Whipping the Watcher: A Showdown Breakdown (Patreon)

I've had a request for a Showdown analysis of the Watcher and as I do enjoy doing these things (despite the amount of time and work involved in each one), I was very happy to oblige as The Watcher is part of the content I've still not fully broken down on this patreon. We've looked at oxidization in the past, but this time we're going to drill into The Watcher as an overall foe on the board. 

Spoilers for People of the Lantern and various bits of the lore along with massive spoilers for the Watcher and even Steven King's Dark Tower series. So below this image of the Ultimate White Speaker. She is here to protect you from unwanted spoilering.

As source of all innovations in Lantern, the trigger for the creation of saviors and one of the servants(?*) of the Ethereal Dreamer - The Watcher was the flagship monster for the original Kingdom Death release known as 1.31. In 1.31 The Watcher was the looming menace that protected the settlement and fed them ideas/technology so they would survive and thrive until it was time to awaken and feast!

It is important to remember this, the Watcher used to be the intended final foe of the campaign before it progressed into the (now cancelled) Lantern Festival. The Gold Smoke Knight was added in 1.5, but never integrated well into the story, this creates an odd disconnect that only makes sense when you look at what the game used to be. 

--------------------------

As you can see In 1.31 the campaign turned into a desperate fight for survival once the Watcher was slain, the settlement could no longer innovate and they had to fight a stream of gradually stronger and stronger monsters in a survive or become extinct situation.

I should really at some point go into the 'endings' issue in some detail, but suffice to say that endings in horror (or even in the grubby fantasy genre like KDM) are hard to get right. Especially in the medium of games; in books and in film/tv the consumer is a passive watcher, they may analyse and comment, but they cannot influence the outcome. In games they are an active participant, they make decisions - and in KDM that is oh, so many, many, many decisions. So for a passive watcher a bleak, downer ending that feels inevitable and unavoidable works, but for an active participant, especially one in a pseudo-roleplaying game like Monster - it has a lot of problems.

In 1.31 the endings of the campaign were very interesting, either you died before the Watcher awoke, you were slain by the Watcher or you entered the 'Boss Rush' period and the settlement faded away into darkness. "Wait, that's not interesting!" You say, well the reason it was interesting is because players figured out two other alternative endings; you could reset the campaign via Clinging Mists/Déjà vu - creating a bleak, nihilistic situation where only 4 chosen survivors could carry back to the start of the timeline and erasing everyone else who ever existed in the settlement. Even looping that situation is bleak as heck because the chosen 4 might not be the ones who loop next time - it's like the Dark Tower except there's no indication that any loop will ever result in an improvement.

The other ending that was discovered by a player is equally bleak, dark and wonderful. By employing the original version of Sacrifice, you could ritualistically slay survivors and push back the Watcher's awakening indefinitely. Building a society that can last the ages, but at the cost of essential cultish sacrifice of their own. Talk about nihilistic. 

All of this is part of the Picture in understanding the Watcher, it was designed as the ultimate foe for the settlement, it's why the campaign feels like it reaches its culmination when you are at the Watcher and anti-climatic afterwards, because the Watcher is the end of the first story arc and the Gold Smoke Knight is basically an intermission period Boss. Lorewise the GSK is considerably more important than that, it's been horribly mistreated by the game - killing it is slaying the guardian of the very land you stand on . But, well the hope is that things get improved and refined in the upcoming releases, APG are aware of the problems and issues caused by the rushed release.

The Watcher's Themes

The Watcher, like all monsters in this game, is built around a few core themes, and understanding these themes can help solidify your understanding of how the monster is likely to behave. Just like the Dragon King is Godzilla, the Butcher is Jason Voorhees and the King's Man is a blend of a clockwork soldier and Michael Jackson's robot character from the end of his movie. 

The Watcher is a Dream/Memory Jellyfish. With minor 'breathing' themes because of how breath links to dreaming and mimics ocean waves.

When you take a look at the monster through this lens, you'll see how every part of it echoes this in a very clever and intelligent fashion (also this is the reason why there is no need for a jellyfish monster to exist elsewhere in the game ever, we already have one).

These are the driving themes of this creature, a nightmare/dreamlike control over things along with the physical characteristics of a Jellyfish (albeit one constructed from cloth and lanterns). We'll explore that more as we move forward.

