Constructing a Hunt Party: Late Game Life (Patreon)

For the early game; link here. 

For the mid game, link here.

Starting out at this point, above is the example foundation hunt party load out which we have reached. The exact fighting arts that these survivors have does not matter, fighting arts; outside of a few specific build arounds such as Abyssal Sadist, Timeless Eye, Monster Claw Style and the weapon specific ones (Shieldarang, Backstabber). This is because Fighting Arts are difficult to control gaining (apart from the amazing Music ones, highly recommend Rhythm Chaser, especially if you have access to the Gorn and a few others that are stuck onto innovation endeavors).

As mentioned at the end of the previous article, your first and most important part of moving from mid game to late game is this little gear card here:

As soon as you have enough leather, you should be spending resources on this and slotting multiples into your gear grids wherever you can spare the space. In the above party we have 2 slots spare already, and can also drop the Leather Shield from the Off-Tank and the Claw Head Arrow from the Support. That means potentially we can run 4x Bone Pickaxe per hunt if we have the resources to support it. And that means iron, lots of iron. Because, in the core game that's what we need.

(A quick aside here, if you have the Sunstalker in as a quarry, that monster is very light on its iron requirements and you can adjust to less iron hunting. The Dragon King uses a lot of iron, but it also provides a massive amount of iron. The DBK is another monster that doesn't need much Iron, so in particular if you are struggling with Iron gathering strategies consider the DBK + Sunstalker. However, my recommendation always remains to use the Sunstalker and Dragon King together as quarries if you can.

Typically your best iron hunting targets are the L2 Dragon King, L2 Flower Knight and L2 Screaming Antelope).

Note: As before, the main focus of this article will be on core game builds, this is the hardest version of the game because the lack of variety in your quarries and the very stingy nemesis monsters means that you have few good options and a lot of places where you can screw up. I will mention expansion options in a few places, but not always.

We need this iron because our next two destinations in the core game experience are constructing Phoenix armor and Blacksmith gear. Blacksmith gear in particular is the next largest step up in power that a settlement can take, this is because of Beacon Shields, Lantern Armor, the Lantern Glaive and Oxidation. Phoenix Armor is less important, while it is a very powerful damage dealing set, it also has a lot of defensive functions and a lack of affinities. This combination of split focus, where the set bonus provides offense, while the armor set provides exclusively defense; in combination with the low number of affinities that Phoenix armor has, makes it a less appetizing proposition than many of the other options one can spend armor on.

It is still, however, the armor set with the highest potential for total strength in the game thanks to the combination of Charge with Harvestman (Fighting Art from Spidicles) while holding a sharp weapon. So it is absolutely worth considering, however outside of the Arc Bow and the Hollowpoint Arrow, almost everything else from the Plumery is either a meme (Rainbow Katana) or has limited applications (Bloom Sphere).

Lantern Armor is a heck of an investment, and one that holds significant risks because of its heavy keyword. However, in combination with cheap early and mid game clubs (most notably the Bone Club and the Skullcap Hammer), it is the premium Tank armor for the late game and I do consider it worth the effort of building. Mostly because the late game in KDM is an incredibly long period with lots of farming and no new monsters (Lion God doesn't count!)

For the other armor sets, the Archer/Support DPS is basically set, the only change at this point is adapting in the Arc Bow, and the other DPS has quite a few options, but the main decision is what armor set to adopt.

So, with all of that said, lets get to the builds!

Lantern Armor Tank

You'll have to excuse me, as I forgot to include the armor bonus in this image. Here it is:

On Arrival, gain survival up to the survival limit. All clubs in your gear grid gain Sharp.

Lantern Armor provides a huge amount of benefits with just one drawback (outside of its costs, which are massive). It's heavy. Still, unlike many heavy armor sets it is worth using despite that. Part of this is because of how powerful it is, but the other part is more hidden. You can't construct Lantern Armor early on in the campaign, which means that when you do finally make it, you have less lantern years left to deal with. That means less settlement events, less hunts, less hunt events and therefore less chances to hit an event that punishes you for heavy. Still, if you hit one, it is going to hurt in the worst way possible as heavy is one of the two most negatively slanted keywords in the game.

