If it Bleeds, we can Kill it: The Sunstalker's Armor (Patreon)

The Sunstalker is one of the strongest, most interesting and exciting creatures in the entire range of Kingdom Death's monsters, capable of holding the focus of anything up to ten lantern years worth of hunting with its wide range of different gear cards. It's also unique in that the Sunstalker is the sole monster in the game without a single bad gear card, some of them are situational, but none of them are weak or not worth crafting because there are better options available elsewhere.

In addition the Sunstalker's gear has massive levels of synergy with multiple other quarry monsters gear, able to make items shine in a way that they cannot do alone. The synergy that this gear has with say the Dragon King gear cards is so joyful and engaging that I find the single most wonderful quarry experience revolves around hunting those two monsters in the mid game and piecing things together in order to build really potent and unique gear load outs.

We're going to be deep, deep diving on this one because there is just SO MUCH to talk about, as such we'll start with the gear cards that do the most exciting things. The borderline overpowered armor set known as Cycloid Scale Armor (CSA); an armor set that jostles with several other major power house armor sets for the top five slot of best armor in the game (along with Rawhide, Screaming, Dragon, Dancer and Rolling Armor).

CSA is not a cheap, or easy investment to achieve. The entire armor set requires:

• 5x Cycloid Scales
• 2x Huge Sunteeth
• 1x Small Sunteeth
• 1x Shadow Tentacle
• 1x Prismatic Gills
• 2x Salt
• 2x Hide
• 2x Bone
• 1x Scrap

That's 17 resources, which are 5 generic, 2 special (easily gained from a single Sunstalker Showdown) and 10 Sunstalker specific resources. There are critical wound locations which allow you to generate the Shadow Tentacle (Brilliant Tentacle) and Prismatic Gills (Prismatic Gills) and the Death Blow can generate the small sunteeth. But the Cycloid Scales and the Huge Sunteeth cannot be 'tutored' through specific hit locations; you're going to have to do this the old fashioned way and bad news, very few Sunstalker hit locations generate '1 random Sunstalker resource'; which in addition to how much the Sunstalker pressures you to kill it quickly, means that a lot of the time you're going to be relying on the showdown rewards to generate the resources you need.

Also, many of these resources compete with other top tier items; the huge sunteeth are needed for the best bow in the game (Sunshark Bow); the salt is needed for multiple items, the small sunteeth are needed for the Sunshark Arrows (though these days the Gigalion arrows are stronger) and you're not making the Ink Blood Bow without a lot of Shadow Tentacles. It's a rough ride, and that's a big part of why you have to commit to hunting the Sunstalker so much – it's resource intensive, but it's also rewarding.

We're going to talk about the set as a whole for sure, something I've done in the past a few times, but for the sake off really getting the visual guide correct it's worth revisiting this armor and all its individual pieces here with updated knowledge and the freshest of metagame moves.

Most of the armor pieces are not great in isolation, there are a couple of exceptions to this, and you'll see them crop up in mixed sets occasionally.

The Hood is a very simple item, as long as you use a (Knight) for something then you get +1 evasion. This works with Dash to give a second +1 evasion in a cycle and also combines with things that ask you to spend (Knight) rather than just pure movement. This means that there's a lot of synergy with anything that asks you to keep moving while also not harming you too much if you want to remain relatively static and only step a couple of spaces a turn.

My preference is to use this with fighting arts that reward movement such as Momentum, which as you'll see below, has a load of synergy with how CSA loves to reward not just strength, but also luck based attacking strategies.

However, one of the things which you do want to pay attention to is the fact that Evasion is not really a core stat for CSA wearers. Typically they are not looking to be the target of attacks delivered by monsters, and a lot of the damage they take tends to be due to incidental damage or reactionary damage. The reason for this is because of how hard the armor set lends itself to blind spot fighting, a place where survivors are typically targeted less often by monsters.

Outside of that, this is just a light piece of protection with the bog standard down blue head affinity. If you did want to use it in a mixed set then you'd be looking to leverage it along with other evasion items. The issue here is, 2 armor isn't really enough for any kind of tank, not even an evasion tank, because just a couple of stray hits can put your survivor in a very seriously dangerous situation (that changes when you have access to the Beacon Shield or other Block 2 shield however).

The Cycloid Scale Jacket is a relatively weak piece of body armor, it has the same style synergy as the head piece; where using the (Knight) gives you an advantage. Here the advantage is very marginal. The times you need to move through other players are few given how open the game's board is and the way that once the survivors settle into position they tend to not be too bunched up.

Still, this jacket's passive should not be undervalued, because when you do need to use it the saving on movement points is massive. Instead of having to move four spaces to get past a survivor you can do it in two.

In addition we have the rather solid +1 accuracy if you get the blue connected (to the Hood for example) and both reds. If you're trying to splash this body piece into a mixed set, this is a tall order  in truth good left and right red connectors tend to be few and far between, but with CSA itself, this is not an issue. +1 accuracy is great for almost every single type of survivor, with only Timeless Eye/Counterweighted Axe abusers not wanting the extra accuracy at all. It's a solid armor piece, but not the reason you've come to the show – its partner in crime is.

