Constructing a Hunt Party: Primer (Patreon)

Published:

2020-06-12 11:00:03

Imported:

2023-10

Content

There is an absolutely massive range of different ways that survivors can be played, both individually, and when grouped together, either via overt, direct synergies or more subtle ones. Considering how wide all of this is,

I am going to be referring to survivors by their allocated classes, these are:

Tank
DPS
Support
Bruiser
Trapper
Debuffer
Hybrid (e.g. Tank/Support)

For more information on what each of these classes is and how they operate, please see the supplementary reading section at the bottom of this post which will link patrons to the more in depth articles on each. If you don't understand this nomenclature, or are not sure what some of the named classes are, please take a look before coming back here as I am not going to be fully breaking down all that information in this post.

The Basics

So, the very first thing we should look at is genders, long time readers will already know the answer to this one, but for posterity we shall break down the advantages that each gender has in this game.

Female:

Can gain Death Touch via Choriea - making them the best F&T fighters
Not affected by Young Rivals
Not affected by Manstealer - so you can always pass on their mastery progress via Family
Only gets a bonus from Stranger in the Dark's mysterious lady (Stan X)

Male:

Can gain Harvestman via Choriea which combines well with Phoenix Armor
Slightly less risk of death when breeding so minor advantage in the Intimacy table.

Yeah, so... that's it. If you want to take advantage of Phoenix Armor or have a kiting tank. Then you'd take a male along (and even then you really want Unconscious Fighter on them unless you like your males as Ken dolls). Otherwise, in KDM, the best hunters are females as they are equal or superior to males in almost every category apart from movement (and you have to own the Spidicules expansion for that to matter).

As such, going ahead, this article is going to be written as if the hunters are female, which they should be if you are playing optimally. And in truth, because of the increased chance that females die during childbirth in Stars/Lantern you should be maintaining a 3 or 4 to 1 ratio of females to males in that campaign anyway (Sun can be nearer 2 to 1 or approaching 50/50).

Foundation Classes

No matter what style you are looking to undertake, two classes stand out above all the others as the most vital. These are the Tank and Support classes. No class is completely indispensable, but these two are the ones that come closest to it, even a party without a tank will run a pseudo tank (usually a Bruiser) and if you do not have a pure support you'll find that either you have a hybrid DPS/Support, Tank/Support or everyone will be carrying the duties of support.

The other "basic" class is the DPS and a simple party formation could be considered to be Tank, Support, DPS, DPS. In a formation like this, every survivor has a specialised role to undertake, specializing in games like KDM is always stronger than being an all rounder because if you focus hard on say, offense, knowing that your tank can cover the defense. You will be able to be more successful at harming the monster or say, generating resources. You have a finite number of slots to spend, diversifying might seem appealing, but that is only really successful in the early portion of the game (where you will see Katar + Lucky Charm + Fecal Salve + Rawhide Armor + Monster Grease + Tall Grass to build Tank/DPS hybrids or Rawhide + Bone Club + CEC to create Tank/Support hybrids). These early game hybridizations occur out of necessity due to limited resources, once you have started to build a strong foundation of gear options, you should move away from them.

Fundamentals

So, what is the advantage of constructing synergistic hunt parties? Well at its core, one of the largest blocks in the game is the need to spend 5 slots per build on armor. While Gorment armor offers a 4 slot version, it is a very low power armor set for its cost and it is best employed in a focused Bruiser build.

So this armor issue is a problem. However, shields can go a long way towards replacing this, as can DBK armor plates or Crystal Skin. But when you start to move in this direction for your more offensively orientated survivors, you'll find that you might end up wanting more protection against reaction/incidental damage or to take advantage of a specific armor set bonus (especially Dragon/Phoenix).

It is this juggling between the overwhelming power and dominance of armor over gear grids that becomes quite a balancing act and it's one of the reasons why I really advocate the Gloom Man Support, an active Gloom Man support cannot be targeted by the monster and is almost entirely immune apart from incidental damage. While it is tempting to try and use the Gloom Man to deal damage with that boost you get, it's actually more effective to float around and do non-attacking things. Doing this means you don't need to wear a full armor set, because you're almost never going to take damage. You're also not targeted by the monster, making it more predictable. The Fecal Salve does something similar, but it is not as potent as being completely elusive. I know it seems odd that having one survivor not attack at all is more powerful than four attacking survivors, but the truth is monsters just don't need that much damage dealt to them in bursts, most of the game's success stories are about mitigating the damage the monster deals.

Just to summarize this with a quick visual. Here is how a typical grid gets filled up with essentials.

The Peach is armor, the blue is your weapon. Suddenly you have only room for 3 more items, so you need to make them really count. However, if you do not need to wear a full set of armor because you are a DPS survivor and can make do with Shields/DBK Plates then the grid changes to this:

The Green slots are your two plates or shields, giving you between 2 and 6 armor on all locations depending on what combination you are employing. You've now got six other slots to put in items to help keep one alive during the hunt, deal extra damage, utility armor set pieces (instead of full sets) or build funky things like the Blue or Red Charms. This can be done because you're not the one taking the brunt of the monster's attacks and therefore you only need your armor points to protect from reactions, incidental damage and the hunt.

The Support can be freed up even further following this philosophy.

That's a Rawhide Headband. Nothing else, and it can even be potentially swapped out for a Blue Ring if you are looking to avoid all armor - more on this synergy in a bit.

So, that's the principles of this, when you focus your hunt party around taking advantage of each other's strengths, you can end up in a position where you need less armor, which frees up pressure both on the gear grids and also on your crafting resources. You'll have room for things like Rawhide Whips and similar if you're not forced to spend all your hide on 4x Rawhide armor sets (but tbh, you might do that anyway because Rawhide is OP).