In exchange however, you get massive survival boosts, huge levels of protection, the ability to make yourself deaf (which combos hard along with the Screaming Horns) and considerable stat boosts to clubs.

Now the single best clubs are, in order: Gloom Hammer (Slenderman), Riot Mace (Gorm), Bone Club (Bone Smith) and Skullcap Hammer (Weapon Smith). Sadly the Whistling Mace is not that great, despite an interesting ability, but you may enjoy using it despite hitting yourself occasionally and the Thundermaul is straight up terrible unless you can disable your ability to roll Perfect hits.

This is a super beefy center-line piece that can be tweaked with quite a bit depending on the expansions you have available. But the bottom line with Lantern Armor is, if you are not going to use it with a club, use Dragon, Rolling or Phoenix armor instead.

Phoenix Armor Off-Tank 

Charge and Leap, like most move and attack abilities in the game are best combined with a weapon that has reach, this is because it gives you a considerably larger 'threat range' in which you can still hit the monster. While Charge is generally worse than Leap (Dragon Armor set bonus), it is as mentioned above, the ability with the highest possible level of strength boost in the game right now. 

Phoenix armor is notoriously difficult to get activated due to the sheer number of dud affinity items it has in it. It also has the aforementioned issue of being a defensive armor set with an offensive set bonus that requires you to push for distance away from the monster.

Without expansions, activating the plackart in particular is quite challenging. Fortunately two of the best support items in the late game fill the role just fine. Which lets this survivor do things when they are repositioning for another charge.

You can certainly upgrade this build when you get to expansions, but the main upgrade is just swapping out the entire build for a Dragon Armor based one, because Dragon Armor > Phoenix Armor.

Screaming Armor DPS

The Dragon Slayer is just too good a weapon to not seriously consider using it in a late game hunt party during the core game. There are three armor sets that hold it the best, Phoenix, Screaming and Leather Armor. Here we have the Screaming version because (currently) Screaming Armor is completely busted and over tuned as heck.  

In addition to providing a load of DPS power, this build also supports everyone else by giving effectively infinite insanity to the Lantern Tank, dropping Acanthus plants for anyone who needs them, slamming the monster to push it under toughness thresholds and providing more anti-bleed assistance with the bandages. 

This build can be beefed up further with the addition of a beacon shield, which powers down the Monster Grease, but you shouldn't really need that unless you are rotating tank duties between the Tank, Off-Tank and DPS.

If you are using expansions there are a massive amount of other weapons you can load into this build, because Screaming Armor works with any weapon whatsoever.

Leather Armor DPS - Alternate

Less slot intensive, but this build is very selfish compared to the screaming one as it provides no support abilities unless you place one in the empty slot. Otherwise this functions offensively in a similar fashion to the Screaming Armor one. It's also super cheap to build because you've already been using this loadout as a tank.

Rawhide Archer Support

This is exactly the same as the previous iteration of the build, with just an upgrade in the weapon and the arrow. However, because that's pretty boring (archers are boring in KDM sadly), here's another version, using an armor we're going to discuss next week.

Same offensive load out, but we have sacrificed the option to AI control monsters in exchange for a load of other support abilities. Yeah, I wasn't kidding when I said Screaming Armor works with anything.

We'll discuss pure support Screaming Armor this time next Tuesday.

Now all of this should be more than sufficient to carry any party to the end game of Stars, or into the post Watcher phase of Lantern. Also most of these builds work fine in Sun (Lantern Armor is not a good fit for Sun except on Prismatic warriors, because it doesn't have enough red affinities to work well with Hellfire). 

These builds are also generic enough that you can slot in and out your preferred weapons, just make sure that the weapons you choose are powerful, either because they have high strength (normally or via sharp) or have a lot of luck. Support gear can be whatever you want, but the best stuff involves controlling the monster, removing bleed and gaining survival/insanity.

So until next time, have fun and be good people.