Late Game Sword Hijinks: Builds without Armor (Patreon)

Recently Lawman5014 over on the discord posted about a build he's been working towards in his latest game and I thought it was a) worth sharing and b) worth tuning, exploring and providing some variants.

Now before we start, I think it's time to just again mention the oddity that are Swords. Swords are a low priority weapon type to master in Monster simply because there are no good early or mid game swords, all of the efficient or powerful swords are sat in the end game. Do not mistake it, swords late game are exceedingly ridiculous, but they take a long time to craft and they do not need the mastery to be powerful. 

While some weapons pay off with early investment into the mastery (Bow, spear, F&T, shield, Whips) Sword is in the group that only really comes online late game along with things like Club, Dagger and Scythe. 

So that's a big part of what makes swords great, you can forget about them for a long time before pivoting into them if you hit the ability to construct one of the big three swords.  For the record, the best swords come from the Sunstalker, the Gorm and the Green Armor (Dung Beetle Knight/Flower Knight sword) - don't forget, you can always build the Green Armor parts anytime, even if you don't have the ability to construct all of it, items like the shield, sword and helm in particular are very strong standalone from the rest of the armor - but even the chest plate, gloves, waist and boots have uses in mixed sets.

Before we get rolling, lets look at the Big Three and examine how they run the gamut of offensive options. 

Griswaldo from the Green Armor is the hardest and most powerful of these, but it also sits between the other two in where it is designed to be used. It's got a mix of strength and deadly, plus it has built in blood paint if you also have Fetorsaurus in the same gear grid. This allows for the survivor using Griswaldo to run a Bruiser build and be right in the face of the monster, tanking and attacking at the same time.

The Black Sword in contrast is a pure strength based weapon, it has become something of a meme in the community and it's always fun to see some newer player push the busted build they discovered. The largest issue with the Black Sword is simple, it's a fine weapon, it is balanced, but it should NOT interact with vagabond armor. The truth of the matter is, the Black Sword is actually the least powerful of these three weapons, it's not close to the overall utility, compact grid, pick up and use plus power of Griswaldo and it's nowhere near as good offensively as the Ink Sword.  

Which brings us to my pick for the strongest sword in the game, I've been pushing to bring this one to people's attention constantly for a fairly long time, but because it's located in a hard part of the game to access (Behind the L3 Sunstalker) and it has a self limiter in its design (requiring darkness to work) it's consistently overlooked. But make NO mistake, this weapon is 100% stronger than both of the other two.

One of the reasons for this is how Luck/Deadly works against monsters, if you trigger a critical wound location (and most monsters have many, many of these) then you get to ignore the reactions. Most dangerous reactions from monsters do not use the attack profile, so the addition of a shield via Blood Paint or Griswaldo's automatic trigger doesn't help here, they are still going to get hurt for attacking at times.  

The other two reasons are less obvious, the first one is that this weapon has Reach 3 and is employed with another survivor 'in the way' there are many reactions that care about the survivor being adjacent, the Ink Sword avoids these and can even be a part of a three survivor combo where you have a Shield Master at the front line, a Spear Master behind him (look at how the masteries interact) and the Ink Sword DPS behind that further.  Range is very powerful in KDM, and it combines with Dragon Armor (or Phoenix Armor).  But the Ink Sword does require a very high positional skill level from the players, especially when combined with the monster movement abilities, you need to get your lantern survivor into the space where your Ink Sword survivor is going to Leap/Charge (Leap is easier to pull off).  It's really damn cool to watch, as a survivor with a shield or spear moves around and the Ink/Dragon survivor then leaps into position.

Just remember to get 1-2 of this item on the escorting survivors.

You can even run dual Ink Sword survivors each with this lantern and they help each other attack. There are also a bunch of passive benefits to this item, it's a lantern, extra accuracy and amazing affinities. But it is not cheap to make, requiring 2x L1 Sunstalker per lantern.

The final reason is one that is often overlooked, the Ink Sword has a blue down affinity, that means it contributes to builds that activate the Blue Charm, giving the weapon additional protection against the Trap, this is one of the few swords that can do that with the right options. For an easy, but inefficient version of this, try out the Ink Sword + Lucky Charm + Cycloid Scale Armor + Sleeping Virus Flower + Blue Charm. You can't benefit from the Cycloid Scale blind spot bonuses, but the ease of use makes it a good way to start learning.

So intro aside let us look at Lawman's build.

So, what is this build looking to do? For a start it is using the combination of a hard shield (2 armor points) plus the calcified DBK plates to create a solid defense in a compressed number of slots (8 armor to all locations + Block 2 + Ripple Pattern).

