

Abilities: N/A

Affinities: One affinity, a decent one, but this armor set doesn't get a pass because the Lantern Mail asks to always be put in the 4 position with the Gauntlets in the 6. This means that the green affinities you do get are hampered by the way that the armor set does its best to make Monster Grease very hard to activate.

D

Score: Bad. This one is just bad, and not MJ at his peak bad, it's MJ after we learnt the truth about what went on in his personal life bad.  The only way you could get excited about this piece of gear is if it cost a total of 3 or 4 resources. But it costs 6. To put that in perspective, the leather skirt, which has the same affinity in a better location and still has 3 armor points, costs 1 leather.

D-

Lantern Greaves

Resource Cost: 1x Iron, 5x leather

Assessment

Efficiency: Movement is a very strong ability and the Lantern Greaves offer the best movement from any footwear in the game, as long as you can activate it's ability. The costs for the boots are as a consequence, more acceptable than most of the other armor pieces.

A-

Defense: In isolation, this piece of gear is amazing at defense, because of how strong dash-cancelling is. Unfortunately, the Lantern Cuirass's negative movement means that it's not able to achieve its full potential. So as a part of Lantern Armor in general, I can't score this as highly as I would in Warlord or more importantly a mixed set.

B-

Abilities: +2 movement is amazing, but here it exists to negate the -2 movement from the curiass and also make your gear grid really restrictive.

C

Affinities: Up half blue and left plus right red affinities should be amazing, but the activation requirements for the +2 movement ability stop that, instead this is a very restrictive selection of affinities, you essentially NEED to activate all three of them all the time unless you have alternative ways of getting around the large movement penalty from the Cuirass.

C

Score: This is arguably the strongest part of the Lantern Armor set, however because of the way the Cuirass is designed, it is held back heavily when used in Lantern Armor and therefore the score for it just can't be as high as it should be.

C+

Oxidised Lantern Helm 

Resource Cost: Lantern Helm (1x iron + 7x bone) + 3x leather, 3x bone, 3x organ, 1x black lichen, 1x cocoon membrane

Assessment

Efficiency: Very poor, you are paying 11 resources to achieve the following: +1 armor points, removal of the heavy keyword, outfit ability and an improved version of 'you are deaf' we'll call 'selective hearing'. Considering how more important the Deflect weapons, the Ringwhip and the Lantern Glaive are to get in Oxidised form, it's a rare settlement that'll choose to oxidise helms.  Massive cost for very, very little benefit.

If you're resource rich and you've been good enough to take down the Watcher as soon as possible, you can probably afford this one regardless of when you get it. 

Jury is out if this is better than the Phoenix Helm in Phoenix sets.

D

Defense: There is no argument that the defense on this item is extreme, not only does it give you selective hearing (you can avoid the nasty "noise" results and choose to benefit from the good ones), selective hearing that still combos with the Screaming Helm 'unlimited insanity' exploit no less, but it also represents a total of 9 armor points on the head. Which means it's tied with Calcified Rolling Armor for highest non-green armor points in the game.

The Outfit keyword means that it can also be used with the Phoenix and dragon sets, but the Phoenix helm is so good that it's hard to justify swapping it out and the Dragon helm is so cheap that I wouldn't pass on it unless the settlement was very wealthy. We'll have to see what future the Gen II armor sets offer further down the line. So at the moment it's just a curioso - Beacon Shields, Ring Whip and Lantern Glaive are more important.

S+

Abilities: It is worth mentioning that the oxidation process has removed the negative heavy from the keywords that this armor piece has when compared to it's pre-bath version. It's also worth acknowledging that right now that doesn't mean anything at all.

Selective hearing however is a very potent ability. It has combos with a whole host of things that require hearing while also comboing with stuff that benefits you being deaf while avoiding the penalties of being deaf. Anything you can do with the Lantern Helm, you can still do, but you don't have the penalties anymore (this includes the - accuracy).

A

Affinities: Provides a down blue, needs that connected plus a red. It's not a big issue in this set because you always have those affinities available unless you're not activating the boots.

