Making White Lion Armor Work (Patreon)

 So, as a part of the new campaign we're slowly working our way through, one that we're trying to use to explore a few "off meta" routes, we're currently analyzing our way through a few of the lesser power armor sets to see if we can eek out enough from them to make them work. After just a couple of hunts of the White Lion we've already exhausted everything it has available unless we decide to go after the armor set, so that's what the exploratory focus has been on.

Is there enough we can squeeze out of the White Lion Armor to make the chore of hunting more White Lions worth it. White Lions; regardless of the level, have an AI that is almost mundane in its focus, hugely predictable and very 'same same' in what those cards actually do. It's great as a training/early game monster, but it is also more rote than any of the other early game monsters. The Gorm, Spidicules and even Antelope are all more unpredictable with their targeting and general behaviors, which makes them more interesting quarries. 

We'll walk you through the analysis process, so you can see how it's done, what is assessed and then how builds are constructed. 

Step One: Strengths & Weaknesses

Here we take a look at the armor set overall, without any support from anything else and we see what it is good at and what it is not so good at. Understanding where it is strong, what its focus is (both intentional focus by "forced design" and unintentional focus by synergies) and where it is weak or just unable to perform. 

As the White Lion set is well known to be an under powered experience, we'll start by going through the weaknesses, so we can see what needs to either be shored up, or just outright accepted as something 'this armor set can't do'.

Weaknesses:

• Costs 10 resources to craft (5x White Fur, 3x Hide, 1x bone, 1x Great Cat Bone)
• Large amount of monster specific resources required
• Heavy keyword
• Low in affinities
• Awkward affinity layout with little support for its own affinity requirements
• Maximum 3 armor points to all locations
• Helm costs survival to activate

Strengths:

• Easy monster to grind with good support gearr
• Fur keyword
• +1 movement on boots
• Pounce gives +1 accuracy, +1 strength to weapon
• Helm provides all survivors with either +2 strength or +1 insanity
• Set bonus powers up daggers and katars.

Now, lets walk through these and see why they matter enough to be listed.

Costs:

The cost of this armor set absolutely matters a great deal, because it is competing with Rawhide and Leather Armor, two of the most powerful armor sets in the game. Every time you spend hide on something that's not a rawhide piece early on, you need to justify that, because 3 or even 4 rawhide armor sets is a valuable investment that helps any settlement stay alive/grow while Leather Armor is something that you need at least one set of per campaign.  That's rough to start, and on top of that, this armor set uses a Great Cat Bone, which is a core crafting component for the King's Spear and the Zanbato. Two exceptionally powerful weapons. When you break it down, a White Lion Armor set could also have been:

• 1x Rawhide Armor Set
• 1x Rawhide Headband
• 1x Bandages
• 1x Bone Darts
• 1x Zanbato

That's a starting load out for a support survivor and a Rawhide/Zanbato DPS. And trust me, just the Rawhide/Zanbato DPS offers more power than a White Lion Armor set in its entirety. That's rough!

Keywords:

On the keyword front, heavy is a major problem, there are multiple places where the heavy keyword can result in the death of a survivor, or even the deletion of the armor set. Which is a very high price to pay indeed - but for APG heavy isn't considered a 'cost' when balancing armor sets, so you don't get a power boost to make up for the risks. 

Also heavy armor can't be worn in People of the Sun without the Hellfire Secret Fighting Art (more on that later). Finally it's worth noting that the Silk Body Suit cannot be worn with heavy armor, so you can't use that to help with defenses.

Fur on the other hand is nothing but a positive, there are Lion related several items that give you bonuses for fur. Specifically the Lion God's golden plate (+2 armor to fur locations but -1 evasion) and the Gigalion's Lion Slayer Cloak (1 point of damage mitigation). 

Affinities:

We can see in the image above just how awkward and difficult the affinities are. This armor set wants to activate the boots and helm, but can only provide exactly 1 red affinity, 1 red half affinity and one blue half affinity towards that achievement. In best situations the armor gives us:

• 1x red affinity
• 2x red half affinities
• 1x blue half affinity

In comparison, rawhide offers 1x red, 1x blue; leather offers 2x red half, 2x blue half (or 1x red, 2x blue half or 1x blue, 2x red half), 2x green half, 1x green; and screaming offers 2x green, 2x blue, 1x red and 1x blue half. 

This set does however provide a solid base for moving into 4x Red affinities for the Red Charm, but that item removes a lot of the fun, making the strength/luck of your weapons completely irrelevant (disabling part of the White Lion bonus from the set & pounce) and encouraging you to just use some trash 2-4 speed weapon for the entire campaign (efficient, but boring). That is a benefit for daggers, whips and shields however; so make note of that for later. Also, don't forget that this amazing item is a thing.

