Pork Chop Express: Weapon Strengths! (Patreon)

I've been working through a lot of the raw weapon stats in the game recently as a part of the development process. While Speed, Accuracy and Luck (Deadly) on the weapons has a very small range of values; with Speed rarely going above 3, Accuracy sitting between +5 to +7 typically and Luck (Deadly) rarely climbing outside of +1 there isn't that much to really tease apart, while I'll dive into them in the future, right now it's strength which I want to take a deep dive on.

I wrote recently about the underrated power of the Monster Tooth Necklace, and in that I laid out the groundwork about just how important a few points of strength can be for a weapon. I wanted to go into that more here and lay out in full the whole strength experience, as such this can be looked at being a supplementary piece for the weapon assessment articles that are going on (we're up to Clubs next). This one's going to include a lot of graphs and some discussion about a few key armor sets - in particular Dragon, Phoenix and Cycloid/Lantern (which is just better Cycloid for clubs only). Those 3(4) sets are the optimal choices for any DPS survivor, with Phoenix offering the highest potential strength (Between +5 and +10 typically), Dragon offering the most reliable boost for a weapon (+2 accuracy and +5 strength) and then Cycloid offering sharp for non-sharp weapons on blind spot attackers only. We'll look at those near the end of the article and we'll start with this:

So that's a massive image with a huge amount of data points, it's best viewed on computer because of how large it is.  What it has on it are two things, the lines are the various monster toughnesses in the game right now, going from the L1 White Lion up to the L3 Hand and the two different coloured bars are the average weapon wounding rolls for every typically used weapon (green). 

The average strength of a weapon is based on the weapon strength + 5.5 (average roll on a D10) and any relevant inbuilt bonuses like sharp (worth another 5.5).

You can look at the chart yourself and have an investigation, it highlights why the meta is the way it is for weapons and why certain weapons are considered to be the best or overpowered.

A few observations to get you started:

• Survival of the Fittest's simple +1 strength pushes a lot of weapons over thresholds that they've just missed. Again demonstrating just how powerful +1 or +2 strength can be.
• The Black Sword is way, way skewed towards the late game, currently it's the only weapon that threatens the L3 Hand and Gold Smoke Knight on a 2+ naturally
• Sunshark Arrows are the nuts
• You can't go wrong with the Dragon Slayer, Gloom Hammer, Lantern Glaive, Calcified Digging Claw, Steel Sword, Skleaver, Black Sword, Sunshark bow and Oxidised weapons in general.
• The Nuclear Scythe sucks without a Blue or Red Core
• A lot of weapons need help from Dragon, Cycloid or Phoenix Armor to transition to fighting L3s
• Daggers and Whips are still awful without a lot of work to support them
• There are not enough Katars, Whips, Daggers, Bows or Clubs to support variety
• Late game clubs rely on armor boosts to work unless they're the Gloom Hammer
• Throwing Weapons peak with the Bone Darts
• Weapons that use alternative wounding methods look bad on this chart, the Ink Sword for example is super deadly and wounds via easy critical wounds.
• Muramasa's extreme power is held back by Frail + self bleeding. It needs a lot of work to make it effective.
• Some weapons are ridiculously weak for how hard they are to make (Sonic Tomahawk and Hollow Swords for example) and while some of these weapons make up for that with powerful alternative wounding mechanisms (Acid-Tooth Dagger, Deadly), many of them have no such compensation outside of getting help from an armor set or survivor.  

The following weapons are very OP because of how powerful they are compared to when you can typically get them.

