Requesting Backup: Utility Offense (Patreon)

• 1. Introduction & Debuffs 
• 2. Contents
• 3. Hit Location Control 
• 4. AI Control 
• 5. Buffs 
• 6. Defense & Healing 
• 7. Activators 
• 8. Movement & Positioning 
• 9. Utility Offense 
• 10. Survival Gains
• 11. Resource Gathering
• 12. Tactics
• 13. Miscellaneous

Overview

Utility Offense is a bit of a weird term to use here, but the main reason for that is I couldn't find anything that fit better, calling it pure 'offense' didn't quite cover this category as some of the items are not exactly 'offense' and also that may 

So in essence, Utility Offense are items that increase your overall offensive capabilities, either by helping you score wounds in unusual fashions, boosting offense in non-weapon based manners or helping you attack with varying effects (Blue Charm for example lets you spam high speed attacks with less repercussions).

Red Charm - Core/Stone Circle

Crafting Cost: 3x organ

Additional Categories: N/A

Affinities: Wants 5 red affinities, but supplies one by itself, meaning you need to gather 8 more half affinities and connect them to get the rest online. One of the simplest methods for this has always been to use White Lion armor and a bone dagger, that tends to get you there with the least hassle and it also has decent synergy with the Red Charm in the first place. There are also mixed sets you can construct to complete this, or you can do semi-naked builds.

Abilities & Keywords: Jewelry can be stolen by the white lion and it is fragile, so this item can go walkabout and land in the dumpster. However, it's not a big deal thanks to that cheap generic crafting cost.

Main Ability:  All of your weapons, no matter their strength, no matter the monster's toughness wound hit locations on a 6+. This means that your strength now scales to match the Monster's toughness exactly at the cost of not being able to score critical wounds. Items that are cheap and scale throughout the campaign are inherently very strong because of the amazing Return on Investment they represent. While the hoops you have to jump through to get this one online are not great (because it has anti-synergy with Cycloid Scale that's not a great tool here).

Rating: This is something you should always remember as a tool to help deal with higher toughness monsters, the Gold Smoke Knight in the core game only for example. A- tier.

Blue Charm - Core/Stone Circle

Crafting Cost: 3x Organs

Additional Categories: N/A

Affinities: This is the blue version of the Red Charm and everything said their applies in general terms. However, it is significantly easier to hit 4x blues than 4x reds because blue affinities are more common on armor sets and also Cycloid Scale Armor has a very high synergy with this piece of gear. 

Abilities & Keywords: Same as Red Charm

Main Ability:  If you want to run high speed, say with Paired weapons, this is the item you want to slot into your build because it gives you that 50% chance of discarding the trap and shuffling it back in. So you can lock in hitting those hit locations which you have already drawn and only have to deal with the reactions. I really rate this on Cycloid with Double Tempered Daggers.

Rating:  S+ Tier, no doubt about it. If you have friends who love to roll lots of dice to attack, you should steer them in the direction of this charm. It also stacks with Spear Specialisation (and the new Overpowered Tempered Spear) to reduce the amount of trap triggers you'll have to deal with.

Red Ring - Spidicules

Crafting Cost: 3x Venom Sac, 2x Arachnid Heart.

Additional Categories: Defense

Affinities: It can be hard to get all three of these red affinities active, but if you are using this item then you are building around it and you are going to get them connected no matter what. It is fortunate that the build which uses the Red Ring most effectively (aka the Red Ring of Death/RRoD) requires little gear to get itself online (it is mostly based around fighting arts and abilities interacting with the ring's mechanics, plus bandages to remove the bleed tokens and sustain longer).

Abilities & Keywords: At's jewelry, which means White Lions might pinch it and it's amber which also has some rare impacts. It is surprising that this item is not 'other' as so many similar things are, but the three rings always have been something of an odditiy.

Main Ability: Anytime you see a way of inflicting wounds onto a monster without having to draw a HL card for that wound you should stand up and pay attention. The simplest and weakest version of this is Devastating X which gives you additional wounds per hit location card wounded, but then you move on to the Counterweighted Axe which has become a staple in the game - being combined with +speed, -accuracy (via Bone Witch who drops your accuracy without blinding you) and Timeless Eye to only score wounds on automatic hits, completely negating the drawback of higher speed scores.

The Red Ring takes this to its logical extreme, with the correct build (see the link above for one version of it) allowing one to decimate monsters entirely with little to no risk. 

Automatic wounds are one of the most powerful mechanics in Kingdom Death and items like the Counterweighted Axe and Red Ring give you access to a potentially huge amount of them per showdown. This item distorts the game in a way the engine really isn't able to handle and even if you don't abuse it you can still score several wounds per showdown with relatively no risk.

Rating: Yes, the cost is expensive, But as this is capable of killing almost every single monster with almost no risk with the right set up there is no way that this item can be anything other than in the most premium of tiers. It is an S++ item, something so powerful that it distorts the game around it when it is used correctly. Can be challenging to set up, but once you have done it you can inflict a huge amount of wounds on a monster without drawing a HL location even if you don't go full RRoD.

For the record, if you want to know what I would do to change this one if it was felt it needed balancing? I would make it that the ring stops you being able to remove bleeding tokens, high risk, high reward - can still be made more powerful via Unconcious Fighter and/or Purpose - but you can't just endlessly add and remove bleeding tokens to chip away at a monster without threat of the HL deck.