B

Score: How many other people were really, really disappointed to discover that only the Lantern Helm could be oxidised? Sure the entire Oxidation process is immensely expensive to the point that you're lucky if you can Oxidise more than 5 items anyway, but come on?

The helm itself is good, but the prohibitive process (People of the Lantern only) and the absurd cost mean this one is only for the 1%.

D

Lantern Armor (Set)

Resource Cost: 7x iron, 7x bone, 16 x leather, 5 x organ + oxidation costs (optional)

Assessment

Efficiency: Not. Good. This is a hideously expensive set to construct and while that cost is mitigated somewhat due to the fact that every piece of the gear is either iron or comes from generic resources; it's not enough. This armor set costs 35 resources to construct, 23 of which are strange resource.  That's a massive investment and when you compare it to the other main tank set in the game (Calcified Rolling), it is not as powerful - it holds more offensive capabilities, but it's still behind that set.  You have to be swimming in Iron and hide to consider making this set. 

In fact, it's so expensive it should be made out of solid gold.

C-

Set Bonus: I mentioned during the piece on the Dragon Mantle, that the ability to max out your survivor on arrival rather than when departing is an absolutely powerful ability. It means that you have a lot more leeway to spend survival as you wish during the hunt phase. Lantern Armor shares this powerful ability, and along with the option to make yourself deaf you can dodge most of the nasty things that happen during the hunt.

The second part of the set bonus is an absolutely massive thing, it gives all clubs in your gear grid sharp. That turns early game powerhouse weapons into huge benefits in the late game - the Bone Club (Bone Smith), Skullcap Hammer (Weapon Crafter) and Riot Mace (Gorm) all become top tier end game weapons once you're wearing lantern armor.  More than anything else, I feel it is this ability that makes Lantern Armor so good - unconditional sharp on clubs is incredible and it's one of several reasons why I don't agree with people who say 'just use Cycloid'.

Note: This is one of the few armor sets that doesn't give armor points as a section of its set bonus, that's tied to the Lantern Cuirass.

A+

Defense: 8 armor to all locations and essentially unlimited insanity when combined with another survivor with the Screaming Helm is a big boost to defense, but it's not absolutely staggering, which you would expect it to be for the price.

A

Abilities: Deaf & -1 accuracy (optional), -2 movement, +2 movement (optional), +1 accuracy & sharp on clubs, max survival on arrival.  That's a pretty sweet suite of abilities you get there, but you'll notice that it has more downsides than even phoenix armor. It's this 'gains and losses' package that's built into Lantern Armor, plus conditional Club only bonuses that keeps it from being S tier abilities.

A-

Affinities: 2 red half, 2 green, 2 blue. This is a solid set of affinities, but you generally need to jump through hoops to get those other two red affinities active because without them your survivor needs other ways of gaining extra movement to be able to be optimally effective.  I've written about it before, but may I recommend Choriea for Harvestman (if your survivor is male)?

Layout is also a bit of a pain, you need to move the helmet to one side if you want to get Monster Grease active.

B-

Score: The extreme cost of this armor set, the 'cross' design that the Cuirass forces and the awkward need to activate the boots in order to negate the negative movement from the curiass keeps it out of the S Tier. This armor set isn't necessary for any settlement once you move into the expansions and it mostly becomes the end goal for just the Club masters (Except for when you're playing with Green Armor).

B+

And that's it, that's all the armor sets with the exception of Green Armor. We will be putting that article out next week and then finishing with an overview that ties everything together and explains in detail how you can have so many S Tier armors co-existing in a rating system like this. 

But for now, you should have detailed knowledge of what makes for a good armor set, what things you should consider (armor points, affinities, optimal positioning for each piece, puzzle affinity abilities, negatives, keywords) and you'll be better placed to create your own armor sets without bloating them into an overpowered mess.

So what are you waiting for? Grab a set for yourself, no not the Dragon Armor, that's mine.

 Suit up!