Thunderstruck: A Thunder Maul Build Guide (Patreon)

"The thunder of guns,

Tore me apart 

You've been,

Thunderstruck!"

Rare gear is a very difficult thing to construct builds around due to the fleeting and opportunistic nature of them. Many have strange, limited windows in which you can collect the items and often require 'beating the odds'. Then when you have them they often come with the Irreplaceable ability, meaning that if the survivor holding the gear dies then you lose the gear at the same time, some of them even have the cursed ability added onto them, ensuring that not only death, but retirement and lost weapon progression are also issues. There's a lot of things that can go wrong, but sometimes the right weapon lands with the right survivor at the right time and you capture literal lightning in a bottle.

We're going to look at the Thunder Maul this time, with an aim of exploring how best to optimise gaining it, where to get it to land and

Gaining the Thunder Maul

This weapon can only be received through the hands of the Finale hunt event. Images for reference:

So what you need to get to the rolling portion of this event is a survivor with 3+ understanding. So if you are aiming to get this weapon, you should be bringing a 3+ understanding survivor on every hunt (that's just good practice anyway).

But, if you want to make this event happen for sure, you can 'tutor' it via the Barbaric conviction principle. While personally I believe that Romantic is the stronger option for any settlement (due to the improved Fighting Art pulls and increased odds of Romantic), picking Barbaric with the aim of maximizing the chances of getting the Thunder Maul is a valid subsitute.

However, we want to be as efficient as possible when doing this process, so there are some other things that can be done to help make this even more effective.

• Bring along a club user and make sure they have maximum courage plus an empty slot in their grid. Make sure they are ready to use it and they are hopefully Ageless (low chance of that). You can also go for an Ageless Fist & Tooth Weapon Master here if you somehow happen to have one, they can switch to using Club easily without much opportunity cost.
• Or have a Crystal Skin survivor be the one with highest courage, they can ignore cursed and remove the weapon ready for the one true user (I wrote loser here originally, almost kept it in!)
• Ensure the Event Revealer (Thundercaller) has Otherworldly Luck.
• Bring spare lifetime rerolls to go again if you fail. (Survival of the Fittest / Infinite Lives)
• Bring the Hidden Crimson Jewel (if somehow you've gained that item from the climax of Golden Wind)

In essence, Grab Barbaric make sure that the Thundermaul will land on someone who is already training Club and bring as much as you can to help you beat the odds and get that 9-10+ result. 

With all of that done, you should now have your shiny, pretty Thunder Maul in the hands of a survivor who isn't training some non-club weapon. Lovely. 

Now it's time to look at optimizing its use.

Ride the Lightning: Know thy Thunder Maul

The Thunder Maul is one heck of a weapon, it has close to perfect stats, missing only Sharp and Deadly which would make it close to a perfect entity. It is also a Club with high strength, which means it benefits a huge amount from club specialisation and mastery.

It's also got a picture of the Gold Smoke Knight's head before it caught fire on it, so that's nice.

However, the rub is that absolutely nightmarish drawback triggering on a Perfect Hit. It's a bit of a double headed club in that while it knocks down the monster and makes a cool sound that causes brain damage, it also inflicts an automatic severe arm injury, which means that this table here is a constant companion for the Thunder Mauler.

(Injury decks and reference cards attached to this post for those who want them).

There are a number of problematic results on this chart:

• Dismembered Arm (Can't use the Thunder Maul anymore)
• Ruptured Muscle (Disabling fighting arts)
• Contracture (-1 Accuracy)
• Broken Ribs (-1 Speed, but additional broken ribs do nothing extra and being down to 1 speed on this weapon isn't a disaster).

In fact the best you can hope for here is bleeding tokens, and we know how much of a problem they can be if not dealt with.

So that gives us a list of pros to maximize and cons to mitigate. Let's list them out:

Pros:

• Club
• Very High Strength
• Knocks Monster Down
• Special move vs. Gold Smoke Knight 
• Not heavy, noisy or fragile (only negative keyword is two-handed)

Cons:

• Moderate accuracy
• Two-handed keyword
• Cursed & Irreplaceable 
• Can kill the user or make them unable to use it
• Not as good as the Gloom Hammer (so don't bother with this if you're making that)

This combination of pros and cons means that we have two armor sets we want to consider for this item. The first one is the original Club synergy armor set - Lantern Armor and the second one is the absolute underdog come good - Gorment Armor.

