Blade of Darkness: Gloom Katana (Patreon)

After talking about the Gloom Hammer last week, I was reminded about how much I need to properly get into the Slenderman and its selection of gear. It is one thing to write quite often that the Slenderman is the finest nemesis monster we have in the game at the moment, but breaking down the why of that is an important supplement to the statement. One does not want to be like a Geist, making statements without backing them up with any substance, so I'm going to spend a bit of time drilling into the lead pieces of gear and exploring their synergies.

We shall start the second part with the sharp pointy weeb stick, the Gloom Katana (GK).

Gaining the Gloom Katana

Acquisition of the GK is not as straightforward as gaining its club cousin was, the Gloom Katana is (incorrectly) designed to be the top tier item in the Slenderman suite, so it is a bit of a journey to unlock it.

First of all you need to craft the Gloom Mehndi, which is in its own right an exceptional item with few downsides. Then when you have this, you will need to get to the Crystal Lake for a skinny dip; something that has been discussed previously in the Crystal Skin article - so we will not repeat the lessons here and instead you can refer back to that article here.

The short version for here however is; Crystal Skin + Pickaxe (Digging Claws) + Sickle and no whip is what you want to be carrying. The monsters you want to target for the easiest results are the Flower Knight or L2 Screaming Antelope. Otherwise it will need to be L2+ Node 3 Monsters, and they are not slouches.

All of that done, you'll get a wonderful living haemarroid for a survivor (who works well with the above Mehndi as a bonus) and this rare resource:

I think it's a really neat bit of storytelling to have this link to the Crystal Lake, a dark world filled with rocks combine with the Slenderman who comes from a dark dimension filled with sentient plants.

This mold is combined in Level 3 Dark Water Crafting with 1x iron and 2x dark water to result in the Gloom Katana and that is more than sufficient for your needs. You can invest further by making the Gloom Sheath, which costs 1x Shank Bone (Antelope), 2x Organ and 2x Dark Water but the thing is, unlike the Rainbow Katana/Blood Sheath interaction, the Gloom Katana/Gloom Sheath synergy just isn't as high. The Sheath is a bad shield unless you can activate it, and then when it is activated all it does is give you +1 insanity at the start of your act and Savage without Deadly. That has uses in concert with the katana, but the bonus from this item just isn't good enough for the costs. If it had Block 2 then it would compete with shields, but as it stands you have better uses for that 2x dark water, so this is an addition for the very rich.

As such, let us look at the Gloom Katana

This weapon is entirely about having as much Insanity as possible in order to make it effective. Because Sanity is not capped, this means that the Gloom Katana is one of two weapons with the highest potential strength in the game (the Xmaxe being the other). It also means that the weapon has quite a few strong downsides, having your Insanity set to zero will make the weapon as effective as Ninja Gaiden's non-upgraded wooden sword and you also cannot use this weapon against the Screaming Antelope or L3 Slenderman without severe risks.

What we want to be doing with this weapon is looking at ways of getting as much insanity as possible. The simplest way is to go fight the Legendary Phoenix, which will give 1000 Insanity to a survivor when you kill it, but that involves finding the Mask Maker location from the Butcher, crafting/gaining the Phoenix mask and killing an L4 Phoenix - simple, but not easy.

So we will also need to consider other methods of increasing insanity. The most powerful of which is getting a Screaming Horns helmet into a party with a deaf survivor and then spamming the helm while stalling out the monster. The White Lion and Gorm both provide lovely loops that aid this, the Gorm even does it all by itself with Hiccup, because Hiccup is the second worst designed AI card in the game (behind Earthquake and just ahead of Silent Hymn). But any monster with low speed facing a shield and high evasion can also be stalled while insanity is gained. This works because of a failure in the wording on the Horns:

The issue that makes it work is that last sentence. All other survivors gain +1 insanity, that means deaf, insane survivors keep gaining insanity because they cannot gain the +1 movement. In truth, this has been reported to APG and they should be re-releasing the armor piece with the following text:

[Activate]: Scream. Non-deaf insane survivors gain +1 movement until end of round. All other non-deaf survivors gain +1 insanity.

That closes out this loop while keeping the item an option for support builds that want to help survivors with insanity gains in order to keep sentient weapons active. One hopes that they listen when I sent over that feedback from this community, we'll see.

There are other ways of increasing your insanity though, and while the basic b****es will pick Phoenix Armor, the more interesting way is to step into the world of mixed armor sets and make use of the spider booties.

If you combine this with high survival gains + a high survival limit, you can continuously drain your survival and increase your insanity. Especially if you add it to the L4 Manhunter specific reward; Deathpact.

This Holy Lands pistol gives you that exciting single use 'founding stone' ability, but more importantly it gives you +1 survival every single turn. It is; however, quite late game, but a fighting art gained when the Manhunter turns up can fill in the gap until you get to the lion pistol.

This top tier fighting art is a primo choice for someone wanting to make use of the Gloom Katana and it should be sculpted as soon as possible in order to make use of it for this, and many other, builds. So when you get it, protect the survivor with it by keeping them in the settlement until you have completed the sculpture. You won't regret having this fighting art sculpted.

All of that written, how about we put together one sample build to demonstrate?

So amazingly this build is entirely Silk armor, and it's here to demonstrate the various different ways you can generate insanity in the late game (while also showing how problematic Silk Armor is in general). You can play this build in the earlier portions of the game by keeping the Silk Boots and substituting in leather + monster grease for the other sections. This keeps the boots active, but you'll probably need to also add in a leather shield to help keep armor points a bit higher. Requires Spidicules, Manhunter (for guaranteed Abyssal Sadist) and Slenderman. (Note: Unfortunately the Sheath's +1 insanity is not active in this version of the build, that is because of how awkward Silk armor is, you can activate it in the Leather vesion).

For a bonus which I am adding just before release. Here is an example of the Deaf route, here is a build, however I hope that two fixes come in the future - because strategies based around infinitely stalling the monster for a permanent bonus are not good gameplay. 

• 1) Screaming Helm/Deaf exploit patched (as mentioned above).
• 2) Infinite monster loops such as Antelope Instinct with no cards left in deck, Hiccup, Butcher Menace and Ground Fighting are patched/removed from the game.

The Cat Fang Knife is here only for the affinities, a Hidden Crimson Jewel from the DBK would be a better option in that slot, however it is very hard to get. This build is also a great example of how you can alternatively use the Gloom Sheath, while it has "anti-synergy" with the Gloom Katana, the +1 insanity will help keep the Phoenix Plackart active and allows you to tank the first reaction hit from attacking, making up for the slightly lower armor points all round. This build gets a lot stronger if you have Immortal on the survivor, and Abyssal Sadist is always a benefit. You can also swap whatever legs you desire into this build, Phoenix ones have more armor points, but don't give as much insanity.