As before, we're going to look at the strengths and weaknesses of the monster, so you understand how the monster will try to kill you, and be aware of when the monster Power Spikes and the troughs that it has. In particular, with the way that the Watcher ebbs and flows as a part of its Jellyfish design, these are always worth keeping an eye on.

Stats

The Watcher comes in one main flavor of stats. It has infinite movement, 12 AI cards, toughness equal to the lantern year and life points = to the current lantern year  -10.  This means the earlier you awaken the Watcher, the weaker it is. This is why I advocate waking the Watcher as soon as possible, while there are times where you may need to hunt a few more specific L2 or lower monsters (say to finish a Skleaver), there is no reason to hold back on pulling the band aid, you should be more than capable of handling L3 monsters by LY16-18 anyway, so the change post Watcher into the new "boss rush" is not a large issue.

Also because it is a life points monster (like the Lonely Tree) you cannot disrupt its AI by pruning nasty cards, you can only Rawhide Headband them away.

Attack Vectors

How does the Watcher try and kill? Well, it's prefered attack vectors are:

• Survival Drains
• Bleeding
• Brain Damage
• Collision (which triggers Bleeding & Brain Damage)
• Auto Kill vs. Double Trap Draw
• Normal Damage

Basic Action, Instinct & Status Cards

We start with a look at the persistent cards that are present throughout the fight. As always, because status cards impact repeatedly over the showdown they are your first clue as to how the monster will operate and what attack vectors it is going to employ.

Basic Action

This attack targets the furthest away survivor with an attack a 4 speed and 5 damage. Needless to say, this is a very dangerous attack to be hit by and you want to avoid it going to the wrong target. Which can be done by keeping your tank as the furthest survivor, or ensuring that all survivors are at the same distance. The Knockback 10 means that the survivor who is hit may well end up being the furthest survivor again.

Lantern Vortex

This Bashes all survivors within the 6x6 area surrounding the monster at the start of the monster's turn. This means they will be knocked down and not a threat. It then performs the Basic Action. Meaning that the first thing the Watcher does is knock everyone nearby down and then go after the furthest away survivor.

Absorb

Very simple, very dangerous. The Watcher "ebbs" back to the middle of the board and then heals while dropping -1 strength onto all the survivors. Nasty, because Heal is a dangerous trait on monsters that do not drop rewards for critical wounds. You're looking to end those fights as soon as possible and Heal prolongs the fight. This heal even weakens the survivors to boot.

Also, as you can see, the Watcher can sometimes move back to the middle 4 spaces, don't stand survivors/retinue in them.

Indomitable

Very standard, this trait exists to mitigate the Knockdown dogpile strategy of knocking down the monster and then dealing as much damage as possible while it cannot react. At this point everyone should be aware of how to handle this one, you've got opportunity(s) to surge and attack during the first attack against the knockdown monster, but it depends on when/if you can score survival opportunity triggers.

Vapor of Nothingness

The Watcher likes to collide with things, this is how it deals damage when it does. It's a nastier version of Trample. You're just going to have to deal with it by trying to minimize other damage to the head, because you can't avoid this unless you can avoid the collision in the first place.

Audience

This one is part of the combo that makes the Watcher fight feel epic in a way that the GSK just doesn't. The entire settlement is involved here as they see a fundamental change in their world, the thing they saw as their protector, turned against them.  

The main trick here is, you get to keep departing with survivors - with all the benefits of departing. Pay attention to the rules for Survivor Death (all gear returned to the settlement storage) and departing (equip up). This means you can pull tricks like sending out a sacrificial Pleb loaded up with founding stones and maybe a weapon in the first wave, then after they've spent their load they can be killed and replaced with someone more effective.

It also means you can leave your best survivors for later in the showdown, bringing them in to mop up after the plebs have taken most of the damage and dealt most of the wounds. This depends on your builds, I prefer builds that do not rely on specific survivors (most of the time), so the survivors underneath the armor are interchangeable. However, be aware, you NEED to trigger Embolden to get the next survivor in, so swing for the ropes once someone has died.

Also, big populations matter, there's no punishment for having a large population once you're past the Armored Strangers event. So always be breeding.