I also can't finish without pointing out that the up blue affinity on the coat is REALLY hard to activate without the Gorm expansion. The Gorn or the Metal Spikes are one of the few items out there that can do it - because most down blues are on hats. You'll see the Gorn a lot in the builds because of this. Turns out the Gorm heavily complements the White Lion, who knew?

Movement & Pounce

This is an odd situation of conflict here, the armor set gives us a bonus to our movement, which is an incredibly powerful stat, but it also provides an alternative movement ability in Pounce. Pounce lets us jump over intervening obstacles and if we move exactly 3 spaces (maximum allowed) then we get to attack at +1 strength. Now as discussed in the past, +1 or +2 strength often matters, a lot. Monsters don't move up huge amounts of toughness from L1 to L2 (most of the time), so any strength bonus matters, especially when combined with the right kind of weapon in the early game (and even the mid game).

However, Pounce is strictly worse than every single other Monster Armor Movement bonus; Slam, Charge and Leap are all superior, even when you take into account the set bonus and the bonus on the gloves, so when you're able to move into other armor sets, they're going to do more for you.

Helm

The helm is worth a mention by itself, it is the only support ability the entire armor set has and it is a decent ability in isolation. +2 strength is a LARGE bonus, but the cost of activating this is too high. WLA doesn't generate any survival itself, so you are very limited in how many times you can use this (need something like the Abyssal Sadist Fighting Art to generate the survival) and even if you had unlimited survival, you can't use this without sacrificing an activation (so you need to surge to benefit yourself). 

If you wanted the insanity, the Screaming Horns does the same job, but better. It's so close, but yet so far away.

Daggers, Katars and More

As the main focus of this armor set, you would think that its design would be amazing when used in combination with them. Unfortunately, that is not the case because of how Daggers and Katars work. Early on Katars are used as a DPS weapon, but once you're past the LBK portion of the game, Katars turn around and become tank focused weapons, where Perfect Hit tanking allows you to build evasion up and really cripple monster accuracy.  Frustratingly, the single best Katar in the early game, the Lion Beast Katar, has more synergy with rawhide armor than WLA. The LBK needs a down blue affinity to work with the WLA.

Daggers prefer to be behind the monster, as they benefit most from that extra accuracy and being constantly adjacent to the beast (when at mastery). While there are two monsters you can pounce attack repeatedly in the blind spot (Sunstalker & Dragon King), most of the time you just can't do that, it's really awkward and given that the White Lion set cares most of all about pouncing exactly three spaces you're often out of luck.

However, there is one type of weapon that is built really well for pouncing, and that's reach X weapons. Adding reach onto your repertoire (or the Sunshark Bow) means you have more leeway with your pounce. You can move 3 spaces and hit the monster from further away, it's a trick that's often done with the Dragon Armor leap ability, and while that is a more powerful use, the same theory still applies. We'll explore reach weapons in the next section!

Builds

Now that we've looked at all of that and identified our weakness/strengths, it's time to look at the kind of builds we'll use. You can boil them down to the following:

• Reach Weapons
• Good Daggers (needs promo content/Gorm/Gigalion)
• Red Charm
• Sunshark Bow
• Cumbersome cancellation (Bone Club, Twilight Sword)

Yeah, sorry, Katars are not making the list. But you can get away with a Digging Claw on the armor set if you want. But by the time you have digging claws, there are better armor sets to use.

So! Lets get to the part that I'm sure some of you have just skipped down to look at, here are the builds:

Reach Axe DPS

There are two axes which tick the boxes for this one. The Counterweighted Axe and the Gorm's Greater Gaxe. Yeah, as we mentioned above, the Gorm supports White Lion Armor a lot... get used to it.

Counterweighted Axe Support/DPS Variant

Both of these axe based builds love Timeless Eye.

The Gorn, Pulse lantern and Monster Tooth Necklace are all optional slots here, but they provide a lot of support utility or power while also activating the Helm.

Greater Gaxe Support/DPS Variant

This one gains a little on the support front, and provides a more durability with the leather shield giving 1 (2 with shield mastery) extra armor points to all locations. You can alternatively drop the Pulse Lantern & Shield to bring in a Lucky Charm and a Wisdom Potion in order to leverage Deadly more, that looks like this: 

Also, if you have access to the Gigalion, you can combine the leather shield with the Lion Slayer Cloak (on the first build) to gain the green affinity instead of bandages. That helps push the durability of the armor set way, way up, and you can later transition to a Denticle Axe, Amaxe or Lantern Glaive if you want.

