Late Game Grand Weapon Tank Builds (Patreon)

This is a request from patron Daniel Ignacio Narváez Muñoz who asked:

"...how would you arrange a grand weapon late game tanky build (Perfect Slayer if possible, if not, whichever you like the most)."

I always enjoy doing this patron request builds, especially when there is a specific weapon/weapons or combination of gear that is being asked about. So Daniel, we're going to go through the late game Grand Weapons, talk about each, and provide a few builds for them.

These are the five late game Grand weapons that I consider when playing. The Dragon Slayer is the default choice because it's from the Blacksmith location, while the Skleaver from the Sunstalker is my personal favourite (and one of the best weapons in the game overall). The Calcified Zanbato and the Calcified Juggernaut Blade both come from the Dung Beetle Knight expansion and they do a lot to help with the curve of your Grand Weapon progression, the Calcified Zanbato isn't really a true late game weapon, it lacks the strength, but with the right armor set it can get the job done.

In the late game the monster toughness climbs up to typically around 16-18, capping out on the quarry side with 21 for the Lion God (and a bit higher for the L3 DBK Century Carapace). So which weapon is right for your campaign can depend on the monster, here's the list of L3 toughnesses Quarries you need to consider:

• White Lion - 14
• Gorm - 15
• Screaming Antelope - 12 (Yeah... wtf?)
• Spidicules - 12 (at least the Spiderling Spam makes up for it a bit here)
• Flower Knight - 11
• Phoenix - 16
• DBK - 18 (24 on the carapace)
• Sunstalker - 16
• Dragon King - 17
• Lion God - 21

Apart from highlighting just how bizzarely frail the L3 Antelope/Spidicules/Flower Knight are  (Spidicules AI helps it a bit though), most of the interesting monsters you'll typically hunt sit between that 16 - 18 range I mentioned before. Considering that the mean wounding roll approximates as 5.5 (median is between 5 and 6 aka 5.5), you want a baseline weapon plus survivor strength of 11+ to ensure that on average your attacks will wound half the time, ideally because you are using a Grand Weapon and they are most of the time slow, you'll probably want this to climb higher in order to secure the wounds when you hit (especially because of devastating).

Of the weapons listed above the mean wounding rolls for just the weapon + dice (no modifiers) work out as follows:

• Calcified Zanbato: 8 + 5.5 = 13.5 
• Calcified Juggernaut Blade: 9 + 5.5 = 14.5 
• Skleaver: 10 + 5.5 = 15.5
• Dragon Slayer: 9 + 5.5 + 5.5 = 20
• Perfect Slayer: 14 + 5.5 + 5.5 = 25

Yes, you can't roll a 5.5 on a single dice roll and if you have problems visualising that, just consider that it means typically you'll roll between a 13 and a 14. We use the mean here because of what Sharp does to the rolls.  I've also not included ranges because they all start at 0 and end at infinite because of the 1 is always a fail and the 10 is always a success. It makes giving an exact wounding result difficult, but the roll is easier to visualise and the 1 cancels out the 10 for the most part when you consider this.

As you can see, the Dragon Slayer and Perfect Slayer do not need much assistance at all on the strength front in order to reach a sufficient score, while the others need some help. The CJB (Calcified Juggernaut Blade) has inbuilt strength boosts by generating tokens for yourself (even bleed) and the Skleaver can always get access to Sharp via Cycloid Scale Armor, but the Calcified Zanbato can struggle without being used on Dragon/Phoenix sets.

So bare in mind the monster you're facing, you might need to add the Monster Tooth Necklace to your build in order to reach a suitable level of strength if your survivor isn't quite strong enough for the job.

All of that written, lets move onto some builds:

Dragon Slayer Tank - Core Game only

One of the major issues with People of the Lantern is the need to put a lantern in your grid when you hunt in the late game. For late game tanks you have the choice between taking Phoenix Armor or Lantern Armor.  Phoenix Armor is more of an offensive set and you need to be able to remain mobile in order to take advantage of its charge ability. However, if you have sharp on your weapon, you just don't need that.

As a result of the set bonus and gauntlets, there are some people who are hung up on Lantern Armor being 'just the late game club set'; which is a very corridor way thinking and is not how I try to approach such a sandbox game.

In addition to being one of the Lantern Builds that modelers love to construct, this build sacrifices a little movement (you're down to 3 move) in exchange for a massive pile of durability. Lantern Armor offers you 8 armor to all locations plus on arrival your survival goes up to the survival limit. That's huge, it means all the survival losses you suffer on the hunt are mitigated and you have a deep pool for surging/dodging and so on.  You don't need any extra strength gear because as shown above the Dragon Slayer is more than capable of wounding most L3 monsters and it has Devastating 1 (deals 2 wounds per successful wound roll) which means it dishes out the damage.

The layout is a little unusual in order to get +2 evasion from the Monster Grease.

