Whats in an Affinity: Weapons - Objective (Patreon)

Last time we looked at the flavor of the various weapons available in Monster, looking at how their component parts all have a particular colour bent and also breaking down how the mechanical themes of the weapons tie to the affinity themes. 

This time we're going to get into the actual application of this and see how the Objective, cannot be debated, portion of the affinities turns out. This is useful to players because it allows you to know what affinity spectrum you're going to receive and need for a particular weapon category and it is useful for custom creators because it ensures that you can keep your weapons 'feeling' like they are genuine and also know when it is Okay to divert away from this template and make an exception. This is a very tricky and difficult part of making the content if your brainstorming comes up with something that drifts far away from Adam's original ideas then it is just going to look and feel off to players even if they can't put their finger on why. Not only is there a strong visual and design aesthetic to the creatures in Monster, but their thematic designs, including the affinity ones, are also very strong. Get it wrong and experienced players with a lot of time in the game will instinctively avoid it.*

So we are going to look through the weapon catalog now and compare the Subjective/Flavor of each weapon to the Objective/Mechanical. There are some interesting results, including clashes (one is quite significant and has the 1.5 changes at its heart).

Each category is laid out as follows

Name - Self Explanatory

Subjective Affinities: MAJOR/minor - This is from last week's article and here for comparison in matching or clashing.

Number: Total number of weapons in category.

Has: B/G/R - Total number of blue, green and red affinities from all weapons in that category

Wants: B/G/R - Total Number of blue, green and red affinities needed to activate abilities.

Facts: Interesting facts about orientations and so on.

Then various notes and observations, including any dominant directions for certain colours.

Axe

Subjective Affinities: RED/blue

Number: 9 (11)

Has: 1/3(6)/10

Wants: 3/2(3)/4(5)

Facts:  The most common Red orientations on axes are in order Left (6) and Up (4).  

While the red component of Axe is very strongly represented in the existing designs, the rest of the affinity pie is about an even split between green and red. You get more green from axes, but they want more blue. This puts the weighting slightly into blue more than green (because we should weight demands higher than what the weapon is providing) - but it is still more of a RED/blue/green than a full RED/blue.

A large portion of this is thanks to the Xmaxe providing a Christmas Theme of Red/Green affinities and the rest of the green comes from the Greater Gaxe and the Sonic Tomahawk - in particular the Sonic Tomahawk's 'Need Two Green' comes heavily from the Phoenix's Rainbow theming. So I think when you look at the Axe affinities you can disregard the Xmaxe and Sonic Tomahawk because they are "monster" themes and you end up with a weapon that's heavily red and very mildly blue.

Taking into account the disqualifications of the two thematic weapons, I would consider this to be a soft match between the objective and subjective.

Bow & Arrows

Subjective Affinities: RED/BLUE

Number: 6 Bows, 7 Arrows

Has: 5/1/7

Wants: 2/1/6

Facts: No real pattern on orientation. Arrows do not seem to get affinities unless they come from a White Lion. Sunstalker bows are very red and as expected have heavy bone component.

Ah bows, outside of the rainbow/forest element of the Phoenix and the Flower Knight you are a very, very Red/Blue weapon. Which lands pretty close to thematically how they look, what they're built from and the mechanics of their mastery. However; the Sunstalker is responsible for three of the bows out there right now and the White Lion is responsible for the only arrows with affinities - so this pool is pretty polluted by those two monsters, both of whom have heavy red themes for their weapons and the counter push of blue/green comes solely from the Flower Knight who is a heavily Blue/Green monster by design (nature, luck, vespertine). 

I call this one a solid match, but it feels like we need more data.

Club

Subjective Affinities:  RED/BLUE 

Number: 9 

Has: 3/7/5

Wants: 0/0/0 

Facts: Most Red affinities are left facing, most green affinities are down facing. Clubs do not have affinity based activated abilities at the moment.

The single largest detractor from the template, Clubs defy the conventions set by their mechanics. They are one of the few AI manipulation weapons out there, but they have an incredibly weak blue presence and a very strong green one (far stronger than one expected). There are also very few 'monster theme' weapons pushing into this; the Prism Mace is a rainbow/light/refraction theme and it is responsible for 2 of the Green affinities, but the Gloom Hammer is a Slenderman theme one and that monster's colours are Blue/Red. 

Most of all, the trio of the Long Club (Frogdog), Whistling Mace and Skullcap Hammer steadfastly push clubs into green (with support from the OP Promo Scoopy Club). So it looks like there is absolutely not a match between the subjective flavor and the objective results.  It was expected we'd see a RED/BLUE but instead we have GREEN/RED (and a lot of green). The Red is fine, it matches up perfectly, but the skew to Green over Blue is a very hard one to explain.