This is one of the reasons we've all lined up to wear an outfit made of teeth and tentacles, the Cycloid Scale Sleeves are the single most powerful arm armor in the entire game, with absolutely no exceptions. In combination with the 'shadow walk' that the body armor provides when you (knight) the Sleeves give your weapon an additional +1 accuracy and sharp. Sharp is a premium weapon ability and alongside the full set bonus this boosts the power of weapons by an average of 5.5 strength (over the duration of the showdown) and can potentially add as much as +20 strength to an attack (1% of the time). We'll discuss during the look at the set as a whole just what you can do with this, but the two main schools of thought are using it to beef up already powerful weapons further vs. using it to make weapons with good abilities but bad statlines viable. I land in the latter camp, because if you want weapons that hit really hard then Dragon/Lantern Armor are better choices.

With a very powerful departing survival bonus, the Cycloid Scale Skirt makes sure that players have zero weaknesses when they wear full CSA. At an absolute minimum this skirt when active gives a survivor +3 survival when departing, but as we'll soon see, that's not the case for full CSA wearers. There's not really much more to say, it's a huge chunk of survival, one of the highest amounts in the game and it adds onto all of the other amazing abilities that this armor set has.

Last but certainly not least are the Cycloid Scale Shoes. Not only do they give you neat teeth toe covers and a sweet tentacle knee pad so you don't hurt your knees while trying a sweet trick on your Screaming God Skateboard but they also have a super charged version of the Fecal Salve attached to them.

I rate the Fecal Salve as one of the strongest items in the game already, the way that it gives you immunity from a wide swathe of threat based AI cards (variable depending on the specific monster, some are more threat based than others). However, the drawback of the Fecal Salve is the slot that it takes up. These shoes take the poop make up and slather it all over your footwear instead. Which is such a strong ability to have tagged onto your feetsies. There's a bunch of neat tricks you can pull with this, if you intend not to attack because you're using support items, or moving into position then you can activate it and it'll stay on you until you break its cover by attacking (It's like your own personal predator cloaking). Or you can use it by surging after you've attacked and left yourself in a vulnerable position – but most of the time, because the Sleeves encourage you to be so aggressive and stay in the blind spot, you'll leave these boots as an emergency option.

Before we get into all of the neat things you can do with this armor set, we should take a look at the set bonus. This is one of the most powerful set bonuses in the entire game, all affinities become “rainbow coloured” in that you can connect reds to greens and greens to blues and blues to reds and they activate. This means that you can use CSA as a spring loading platform for whatever affinity based build your heart desires (as long as it's not one that needs a different armor set). This is the other reason you come to this rodeo, because this armor set can take some very powerful items and give them an easy place to shine. We're going to discuss a whole bunch of these next as we pull together the different modes you can use the CSA in and explore why it is such an interesting armor set that sets the bar for what mid armor sets should be designed like.

Using the Cycloid Scale Armor

In order to properly optimise the use of such a versatile and powerful set as the CSA; one wants to identify its strengths and weaknesses. Now we can start with the weaknesses, outside of the cost; CSA has but one weakness, it has low armor points – the lowest of any mid to late game armor set we have available right now – and this means it has a heavy reliance on evasion, shields and positioning in order to keep its user safe. Fortunately, these are all things which are either relatively easy to acquire, or they are built into the CSA as standard. There are two another minor weakness in that it has redundancy with sharp weapons and you have to spend (Knight) to activate its strengths. But these are both super easy to get around and as such are not real weaknesses.

I'd like to also briefly note that despite the artwork holding bows, this is not a very good bow armor set. You are better off with Rawhide or Dancer Armor.

When it comes to strengths however we have a huge amount to consider:

• Prismatic Affinities
• +Accuracy
• +Evasion
• Inbuilt Fecal Salve
• Walking through fellow survivors
• Sharp when attacking in the Blind Spot
• No negative keywords (heavy, fragile etc)
• Survival gains on departing

What this gives us is three main styles we can consider using this armor with. The first style is leveraging the sleeves as much as possible by playing a blind spot attacker using a non-sharp weapon. There are some superb choices you can put together for this particular loadout, in essence you can choose anything you love that doesn't have sharp already, but I have a particular love for the following weapons:

These weapons are low strength but have an amazing perfect hit ability (the non-busted version of the CW-Axe's auto-wound) and like most daggers the only downside to them is their terrible stat-line. With the ATDs you get access to a way of developing the really good Dagger mastery (that's the one thing which holds daggers back, the weapon stat design). I'd always recommend using these paired with CSA, which makes the build even more unique.

Another weapon that only gets good when it's given a strength boost, this weapon can have a core in your grid to give it sharp. But why bother with that when you can roll the core into your armor set with the Cycloid Scale Sleeves? This then even allows you to fit the Red (+Luck) Core into the build because you have less slot pressure on the grid. Scythe Mastery, just like Dagger Mastery is an amazing thing to experience, but it is hard to get off the ground because of the limitations of the weapon (low statline again). Everything written in this section also applies to the Nuclear Knife – but that weapon isn't as unique as the Scythe (and it is just as hard to construct) so I prefer to go for the Scythe.