Retinue 

One of the 'silver bullets' for The Watcher, Retinue gives you access to a LOT of extra strength for the damage dealing survivor. You can easily manage to get a +12 for any survivor who wants it. 

The cost of this is population, each Retinue that dies is -4 population and they are killed 60% of the time by any kind of damage at all. (Yeah -4 population, but 9 miniatures used... just go with it). They're large, unwieldy and the Watcher tends to slap them about with incidental collision damage a lot. 

But if you have a big population, and if there are any rules I've wanted people to take away from this it's that females > males as hunters (except for Harvestman) and big populations matter.  So you should, if you've been playing strategically, have enough population of plebs and rejects to absorb these losses and keep respawning the Retinues.

Stolen Dreams

Rarely inflicted, and a survivor is completely immune to this if they have max courage & understanding. But it's pretty nasty, immobilizing a survivor almost entirely with knockdown until 2 survivors/retinues (any combination) can manage to get adjacent to the knocked down survivor. This is handled via a moment by moment monitoring of positioning. 

AI Deck (12 Cards - No Variation)

Special note to the AI Deck here, it's unique in the way that few monsters are, because you never remove the AI cards via wounds. It's always going to have those same 12 cards, just the order is switched up. This makes it more predictable than most monsters early on, but less predictable (in comparison) later.  

Power Spikes

Inhale - This card is bad news because of how it pulls survival away from survivors, meaning they're more likely to get in trouble with the 'die if you don't have enough survival' cards. This can be limited by sticking far enough away that you do not get pulled in at the start of the monster's turn, but you need reach weapons for that.  You can also set Block at a distance, get pulled in and then surge to attack during a flow step. In contrast Exhale isn't much of a problem outside of its positional effects.

Void Warp - good luck with this one. But, if you're wearing the Hours Ring this card is probably going to just get you killed and reset the lantern year. Worth remembering if things have gone horribly wrong, just run and kite until you can embolden out a survivor with the Hours Ring and bam, the Watcher will hand you an extra go at killing it.

Harrow - And there goes your survival... Whee.

Purify - Big oof if you have positive tokens. 

As for Targeting, about half the time it's going to involve a threat, the rest of the time it's a bit mixed on what happens. So not being a threat does help protect you. Mmm Poop Makeup.

Troughs

Biophoton Feast - If you are aware that's coming, or even just aware of it in general, you can handle this by not being on the side of the monster where the 'furthest board edge' is. However, you might want to keep one target there because otherwise you'll have to deal with absorb.

Stupefy - Horrible if you're high understanding, irrelevant if you've been performing Insanity abuse or you are wearing a Gorment Mask. Yes, the Watcher's level is 1, so you only need 2+ courage to ignore intimidates. Whoops!

HL Deck (25 Cards - All "Unique", 14 crit locations, 2 traps, 9 non-crit locations)

Trap: Another special note to the Trap, the Watcher has two trap cards and drawing both of them is an automatic kill. So you need to be very careful with valuable attacks during this showdown, slow weapons are fantastic (as they are everywhere), as is HL Scouting and intelligent play.  Spears/Blue Charm do not work vs. the double trap draw, Scythe does help however because of the reshuffle (other Reshuffle effects are also good, like Phoenix Crown).

Unique-ness: In truth there are several duplicate cards in the watcher's HL deck, but they have different names to fool you into thinking they are different. Whiteout/Blackout are identical, Void Membran/Void Epidermis are also the same card, same with Tentacle Crown/Tentacle Chains. There are also cards which are functionally almost identical, such as Void Light/Void Gastrodermis.

Power Spikes

Void Membrane/Epidermis 

Basically, lose 2 survival or die. Otherwise the Watcher flees after you try and wound it. You generally want to leave this one till the end unless you're attacking with enough Range/Reach that you don't mind it floating backwards. It's also worth mentioning Tentacle Chains/Crown in the same section because they drain your survival and dump Stolen Dreams on you. Not as bad, but you'd still rather avoid it. Remember to stick relatively close to your fellows in case they need help.

Troughs

Inner Robes gives you an embolden on a wound, which is rare and very useful.

Void Nerve Mask gives out Survival for Romantic settlements or Insanity for Barbaric ones. Needless to say the Romantic one is stronger, but I've been recommending Romantic over Barbaric for a long time now. Likewise Hydrostatic Fluids/Skeleton provide +3 survival on crits. 

