What's in an Affinity: Weapons 1 of 2 (Subjective) (Patreon)

Now I've been right through the recording and analysis all of the weapon affinities it's time to break down and doll out the information. Weapons come in a wide range of different categories and styles, but their flavor and design on the affinity front can be broken down into two different categories, the subjective and the objective. Or if you prefer, the flavor and mechanical.  

Objective (Mechanical) affinity design is very straightforward and cannot be argued with one iota, it is the existing affinities as applied to the weapons available right now in the game. Each weapon has a dominance of one or two affinity types in its design and this is only varied when there is some strong thematic or synergistic reason for doing so. An example of when this variation occurs is in the Rainbow theme of the Phoenix or the synergistic pushing of the Rib Blade to be blue (there are actually thematic reasons for it being a blue weapon as well despite its position as a grand one - we'll talk about it a bit later on here).

Objective will be for next time (and that's the one for the stats nerds). This week we are going to go through the Subjective (aka Thematic or Flavor) design behind the affinity choices on the weapons. These come from two main sources, the materials behind the weapons design and the "realms" that the weapon specializations/masteries are placed in. I think you'll find this one an interesting read, for sure if shows just how deep the rabbit hole goes where Adam's designs are concerned and I think it's something no one has really discussed before. Lets get to the first part, materials!

Materials

So, while there are a bunch of different material types in Monster, the main three are bone, hide and organs. Scrap/metal is the fourth one and the rest are all minor resources. Each of these three main material types are directly and clearly linked to an affinity colour, some of you may intrinsically know what those are, some of you may be able to figure it out based on the previous articles in this series, but here we go.

• Bone  →  Red  → Body/Blood/Offense
• Hide  →  Green  → Resilience/Nature/Defense
• Organs  →  Blue  → Mind/Sky/Spirit 

These three themes link to the general gear design in the game, weapons more typically use bones, items more typically use organs and armor more typically uses hide.  It just clicks together neatly.

So, when we look at a weapon, the first portion of what makes up its affinities are the materials it is made from. A weapon that is made from bone and organs should be blue, red or blue/red. One that is made from organs and hide should be green/blue - this is a close to consistent rule that's followed throughout the weapons, except when monster themes override this. Lets take a quick look at a few weapons and see how this flows:

• Bone Sword  →  1x bone  → Red Affinity
• Rib Blade  → 1x bone, 1x organ  → Blue Affinity (Organ plus Deadly)
• Knuckle Shield  → 1x bone/organ/hide, 2x bone  → Red Affinity
• Sunshark Bow  → 2x bones, 1x organ, 1x salt  → Red Affinities
• Sunring Bow → 6x bone, 2x organ  →  Red Affinities
• Zanbato  → 1x bone, 1x hide  → Red and Green affinities

But. BUT! This is not a hard rule, as mentioned above monster themes, weapon mastery themes or even mechanical needs can override this. It is just one way of building a weapons affinity framework. 

We shall now move onto the other portion of the affinity theming, this one is certainly up for debate and subjective, but it fits the picture well and most importantly it follows Ockham's Razor (this is a very useful tool when analysing things, without it you end up thinking the Manhunter comes from the Great City - Spoilers they don't, they're from the Holy Lands, don't believe me? Here it is from the man himself). So lets go hack at the weapons with our razor shall we?

Axe - Major Red, Minor Blue

Axe is a very straightforward one to lay out there, both of its proficiency abilities are linked to wounding (red dominion) and its mastery indirectly alters monster behavior which is a blue dominion. But, we're going to see that this does not translate across to the actual way axes are designed in the game next week. It's interesting.

Bow - Red/Blue Major, Minor Green

Rerolls and movement (ignore cumbersome) are firmly in the red dominion at the moment and critical wounds (Deadly 2) are in the Blue one. The minor green comes from the slight flavor that the reroll impacts on accuracy (accuracy is currently suspected to be green ability, but that's subject to change) and that distance (range) is a great defensive tool. However I suspect that Bows may just end up being blue/red weapons in the end - all of the bows in the game except for the cowards bow are either red and/or blue already.

Club - Red/Blue

Clubs themes come from not just its proficiency, but also from the weapons themselves. Clubs have a massive amount of AI control, one of a few places where you can impact on monster AI outside of the Rawhide Headband in fact, so that is where the blue portion of the pie comes from. The Red is self explanatory, clubs have higher chances to wound and deal more wounds when they do so.

However, when we look at the affinities on clubs, they are absolutely not this. While Red is well represented, multiple clubs are heavily green (Whistling Mace, Skullcap Hammer, Scoopy Club) with no real thematic link for this. Clubs have always been a problem child in Monster, it feels very much like they were not well thought out (in a similar way to how Daggers and Whips are neglected).