One of the best weapons in the game, this early to mid game club is hard to make and it's a very sad occasion when it falls off due to having a mid-tier level of strength. In most campaigns the goal is to add this to a Lantern Armor set and give it new life, but Lantern Armor is a) the most expensive armor in the game and b) heavy. So the CSA gives you earlier and cheaper access to the same ability, you can then use it all the way until the end of the campaign. Saving on the cost of having to purchase more weapons.

This Dragon King KATAR (not a Dagger, poorly names) is a Katar that if everything hits gains Deadly and Savage. CSA gives it +2 accuracy (plus blind spot bonus) and that unlocks so much more power within the weapon. You can even risk using it paired if you have the CSA, normally it's only used singleton.

This weapon from the Spidicules is the second best whip in the game (after the Oxidised Ring Whip) when combined with the CSA and it, just like the options above, unlocks a whole mastery that you otherwise would not have access to.  Whips suffer from a lack of mid game options, with the development having the Silk and Hunter Whips (which are essentially variants rather than upgrades) and the CSA gives your Whip survivor an upgrade path that lets them remain relevant even if Oxidisation is not an option. You can also do this with the Hunter Whip; but I prefer the Silk Whip where possible as has a slightly superior statline and ability.

Yeah, that's right! If you're having problems training up Shield Mastery you can get CSA to help you sort it out. The Knuckle Shield is the most offensively orientated of the early game options, but you can combine this armor with any shield you can get access to.

We'll end the weapons section with a look at the two Sunstalker Weapons that have high synergy with the CSA. These Level 2 specific weapons are both amongst the best in their class but they lack sharp (by design). The Denticle Axe in particular is designed for blind spot attacking and it's the weapon with the most forced design in the game (as in Adam pushed this design to synergise with the CSA).

The Skleaver is the other option, this is the only non-slow grand weapon in the game and as such any survivor with +speed (frenzy) can do dreadful, devastating things if they combine this weapon with the CSA. I absolutely adore this weapon and its combo with high speed + CSA is one of the greatest forced synergies in the game.

Honorable mention to the following; Amber Edge, Grinning Visage, Hooded Scrap Katar and the weaver from the Spidicules expansion. Greater Gaxe and Gaxe from the Gorm and the Scrap Sword from the weapon crafter. All of which can turn interesting abilities into massive powerhouses when they have access to more accuracy + sharp.

Unarmed Support Style

You can instead take advantage of the evasion and shoes by not bringing along any weapon and using the shoes with only a couple of Fist & Tooth attacks for training mastery. The incredible thing about the sleeves is how they combine with Fist & Tooth's various bonus abilities and fighting styles. Even stacking onto Acid Palms to give you +3d10 strength when attacking. I can tell you it is a LOT of fun to roll 4d10 for your wounding rolls (and have Luck).

Once you've done this, you've freed up not one, but two slots on your grid (no weapon, no fecal salve) and you can carry a load of useful support items (plus a Luck Charm, because why not?) Fitting things like the Cats Eye Circlet, Gorn, Wisdom Potion, Blue Charm and similar into your grid and acting as a hybrid support/DPS. This is very effective when combined with a Ranged Rawhide Support/DPS survivor because the pair of you can share duties of controlling the monster rather than one person having to do the whole job and nothing else. I'd also recommend the Shadow Saliva Shawl in this build, but Monster Grease is also fine.

This also lets you feel like a bad ass martial artist in a way that nothing else in the game gets close to, you can slip past other survivors, disappear into the darkness while preparing to deal a devastating hit and sneak up behind the monster for massive damage. It's a lot of fun.

Green/Blue Ring Survivors

There is a way that CSA survivors can become tanks and that is through one of the three Spidicules rings in combination with the Prismatic Ability from a full set. These rings are absurdly hard to build, but justifiably so and they are also hard to activate. 

However, once you have the green one you can actually start to tank with this armor set. The Green Ring is more overt in how it helps because it gives you a big boost of armor whenever you are targeted by the monster (and are the monster controller), and even if this only happens once every four turns it is still enough of a boost each time to allow you to endure most attacks when combined with a shield.

The Blue Ring is more of a support item and you'd put it on any non-tanking survivor with the intention of getting a free rawhide headband when it is your turn as the monster controller (frustratingly the solo rules disable these items). I love the Blue Ring as something that you just fit into any Cycloid Scale build because of how easy it is to include and how strong its passive is.

These rings both have natural synergy with a DPS survivor using the Gloom Hammer, one of the more famous broken combos in the game. The Gloom Hammer survivor sits before the Ring survivor in the turn order and ensures that the Ring Survivor is perpetually the Monster Controller. Profit!

And this closes out our look at just the armor from the Sunstalker, hopefully you can now see why it is designed the way it is (each element of it ties to the Sunstalker's physiology) and next time we'll go through all the other gear items and discuss each of them. Until then, keep on inking!