FenPaints

Requesting Backup: Tactics (Patreon)

Published:

2020-01-20 12:00:05

Imported:

2024-02

Tags:

Support

Content

Overview

A relatively small section of the game, but a very important one. Tactics cards are linked to the various 'knight' expansions and do not come into play without at least one of these monsters providing a route to collect them. In short, in the world of Monster one does not have any tactical knowledge without a badge (or armor) to prove that one is a Knight.

Tactics are something I looked at in the past and for those of you who have not read the article, it is located here. I would recommend reading it as a supplement to this piece, because a huge part of the picture in what Tactic gear provides is behind those cards.

Without getting into too much detail here because I want to look at what the gear means for supporting, rather than an overall look the way I did in the past - the more tactics cards you draw, the stronger they become. There are only a few 'duff' tactics cards that do not do enough.

Now the Green Plate is the strongest option for drawing tactics cards, and we've discussed that item in the past over here: Green Armor the Alpha and the Omega. So that is not in the scope of this look. Instead, here we're going to look at the three badges, how you get them, how good they are for the 'cost' (costs do not just include resources for these badges) and the way you would employ each one. In some ways this is retreading old content, but for the sake of completeness for this series I wanted to take a fresh look and see if my opinions have changed over the intervening time.

(Part of the reason why I am doing this here is because we are moving to a new home on an Island over this week, I have been packing up my office and trying to complete/ship things in this period. If you are waiting for stuff from me, it is in the post by the time you read this!)

Flower Knight Badge

Crafting Cost: Defeat the Flower Knight (Any level)

Additional Categories: Buff

Affinities: Up Blue is fine as an affinity, though you won't often use it on many builds. Still it can help plug up issues.

Abilities & Keywords: Badge keyword does nothing except confuse me (see Lion Knight entry for why), the jewelry keyword means it is vulnerable to being stolen by white lions - make sure you have some stone noses to protect this if you're concerned about losing. And all of these badges are unique to stop players from stacking them with themselves.

Main Ability: Aside from drawing the tactics card, this one has the strongest single bonus in +1 evasion. Each point of evasion you stack onto a survivor is stronger than the last one (until you cap the monster at only hitting on a 10) and this is an additional point of evasion you can get your hands on at LY5 which has synergism with Leather Armor + Monster Grease. It is possible to really min/max your evasion something crazy thanks to this. Drums (Rhythm Chaser) + Leather Armor + Monster Grease + Forbidden Dance (+1 evasion) + Survival of the Fittest is an easy +5 evasion without getting into any survivor specific benefits outside of those gained from repeatable innovation actions. Add in some cooking and/or tall grass and you can bottom out monster accuracy very early on.

Rating: S+ Tier. This is part of the puzzle as to why the Flower Knight turbo charges settlements into godhood. It's got the one of the two best possible stat buffs and it also provides a tactics card and an ok affinity to boot - all with no crafting cost!

Lion Knight Badge

Crafting Cost: Defeat the Lion Knight (any level)

Additional Categories: Buff

Affinities: N/A

Abilities & Keywords: Has the Knight keyword instead of the Badge one. This seems to be an inconsistency between the three items and it seems that some mistake was made here. Either they should all be 'badge' all be 'knight' or all be 'knight, badge'. I am not sure if this is the kind of thing that APG will notice and fix for Campaigns of Death. Otherwise the same old 'warning about lions stealing your jewelry applies'.

Main Ability: In addition to gaining a tactics card, you're getting +1 accuracy, which is not a very high priority buff. Most weapons have sufficient accuracy for their purposes and can also leverage the blind spot, so typically you're only going from 6+ to 5+ (20% improvement) or a 5+ to a 4+ (16.67% increase). However, the less accurate your weapon is, the better this badge remains. And the Lion Knight features a 4/8+/8 paired weapon in its Replica Claws - so there are areas where this badge can feature strongly. Going from an 8+ to a 7+ is 33% improvement in your relative accuracy.* I consider that to be pretty great.

This accuracy bonus is also better on slow weapons because they are more 'all or nothing' in their design and it can feel bad to miss with them.

Rating: A Tier. It very much depends on the weapon you are using. However, the cost for getting this badge involves having the Lion Knight on your timeline and that has a bunch of other issues surrounding it as the expansion is not that fun or engaging when you get to the showdown. (The stuff surrounding the showdown is amazing btw, so you have to take the rough with the smooth).

DBK Errant Badge

Crafting Cost: 1x organ, 1x bone (requires unlocking the Wet Resin Crafter)

Additional Categories: Defense

Affinities: Up red is, eh whatever. You might make use of it in combination with a down red on a Gorment build to activate Guard, but on the whole it's nice to have, but not anything to write home about.

Abilities & Keywords: Same as the Lion Knight here. A mostly irrelevant bunch of keywords with just a mild weakness to White Lions.

Main Ability: In addition to giving you a tactics card, the Dung Beetle Knight Errant Badge provides 1 armor point to all locations. That's 5 armor points in total, which is pretty darn big - it's half to a third of the protection that a Leather Shield provides (depending on how you value Block 1) or most armor set bonuses and it stacks onto things like that. One can never have too much armor. Which makes this a desirable choice for tanks, dps survivors or even survivors trying to play support without wearing a full 5 slot armor set. It is very good.

Rating: Considering the price, which is seriously low, this item is an amazing steal. It's on a similar power level to the Leather Shield and that item is amazing, plus it combines with shields, and armor, it's amazing, just like things such as the Scarab Circlet. S tier again.

So! This was a short one, but next time we have the most fun (and frustrating) category, miscellaneous - which will be extra long to make up for the short length of this one and then we'll cap this series all off with detailed drive into the various promotional support cards (plus a capstone article that will act as the contents page for the series).

*Notes on "Relative Accuracy":

Relative Accuracy is not the same as absolute accuracy. An increase in accuracy can be looked at in two methods, either you consider it in absolute terms - an 9+ to a 8+ is 20% to 30%. Which is you hit 10% more often. And that is a correct way of looking at it from dice roll to dice roll. But Relative Accuracy is where I am looking at how much better one accuracy is compared to the previous. So 8+ to 7+ is turning 2 successes on the dice (9, 10) into 3 successes (8, 9, 10) and that is a 50% improvement. In short an 8+ is 50% better than a 9+, which is 100% better than a 10+. This is why there are diminishing returns on certain stats, and they are better spread around, while others, especially evasion have increasing returns because they work in the opposite direction to most. If there is interest I can write a full piece on this matter, it helps a lot in understanding what stats are worth stacking or not (short version is, Luck and Evasion are the best ones to stack, Strength just needs to hit certain breakpoints and if you can't hit them then the inbetween values are not worth that much).