Reach Spear DPS

I'm not going to run through every permutation of spears available with specific builds here, because they're essentially the same idea as the Axe builds above. The best spears to use are:

• King's Spear
• Sky Harpoon (Reach 3)
• Lantern Glaive

However, I think that the late game spears are better on Dragon Armor or Phoenix Armor if you have them available. So you might generally want just a King's Spear build before transitioning into a different armor set for your spear girl.

Here's the Sky Harpoon build, the Pulse Lantern and Bone Dagger are in for their affinities. You can use other items there.

You can also use the Gloom Hammer from Slenderman, so don't forget that one!

Sunshark Bow DPS

One of the powerhouse builds, I've mentioned this one in the past a few times and this is one variant of it.

The important part of this build is the bow, plus pounce, plus the quiver.  You need to have the quiver activated in order to get that +2 range, otherwise you lose the benefit of having a Range 2 melee/ranged hybrid weapon with sharp. The Lucky charm is one cheap way of doing this because you can use it plus bandages or a fecal salve to complete the blues. That's just 2x organ or 1x organ, 1x hide. Also, as a bonus, you get to double your critical wound range!

Also, note that you can hold 3 extra arrows outside of the gear grid. So this build has a lot more support capability than you'd normally think. I recommend Claw Head, Hollowpoint and Sunshark/Dense Bone arrows as the three to use.

Red Charm Shield Training DPS

Note that you can use any weapon you like for the Red Charm build, Perfect Hit weapons like the Counterweighted Axe or Bone Daggers are exceptional choices, because they give you extra bonuses that are not cancelled out by skipping the wounding roll.

You can use other shields in this build, I prefer the Knuckle shield because it has higher speed and accuracy than most options and it gives that Block 1 bonus for wounding, that's a nice boost to your durability.

Pulse lantern is a flex spot as long as the replacement item has an up red affinity. You can also trade out the Bone Dagger for the Gaxe if you want. It looks more intimidating.

Daggers

Daggers are a better choice than Katars for White Lion Armor because they have been pushed by promotional content to a far stronger state than Katars. Here is my favourite WLA dagger build:

Acid-Tooth Dagger DPS

This is another one of the classic Timeless Eye builds, with Acid-Tooth Daggers effectively having  ∞  strength (infinite) on a Perfect hit. So they are one of those few, select, high speed builds that actually work. Build this one for your buddy who likes rolling lots of dice.

Hooked Claw Knife:

However do not overlook how powerful the new Hooked Claw Knife is.

You can easily reach 4 red affinities with this in the center spot. You just need an up red to finish it off. 

The other daggers worth mentioning are the Tempered Daggers (10th Anniversay Pattern), the Nuclear Knife and the Black Ghost dagger. I would do builds for them, but this article is long already - so I'd need multiple requests to justify it!

Cumbersome

Cumbersome melee weapons are few and far between, currently we have the Twilight Sword and the Bone Club. Now you can use the TS on a WLA survivor to get around cumbersome, but eventually the TS levels up and you lose that cumbersome drawback, so it's not really worth constructing WLA for this situation, because it's an expensive cost to pay for a temporary problem.

The Bone Club on the other hand is a different matter, you can run the Bone Club from LY1 all the way to LY30 because of how Lantern Armor works - and WLA could be one of the armor sets you use along the route (along with Screaming, Dragon, Phoenix and the aforementioned Lantern). However, the issue there is, when you are not in position to attack or pounce attack, there isn't much else you can do with WLA (unless you have a back up Skullcap Hammer). 

This makes it rather inferior to Rawhide armor in the early game, which can evasion tank and AI control the monster when it's unable to attack. So it's very difficult to justify using the WLA in this situation, but it is possible.

Items that support White Lion Armor

You may have noticed a few of the same old candidates turning up time and time again in these builds. White Lion Armor greatly appreciates good items with an up red or down blue affinity because those are things it lacks itself. Therefore, before we finish, here's the list of the most useful items for girls who like to rock the WLA.

• Gorn/Armor Spikes (Gorm)
• Pulse Lantern (Gorm)
• Lion Slayer Cloak (Gigalion)
• Bone Dagger
• Red Charm
• Pulse Lantern
• Monster Tooth Necklace

Finally, the promise of future content!

All of this has had me wanting to go back and take another bash at fixing the White Lion armor set. So expect a custom version of it soon because I now really know what it needs and I have some ideas about how to tweak the official version without ruining its flavor!