As Lethal as it Needs to be - Clubs (Patreon)

 Contents:

1. Introduction

 2. Axes

 3. Bows

 4.  Arrows and Quivers

 5. Clubs 

6. Daggers

7. Grand

8. Katar

Overview:

Clubs are a bit of an odd category of weapon, not really sitting in any one bracket, they're a suitable weapon for both DPS and Tank survivors, but they also hold a lot of monster control abilities, which makes them quite a hybrid weapon. Overall however, the existence of Lantern Armor makes them a tank weapon at heart, they hit hard, very hard, but without much flash or pizzazz. 

The spec/mastery for Club was rehauled from 1.31 to 1.5, the original 1.31 version was designed around dual wielding clubs as 'paired', which didn't really work very well at all, but it was interesting. 

This was revised in 1.5 to the following:

As you can see now the design of Clubs was moved to a Perfect hit version, which made timeless eye an even more valuable fighting art than it already was. In order to trigger the Mastery against the higher level monsters you often need to also get the Perfect hit doubling.  It sort of ends up working like poor man's Devastating at times. So it's still not super impressive, but a Timeless Eye sculpture settlement will very much enjoy using the specialisation ability.

Clubs statistically are also a little all over the place, if we look at the net graph of the most craftable types we end up with this. (Excluded from this are: Prism Mace, Thundermaul and Scoopy Club).

Clubs as a whole are slanted more towards strength over accuracy, they hold few abilities (and often one of those is negative) and they have a relatively low amount of affinities. Their speed is almost only 2, as you'll see below it's only the campaign specific club which breaks the speed limit in this class of weapon.

It is also important to note that most of the strength is being skewed hard by the Gloom Hammer, which has 13 strength, typically crafted clubs otherwise have 3 or 5 strength and the rare clubs tend to have 10+ strength.  The Gloom Hammer is an anomaly in the weapon class and it's honestly one of the strongest weapons in the entire game.

We're going to dive into each of the clubs now, but before I do, I want to just note that every club is late game viable when combined with Lantern Armor (and Cycloid I guess, yuk!)  I'm noting what part of the game they're viable in they're without support from other gear here.

Bone Club

Power Level: Whatever you need it to be baby, mid game to start with.

Speed: Average for a club

Accuracy:  High for a weapon in it's crafting tier, and above average for clubs in general.

Strength: 5 strength is absolutely massive for a weapon that can be crafted in LY1. M A S S I V E.  This weapon makes most early game monsters wet their pants when they see it. It's absolutely staggeringly powerful, it's strong enough for the second tier which is L2 White Lions/Antelopes/Gorms and L1 Dragon King/DBK/Sunstalker/Phoenix with just a Monster Tooth Necklace (and it's great at activating it).

Affinities: The affinities on this club are perfect, it's one of the reasons why the Bone Club remains relevant even when you have Phoenix, Dragon or Lantern Armor. Left Red and Right Red on a club are close to perfection - you can bounce from White Lion (yes!) to Phoenix/Dragon and then right on into Lantern Armor no problems.

Ability: Cumbersome is a heck of an inconvenience on a melee weapon, just ask Twilight Sword users. However, when you build your entire hunt team around a static tank who can do things when they're not attacking (starting with Bone Club + Full Rawhide + Monster Grease and moving up from there) well it turns out that Cumbersome isn't much of a drawback because the monster comes to you, and when it doesn't you can move and block or AI/HL manipulate. Support/Tank Hybrids here we come.

It also turns out that Phoenix/Dragon armor absolutely love this weapon and Lantern Armor finds it incredibly useful both as a static big hitter and an activator for the Lantern Greaves.

Summary: Can we get a huge F in chat for the meta. The Bone Club, when it was first released was something I thought was either going to be completely ignored, or top tier. It's the latter. 

The most efficient use of 3 bones you can get in the early game.

Skullcap Hammer

Power Level: Early

 Speed: Average for a club, nothing special, right in the sweet spot for normal skill level use.

