Tarred and Feathered: A look at the Phoenix (Patreon)

Following on from the Lion God series, I had a few requests to take a similar in depth dive into the Phoenix and while we have covered the time chicken on the Great Game Hunters, as that series seems to be on indefinite hiatus I am working on written versions here and there to fill the gap - at least until something can be sorted out with Josh & Matt or I can find a new podcast to record with.

The Phoenix is one of the monsters with the highest number of 'apologists' for it, by that I mean people who talk about how the Phoenix is 'unfairly called a bad quarry', 'it has good gear' and similar - often defending with edge cases or trying to ignore superior general term gear options (i.e. Fecal Salve > Bloom Sphere and Dragon Armor > Phoenix Armor). Quite often when you drill into the experiences of these players they tend to be newer and not familiar with the whole quarry/nemesis experience. So they misunderstand the position on the Phoenix.

When compared to the other node 3 monsters, the Phoenix is solidly the worst one of the bunch; all of the other three are punishing in their own manner, but if you were going to rank them it would be Sunstalker/Dung Beetle Knight in 1st and 2nd place, Dragon King in 3rd and Phoenix in 4th. The Dragon King's best gear is not as good as the Phoenix's best gear but the DK holds a bunch of 'hidden' benefits. The Showdown against the DK provides a huge amount of stat boosts and opportunities to gain Iron.

However, the main reason that the Phoenix lands low on the quarry ranking lists is not because of gear or farming considerations. It's the way that it attacks your resources.

Resource Attrition

If one was asked to list all the resources you have available to spend in Kingdom Death, you'd probably list monster resources, basic, strange and endeavors right away. Then after some consideration you'd likely add in gear, survivors, fighting arts and insanity. Which is a pretty comprehensive list; but I am sure that the most experienced or deepest of you all thought of time, specifically survivor ages and lantern years. Lantern Years are the most precious resource in the entire game as they determine how many hunts you have to gather your power together, you rarely get any additional ones and while you may feel that a 30 year campaign is a long time, when you get to around 20 years, it always feels like there isn't enough time left to do thing. 

Each showdown you can complete successfully represents resource gains, plus a tick in aging and weapon progression for your survivors. And these two matters bring us to the crux of matter where the Phoenix is concerned - the dichotomy of age vs. weapon progression.

Weapon Mastery

Weapon mastery is the single most contradictory element of Kingdom Death, everything about the world, the fiction, the ethos, the randomness and even the designer tells you that survivors are meant to be disposable and that what matters is the Settlement. But all of this is undercut and undermined by the weapon mastery system - It is tied to a single survivor successfully surviving 8 hunts while scoring a wound with a weapon from their relevant weapon mastery. 

The reward for achieving this? A weapon mastery innovation in the settlement that gives all survivors who use the relevant weapon a bonus. In short, this mechanic is telling the players 'hey use one single survivor over and over and in 8-10 hunts everyone gets a big benefit'. This fact, in combination with human nature - we love to chase perfection and the idea of weapon masters is one of those things that all roleplaying progression style games encourage - means that at the heart of the game we have a mechanic which says "Hey all those things that those Kingdom Death told you about how survivors are disposable? Not true." 

And that's the largest conflict that sits inside the game and the primary reason why extremely conservative strategies are employed (Circlet, Headband) and successful. It's not just that weapon mastery is a nice bonus to a single survivor for living a long time (the way that weapon specialization is), no weapon mastery is a potential meaningful boost to every new hunter who uses the same weapon and in the case of Fist & Tooth, Spear and Shield it's bonuses that are absolutely game changing. F&T and Shield in particular tend to be used by all four hunters.

So where does this tie into the Phoenix

I am Become Time, Destroyer of Age Boxes

The Phoenix demands that you go out to hunt it with at least moderately experienced survivors, due to a single hunt card that "auto kills" (erases from existence) survivors who have less hunt xp than the Phoenix's level players have to take out survivors with 1-3 hunt xp at a minimum. You can't really risk newbies because losing even one survivor on the hunt is a massive issue in a game with showdowns balanced for 4 hunters - even more so when you are playing 4 player and this means that one player now has to sit there on their phone or move the monster around and make the sounds for it. Rawr, I'm a lion.

That in itself would not be as much of a problem, except the Phoenix showdown mechanics are based around trying to erase survivors from existence by aging them as much as possible. Next time we are going to look into how you handle this and mitigate its antics as much as possible, but this combination of factors: Weapon Mastery, forced Aging and hunt xp floors raised is at the heart of why the Phoenix is considered to be a low tier monster. There are additional minor factors and we'll explore those in the next two weeks, but the main wheel is that ageing/proficiency conflict. 

In short, The Phoenix eats the most important resource we have available to us, it takes away time, and; as we will see next week while it can refund it, the mechanism for that is not cyclical in nature. In other words, most of the time the Phoenix shortens the lifespan of your hunting survivors and there is no real way to mitigate this, once they're older, they're older.

As we will see, this tool can be used to ones advantage, but it is not something that you can repeatedly gain benefits from. So the Phoenix, unlike almost every single other monster in the game is one that punishes you for repeated farming, this is why it is like Spidicules and the Lion God - you see it on the table for experienced players far less than the other options. 

It is not that the Phoenix is completely bad as such, it has problematic design elements that almost no other monster in the game have. When players enjoy such a wide range of choice in targets as they do with quarry monsters, they will naturally avoid the ones which are not as much fun. This is seen in the core game where players tend to mostly grind out Lion and Antelopes (and enjoy a higher success rate if they do) and in the expansion choices where players sub in the Dung Beetle Knight/Sunstalker/Dragon King over the Phoenix and rarely target it. Not even elements like the Slenderman or Lion Knight, that have built in Phoenix integrations help with this situation, The Phoenix still remains a 'small shopping list monster' over a repeated farm one and without serious updates in Campaigns of Death to address the heart of the issue, we're not going to see much of a change in this one. 

This is a great lesson in player behavior, humans do not enjoy an overly high punishment level and especially dislike losing things that they have worked hard to achieve. Even more so when the counterplay to these situations is limited or impossible. To quote Yahtzee Croshaw.

 "It's not best practice to punish the player because of things they have no control over."

In short; there is too much stick and not enough carrot here and when you become experienced in the game, you start to see just how glaring this issue is. 

So, If you want to figure out how rarely it hits the table when one is experienced, I sold my constructed phoenix before leaving the UK in 2018 to one of my patrons. I have not built my replacement because outside of personal testing games, no-one wants to fight it on the tabletop often enough to make it worthwhile. The few times it has appeared, it's been rare appearances for specific gear cards and we've used proxies.

Next week we're going to drill into this in specifics with a look at the showdown, the power peaks and troughs, strategies and mitigation you can undertake. Both for the Hunt and the Showdown (I'll be splitting the article into two posts on the same day, a short one for the Hunt and a longer one for the Showdown, that's why this primer piece is a little shorter, but I feel it is very important to highlight the core problem of the Phoenix, because it's a problem at the heart of the game design itself, this game has a lot of identity issues in conflict between the theme and the mechanics).