Tis The Season: The Xmaxe (Patreon)

With us being deep into Spring and Summer on its way it seems only right that the time to take a deep dive into the Xmaxe is now. For those of you who are not familiar with, or have never owned the Xmaxe, it is the promotional content that comes with the Christmas Twilight Knight and represents one of the first pieces of additional crafting content. If it had been released in our current times there is no doubt that it would have been a pattern item, but instead it is just a regular old mid game craft for settlements with the right pre-requisites.

In order to craft it you must have the following:

• Innovations: Storytelling, Sculpture
• Resources: 2x bone, 2x leather, 1x fresh acanthus

Originally this weapon was considered quiet odd and anachronistic, these days we've come to learn that the Xmaxe is part of Krampus's aesthetic so there is some suggestion that Krampus might be the originator of this weapon (or it is from the same place). What we do know is that it is a replica of the original weapon, as indicated by the innovations - storytelling for the fable and sculpture for the construction.

Stats wise this is a very solid weapon, 2 speed is always a treat and 5+ accuracy is slightly better than you'd normally expect - this means the Xmaxe's average number of hits per attack is 1.2 rather than  the usual 1 hit for a 2 speed 6+ accuracy weapon (which we can consider the default weapon survivors use). In a game with as little granularity as KD:Monster that's a relatively significant jump. 

It also has a very unusual and interesting piece of design in that it is irreplaceable but craftable. Most irreplaceable items are unfortunately rare items and hard to get back. But the Xmaxe has one of the straight up best twists on this. I absolutely love that we have a high power-level weapon which is lost when the survivor using it dies, but can be replaced at the cost of 5 resources and an endeavor. It's a superb wrinkle to the previous formula and gives you a taste of what the game is like to play on Nightmare mode.

The reward for this high risk, use it and maybe lose it weapon is, the sheer number of affinities it packs onto its grid like Christmas lights on your grandpa's shed roof and an ability shared with the Gloom Katana.

Yeah, that's right, this weapon is basically an easier to make Gloom Katana with better affinities and a better weapon type. Ooof. We're fortunate this thing hasn't been power crept on because it's already EN YOU TEA ZEE.

So, when using this we are going to want to pay attention to all of the classic insanity gaining strategies in order to float up the strength of this weapon as much as possible. The classic friend of all insanity strategies is of course the goat horns.

We've talked about this many times, but in brief, it lets you get your Xmaxe to 3 strength and hold it there, it doesn't have to be worn by the survivor who needs the insanity and if you are deaf it can keep giving you insanity like you are Mr. Creosote at the restaurant, but instead of a stomach you have a black hole. A black hole that eats away at you no matter how hard to try to fill it with crazy, the numbers just never end, they keep going up and up and up, but it just never stops and when you think it will the phoenix comes along and Deja Vus you back to the timeline again for the umpteenth time and you're left reset so many times that you're not sure if it is you or the settlement that is real anymore. Oh, hey, are those feet?

The Xmaxe has some serious advantages over the Gloom Katana however, for a start using it allows you to raise up axe proficiency and completing that puts you in a position where the mastery combines with the weapon to cover the odd situations where you have your insanity blanked.

An automatic critical wound on a persistent injury location is something that has both benefits and downsides - while you often get neat bonuses for a persistent injury, the game also designs persistent injury locations to be softer than normal ones (less punishing) so when they are removed from the deck, the remaining portion of the deck becomes more dangerous. In trade for this increased danger, you get some kind of permanent benefit when fighting this particular monster, usually stat decreases or disabling of certain AI cards. It's not the best mastery, but it is solid.

More importantly, in the situation where your insanity has been set to 0 by events; this gives you something to fall back on while you are working on rebuilding your insanity, even in the very late game where monster toughness has climbed up to ridiculous heights you can still reach them occasionally and cripple their bodies. Neat.

Also, the red affinities are a huge help for the Xmaxe, if you are not planning to be an abusive little loop monkey by stacking up insanity, you can use leather armor (which this item is designed to click with) alongside the Monster Tooth Necklace to ensure that the weapon always has at least a base strength of 2 + survivor strength + survivor insanity.

Then you slot the Leather Mask above the Xmaxe and Bob's not your uncle because you're a survivor and they rarely manage to have uncles, in fact who pays attention to their family trees because most survivor settlements are horribly incestuous in the worst kind of manner because it's a huge amount of bookkeeping to handle it any other way. So just deal with most of your survivors being related to each other in some fashion. It's fine?

The Xmaxe also has the incredibly rare right green affinity, which combines straight to Monster Grease and it also has a down green for the Leather Shield. That makes this weapon an eminent tank choice, so there is a lot of argument for using this weapon as your mid game leather daddy tank's primary weapon. If she loses her insanity she can always just full turtle with shield activations anway.

That gives us something a little like this:

This is a pretty basic build for the mid game, but it contains just about everything you need for a tank. However, if we were going to leverage into the late game, this build isn't going to be able to tank the harder monsters without a LOT of survivor evasion and support.

Note: That's the CE Screaming Horns, I'm going to have to stop using this mod because the mod maker can't help himself and keeps sticking house rule stuff in without keeping the original versions intact. Fortunately it doesn't change the affinity layout.

You can substitute the Beacon Shield for a down blue if you want to improve the insanity gains a bit more when departing, but overall this is a very solid build because even a survivor with 0 insanity will arrive at the showdown with 2-3 Insanity and +2 strength for a total of 5 strength baseline. Of course, if you're hunting tougher monsters you can pivot into more luck by sticking that in the top right slot. This works well with Warlord Armor because of the bonuses that set has for luck.

And that's it, ultimately this is one expensive promo for people who do not paint miniatures, but I do think that the Xmaxe is pretty much a 'must have' for anyone who can afford it because of how straight forward it is to build and use. It's in essence a straight upgrade to the core game, but oh boy is it pricy.