The “Legendary” Hot Take Part 2 (Patreon)

For Part 1 go here.

So we're going to continue this hot take, again I'll stop around three thousand words in order to keep things at a manageable length, so we'll have to see if we can get everything completed within two or three parts, but there is a lot to look at with a whole bunch of locations and changes to wade through, so we'll start with the second tier locations; Leather Worker, Weapon Crafter and Barber Surgeon.

Leather Worker

Notable because this location did not receive any changes, I think that it is still very important to talk a bit about it because the Leather Worker sets the trends that the other two locations are following; it also dominates the defensive meta and will continue to do so until the Gambler's Chest comes out.

So not having any updates to the location means three things, first of all Leather Shields remain almost core to every single build you can imagine so that's a hard weapon to pass up on; secondly nothing has been done to the Hunter's Whip – so Whips remain the weapon of memelords, this is because Whips require a survivor with a lot of baseline strength and they are not great until you unlock the mastery. In a game which tries to force you to not invest everything into one single survivor, whips just do not click in seamlessly. It'll remain better in hero modes, but that's about the lot.

Barber Surgeon

Our biggest winner is the Barber Surgeon; this location used to be something that almost never turned up because of how the Pottery/Screaming Antelope interactions were structured. It was hard/low priority to get pottery, the King's Man might kick pottery out of existence and when you had both you still had to go out and fight the correct level of Screaming Antelope. All for a location that wasn't really worth the effort.

That has all changed with the updates to the location; for a start it is now a genuine core campaign location and is crafted from the Organ Grinder (3 Organ, 1 Hide). This is a big change because it now gives us all early access to Trepanning, a strong and relatively reliable way of removing disorders. That alone is worth the cost.

However; the location has also been restructured to hold the following gear:

• First Aid Kit
• Scavenger Kit
• Almanac
• Bug Trap
• Musk Bomb
• Blue Charm
• Red Charm
• Green Charm

Musk Bomb is still a pile of garbage and Bug Trap sometimes sits in your grid and does nothing at all – so those two items are not worth the investment, they're both far too expensive for what they do. If the Musk Bomb didn't archive itself and the Bug Trap was reliable and they both had affinities we could discuss them further, but they don't and as such the Musk Bomb remains possibly the worst item in the game.

While the First Aid Kit, Almanac, Scavenger Kit and the Charms have not been mechanically changed it has become easier to get them earlier and for the Scavenger Kit in particular that is huge. I think that rushing the Scavenger Kit is going to become a very viable early game goal if you hit a perfect hide. So that in particular is a huge change. I don't think I need to reiterate how good it is to be getting an extra resource (monster or basic, your choice) at the end of a victorious showdown; we're all aware that resources win campaigns!

The other change is the three charms being moved to this location and having their costs changed to require a Perfect basic resource plus Pottery. Pottery is fortunate that it's in one of the two strongest tech trees (Art & Music) and it's also not going to get destroyed if you're playing with the Slender Man (and as we'll discuss below, we're #teamSlenderman forever now). Also Pottery itself has some powerful plays in combination with Face Painting, so we're rewarded for playing cheesy Art population strategies even more now.

Functionally the charms haven't changed, they're just cheaper in cost, but the resource is harder to find. So the Blue Charm remains the best of the three, the Red Charm exists for paired meme speed builds and the Green Charm is just as naff as always.

Weapon Crafter

It is unsurprising that the Weapon Crafter was receiving the largest amount of new gear because so many items were moved away from it and added to the relevant creature locations and there were also direct changes to some of existing items. Here's the list:

• Counterweighted Axe changed
• Skullcap Hammer costs changed
• Scrap Sword updated
• Scrap Lantern created
• Scrap Dagger updated
• Scrap Rebar created
• Scrap Bone Spear created
• Zanbato updated

So outside of the Whistling Mace, which desperately needed a strength increase of one to two points, just about every item in this location was updated, added or changed. I'm not going to go into much detail with the Scrap Sword/Dagger because all that's happened is their Perfect Hit ability is given its own ability word in Barbed. We'll discuss why they're still not very good when we get to the new Barbed weapon.