Here is the Phoenix variant of it:

This one is a lot faster moving, but as you can see it has less evasion and you want a deep pool of insanity in order to maintain that Plackart, so I prefer the Lantern variant most of the time.

Before we move on; here's a Gorment variant for People of the Lantern:

It's not tanky, but it has a few other benefits such as increased kiting capability thanks to Guard. You can also apply the principles used here to Dancer. 

Here's a more durable late game version of it, the Crest Crown can easily be replaced by any item that provides a left red affinity (i.e. Elder Earrings).

Skleaver - Sunstalker

As mentioned above, the Skleaver really needs a bit of help in order for it to reach a high enough wound roll total in a regular fashion. As a consquence, most of the time the Skleaver is used as a blind spot DPS attacker/damage dealer. However if you wanted to run in the face of the monster a bit you could use a build like this one.

The Shadow Saliva Shawl should be Monster Grease for this build (you can choose to either have a shield + grease or the shawl + something else, I've put both on this picture because of space considerations). However, you'll notice that a survivor wearing this sacrifices wounding roll totals for speed and a little extra evasion. Ultimately I think it's better to go a bit cheaper, use something else instead of the Monster Grease/Shawl and stand in the butt swinging.

But, there is another way that you can use the Skleaver for a tank build and with a little help from the Dung Beetle Knight I present the Bone Tank.

As you can see, every single gear piece in this grid has the bone keyword, which activates the Bone Earrings. That means you get +2 speed and +2 strength tokens for the showdown (+1 extra strength from the necklace) as long as you remain insane. 

That turns the Skleaver into a (3/5+/13) weapon (mean wounding roll of 18.5) and also makes it the only grand weapon that can really take advantage of the mastery. Also you have 8 armor on all locations (11 on the head), block 1, -1 damage from all hits and the ability to regain your insanity via the Screaming Horns. All in exchange for being insane and losing 1 movement.

The only real issues with this build are you can't use it post Watcher because there are no bone lanterns and you only have Block 1 instead of Block 2/Deflect.

Edit: You can activate the Ripple Pattern by swapping the Rubber Bone Harness (Wet Resin Crafter) gear in for the Monster Tooth Necklace and placing it on the right of the White Lion Cloak. I omitted this in the original build pictured above.

In People of the Stars this build is immense fun, and it's worth remembering for other campaigns in the future as it can only get better when we have access to more bone items.

Calcified Juggernaut Blade 

It turns out that the previous build can also be used with the CJB and here it is!

The Bone Earrings in this case are providing +6 strength because of the interaction between the CJB's ability, slow and the tokens. Each +1 strength token is +2 strength and the +1 speed tokens get turned into +1 strength.

This means that the CJB's baseline strength climbs up to 17 before you even consider the survivor's stats! That's good enough to push it past the Dragon Slayer for pure power.

Perfect Slayer

So, after all of that, what build would I use for the Perfect Slayer in the campaigns where I managed to roll it? Well thanks to the release of the White Gigalion, we now have the ability to create the sillies facerolling build there is. But before we get onto that, it's important to mention that you can basically use the Perfect Slayer in any of the builds above (apart from the Bone one) because it's nutty. I also like it in the Gorment builds instead of the Dragon Slayer, I discussed these a long while ago (Part 1 here, Part 2 covers ranged options for Gorment).

This one requires Spidicules, the Screaming Antelope and the White Gigalion, apart from getting the Perfect Slayer it's all fairly straightforward to build.

What we have here is the ultimate faceroll tank. In addition to all the usual Screaming Antelope bonuses that give you extra durability and the amazing slam. You also have a crazy amount of damage mitigation thanks to the way that the Silk Body Suit and Lion Slayer Cape stack. Previously we couldn't have the Lion Skin Cloak with the Silk Body Suit because you cannot wear metal or heavy armor alongside the suit (weapons and items are fine), but as long as you have some fur armor that is not heavy, you can put both of them together.  That's where the Screaming Armor comes in and in addition to providing the following armor (6H/5A/6B/6W/5L) it also gives you -3 damage vs any hits and -1 damage to all other sources (minimum: 1). That's a HUGE amount of 'virtual armor', and it's one of the reasons why this kind of damage mitigation is worth jumping through hoops for.

Outside of that, the other tricks with the Perfect Slayer is the following combo:

This combo which requires the maximum courage ability allows you to unlock the Perfect Slayer's true potential at the cost of losing access to your weapon specialisation/mastery. It's worth the trade off.

If you wanted to put that into the previous build you would drop the Beacon Shield because it's actually less protection than the Suit/Cape or you would drop one of the Cape or Suit (You'd also have to lose one of these for a lantern slot post Watcher).

So there we have it, a bunch of late game grand weapon builds using a variety of pieces of gear. Hopefully these have given you some ideas of your own and you can expand on these further!