Outside of that, the vast majority of the troughs live on the critical wounds, in fact critically wounding the Watcher is a vital part of success against it because those are the ways that you reduce the attrition it is throwing against your survival and get your Embolden opportunities. 

So, on that front, the Watcher is much like most monsters in the game, crits good, really good.  

Silver Bullets

I've mentioned Silver Bullets above, the Watcher is greatly weakened by the presence of the Retinues, it's toughness should always effectively be -6 or -12 when you're attacking it. (You can see why the earlier you wake the Watcher, the easier the fight is with this). 

But there are also two other major silver bullets, Founding Stones and the Twilight Sword.  The TS is an overt and obvious silver bullet, as the Twilight Order slay Watchers (hence their heavily blue affinity nature), they have developed protection from the Watchers and weapons that are very effective against them.  A Twilight Sword, developed to the appropriate level will devastate and shred a Watcher. This is the point you have been saving them for, I hope you benched your TS s

Also the second silver bullet, or bullets is Founding Stones (and Deathpact), the Watcher punishes high speed attackers, but reels from critical wounds. Thrown Founding stones are both of these in one, they're a slow automatic critical wound and you can pack all of them onto one survivor who just tosses them until they die, or they have spent them all. It's crazy and I wonder if it this silver stone bullet was intentional or just caused by players being inventive.  So you might want to save your founding stones from the start and stockpile them as you find more.

Summary

So to wrap this all up, how do you go about approaching the Watcher fight? As can be seen, the main attack route that survivors should be undertaking is via critical wounds, this is because the Watcher holds a lot of locations with extreme benefits for critical wounds and a significant portion of punishment on the normal reactions.  Critical Wounds in particular are vital and you should be running 2 crit builds if you can because that is how you mostly get your embolden triggers.

Where Critical Wounds are not being employed, the combination of high strength weapons plus retinue(s) should cover most circumstances. 1-2 speed is safest to employ and unlike most monsters you cannot get away with high speed spear/blue charm spamming because of how the double traps work.

Other highly useful bonuses one can employ include evasion, Block 2, Fist & Tooth Mastery, Leather Armor (immunity to bash), Tumble (evade collisions), Bandages and a lot of armor. The Watcher hits very hard. 

Also Automatic Wounds via the Counter-weighted Axe or Red Ring are as broken here as they are everywhere else in the game. Ignoring the Hit Location deck is ridiculously powerful in a game where it's a core balancing mechanic because you are in essence removing a portion of the monsters' offensive capability and all of its defensive ones.

As for when to undertake this showdown, The Watcher should always be woken up as soon as possible. The increase in toughness over time is very significant, in a game where the strength vs. toughness ratios of weapons to monsters is so tight, pushing up 2 points of toughness is a large plateau in monster durability. The watcher manages to push up 5 points if you delay as long as possible. In addition, you miss out on a lot of the oxidation opportunities if you delay and that will impact on your ability to handle the Gold Smoke Knight afterwards. I would recommend delaying no more than 1-2 years at most except in the most dire of circumstances.

Other preparation for this is the same as you would do for any major nemesis monster, good armor, good block, good evasion, high luck, high strength. Worth mentioning that Kiting strategies are not viable because of the Watcher's infinite movement stat. But by LY20+ you  should have the Blacksmith constructed and have several top tier armor sets, otherwise you've been fighting monsters that are too weak for too long.

All of this written, I would like to say that, for as much as I do not rate the Watcher showdown mechanics, I absolutely rate it's thematic and narrative experience. It absolutely sells its Dream Jellyfish theme to a fault and this fight represents the end of the narrative story of People of the Lantern. The stuff which follows feels nowhere near as polished or interesting as the events leading up to the Watcher and it's even more glaring when you compare it to the Gold Smoke Knight, who, unless you happen to hit a couple of hunt events, has zero foreshadowing or involvement beyond 'hey this burny face big man with a hammer wants to fight'. So, at a minimum I have to give thumbs up to Kingdom Death's jellyfish on that front.

*Speculation based on the facts presented in the lore, game text along with analysis of the mechanics. We'll have to wait and see if I'm right on this one but it seems to be the way Ockham's Razor points.