Counterweighted Axe

The King is Dead, long live the Daggers!

So the Counterweighted Axe can now trigger a maximum of one automatic wound per attack. This is still a solid ability, but the weapon isn't anywhere near as good as the Acid-Tooth Dagger design now.

The updates are very fair, the fact that you could kill the Gold Smoke Knight on the first attack with this weapon was not balanced. So I have no problem with that; this weapon needed to be updated. But the change itself is lacking finesse. We already had a very enjoyable and well designed auto-wound mechanic with the Acid-Tooth Daggers – that's what the recommendation on the fix to the CW-Axe was given. Instead we've got this weird single automatic wound that ignores the Hit Location deck – it's super powerful, but the weapon no longer has any specific builds you'd construct around. Instead occasionally you get to deal an automatic wound which is worse than building to try and score multiple wounds. I'm not sure if this brings the CW-Axe down to a reasonable level, but I do know that I'd rather use the Acid-Tooth Daggers if I'm looking to do something with perfect hits and automatic wounds. So I'd call this change a win for the Gorm and something I'll have to play with to see how it feels, but provisionally I'd say that the axe's baseline stats are not strong enough to justify its cost anymore.

Scrap Bone Spear

Oh boy, what an absolute pile of trash this weapon is. Seriously, the main use of this spear is to identify the good players from the bad ones. Now, in principle this weapon could have worked, but the number of downsides and poor rewards for the costs push this thing down to dumpster tier.

This is a 5 resource 3 strength spear that requires heat to craft and on top of all of that it comes with Frail. In other words, you're paying through the nose for access to Barbed 4 – which is an ability that looks good to the untrained eye, but when you walk through the maths.. it isn't. So before we get back to bashing on this weapon, let's break down just how poor barbed is as anything other than a 'nice free bonus' (Like it is on the Greater Gaxe).

The odds of getting +4 strength on one dice are 10% per dice rolled (0 or 0). That is a simple straight additive percentage calculation, so it's 20%. Then the odds of getting two dice with +4 strength is 1% (0 + 0). Which means that 21% of the time this weapon will gain either +4 or +8 strength. The best way to estimate how much strength that works out to being is by taking a % of each strength gain.

So 20% of +4 = 0.8 and 1% of +8 = 0.08

That means you can effectively consider the Scrap Bone Spear to have an average of 3.88 strength over a showdown (yeah this is back of the napkin mathematics), but the variance on what you get is absolutely wild, with it clustering around 3 strength for 79% of attacks. (For the Record, Timeless Eye doubles that average strength bonus so it's 4.76, there's better things to be doing with Timeless Eye if you get it).

That's terrible; the baseline required for a weapon crafter weapon to be good is 4 strength with a really good ability or 5+ strength with a downside. As we can see the Scrap Bone Spear is both expensive and Frail – so the only upside is the relatively small benefit of the weapon being one handed.

Both the Tempered Spear and the Sky Harpoon are significantly better and they are around the same price (or cheaper) than the Scrap Bone Spear – and most worrying of all the King's Spear (White Lion) and Amber Poleaxe (Spidicules) are significantly cheaper and barely weaker – so this spear is left stranded in the world of “Why on earth would I make this?”.

So yeah, that's a lot of writing, but it boils down to the fact that this weapon needed +1 strength and removal of frail or a two resource cost before you would even consider crafting it. Just move on from this one and hope that it gets buffed in a future update pack, it's terrible.

Scrap Rebar

Speaking of terribly overpriced things with far too many downsides, say hello to the newest meme, the Scrap Rebar. In principle this item exists to protect your Frail item from its first breaking. However, in exchange for protection of exactly one Frail it this item archives itself when it works, takes up a slot in your gear grid, can only be placed exactly on the right of the relevant weapon, requires heat and costs 2x scrap and 1x organ.

I do not know what kind of testing process results in an item like this, but gear slots are at such a premium that an item which exists to just protect against frail needs to be better than a Hit Location scouting item because they do the job just as well. Funnily enough, this item isn't better than the Cat's Eye Circlet, Infernal Rhythm, Wisdom Potion, Necromancer's Eye or the Trash Circlet.