That frees up the rest of the grid to include the Blood Paint combo and some items to boost luck plus an incredible weapon.  Now, as our discussion progressed, Lawman looked at Griswaldo in the build instead, which I agree with over the Black Sword for a number of reasons.  We'll go into it now.

For a start, as mentioned above Griswaldo has build in activations for Fetorsaurus, so there is not so much of a need for Blood Paint (you can still use if as we'll see later). But the most significant thing is this, the point of the Black Sword is it is overwhelming offense that needs zero support from the rest of your grid. When you use the Black Sword you are saying 'I will wound ALL monsters on a 2+' so it has weak synergy with the +luck items.  When building offense choose one of either strength or deadly as your focus, don't dabble into both.  

However, that is still not what I consider to be the optimal focus for this kind of build, and we will explore that below. But before we begin, I want to bring two abilities and one SFA to your attention, they are going to be used extensively.

True Blade is an example of a really well designed SFA, with a simple bonus of Deadly to all swords and then if you have and live with the Ghostly Beauty & Narcissistic disorders (both of which are non-trivial downsides) then you gain a massive benefit, effectively turning every sword you wield into a baseline Deadly +3 Luck and scaling with weapons that have higher deadly.

Crystal Skin and Leyline Walker are two abilities that provide bonuses for not wearing traditional armor, they can in fact be combined at the cost of not being able to wear accessories (something Crystal Skin can do normally). But you get huge baseline benefits with +3 evasion and 3 armor to all locations. You should be able to see how these two abilities stack with shields and the DBK Plates, both of which provide armor points without being armor.

So, with all of that written, what variations can we take on this idea of True Blade + powerful weapons?

Lucky Ink Sword

For reasons I have already written above, I consider this to be the purest and most well refined version of this type of build. The Ink Sword provides Deadly 3 and you gain +2 luck from your grid and an additional +3 luck from True Blade, resulting in the equivilant of +6 to your chances of scoring critical wounds, add to that the baseline 10 and you're scoring critical wounds 70% of the time (3+). That means every location you hit which has a critical wound possible will allow you to dodge the reactions 70% of the time and generate the beneficial results of the crit.  

The Sunspot Lantern is a flex spot, however if you run two of these survivors you can benefit a lot from having it. Still, the core of this build is True Blade + the gear and a Sunspot Lantern on one other survivor.  The major benefit? This build does not care if you are a sword master or not, you get 4/4+/4 "Deadly 6" attacks with Reach 3 - that's not something the Black Sword can provide.. Boom.

Deathly Ink

In contrast this version of the build takes advantage of the Vagabond Armor set bonus, which pushes your Sword into a becoming a 5/5+/5 "Deadly 11" weapon (therefore not really needing the Sleeping Virus Flower - you can replace it with a Life Potion or Dried Acanthus). At "Deadly 11" the survivor essentially ignores the first three luck tokens that the monster has, consistently critically wounding most monsters in the game on a 2+ (with a few exceptions such as the Butcher and the Golden Eyed God of 1000 Years - aka Old Man Phoenix).

The major benefit of this build however is even without True Blade this build clocks in at an impressive "Deadly 8", which is still 2+ crits versus most crittable wound locations.

Mid Game Scrap Deadly

Where would be be without a mid game version, In fact if you have True Blade, you can jam any sword into the grid because of how it works, but without True Blade this is a place where  a survivor can actually make use of the Scrap Sword.  And that is why I present it here, this should give you some ideas on how to leverage the Scrap Sword more and make use of it. It's actually not terrible with White Lion Armor parts as you see.  The Silk Robes are in the grid simply because they fit the up red requirement and I rarely get to showcase them because Silk lacks a lot.  You could easily put other things there as long as you can manage to connect the affinities, what matters is the two White Lion parts, the Lucky Charm & Flower combo and the Scrap Sword. Boom.

The Ridiculous Bruiser

Lets finish this off with a really silly version that showcases what happens if you stack the same ability (or variations of it) onto the same survivor. By combining Griswaldo & Fetorsaurus along with Blood Paint and a second sword (it could be the Black Sword or an Oxidized Lantern Sword, anything powerful) you gain the ability to attack twice and block 2 per attack. This gives you the capability to shred monsters from the front line, sat right in their face and slashing away at a level of power that few survivors ever reach. The rest of the hunt party could be devoted to support and trap control when you have a survivor like this at the front line.

Until next time, may your builds be powerful and unique!

Note: Never forget that you can get a Sleeping Virus Flower onto any survivor you desire by killing an L3 Flower Knight. Also Crystal Skin survivors who die with it equipped do not cause it to be archived because they ignore the cursed text.