When Good Fruit Goes Bad: The Slender Ovule (Patreon)

An ovule is a plant structure that builds and contains the female reproductive organs of flowering plants. It contains the seeds and once pollinated it will change and grow into a pod, a fruit or similar. The Slender Ovule is no different, using the seed of a Phoenix Eye placed in the heavily plant infested dark waters that slosh around inside the Slendermen (and are found everywhere in the Dark Water dimension), the nascent vines and plants that make up the Slendermen will converge and form one of the most powerful and unique craftable items in the game. 

The Slender Ovule.

In order to craft this item, you will have to reach the pinnacle of Dark Water crafting research through the Dark Water Research innovation:

This costs a total of 2x endeavors, 4x (any) resources and 4x Dark Water. Which means you should be able to complete the research stage by the time you slay the L2 Slenderman. However, the Ovule itself requires not just an additional 4x Dark Water; which is a tall order considering that the Gloom Hammer and Gloom Katana are tempting drains on your Dark Water reserves and it is also hard to resist the Gloom Mehndi for Crystal Skin survivors.

That means, if you want the Slender Ovule, you'll need to be focused and reserved with your Dark Water expenditure, it'll take 8x dark water to get you to your destination. But you'll also need to make a stop or two along the way because the water doesn't do anything without the 'seed'. Also known as an eye plucked from the socket of a Time Chicken (Phoenix). 

Getting the eye is a huge part of the challenge of making this item, because the Phoenix tends to be a major source of resource attrition through aging and the Phoenix Eye is a single resource in that deck, so getting it may take multiple attempts.

As such, if you are going to go for making a Slender Ovule, you need to plan in advance by hitting the Phoenix and gathering the resources. This means you should also keep an eye out for the resources to build the best of the Phoenix gear which are:

• Arc Bow
• Hollowpoint Arrow
• Dancer Armor
• Warlord Armor
• Phoenix Armor
• Bloom Sphere
• Crest Crown
• Feather Shield

(Note this list will hopefully change when 1.6's updates release).

And that's one of the nice things about the Slenderman, it pushes you towards fighting the three core monsters and a change in value for some of the resources they provide. As always in this game, the carrot works way better than the stick. Players will risk dangerous stuff if the rewards feel worth it.

So, that's the first half of this item, getting it was indeed quite a journey, but now we have it, what do we have?

This completely unique (both mechanically and figuratively) item has a very unusual spin on luck modifiers. Rather than giving yourself +1 luck, it gives the monster (and adjacent survivors) -1 Luck. This is far more powerful than just +1 luck because it is effectively +1 luck to everyone in the hunt party as long as the bearer is adjacent to the monster and none of the other survivors are adjacent to the bearer. 

As a quick aside, I like the theme of this item, suggesting that it spreads an aura that curses anyone else who steps inside it and therefore gentle 'repels' them, solitary behavior is very much a theme in the Slenderman stuff (along with plants, crystals, water, memory and being someone else's commercial property). 

There is little to no reason to use this item if you are not going to be activating it, and also you should be running a luck based build as well. One of the particularly neat portions of this item is how closely it ties itself to phoenix based gear. It connects with the Feather Shield and the Phoenix Plackart and it also has strong synergy with Warlord Armor. Which informs the most obvious and interesting build we can aim for. Warlord Axe builds. 

However, before we push into builds, it is important to look at what goals you will design the rest of the hunt party around, this is because the Ovule is one of those rare items that doesn't just impact on your own turn, but it also impacts heavily on other players. -1 Luck to a survivor means that their critical wound range is reduced when they are adjacent to the seed bearer. That can reduce their luck to negatives and remove the ability for them to score critical wounds at all. That is, needless to say, an absolute disaster for fighting monsters and should be avoided wherever possible.

In contrast, for a normal survivor with no luck bonuses or deadly weapons, this represents a 100% increase in the odds of them scoring a critical wound (1/10 to 2/10) and that is a very significant increase also. For survivors with deadly or extra luck, the comparative % increase isn't as high (you get diminishing %s when moving from 2/10 to 3/10 and so on), but the overall statistical change that matters (instead of meme-ing on the actual odds increase) is a +10% increase per roll.  Because you cannot have too much luck until you reach the cap of +9 luck (or +8 luck and -1 luck on the monster, same thing) - stacking more and more luck is always a good thing at the moment. Even the monsters that seek to somewhat punish critical wounds (Manhunter for example) are still worth scoring crits on more than not. 

This means that the rest of the hunt party should consider investing in luck and reach/ranged weapons. While non-reach (range: 0) weapons certainly can be used, it's typically more flexible to look at reach/range if you can find the right weapon for the job. Some obvious selections are:

• Bows: at Mastery you get Deadly 2 as a baseline to build on
• Greater Gaxe: Reach 2, Deadly and a strength that is increased with Perfect hits
• Sunshark Darts: Nice little support weapon with a lot of survival gains
• Riot Mace: Deadly and cripples monster AI on critical wounds
• Lucky Charms: Duh!
• Griswaldo: Can be constructed without the rest of the armor, has Deadly and Savage
• Lion Knight's Left Claw: A deadly late(ish) game Katar
• Zanbato/Calcified Zanbato: Always around, always deadly
• Sky Harpoon: Has Savage, but lacks deadly, so appreciates the extra luck.
• Ink Sword: Perfect weapon for this situation with Reach 3 and Deadly 3.
• Nuclear Scythe + Blue Power Core: Reach 2 and Deadly 2 and amazing mastery

There are, of course, more besides. In essence if it has Deadly, Savage or Reach you should be considering it.

So before we close out, lets look at a Warlord build for using the Slender Ovule!

As you can see, this build has Deadly, +2 Luck and the Ovule, for a total baseline gear 40% of critical wounds. Which means that we don't really mind the Greater Gaxe having a low strength for the late game. We're looking to crit here (especially if we have a survivor with +1 luck). The Beacon Shield is a flex slot, but I find it useful simply because this build tends to take a lot of retaliation damage due to the 60% chance of failure on critical wound locations and the really low chance of wounding L3 monsters without a possible crit. Having 7 armor on all locations does help.

As a bonus, here's something you'll not have seen before on this patreon. A very, very rare appearance from a weapon that is normally, outside of this situation, bad.

That's right, with nothing but the core game/phoenix gear and the Slenderman we've actually made the Sonic Tomahawk a viable weapon. It's lacking deadly, but the aim here is to once again score wounds with luck when we can't Charge (so having bonus luck on the survivor matters). The other thing we want to pay attention to is this (and this is the reason for creating this). It is likely that many of the gear cards on this grid are going to get tuned/improved for 1.6's "sorry for procrastinating" card pack and that means this build is only going to get stronger (as long as the Sonic Tomahawk keeps that left red affinity at least). So remember this one for the future! 

(Any weapon with a left red affinity can fit in there and keep the Plackart active btw, or if you don't care about the Plackart you can stick any melee weapon onto the build.)