So I guess you can Muramasa meme with this + Rebar, but you'll still break that weapon very quickly during a showdown. I don't write this often, but I think that this card is a waste of the cardboard it is printed on. If you want to use it, you do you, but don't pretend its better than an item that costs one Eye of Cat or two organs, some innovations and a dice roll.

Scrap Lantern

It is always welcome to see more lanterns put into the core game because of how the end game portion of People of the Lantern requires one in the grid. Previously there was not a lot of choice for core game players as to what lantern they could bring along; it got better when you had access to expansions for sure, but that is less important than ensuring that players have a good core game experience. As such the Scrap Lantern is a welcome addition to the game, if one that is rather bland and uninspiring.

This item boils down to being +1 survival when departing, +1 accuracy, one blue right affinity and a lantern. That's absolutely fine when you are forced to use lanterns, but it's not worth very much for most other campaigns.

Honestly if Kingdom Death: Monster wanted to really sell the nature of the game being stuck in oppressive darkness it should have provided a lantern keyword specific gear slot sat somewhere on the side of the 3x3 grid and given players a bland generic starting lantern to get them going. It's always been a bit weird how the game visually and thematically sells this world where everyone needs a lantern – but it only locks that in for less than a third of what is the weakest of the three campaigns available right now.

That tangent done, well the Scrap Lantern is OK, but it is a bit pricy for what you get. So I don't see this one being used much outside of People of the Lantern; there are precious few builds that desperately need to trade a slot in exchange for +1 survival and +1 accuracy. Most of those Builds are probably using the Lucky Charm; but I'm not convinced that the timing of getting a Scrap Lantern works well with Rawhide + Lucky Charm. We'll see; this is honestly one of those ones that could be a sleeper hit, but at the moment it looks too low powered/oddly timed to really manage that. (But I do like the idea of Rawhide + Lucky Charm + Scrap Lantern + Deadly Weapon).

Zanbato

So we've left the big gun for last, with one of the few good Frail weapons – the Zanbato – which for a long time has been one of the core pieces of the entire game has experienced crafting cost changes. No stat changes, just a shift in how you craft it which unlinks it from the White Lion while also making it rare to make, harder to make and more expensive. It's a bunch of relatively appropriate changes, but they do increase variance in campaigns a huge amount. There's only one Pure Bone in your basic resource deck, if you don't draw it, you don't get to make the Zanbato. That's a massive change from the previous version which used the Great Cat Bone – and there are multiples of that in the White Lion Resource deck.

In addition the Zanbato now requires heat and its crafting cost has changed from 1x great cat bone and 2x hide → 1x perfect bone, 3x scrap and 1x hide. That's a huge increase and its going to reduce the number of Zanbatos that are available during a campaign, you might get one and because you also need a Perfect Bone for the First Aid Kit that's probably the maximum you'll take per timeline. Maybe you'll get a second one, but that's going to be a hard ask.

This has a large impact on the Dung Beetle Knight which not only calcified the Zanbato to create a late game grand weapon, but also seeked to fail at calcification in order to make the Trash Crown. The Zanbato was a great item to calcify into Trash Crowns because of its low cost, but now with the changed crafting costs and increased scarcity of the resource involved that's less likely. Which is a genuine shame because of how unique, fair and powerful the Trash Crown is. Making a Trash Crown for 3 resources + time was fair, but now it requires 5 resources to construct, which means planning to make this support item is less reasonable than before. That's quite a blow to diversity of builds – but that's entirely what this change has been about, it's reduced the number of build options by making the Leather/Zanbato tank hard to make. I guess we'll just pivot to something else that provides the affinity we want. (The Leather/Zanbato build has been hit also with the nerf to Monster Grease costs).

I'm good with the changes to the Zanbato overall, it's not how I would have done it, I would have made this a White Lion specific item which required a L2 specific Special Resource, that would have added value to the White Lion while also removing the Zanbato from future campaigns without the White Lion. I still feel that's a nicer, cleaner switch that also helps keep the White Lion's power level up. The changes here make the White Lion less relevant in a campaign and we are really at the point where one needs to own a Gigalion if they want to keep hunting lions.