Accuracy:  7+ is a little low for a weapon of this class, while KDM has some very small ranges possible for its typical accuracy, you would have expected this weapon to be either more accurate or stronger.

Strength: 3 Strength is the biggest problem with this weapon, it's kind of cheap to make as it requires 2 bone and 1 scrap, which is a big part of why it's got the stats it has. The Weapon Crafter is "supposed" to sit between the early stuff (Catarium, Gormery, Silk Mill) and the weapons you'd aim to get from the next tier of monsters. However, strength 3, with the accuracy this offers, is strictly worse than many of the other options you pick. It's confusing why this weapon isn't 1 of strength higher so it would have a place in the progression of the game or it didn't cost a lot more and have 5-6 strength. Honestly, it's impossible to justify this weapon when you compare it to the Zanbato and the weapons that come from the Gorm and White Lion.

Affinities: The down green affinity on this weapon is decent.

Ability: The ability is good. Really good and that's where this weapon starts to come into its own. While it's bad without any support, the Skullcap Hammer starts to shine when you use it with Lantern Armor. More than any other gear in this class, the Skullcap Hammer is the one that benefits the most from it. One of my preferred late game Lantern Loadouts (if I haven't unlocked the Riot Mace) is using the Skullcap Hammer. 

Summary: You'd skip out on this one, but the ability is strong and so it's something to consider once you have Lantern or Cycloid Scale Armor - both of which overcome the drawbacks of the weapon and make it useful for Tank or DPS classes.

Whistling Mace

Power Level: Early

Speed: 3 speed is at the faster end for this weapon, however it does play into the downside of this weapon somewhat. 

Accuracy:  6+ is solid for a weapon in the weapon crafter. But you can get away with a 7+ to hit when you have 3 speed, so it's on the edge of being a drawback and at times you'll hit too many times.

Strength: 3 Strength is the biggest problem with this weapon, it's kind of cheap to make as it requires 2 bone and 1organ, which is super cheap and I suspect that's why this weapon has been given the strength stat it has. But with the Unwieldy drawback this weapon could have easily been high strength for a high risk, high reward style weapon.

Affinities: Same as the Skullcap Hammer

Ability: The Unwieldy drawback is super flavorful and honestly great. This type of weapon design, if it has a significant level of carrot (which the Whistling Mace doesn't) is very interesting and I hope we see more Unwieldy stuff in the future. As a quick aside, I think Unwieldy should have been placed onto the Zanbato.

The Perfect Hit ability is really sexy, one of the main uses you'll see for this weapon is to cheese your way through the Hand fight by using this to slap the Hand's AI cards underneath applause and reducing the length of the fight. Which is always a neat trick, but in general terms this is a better Rawhide Headband attached to a weapon, you can build an unusual support character with Timeless Eye, extra speed, this and the armor to soak the reactions. It's not great, but it's fun.

Summary: This one has a really strong AI manipulation ability, and that can be super relevant if you can get around its true drawback of low strength (Lantern, Cycloid, usual suspects), it's especially good with Lantern because that armor has the spare armor points to lose with the drawback.  But it honestly sucks to have to say 'it's good with a way of having high strength'. Great in the hands of a beefcake, or against the Hand as a way of speeding to the applause, but otherwise, there are so many other better options.

Also it's a flail, NOT A MACE. This is a game that knows what sabatons are, it might be a minor point, but I expect better because of how well this game does on lore/flavor things elsewhere.

Riot Mace

Power Level: Mid to Late

Speed: Exactly average

Accuracy:  5+ is super sexy, especially when you pay attention to the fact that this weapon is available to craft from LY1 (I've done it with a bit of luck on LY2 a couple of times). 

Strength: Very hjgh for window in which you can craft this club. It requires a deathblow, blindness (which you can plan for with Dried Acanthus) and quite a few specific Gorm resources under Gorm Climate - so getting this one early is no small achievement. But 5 strength is pretty much in the upper portion of strength for non-sharp weapons in this game (that's kind of sad really if you think about it).  Once you have a Riot Mace you're unlikely to stop using it for a long time.

