The Culinarian Baker: A Valentine's Day Promo Build (Patreon)

With the Valentine's Day sale gone live at 3pm today (unless Adam has fails to keep his word, but he has not shown a pattern of doing that so we'll be fine). I thought this would be the perfect time to bring one of my favourite promotional based combos out to the front, just in case you want to pick up one of the cards this is constructed around. The Scoopy Club.

The Scoopy Club comes with the Valentines Day Twilight Knight (the overly sexual one popping out from a cake, but she comes with a really cool 35mm miniature of a Baker which will work for this build).

This promotional club is gained when you innovate scrap smelting (for free), which makes it one of the most efficient weapons in the entire game, It has a solid stat line with good strength, exceptionally high accuracy and the unusual position of having 1 speed without being slow.

It also has a pretty crazy ability that turns it into an improved Skullcap Hammer if something (or someone) vomits (or any similar result) while you are adjacent. Turns out that vomit/puke/bile/retch/etc is a keyword and we never knew it. 

Something else of note is buried within all its keywords; that neat little word 'tool'. Tool didn't mean that much in the core game, it was a way of distinguishing the Sickle/Pick axe from other weapon types and that was it. 

At least, that was it until the L3 Manhunter rolled into town and brought us the number one tool synergy gear; the Tool Belt.

The classic combo with the Tool Belt is as follows:

Requires Manhunter and Sunstalker

This combo was first discovered by my friend Tom (who's back in the UK with his first child on the way, congratulations Tom) and it's a wonderful trio of synergies that click together to give you a survivor with an incredible weapon plus a huge amount of evasion. The really neat part of this combo is how the Bone Pickaxe is an item with an attack profile rather than a weapon. This means that it fulfils the requirements for the Tool Belt's evasion gains and it dodges the 'All weapons gain slow' from the Shawl. The only real limitations here are that you have to wear light 3 point armor and you cannot have Monster Grease, Mhendi or shields. Considering how heavy armor is a negative in the first place, the only real drawbacks here are the loss of the shields and the armor point limitation. Turns out that's super easy to build around.

The Culinarian Baker takes this in a different direction, simply because it cannot get around the issue that the Scoopy Club is simultaneously a tool and a weapon (instead of being an item). You can use the above build with it if you wanted to, but you would lose a lot of the benefits of the Tool Belt and be unable to get around the 'slow' drawback built into the Shawl. We will include a Shawl builds on a later date, but just note that other builds are available on request.

In respect to fighting arts, all clubs are great with Timeless Eye. Otherwise great aggressive fighting art options are always good (Abyssal Sadist for example) or classic defensive ones (Unconscious Fighter, Tough, Unbreakable etc).

The Recipe 

One of the main advantages of this build is the cost of the two key combo pieces, or to be more precise, the lack of a traditional "cost". All you need to get access to these two gear cards is innovate Scrap Smelting and beat the L3 Manhunter - this does limit the build to being LY17+, but it is powerful enough that it can hang there without too much issue.

Because of this, you are able to concentrate on getting the other parts of the build online in advance, so your Culinarian Baker can immediately rise up early the following morning and immediately start smacking things with her spoon.

This means we need to figure out what else to use with our build, this can be a little tricky because the Belt/Club combo is very self contained and has few drawbacks. The main decision is what kind of armor set to use. There's no need for Lantern or Cycloid Scale armor here because the Tool Belt is giving the club sharp, so we want to step back and consider the other options.

The classic candidates are:

• Dragon / Phoenix Armor
• Rolling Armor
• Leather Armor

(Hopefully when Campaigns of Death comes out Silk Armor will also be an option.)

Dragon and Phoenix both fulfil very similar functions in that they add additional maneuverability and power with a few other extras. Phoenix Armor is better if you can maintain your insanity, but Dragon Armor is easier to use and has a lot of additional benefits when you gather the resources for it (the Dragon King gives out a lot of stat boosts, but have a plan for handling murderous doppelgängers). Rolling Armor is just a really tough, durable armor set, but it's honestly better used with inaccurate weapons such as Early Iron (and it has heavy), so it's best used elsewhere. 

Leather Armor is a very strong candidate because you should have a spare set kicking around at this stage, in addition it has a giant pile of green affinities so it can even allow you to build a little tanky with some additional evasion this build.

Ultimately this is a DPS style build, while you might hybridize it to include some tank or support elements, most of the time you are going to be aiming to be adjacent to the monster (in case it vomits) and hitting it as hard as possible.

Leather Apron Baker

Very simple, this is the classic Leather Armor build with the Scoopy Club and Tool Belt added in extra. It doesn't do anything fancy at all, but it stands as a solid base version to compare to other options. An alternative version that runs a Bruiser strategy (Tank/DPS hybrid) is in the attachments. It trades off evasion for the ability to activate a shield every turn.

Dragon's Breath Culinarian 

First up, when you Leap the Scoopy Club has a base accuracy of 2+ and 10 strength (Plus sharp) pretty neat eh?

The rest of this is just standard Dragon Armor stuff, you want something to activate the Dragon Mantle due to how powerful its arrival ability is, I've chosen the Lucky Charm (Slot 6) here and supported it with a Gorn (Slot 1). But you can easily swap that with any other pairing, for example Monster-Tooth Necklace and Fecal Salve are other excellent options.

Time Chicken Chef

A fun one that makes use of the Grim Muffler also, this is a standard Phoenix Build with a little bit of additional Insanity gain and support powers through the Drums. As always stuff like Leader or Infernal Rhythm is great on a build like this, but to be honest you can build this one with other options if you want to not go the Music/Grim Muffler route because the Stone Noses gives insanity on arrival (which helps keep the Plackart active).

Feather Mantle is just for the left blue and to show variety, Fecal Salve is stronger and other options are available. The Abyssal Sadist fighting art is very good for this build also and Harvestman is always a must have for any Phoenix Armor male.