Blacksmith

Hmmmmmmm, what do you do if you've created a really terrible negative ability that players avoid using at all costs? Do you double down on it like we've seen with Frail, or do you build a crude and obvious band aid patch gear card (like we've also seen with the Crap Rebar)?

Polishing Lantern

Well in the case of Early Iron; it's the latter option, so say hello to the Polishing Lantern. This item, unlike the Scrap Lantern, does have some interesting potential, but it is one of those cards that requires time and a lot of playing around with to see if it's worth the effort or not.

The Polishing Lantern costs 1x iron, 1x organ and 1x scrap; which is reasonable costs for the time in which you'll get access to crafting it. It's a keyword lantern, so all of the comments on the Scrap Lantern above apply. But it does more than just provide a couple of static buffs, ish.

The main use of the Polishing Lantern is as a slightly worse version of the Rainbow Wing Belt, but available in the core game. It is an unsightly patching ability that allows you to ignore Early Iron. Now despite the crude and inelegant way which this has been done; it is still a very interesting and useful item. In other words, I don't like how this has been executed, but what it does is great.

We've been in a world where the Lantern Sword has been nothing but a joke because of how terrible the odds are when rolling 3 Speed Early Iron attacks (30% of the time all of your attacks miss). This has also impacted on the Lantern Daggers; who potentially offer high speed addicted fiends a powerful set of paired attacks, except they automatically miss 40% of the time. In the past the only way to overcome this was with the aforementioned Rainbow Wing Belt – something that came with the Dung Beetle Knight expansion and didn't provide 100% protection.

However, if all the Polishing Lantern was doing was cancelling Early Iron; well it would be a solid gear card, one you're forced into, but it wouldn't be interesting. No, what's interesting is the other ability, the one that combines with finesse and allows you to add +4 strength to not just the lantern weapons but also the following interesting weapons:

Adventure Sword, Gloom Katana, Griswaldo, Muramasa, Plated Shield (10th Anniversary Pattern Gear), Rainbow Katana, Steel Sword and Twilight Sword. The Verspertine Foil is not a finesse weapon, which strikes me as very odd.

The issue we have here is most of these weapons do not really care about gaining a meagre +4 strength at the cost of an entire activation. Many of the high strength builds seek to use Dragon/Phoenix armor for their strength increases and that means they can't really make good use of the Polishing Lantern except on turns where they're positioning.

On top of that, a lot of the weapons listed above here just do not need that extra strength, mostly because they're packing Sharp already. As such I think the best use for the Polishing Lantern is in combination with Lantern Daggers, they could do quite well attacking every other activation with 5 strength (and sharp) and that's pretty neat.

Overall; again, I can't see the Polishing Lantern being used too much outside of People of the Lantern, but it is something that one should always try and remember due to its excellent Early Iron cancellation, lantern keyword and interactions with finesse weapons. It has potential.

The Rest of the Gear

One would be remiss if we didn't briefly touch through the other gear, this is almost all items I've written about in the past, the various 0 armor point pieces are varied in power, but the really cool use for them is when they're placed into hybrid armor sets. This means you get the same bonus, but you don't have to pay as much. They also let you complete rawhide sets for 4x hide + 1xbone/organ and that's a decent return in exchange for losing 1 armor point.

The Steel Sword (And Oxidized Lantern Glaive) has not changed (except for gaining the Barbed ability word to classify its previous Perfect hit ability). The Lantern Halberd and Final Lantern both gain their long overdue lantern keywords. We get some of the Vagabond Armor (but not all of it?); the Blue Lantern, Dormant Twilight Coat, Blood Skin and Speaker Cult Knife all make their appearances (I'm waiting for my 1.6 rulebook to see if those are specific to just the card pack). You can't complain about getting all that promotional material, no ma'am, not one complaint at all.

Also, the Boss Mehndi did not get fixed to work with the Necromancer. I missed that one while going through the Antelope initially, quite a bizarre omission from APG. 