Dagger - Red

Oh dear, it's the word salad weapon class!  That mastery is absolutely how NOT to write rules text by the way, it's a horrible mess to parse (good ability though now that Daggers have been buffed in the 10th Anniversary, Halloween White Speaker, White Speaker, Echoes of Death and Gigalion promo sets).  This is a very straightforward 'hurt the monster' weapon class and most of the daggers in the game follow this red theme.

Grand Weapons - Major Blue, Minor Red

So, Physically (materials) grand weapons are very, very red, but when you drill into what they do, they are a weapon with a massive amount of monster control, having both a straight 'reaction cancel' knock down on a critical wound and the ability to cancel all reactions on a perfect hit (I will remind you once more that the Skleaver is NOT slow, don't leave home without one).  This is a solidly blue weapon and when you look at the Grand weapons as they exist right now, it holds up except for the zanbato. That old problem child Zanny-Bee, ugh how I wish you and the Counterweighted Axe would get redesigned. You're both a mess!

Katar - Green/Blue

Yup, a very blue/green weapon here. Cancellation of reactions is a solidly blue ability while evasion is sat over in the world of green. This isn't surprising at all considering how Katars are (eventually) used as primary attacking weapons for evasion based tanks.

Shields - Major Green, Minor Blue

There is no surprise to anyone that shields are a very green weapon. However at mastery level they gain a green/blue ability that allows them to protect others (green) while also controlling who the monster targets (blue). The spear/shield master combo btw is my favourite 1-2 survivor pairing in the game.  I have had 2 spear masters and 2 shield masters in the same hunt party exactly once and it was amazing fun.

Spear - Blue

There is no weapon class that is more blue than spears.  That specialization is a game defining ability found only on the blue charm (with variations on it on the Crest Crown and Scythe) and is one of the core foundations of blue. The mastery has a tiny, tiny hint of green if you want to reach, but it is really an AI modifying behavior that is very blue and only gets its green when used in combination with a tank.  You can even build a spear tank with this pairing, but I prefer to split up my spear and shield users.

Sword - Red

Is it a surprise to anyone that the most boring and basic of all the weapon options in the game is so heavily red? Just about every single interesting flair that the sword gets comes from its secret fighting arts, the weapon itself is the bread or pizza base. 

There are absolutely amazing, powerful and ridiculous things that can be done with swords, but they do not come from the mastery (specialization is nice if you have a deadly sword though!) This is as baseline red as it can come.

Whip - Major Blue, Minor Red

Another weapon like the club that gets a lot of its colour identity from the individual weapons, Whips have an incredible level of AI control baked into every single one of them (apart from the normal Ring whip which is just a disappointing basic bitch). However they mechanically work around wounding and that is very much a red ability.

As an aside here, I think that Whips should have triggered from 'on hit' rather than 'when you wound' because that would be more like how whips work. It would also lessen the need for high strength to make whips not suck.

Here is the list in simple to read format:

(Name - MAJOR/minor)

• Axe - RED/blue
• Bow - RED/BLUE/green
• Club - RED/blue
• Dagger - RED
• Grand - RED/blue
• Katar - GREEN/BLUE
• Shield - GREEN/blue
• Spear - BLUE
• Sword - RED
• Whip - BLUE/red

It's not surprising to see that most weapons sit heavily in the domain of red, but there is a very strong showing for blue also. Few weapons are purely slanted towards just dealing damage, with Dagger being the most heavily leaning (which is why daggers were so unpopular pre-buff campaign, their statline just did not link to their ability) and Sword just because it's a basic platform for fighting arts to be pasted on top of - hey, sword, YA BASIC. 

Next time (either next week or the week after, these things take a LOT of time to do) we'll be referring back to this list and cross referencing it with the actual weapon affinities. We can then see where the themes ring out strongly and where they are muddled either by the materials, game requirements (aka forcing builds - I know what you did Zanbato, I know) or changes in the philosophy of the game have muddied the direction that the weapon was originally pointed in.

Note: I have left Scythe and Fist & Tooth off this list because there are not enough examples to be able to explore properly. They are both blue/red ish in style at the moment however. This is also why I have left of the Twilight Sword and Katana - there is not enough information to determine what dominions they belong to, though the Twilight Sword is likely blue because that is the colour of the order and the Katana is likely RED/green because it provides a benefit for being injured that deals more wounds - the Gloom Katana is blue/red not because that is the weapon's theme, but because that is the Slenderman's theme. I firmly think future Katanas will trend more towards red and green than blue - blue is not a very strong portion of Katana design.

Note 2: 1.31 club was a mix of Green/Red and Blue in close to equal parts, this explains somewhat why its identity is a mess now - the changes to the mastery diluted its identity hard.