Affinities: Not many, well just one, but it's a doozy. If you have deadly, you absolutely want to have either a left or right blue in order to click into the Lucky Charm and get a quick 50% towards unlocking it (Rawhide does the rest early on). This has that.

Ability: Deadly and the right blue half affinity plays into the Lucky Charm crit farming builds and the trigger for its extra ability is based on Critical Wounds (which is unusual for clubs), honestly this weapon feels more like a Dagger than a club at times.  

Driving the monster down to its basic action is most of the time a large positive, but there are a few rare situations where it's not ideal and you might even find yourself unable to use it if the risk of the Basic Action is overwhelming (I have been in that position once or twice).  Still forcing monsters down to their basics is generally a really good thing.

Summary: Good speed, high accuracy, great strength, deadly, good affinty, good ability. This thing is one of the holy grail weapons and while getting it is a bit of a challenge, it is completely worth it.

Gloom Hammer

Power Level: End game

Speed: The speed here is actually a little lower than it looks because of how the Gloom Hammer's ability works, you will hit up to 2 times, but you will only wound it at a maximum once.

Accuracy:  A 40% chance of hitting per dice is not great, but you can forgive it when you are dealing with a weapon of this power. 

Strength: 13 strength is absolutely insane for this weapon, you can get your hands on it by beating the L2 Slenderman, which is a mid game encounter and while it's tough, it shouldn't be that hard if you've been focusing.  In truth it is the Gloom Hammer and the Slender Ovule that are the main things you're aiming to get from the higher tiers, the Gloom Katana/Sheath is a great meme, but outside of insanity abuse (Hiccup, Butcher and Screaming Horns) it's not strong enough to justify the effort.

Affinities: The up blue affinity isn't that important on the Gloom Hammer, it's nice to have, but you'll rarely use it. The left red affinity however is huge, there are three armor sets that love getting access to a left red, Lantern, Phoenix and Warlord. Yeah, that's right, warlord armor without axes.

Ability: The ability here is super sweet, it's both a drawback - because you're limited to wounding once (unless you have infinite reach when you attack or you've crippled it's movement with a pile of Hollowpoint arrows), but it's the only way to manipulate the Monster Controller token - which has a lot of benefits when combined with the Spidicules Rings on the survivor sitting after you. Especially the Green and Blue ones.  Sometimes the faster monsters can become annoying when you use the Gloom Hammer on them, it's easy to forget that the Sunstalker has 16 movement until you start slapping it with Gloomy H.

It's also Deadly and has Reach 2, all of which provides adequate compensation for it's sentient activation cost (have a set of Screaming Horns around in your party to cover situations where you run low on insanity).  This weapon fuels mixed builds incredibly well.

Summary: Huge, powerful, unique. This one is THE hammer in the game at the moment, it's everything you want and more.  It's also one of the weapons I'll use on Warlord armor despite it not being an axe.

Thundermaul

Power Level "Late Game"

Speed: Average for clubs.

Accuracy: While this accuracy is around average for a club, it's pretty bad for a weapon of this caliber. 

Strength: 10 is pretty big for any weapon in Kingdom Death, so you certainly cannot accuse it of being weak.

Affinities: None.

Ability: Ugh, this ability suit is pretty bad. The weapon  is cursed, unique and irreplaceable. So the person who gets it is stuck with it unless they have/develop Crystal skin. If you can reduce the range of your Perfect hits to 11 somehow (which I can't remember if you can at the moment) or gain an ability that stops you scoring Perfect hits then this weapon becomes very usable.  

Without that, the Perfect hit ability represents a huge amount of self pain and potential death every time you swing the maul. This is a situation where flavor has won out over design and resulted in a weapon that's more of a meme than an actually useful item.  The Steel Shield sits in a similar space, but there are more ways of making that shield useful. Pack your dried acanthus if you get lumbered with this cursed weapon. 