Toolbelt - Manhunter

Crafting Cost: Beat L3 Manhunter

Additional Categories: Buffs

Affinities: The affinities are decent, the right green in particular is sweet because of how it will click into Monster Grease and stack onto the evasion that the tool belt provides as well.

Abilities & Keywords: metal is something you have to watch out for as a few items deny metal gear and fragile has the same warning it always has.

Main Ability:  This item allows you to run a different build to normal, if you do not take out a weapon and instead use a tool that can attack (Sickle/Pickaxe) then you get a huge set of bonuses. Extra evasion, extra speed and accuracy along with a strength buff via sharp.

The Bone Pickaxe becomes a 3/5+/2+Sharp "weapon" (Average wound roll of 13) and the Bone Sickle becomes a 4/5+/1+Sharp "weapon" (Average wound roll of 12). This means that both of these tools now become viable weapons. Personally I prefer to use the Pickaxe, but you do need to be careful if you use that item in the Mineral Gathering hunt event now because the 1.5 table can break it (It used to not break in 1.31 because only frail pickaxes broke).

In addition, it is worth highlighting that the Shadow Saliva Shawl from the Sunstalker adds an extra level to this combo.

As the tools are not weapons, you are not affected by the 'slow' result on the active gear so you can get a total of +6 evasion from two items.

The one drawback here is you are not going to gain Weapon Proficiency with this because tools do not have a spec/mastery.

Rating: As an item that fuels an entire build around it this lands squarely in the S Tier because of just how interesting and unique it is. There's a lot of limitations surrounding this one, but it is worth the effort. S tier and one of the main reasons you have the Manhunter as a nemesis.

Armor Spikes - Gorm

Crafting Cost: 1x stout vertibrate, 1x scrap

Additional Categories: N/A

Affinities: The down blue doesn't seem like a super useful affinity, but in the Gorm expansion it is very strong because you want a down blue to activate the Gorment Mask - the single best armor in the Gorment set. The cheap cost of Armor Spikes lets you get this job done while you save up for a Gorn. But you might not swap the armor spikes out anyway if you want to really lean into the Gorment set bonus.

Abilities & Keywords: Bone is good, heavy is bad. Overall as Gorment Armor is heavy anyway that keyword doesn't matter too much as being more heavy doesn't punish you extra.

Main Ability:  So this is not a very good ability, while "free" wounds are powerful, it is hard to consider it as being weak, but this one is very situational. You can't control when you're taking that severe body injury, you have to suffer it (no acanthus/unbreakable) and you might die. So it's very hard to make good use of it, you can if you stack stuff like Tough, Gorment armor, Life Potion etc, but the question is. Why would you do that?

Rating: This is mostly for the cheap affinity and activation of the Gorment Mask. For a reminder, this is what the Gorment Mask does.

It is really good, turns into immunity to intimidate very early on. However there are better down blue items you can use if you have the resources. So we're giving this one a D.

Frenzy Drink - Core/White Lion

Crafting Cost: 1x Lion Testes

Additional Categories: Buffs, Defense

Affinities: N/A

Abilities & Keywords: consumable matters here, if you can't consume you can't use this item (unlike Monster Grease, which you smear on but just happens to also be edible) and fragile carries the usual 'could get archived by hunt events' warning.

Main Ability:  So I still wonder if I should have put this one in the buffs section because strictly speaking that's what Frenzy does, but it covers a whole bunch of other things as well - it's kind of a defense & buffs hybrid item that also allows you to ignore slow but removes spending survival for survival actions and weapon specialisation/mastery from you. As the defense & buffs sections were a bit overstuffed, I've put it here (same reason the reverberating lantern will be in next week's article instead of in defense).

So because of that, and because removing Slow from some weapons is actually quite relevant (on top of increasing speed by 1 via the frenzy) I'm putting it here.

Rating: I think that the Frenzy Drink is a solid item, but the timing on it is very important, because it shuts off your survival actions you want to be a pure offensive character who doesn't get targeted much. Also as the campaign moves forward and pools of survival become larger and larger the Frenzy Drink's potency drops because the opportunities to use it at low to no survival reduce in proportion. It is however cheap and it has some neat applications early on, especially with weapons like the Counterweighted Axe or Grand Weapons. B+

Dragon King Cores - L2 and L3 Dragon King

 Crafting Cost: Red: 1x pituitary gland, 1x iron. Blue: 1x shining liver, 1x iron

Additional Categories: N/A

Affinities: N/A

Abilities & Keywords: Jewelry means it would suck hard to lose these to a White Lion. You should be able to avoid that though.

Main Ability:  The two upgrades to nuclear weapons (Knife and Scythe) give two different routes to upgrade your weapon. You can put both on, but my preference is to put Red onto the Knife and Blue onto the Scythe because they interact more favorably that way.

Rating: These bad boys get a poor rep, but if you are just looking for a single one to use in your grid they are a reasonable item to have to help upgrade your offense. You certainly do not want to ignore them when we get more Nuclear Weapons in the future - we already know the Nuclear Katana is coming and there may be something with the Nukalope. A Tier, balanced, well gated, but powerful, especially the blue one.