Even on a material front their are issues, the Weapon Crafter clubs both have zero red affinities despite using skulls in their design (one of the classic Red materials), plus they are both two weapons with Heavy AI control in their design.  Most of this seems to be thanks to a forced push on making these weapons work with Leather gear, but it also could be linked to the way that 1.31 Clubs had a different Spec/Mastery.

Or it could be that Green is also a colour of AI manipulation and we just have not seen enough gear cards to reveal that yet. We shall have to see, revising and updating the hypothesis as time and more information reveals.

Dagger

Subjective Affinities: RED 

Number: 12

Has: 5/1/20

Wants: 2/1/11

Facts: Almost an even split across directions for Red affinities. White/Giga Lion affinities make up 40% of all Red affinities on the daggers and are also the most demanding weapons for wanting red affinities. White Lions are an exceptionally red monster.

There is no surprise here, Daggers have the most red abilities in the game, they care about speed, strength and dealing wounds. This weapon type fits the pattern more than any other. In fact, it is such a hard slant towards red that you should not expect to get much in the way of other affinity colours into your build if you are a dagger used (exception Cycloid Scale). 

By this, one means that it is hard to activate items like the Shadow Saliva Shawl/Monster grease or similar because your weapon rarely ever contributes. This is one (of many) reasons why daggers are not used by Tanks/Bruisers.

Grand

Subjective Affinities: BLUE/red 

Number: 8

Has: 2/4/12

Wants: 0/4/2

Facts: Typical affinities point Up Red or Right Red. Up and Right is the most common affinity orientations for these weapons also.

The objective layout of Grand weapons turns out to be RED/green, so it looks like the Zanbato is the weapon that set the affinity style for this class of weapon. This ties in with what we see in clubs and suggests that we should revisit the subjective concept and consider Green to have AI control elements as well (knockdown/reaction canceling here). This is an interesting result, but it also ties into accuracy as being a green ability. 

We shall see as things progress, but one is already tending towards this consideration, and that's exciting.

Katar 

Subjective Affinities:  GREEN/blue

Number:  9

Has: 5/2/4

Wants: 2/0/4

Facts: Typically low numbers of affinities, no Katar gives more than 2 at the most.

While thematically Katars are 100% a GREEN/blue weapon, it seems that in practice they are BLUE/RED. 

A large part of this was the release of the Oxidised Beast Katars, which slid the scale on red ahead of green. That was because Katars tend to lack affinities a lot of the time. The reason for this was a balancing decision, when Katars were made originally, internal testing indicated that Paired was a strong positive ability, so paired weapons often had either no affinities (LBK, Beast Knuckle), limited affinities (Digging Claw, Hooded Scrap) or awkward layout/activation options (Sonic Tomahawk, Lion Knight Replica Claws). 

The community however learnt that Paired is not a positive ability, while high speed can be devastating when applied with intelligent, high level play - it is a high skill floor stat; that is 'It's very easy to mess this one up and kill your own hunt party'. Which is one of the core reasons why it's advised that newer/inexperienced players avoid more than 2 or 3 speed for as long as possible. 

It will be interesting to see how Katars evolve in the future, because their best use right now is employed by tanks in order to cancel reactions and stack evasion.

Shield 

Subjective Affinities:  GREEN/blue

Number:  12

Has: 2/3/3

Wants: 2/1/1

Facts: Most shields do not have affinities.

Despite an absolutely massive roster of options, it turns out that shields tend to avoid having affinities at all. The only blue affinity comes from the Feather Shield & Green Armor, and the red affinities are on the three 'aggressive' shields (Knuckle, Scrap, Grinning Visage). So overall Shields, despite the small number of affinities, do fit the expected pattern.

As for the low number of affinities overall, this is an area where the design team nailed it. Shields were correctly identified as being very powerful, in truth, a huge portion of the metagame revolves around shields because they are core to two key classes - Tanks and Bruisers (Blood Paint/Gorment DPS Tank Hybrids). 

I hope in the future we see more shields with affinities, especially ones as well designed as the Knuckle Shield or Feather Shield. But on the whole, if they continue this pattern, I think shields are in the right spot (and I do not believe they clash with the core subjective/flavor assessment either - offensive shields have red, the rest are either neutral or green/blue).

Spear

Subjective Affinities:  BLUE

 Number:  9(11)

Has: 3/3/5

Wants: 3/2/4

Facts: Tempered Spear represents a huge portion of both the has and wants affinities. It is a spear that broke the mold in so many ways and continues to be objectively broken with how overpowered it is.

Another weapon with relatively low numbers of affinities, this is reasonable because Spears are, like shields, one of the strongest weapons in the game by a long margin - also creating their own class of speed spamming "DPS" known as the Trapper. 