There is also a neat Gold Smoke Knight only ability hidden in this one, but I'll leave it for you to discover if you happen to take one in against the GSK.

Summary: The Cyclops Knight kind of fluffed it when making this one, leave it for the big boys if you can - survivors shouldn't be swinging this about if they can avoid it.  Ask poor Hissen (3), she was stuck with it in her grid from cradle to grave.

Prism Mace

Power Level: Late Game

Speed: 3 speed is an extraordinary exception for a club, it's also the kind of design that works great with 3 speed.

Accuracy:  Above average for a club, but 6+ is nothing to write home about.

Strength: 10 strength again, but this weapon is People of the Sun exclusive, so it's essentially baseline 12 strength with SotF and the Survival actions that come with the Sunny Grrls.

Affinities: Insane. Not only does it have 2 green a red and a blue affinity, but in the hands of most late game hunters they'll be prismatic because of how that campaign works.

Ability: So it comes with Block 1 and also has a second ability that'll trigger Block 1 and remove a mood pretty much every time you wound.  This weapon is worth the cost of building it.

Summary: This beauty is everything the Thundermaul wishes it was. It's powerful, unique, has lots of affinities, it's sexy looking. In fact the only real "drawback" the Prism mace has outside of its campaign lock is the cost. It's not cheap to make, requiring 2x L3 White Lion kills, a time chicken's anal sphincter and a pile of iron.  Worth it though.

Bonus: Scoopy Club

Power Level Mid

Speed: 1, a break from the typical design of Clubs.

Accuracy:  4+ is very high for a club, nothing else comes close to this, which cements this weapon as a key meta choice for those who own it.

Strength: 5 strength is on par with the Riot Mace and Bone Club, and because this weapon is given out for free when you get Scrap Smelting it makes both the Skullcap Hammer and Whistling Mace very situational (it's almost strictly better than the Skullcap Hammer). Honestly, everything about this weapon is a little overpowered, but "it is a promo".

Affinities: Two really good affinities, left red for Monster Tooth Necklace, which will help push the weapon up to consistently tackle L2s and right green for club tanks and Monster Grease.

Ability: OK, so this one is a doozy. You have to bare in mind that this is a promotional material creation, so it's very fuzzy how this works. But there are many, many situations where monsters and/or survivors vomit, barf, retch, puke and so on. You're going to have to use your best roleplaying judgement on many situations, because things like Motion Sickness (Disorder) imply vomiting but do not explain exactly when it happens.  It's mechanically a mess for rules lawyer types, but roleplaying types like myself will be fine with just winging it.

It's also a tool, which means it can gain sharp via the Manhunter's Toolbelt and it isn't affected at all by the Shadow Saliva Shawl.  Huge keyword addition there.

Summary: Unintentionally named after Honda moped (seriously), the Scoopy Club is one of the strongest clubs in the game and is an essential part of the game's make up. It's unfortunately given out too easily, it would have been more balanced if it was like the Xmaxe with a crafting recipe, but it is a promotional item and that must be considered when you assess it.  

Ultimately it's a pretty important part of Club progression, without it there's little to no reason to switch off your Bone Club (unless you get a Riot Mace) until you have access to the Gloom Hammer and if you're not hunting the Slenderman or playing People of the Sun, this is your end game club. Whoops.

Conclusion:

Clubs have a very limited design in Kingdom Death and currently have a pretty weak form of progression that's strongly reliant on getting to Lantern Armor/Cycloid in order to carry many of them fully.  The weapon crafter clubs are lacking in 1-2 points of strength and while they hold interesting abilities, clubs are pretty much restricted to Riot, Scoopy, Prism, Bone and Gloom - with the others being situational without support.

Ultimately Clubs can be incredibly powerful from start to finish, but that's mostly carried by the Bone Club into Gloom Hammer progression, Scoopy Club or randomly getting the materials for the Riot Mace from the Gorm.