The King's Man & The Hand

An absolutely huge loser, the King's Man got zero updates to the Regal Armor, so it's left on the shelf and it seems that at this point Adam's just not interesting in fixing one of his two most problematic creations (along with The Hand which is also in an identical spot). I could go into a long talk about all of the issues with the King's Man, but that's not the aim of this – so instead we'll just acknowledge that the King's Man (and The Hand) have both been neglected again and they remain the worst parts of the core game. If you don't have the Slenderman you need to hurry up and pick that expansion up because demand for it can only go up as more and more players realise they don't have to deal with the King's Man and also that the Slenderman gained in value with the changes to the Phoenix and the Screaming Antelope.

The Hand remains a cut scene where you get stat buffs for your survivors. Deeply flawed.

It's also worth mentioning that in addition to problems with The King's Man and The Hand The Watcher remains a deeply flawed showdown fight, there was an opportunity to fix things a bit here, but it was passed on getting any love. Shame really, cause the flavour of the fight is on point.

Various Other Notes

The trap rules have been updated to clarify both how the trap itself works - stopping moments where certain traps with loose wording (i.e. The White Lion) allowed for other survivors to attack in the middle of the White Lion's trap basic attack. However, the wording is still loose enough that non-doomed survivors are allowed to Dash during the trap when it creates a survival opportunity (which the Trap always does because it ends an action - which is where a survival opportunity becomes possible). Honestly this wording here is the problem:

"While a trap is in play, survivors cannot attack the monster or use effects that target the monster or any of its cards in any way. This is true for all actions the Trap instructs you to perform while it's being resolved, including actions found on other cards, story events, etc."

Dash doesn't target or attack the monster in any way, so any survivors who are not doomed are still able to do things that do not target the monster, attack the monster or impact the monster's HL/AI decks. Sure that does mean you can't burst down the monster in the middle of its trap card and kill it before the trap resolves, but it also doesn't solve issues like the Gorm's Lure Paroxysm (which everyone can Dash away from), passive ways of hurting the monster that do not target it (remember target is a very specific term in KD:M) and so on. In essence, any trap which doesn't Doom all the survivors still has space for shenanigans. They're just going to be focused around avoiding damage/gaining positional advantage/setting up defenses or offensive moves rather than simply attacking the monster. As an example; we could have the Screaming Antelope trap triggering (which dooms only the attacker) and then another survivor could activate their Polishing Lantern with a surge. Or a survivor with the Red Ring and the AI card could activate story of the young hero, gain bleeding and passively wound the monster that way.

Yeah it's a mess still. Perhaps even more so. But given that APG were told about the various things that happened during traps and they chose to not close the rule loophole fully, instead just patching it for offensive/damage dealing moves which is all they've done. So that in essence means they're condoning actions like the ones listed above. As long as it  does not "...attack the monster or use effects that target the monster or any of its cards in any way." We're good.

Splitting the Doomed section into two clear headings was a good move. There's no mechanical change, but it should be easier for people to find. Good stuff.

Summary:

So on the whole the 1.6 Update Pack provides a lot of sideways moves; nerfs and reduction in play space. While there are some interesting and welcome changes, along with some nerfs that were absolutely required, the overall picture trends slightly negative. Which we'll push through now with a bunch of brief overviews.

Core Game Quarries

White Lion and Screaming Antelope are both major losers. They have now become something you hunt for certain key prize gear cards and generic resources piñatas, your shopping list for each is:

White Lion

• Cats Eye Circlet
• Claw Head Arrow
• Lion Beast Katar
• Whisker Harp
• Cat Gut Bow
• Lion Skin Cloak (campaign dependant)
• Hybrid Armor parts

Screaming Antelope

• Blood Paint
• Brain Mint
• Elder Earrings
• Hybrid Armor parts

I personally do not think you craft either of their monster specific armor sets, leather or Rawhide do the job far more cleanly.