Specific Synergies

Now, this is a HUGE area, there's so many different synergies out there and because of all the options in gear, it's very hard to nail them all down. So I'm just going to bring out the classics, this will let us see why they work and allow the principles to be utilised elsewhere.

Shield & Spear Masters

This one takes a long while to put together and it is easier to create in Stars than anywhere else. But it is an immensely powerful pairing of Tank and Trapper/DPS that can lock the monster into attacking nothing but the Tank semi-permanently. With this build you can then run a focused DPS who just doesn't need to do anything other than concentrate on damage, they can even be protected by sitting next to the Shield Master as well.

Synchronized Strike & Daggers

This Music Based Fighting Art is one of the most interesting and powerful entities to come out of the 1.5 changes. It has a wide range of applications, allowing paired DPS survivors to work together to aid each other when each of them attack with a very relevant and useful bonus to accuracy and strength.

However, this can also be used by a Tank and a DPS in a blind spot. The Tank benefits from higher accuracy on a lower speed weapon, while the DPS benefits from a huge accuracy boost and the strength. The most notable of this is when used with Daggers because of the synergy with Backstabber and how much of an impact extra strength has on Dagger potency.

Gloom Hammer and the Blue/Green Rings

One of the most overt synergies in the game, this pairing really highlights a large void in the (current) design of KDM, there are so few gear cards and fighting arts that care about what other survivors are doing. That's just something that's caused by the young age of KDM, later games will certainly look to build more synergy between player characters.

However, this one here is super powerful, by having the ring wearer sit after the Gloom Hammer wielder in the party order you end up with being able to soft lock the monster into attacking the ring wearer over and over for the rest of the showdown.

Shield, Spear + Ink Sword

Say hello to one of the most busted weapons in the game, this L3 Sunstalker specific weapon has a massive downside (you can't attack unless in darkness, which requires either the Sunspot Lantern or the Sunstalker as the quarry target. If you place a Sunspot Lantern onto the Shield and Spear masters mentioned above (or just have it on a spear user), then you can operate this weapon very easily in an incredibly powerful unit. In fact one of my favourite for woman hunt parties is 1x shield tank, 1x spear Speed Trapper, 1x non-attacking support and 1x Ink Sword DPS.

Multiple Bow Users

So yeah, bows are broken, multiple bows are broken. All Bow Parties destroy monsters. I've written about this in the past with the Shielded Quiver/Hollowpoint Arrow cripple the monster strat (it can suffer -8 movement) and because we also have the incredible Sunshark Bow as a tank weapon option, we don't even need to worry about any other weapon type for the rest of the campaign. Yeah, it's always hard to get past mixing your weapon types for diversity, but stacking hard into a single weapon type, especially one like bows, can result in a HUGE amount of synergies from various debuff arrows and kiting options.

Final Thoughts

So where does this leave us? Well in honest truth, because this is more of a philosophy and a way of thinking rather than a hard set of rules, it's something you're going to have to move towards and figure out as you go. While KDM can feel like a group of isolated individuals chopping at a monster, when you start looking at defined roles for each survivor, based on their mix of fighting arts, stats, disorders and gear you can start to define how your particular group of ladies clicks and reach a higher level.

I would love to see your synergy combos. If you have anything, please do stick it in the comments, because this is a big, open area with a lot of room for development and innovation!

Supplementary Reading on Classes:

Supplementary to this are the following pieces on the various categories or 'Classes' used in the game, for those of you unfamiliar with them I've put a single line after each link to surmise their play style.

Bruisers

https://www.patreon.com/posts/bruisers-blood-22013787

Sword and Board style characters who juggle an active defense via Block/Deflect alongside attacking. Low skill floor, moderate skill ceiling.

Debuffers

https://www.patreon.com/posts/debuffers-rarely-22284384

A (mostly) archer based class built around reducing the monster's stats, weakening it. The most broken class in the game when abused via Hollowpoint Arrows + Shielded Quiver. Very low skill floor and ceiling.

DPS (Damage Per Swing)

Part 1: https://www.patreon.com/posts/damage-per-swing-22365154
Part 2: https://www.patreon.com/posts/dps-101-thinking-22461617
Part 3: https://www.patreon.com/posts/building-for-dps-22686538

A diverse but mostly brainless class that simply needs to keep themselves out of being threatened by the monster's attacks while they wait for the support to hold their hand and the tank to protect them from boo-boos. Very low skill floor, exceptionally high skill ceiling - the smartest players make the best DPS players, but they tend to need a lot of experience and patience.

Support

https://www.patreon.com/posts/seeking-support-21903841

The main class that can get away without wearing armor, often hybridized with a bow to create a support/debuffer/dps. But works exceptionally well as a pure support. Gloom Man excels on this class.

A great class for players who want to strategise, control the monster and help the other players feel powerful. Recommended choice for the most experienced player in the group due to the very high skill ceiling.

Tanks

Cornerstone of any hunt party, the Tank deals occasional pieces of damage, but most of the time positions herself so she can take the brunt of the attacks from the monster. They attack less than most other classes, so when they do they tend to use devastating weapons or clubs. Low skill floor, high skill ceiling.

Trappers

https://www.patreon.com/posts/trappers-poking-23139035
The domain of high speed characters and the place for players who just want to attack without having to think too much about reactions or the trap. This class typically uses spears, reach weapons + blue charm or occasionally Scythes and aims to minimise the impact that the trap has on themselves and as a consequence the entire hunt party. Very low skill floor and ceiling class.

Next time I come into this series, we'll look at some of the early game hunt parties and progress from there!