The Humble Scrap Lantern - Builds for the 1st Transition (Patreon)

One of the items I felt had the most potential impact from the new ones released was the Scrap Lantern. This item provides a right facing blue affinity, +1 survival when departing and +1 accuracy if you have a red and blue affinity in your gear grid. 

Given that Rawhide as a default provides those two desired affinities, it seems that a great place to start the exploration of the new meta builds is around the period where you have unlocked the Weapon Crafter, gained Heat and are starting work on Leather Armor plus transitioning to hunting either L2 Node 1/2 Monsters (Gorm, White Lion) or L1 Node 3 monsters (L1 Phoenix, Sunstalker, Dragon King etc).  This is a point where you need your weapon strengths to climb up in order to keep pace with the new plateau of monster toughnesses. So anything that can stretch out the life of your old gear is really important.

In order to demonstrate what I mean; here is the updated version of the traditional Rawhide DPS/Tank. In order to move forward into its new role, this kind of build sheds the defenses of Monster Grease and starts to rely on a Leather/Monster Grease tank to take most of the monster's hits. This shedding is done because of how tight slots are on a survivor grid, because armor takes up 5 slots there are only three slots left after you've chosen your weapon. This is what causes a need for such extreme focus in survivor builds.

All of that written; lets look at our first stop and explore what it now does in order to try and keep itself relevant against harder monsters.

As we can see, one of the incredible things about the Scrap Lantern is that blue affinity which connects to the Lucky Charm - often builds like this will use Fecal Salve, Cat Eye Circlet or Wisdom Potion to provide that extra blue affinity, but now there's an item which is more focused around attacking.

What this build does is it transforms the Lion Beast Katar from being effectively a (2/7+/3/Deadly 2*) weapon into a (2/6+/4/Deadly 2) weapon which is something that's far more palatable for the early mid-game switch of monsters (also known as Transition Stage 1). 4 strength can easily become 6+ strength with only a modest amount of survivor strength. This new increased strength in combination with critical wounds occurring on a 8, 9 or 10 makes for a weapon that is very capable of handling the higher toughness level of the next tier of monsters in stage 2 of a settlement's power development.

*Deadly 2 is actually Deadly +1 Luck on the Lucky Charm

Now, while I really wanted to showcase a build using just core gear above, I think that the biggest boost actually occurs when you have access to The Gorm as a quarry and I'd like to share two builds which I think will be very important in the 1.6 meta. 

This build does everything that the Lion Beast Katar build above does, but because the Greater Gaxe is a better weapon baseline and also it has that incredible left red affinity which connects to the Monster Tooth Necklace then we've got an absolutely insane DPS survivor who is honestly stronger than the old Zanbato/Rawhide DPS survivors.

The Greater Gaxe goes from being (2/6+/4/Deadly/Reach 2) into a (2/5+/6/Deadly 2/Reach 2) weapon and that's a weapon set up that's so strong you can consider using it against L2 Node 3 monsters! It's got an incredible combination of defense, positioning power and outright strength that makes many other later weapons envious. About the only loss here is the Barbed ability (to give this Perfect hit mechanic its new name) because the build does not have room for the Green Affinity. I guess you could go into the swamp and eat a green fruit if you wanted to solve that problem (or stick this gear on a Green Savior? Do people still care about saviors? I've had so many of them murdered by now that it's hard to think of them as anything other than targets used to protect my weapon masters).

But, if we wanted to pivot elsewhere there is a newer build which this lantern helps enable. You'll likely want Timeless Eye if you really want to maximize its effectiveness.

That's right, the Counterweighted Axe build might be dead, but say hello to its newly minted cousin, the Acid-Tooth Dagger build! Without abusing the Bone Witch rules (if you go that route, swap the Lantern for Speed Powder) you can now have a (4/6+/4) dagger attack that scores automatic wounds on perfect hits. It's a really fun build that promotes an underused weapon type and the main reason it's been ignored in the past is the combination of 'The Counterweighted Axe does it better' and poor accuracy. Moving from a 7+ to a 6+ accuracy (5+ when stabbing the butt) is a significant upgrade and the 4 speed makes this weapon really interesting for players who like to roll lots of dice. You know who you are. (You can also switch this to a single dagger build if you're a coward).

So that's three new meta-builds enabled by the Scrap Lantern and we're going to explore what else we can do with the good stuff from the 1.6 Upgrade Pack, because that collection of cards was not all bad news. Enjoy!