The Phoenix does a little better than the other two; it has a bunch of situational (in italics) items and some strong ones, plus the armor set is worth it in any campaign that doesn't have Dragon Armor. Though it is clunky as heck to construct builds around. The big winner here is of course the Sonic Tomahawk, it's almost good enough to force the game

• Phoenix Plackart
• Phoenix Helm
• Sonic Tomahawk
• Hybrid Armor bits
• Feather Shield
• Bloom Sphere
• Crest Crown
• Arc Bow
• Hollowpoint Arrow

Expansion Winners and Losers

So there are some expansions that do very well from all of these changes. First of all; honorable mention to Spidicules; this expansion is very close to being worth playing over the Screaming Antelope now. If you are one who house rules taken and the Silk Turban then it's totally an appropriate replacement for the Screaming Antelope now. Which means if APG are reasonable in what they do with Campaigns of Death (Taken needs to be changed, it creates absolutely nonsensical situations) then Spidicules could become an absolutely huge winner.

Slenderman wins a massive amount because of the complete lack of work on the King's Man. Slenderman integrates better with the core game than the King's Man, is just as hard but in a more interesting manner and gives you more reasons to go back and hunt the original

Gigalion is another huge winner; I do not like how this creature is AI programmed, and some of the gear is just insanely overpowered. But the fact is there's no reason to hunt the L2+ White Lion any more outside of farming, which is boring, so instead the Gigalion, which offers unique rewards, just feels better for a campaign while also keeping the difficulty up.

The Dung Beetle Knight loses a little ground because of the changes to the Zanbato, it is nice that the DBK can appear in campaigns without the White Lion now; but the Zanbato's cost changes are nothing to be sneezed at.

The Manhunter is mostly unaffected by these changes; it was mainly affected by the 1.5 change to tools (they lost frail); but that didn't mean much then and it doesn't mean much now and The Flower Knight falls even further down the ladder, now landing firmly in dumpster tier. Which of course impacts on those people who still lean hard on the Verspertine Bow & Acanthus Doctor builds, I have no sympathy for players who've not grown and moved away from those two crutches. The Lion God gets a few gains, a few losses but on the whole the only thing that really impacted it was the failure for APG to update the Boss Mehndi. 

Finally the Gorm, Sunstalker and Dragon King continue to push ahead of the other expansion quarries and remain the best things to hunt. That's not really much of a change; but the Phoenix buffs needed to do more – while the Sonic Tomahawk is a great weapon; it's not better than the Denticle Axe (it is cheaper though, so that's a plus). I think it's closer now than it's ever been. The Phoenix definitely gained ground on the Dragon King because of how poor the Dragon King's weapons are, but the Dragon King has a better showdown, better resource drops, better armor and also provides stat boosts during the fight. So a lot of the time it's going to boil down to if you have Slenderman/Hybrid Armor sets vs. Sunstalker as your other content. 

Honestly the Dragon King just feels better than what the Phoenix offers, but if you have lots of Ageless survivors then things shift around because the worst part of the Phoenix's stick disappears (the Dragon King's stick is far harder to metagame).

Finally it's worth reiterating that The Screaming Antelope and The Flower Knight both need a massive overhaul from scratch to fix all their showdown based problems. A new Hit Location deck for both of them is required and also certain durdly AI cards need to be expunged from all of the game, I would love to see a permanent goodbye to the following at a minimum:

• Ground Fighting – White Lion
• Instinct – Butcher (Infinite Insanity exploit)
• Chow Down – Screaming Antelope
• Hiccup – Gorm (Infinite Insanity)
• Cocoon – Flower Knight
• Deja Vu – Phoenix

Also it sucks that Murder, Plague, Cracks in the Ground and Clinging Mists were not revised. Poor show on that front. Which I think is a good overall thought to end this on; there's some decent stuff in here, but on the whole this update is vaguely a bit of a wet squib. I do hope my opinion changes when I get to try out a few builds I have in mind, so I reserve the right to change my mind; but initial first impressions? I'm more wow'd by the promo content included in the box than the new stuff. Crap Boned Spear indeed.

Next time, we're going to release the visual guide for the Sunstalker! And after that we'll get on to the Dragon King while also exploring potential new builds using these 1.6 items.