Lantern Armor

Very simple, we get to put sharp onto the Thunder Maul, making it a 10+2d10 wound roll weapon. You can also do this with Cycloid Scale Armor as you'll see, but I wanted to mention the core game only option for this weapon.

Gorment Armor

So Gorment Armor is not really used for the set bonus, it's actually used because of one key item that is a part of its set. The Regeneration Suit.

So technically (and we'll do it below) you can skip out on Gorment Armor entirely if you're able to jam this item into a build with a different armor set, there are a few candidates, but when we do this we'll go with the most OP option.

Ultimately what the Regen Suit / Gorment Armor lets you do is suck up those permanent injuries during the showdown and then shrug them off at the end of it (as long as you didn't die). You do need a plan to avoid death and we'll look at that now.

How not to Die (or get injured)

There's actually a whole bunch of options you can get your hands on in order to avoid dying to the Thunder Maul's explosive attack. Rather than walk through each one in detail, we'll list them and then discuss them briefly afterwards.

• Dried Acanthus
• Healing Potion
• Life Elixir
• Regeneration Suit
• Green Charm
• Tough
• Bandages / Bloodskin (White Speaker Promo)

Hunter's Heart isn't an option because you do actually die, so you'll lose the Thunder Maul in the process, shame but it doesn't stop you dying, it just regrows you the way that Manhunters regrow when killed.

Tough is the thing you want most of all, and it's a big reason why any survivor who gains Tough should work on club mastery by default, getting +1 to all severe injury rolls means you are 50% less likely to die and 100% more likely to suffer the knocked down result.

Dried Acanthus is the easiest to gain out of all of the options here, you can farm the stuff with Screaming Armor. So you'll be able to have a ready supply of this, which means you can ignore one severe injury per showdown, but once it's gone, it's gone.

The Healing Potion is a similar option, but it won't protect you from death, just undoing one severe injury suffered suffering the showdown. You don't really want this one, but while trying to make better potions you'll find a few of these pile up in the settlement storage. So don't forget about them.

The Regeneration Suit is the single best option available for dealing with non-lethal injuries as it'll wipe them all away once you get through the showdown and in combination with the Life Elixir it can be a huge safety net for your survivor. It also holds a lot of synergy with the Green Charm, but that is not a guaranteed 'extra life' each time it triggers (it can trigger multiple times though!)

So that brings us to the plug and play portion of this, what would the builds look like? I'm going to supply three, one which is entirely based around core gear, one that uses Gorment/Gorm stuff and one that is tricked out and (probably) the strongest version.

Lantern Maul (Lantern Armor - Core)

So, this is absolutely a basic beehatch build for Lantern Armor. Items for 7 and 9 are flexible, but I recommend having the Bone Club in one of those slots as a back up weapon. With the arithmophila disorder (Dragon King) you can put other things in these slots because your movement is set rather than relying on red affinities to get movement online.

If you have the Valentines Day Twilight Knight, this club is even better for the 9 position.

Otherwise, if you have higher movement/arithmophila then you can run a better back up club like the Whistling Mace / Riot Mace. 

Thunder Baby (Gorment Armor - Core & Gorm)

The one issue with this build is you can't easily fit a red affinity into things. However if you swap out the Life Potion for the inferior Healing Potion you might be able to get a red affinity in there in order to activate Guard.

Lightning Squid (Cycloid Scale Armor - Sunstalker, Gorm, Core)

And here's the biggest beast of them all, this build has sharp, healing, death negation, survival gains and everything. But that's Cycloid Scale Armor for you, it's absolutely crazy with any melee weapon that doesn't already have sharp and still APG think it needs a buff...

You can even upgrade this build by adding in the Blue Charm for trap cancellation or the Hidden Crimson Gem for the Dream Build (attached below). There is a LOT that can go into the flex slot here, pretty much whatever you want.

Next time we have another build!