• Bone Club - Bone Smith 
• Sunshark Bow - L1 Sunstalker
• Vespertine Bow - L1 Flower Knight
• Black Sword - L1 Gorm with good Gorm Potion innovation strategy 
• Rib Blade - L1 Gorm
• Riot Mace - L1 Gorm
• Steel Sword - Hunt events
• Counterweighted Axe - Weapon Crafter
• Zanbato - L1 White Lion + Weapon Crafter
• Skleaver & Denticle Axe - L2 Sunstalker
• Gloom Hammer - L2 Slenderman 
• Digging Claw & Calcified Digging Claw - L1 DBK + Black Harvest to calcify
• Claw Head Arrow - L1 White Lion
• Sunshark Arrows - L1 Sunstalker
• Hollowpoint Arrow - L1 Phoenix
• Calcified Juggernaut Blade - L1 DBK via Critical Wound + Black Harvest
• Speaker Cult Knife - White Speaker Promo, 

Which isn't really news to anyone who's played with these weapons. They make up the meta top picks a lot of the time. This is one of the reasons I co-founded the Community Edition, because there's just not enough variety in the game's weapon choices.

We're going to be using these graphs a lot more in the rest of the weapon articles, but I wanted to get this short piece out before hand so I can get Axes and Bows up to speed with the others.

Finally, as a supplement to the previous weapon articles, here are the charts for Axes, Bows and Arrows:

Axes

This chart demonstrates nicely just how awful the Sonic Tomahawk is and also why you should not be bothering with the Bone Axe when you have access to Spidicules or the Gorm.  (I generally skip the bone axe regardless, there are better things to spend the resources on).

The Butcher Cleaver is an oddity on this chart, on pure stats alone it is an exceptional weapon worth using, but the Sentient requirement on it, along with the irreplaceable ability and it's relative difficulty in getting means that it's an awkward weapon to get and use. It's very situational, sometimes it'll be amazing for you, sometimes you'll just sling it in the storage and forget about it until the Imitation Butcher Armor set comes out in the future.  

The Gaxe also sits in a bad spot, it's got the same strength as the Greater Gaxe (GGaxe), but everything else about it is worse - it has a worse cost, it's not got reach or deadly and it's activated ability is not worth the time. With an extra 1 or 2 points of strength as standard it might have found a place in the meta, or if it was in a different expansion it would do quite well at times also. But as it is, it's overshadowed by the GGaxe in almost every aspect.

Ultimately we're left with the following axes really mattering:

• Amber Poleaxe (mostly as a spear though)
• GGaxe
• Counterweighted Axe (because of its broken ability)
• Denticle Axe (especially in concert with Cycloid, Phoenix or Dragon Armor).
• Lantern Glaive (especially on Phoenix/Dragon) - Oxidised version is obviously really, really powerful.

And with insanity abuse the christmas promo Xmaxe beats all of them, because when you have an unlimited amount of insanity, you'll always wound on a 2+.  Even without that, the Xmaxe beats most axe weapons because of its incredible affinities and high strength.

Bows

The horizontal lines are the 4 toughness levels of the DBK (L1 to L4).  As the overall most challenging monster we have right now, it's the best comparisons to use for the late game.

As you can see, the order of power level assessment I made before holds up, all of the bows are stronger than the Vesper-meme Twilight bow and better suited for the late game, it's just they require more effort to work on building. Twilight is only overpowered for how early you can get it, how cheap it is and the "downside" of killing population for a chance at Acanthus Doctors.

The 'flat' points you're seeing in the chart are due to how the different armors work, sharp isn't much help on the Sunshark Bow (and Cycloid is honestly bad on all bows in general), while none of the other bows benefit from the Dragon or Phoenix armors. So overall - as I've mentioned before many times, the Sunshark Bow holds the position as the best and strongest bow in the game right now, but the Arc Bow is the best choice for someone who wants to snipe and the Ink Blood Bow is the best choice for someone who wants to spam.

Arrows

Blue is with the Monster Tooth Necklace, so you can see how these gear weapons can be pushed a little with some help.

Nice and simple, we can see that really the only arrows worth writing home about for wounding purposes are the Claw, Hollowpoint and Sunshark.  The Gloom-Coated Arrow is something of a setup arrow, most of its power comes from that ability and the Vespertine Arrow is entirely about critically wounding one specific location once - if the Vespertine Arrow didn't archive itself after use it would be something worth talking about.