However, spears tended to be relatively tame weapons on the whole, with the Sky Harpoon and Lantern Glaive representing the most powerful members of their roster. This changed with 1.5's release of the exceedingly strong Lantern Glaive and the 10th Anniversary Survivors gave us one of the most ridiculous weapons in the game with the Tempered Spear (see facts above). So the power level on spears is creeping up, which is a concern for such a low skill floor weapon; fortunately the skill ceiling on spears remains high because of how the mastery operates.

Easily one of the strongest weapons in the game and now a 'must have' for mastery pursuit. We're pretty much locked into chasing Shield, Fist & Tooth and Spear for our first three masteries these days.

We're seeing a mismatch on the spear, it's more Red than expected and not as strongly blue.

Sword

Subjective Affinities:  RED

Number:  16

Has: 4/2/12

Wants: 2/0/3

Facts: The most common affinity is Left Red. 

Despite having the widest range of individual weapons in the game, the sword is as predicted a very "RED" weapon type, so much so that the only real exceptions to it are the few Luck/Deadly based options and special lore based ones (Griswaldo, Sword of Silence). 

There isn't really that much to say, swords tend to gain most of their power from Vagabond Armor and Secret Fighting Arts - they are exactly as predicted in the subjective article - Red based springboards for stacking SFAs onto.  The mild Luck/Blue slant was also expected as the precedent was set by True Blade and supported by the deadly/luck subset.

Solid match here.

Thrown

Subjective Affinities:  N/A

Number:  4

Has: 0/0/4

Wants: 0/0/0

Facts: Criminally under represented. The bastard stepchild of weapon types, most thrown "weapons" are not even weapons, they're bombs and those are almost all useless apart from the expensive, hard to craft, unique Beetle Bomb.

There is really not much to say here, if you are designing thrown weapons, you don' t have much to go on except for the fact that Harpoons are spear/thrown, they're red weapons and APG LLC apparently hates thrown weapons with a passion.

Let us hope that this group gets a rehaul soon shall we?

Whip

Subjective Affinities:  BLUE/red

Number:  4

Has: 3/1/0

Wants: 1/0/3

Facts: Not enough Whips? Yes, absolutely that.

We have an exceedingly small sample size here, but it highlights strongly both the fact that we need more whips in the game. It also provides a solid match and gives us a BLUE/RED, with the sole green coming from the Silk Whip.

Because there is not much to say here. Let us take a look at what we lost during the design phase, here is some early art from the game.

While we did get a Leather Whip in the end, the original 'cat of nine tails' style design we see up there was never used - we also missed out on the Cobra Whip, the Bone Whip and that "Thorn Whip" we see the early Rawhide Survivor using. 

The lantern break down is also interesting and possibly worth a future discussion, but I am mostly holding out when it comes to the lanterns because we need to see where the Parasite Queen fits in before we delve into that subject.

Summary

What does this all mean and how can you use it?

Well, the first, and simplest thing to use it for is shorthand for how to get affinities. If you memorize the right side of the "vs." on the list below you'll know what weapon types dip into which affinities. 

If you are looking to design weapons, now you know how to give them affinities that match the real deal, which will help sell your stuff and make it feel authentic. That is very important;  failing to match APG's designs, along side feature creep, word salad and failure to balance numbers are the major missteps that are made along the way when constructing custom content. This is one piece that should help you avoid that, you should at least now get the balance, number and colour of affinities right for your weapons and armor.

• Axe: RED/Blue vs. RED/Green/blue - Soft Match
• Bow & Arrows: RED/Blue - Match
• Club: RED/Blue vs. GREEN/red - Mismatch - so they are Green/Red
• Dagger: RED - Match
• Grand: BLUE/Red vs. RED/Green - Mismatch. - Green/Red again, but Blue is acceptable.
• Katar: GREEN/blue vs. Green/Red - Mismatch (A lot of No affinity weapons here)
• Shield: GREEN/blue (with Red on offensive shields) - Match (a lot of no affinity weapons also)
• Spear: BLUE vs. RED/blue - Mismatch - Spears are more Red than Blue, though that may be in part due to the White Lion/Sunstalker influence.
• Sword: RED 
• Thrown: N/A vs. RED - N/A
• Whip: BLUE/Red - Match

Katanas as mentioned before are either 0 affinty weapons or in the Red/Green spectrum, but more data is required on this weapon type. However, based on all the information we have I do not see them being particularly blue weapons outside of monster themes.

Next time we'll look at Monster Themes and dip into affinities on items a bit!

*If you have something seriously far off the original vision, or something that treads on an existing creation heavily, you can get away with this by constructing your own setting and just using the mechanical framework of Monster. So there is a place for most custom creations, just sometimes it's not in the main game setting, this is why I'm working on Project Hotdog - I don't entirely agree with the affinity and core gear design style in Monster, but you can be sure, if I build a monster for use in the official game, I will stick to that style.