Sunlion Armor - Early Takes (Patreon)

First up, thank you to community members Charles and timberwolfl for supplying the details and scans of these cards so I could proxy them and get testing as soon as possible. Also, as always in these cases, this is something of an early hot take, my opinion could change. Though I think in this case it's always going to trend positive (price excluding) because of how it expands on options in the game.

We're going to look at this new stuff from two perspectives, normal campaigns and in People of the Sun. We'll start with normal campaigns, where the mask can be crafted in isolation.

Cost: 1x white fur, 1x great cat bone(1x White Lion Helm), 1x organ 

Requires: Paint

Notes: Has NO campaign restrictions on crafting

The White Sunlion Mask is something you can build in any campaign due to its generic crafting costs and a lack of any campaign specific restrictions, but it has to be understood that this cannot complete a normal white lion armor set bonus because it is not a White Lion Helm - which is what is required for the White Lion set bonus. This means that if you use it in People of the Lantern, People of the Stars or other non-Sun campaigns then it's not a direct set item, it's going to technically be a mixed set, even if all of the parts you use are White Lion pieces.

That isn't a disaster however, because you can run it as an offensive set and consider supplementing the armor points with gear such as the Lion Slayer Cape accessory:

You can also consider campaign specific armor bonus gear like the Dragon Vestments; generic additional protection such as shields or the Dung Beetle Knight's carapace plates.  Be aware that we can't really use the Lion God gear in Sun because the set bonus does not allow for accessories, and the Ancient Lion Claws are an accessory. But we can consider it here.

The Golden Plate also isn't a great fit for the mask because it misses the 'fur' keyword. This is an unfortunate piece of anti-synergy and it means that the trio of Lion God items remain best used with either normal White Lion Armor or Screaming Armor. (You can alternatively run the Claws with a highly offensive set such as Dragon Armor).

The clear thing about this armor piece is, if you intend to use it outside of People of the Sun you are going to have to live with the fact that your survivor will be an absolute glass cannon. You won't have a lot of armor and other survivors will need to pick up the slack in exchange for your own overwhelming power. We can see that when we look at the gear grid for it:

As we can see from the gear grid above, that's not a lot of armor points baseline (and no armor point set bonus even in Sun) – and as we know, attacking survivors tend to need armor points in order to withstand reactions from hit locations. In addition we can see that we need two up red affinities in order to properly activate everything. In a core game only campaign this means we are very, VERY restricted in what we're trying to do. This is because the additional movement and the Sun Mask abilities are the main reasons to use this particular configuration of gear.

Sadly, upward facing red affinities are not particularly plentiful in the core game. With the main options being the bone dagger, Zanbato and the Counterweighted Axe. None of which are paired weapons; and as such you tend to be best off using a Zanbato/CWAxe plus an optional bone dagger if you want to ensure that the boots +movement is active. If it feels like a 'waste' to put the bone dagger into the gear grid the best thing to do is ask yourself if you would use a supporting gear card that read +2 movement. Which is effectively what the Bone Dagger is doing here.

Between the Zanbato and the CWAxe (Counterweighted Axe) however it's a bit of a playstyle choice, there's not really a right answer. The Zanbato has only one speed (slow), which ensures that when it does roll a hit, it'll be a very powerful wounding roll with Deadly on top of it. The CWAxe has alternative advantages:

While the Reach 2 doesn't have much relevance if you want to trigger the Sun Lion Mask blind spot bonus, it does also have many advantages outside of those situations thanks to how Pounce works in combination with Reach. The ideal attack when you are in the blind spot is a Perfect hit plus a second hit. This means you'll score an automatic wound followed immediately by a massive wounding attempt (1d10+1d10+4+Survivor's Strength). This makes the CWAxe a solid choice if you are not bringing expansions into the choice and it's the one I'd choose over the Zanbato – so I could let the Zanbato remain in the hands of a Leather Armor Tank Survivor.

That gives us a Grid which looks like this:

To discuss the other additions. The Monster Tooth Necklace is just an amazing deal that allows the CWAxe to scale further into the campaign than it would be able to otherwise, you should always have a couple of these kicking about anyway because they are cheap and +2 strength can change a struggling build into a thriving one. It can of course be swapped out for more armor point protection if the survivor's strength is high enough.

The open spot is pretty much flexible for whatever you need, it's likely that further on you'll need extra armor points in order to stay alive, which means that if you really want to keep this build running further than it normally would (and who could blame you for wanting that, White Lion Armor is an EXPENSIVE investment), you'll need to employ a leather shield at first and then later on the Beacon Shield. Fortunately, both of these items are generically good, so even if they don't work out, you haven't wasted any investment on the extra items (just the price of the White Lion Armor bits).

In this example Affinity Build (Demonstrating the layout for People of the Sun also, hence the Cloth/Skirt shared space) The Skirt affinities are not really needed. Note: also in People of the Sun you would not be able to wear the Lion Slayer Cape and get the bonus. This is a demonstration/explanation build rather than one for actual play.

When we move into expansions we're in a better position because we have more options both for weapons and support items in general. The prime candidate for something like this is of course the Acid Tooth Daggers, which are paired, have an amazing ability that lets them scale well through the entire campaign and have the desired up red affinities. But there are also excellent weapon options with the Skleaver, Gaxe, Nuclear Scythe and Calcified Zanbato. On the support item front, the prime candidates are; the Pulse Lantern, Rainbow Wing Belt and if you fancy being a really powerful meme lord you could even craft a Griswaldo for one slot.

Still one the best weapons in the game.

I think it's also worth acknowledging that you only need the mask and coat to make the Sunlion Mask work, which means you could put other armor pieces in the slots. 

This has some potential with the mask. It might not line up well in the timeline however. We'll have to see.

At this point, we should look at how the set fits into People of the Sun (I'm not going to consider Prismatic affinities, the variables become just too wild when you're a Warrior of the Sun, you can just go crazy, but also you probably don't need the Sunlion set if you're a Warrior of the Sun).

As we can see there are a number of additional benefits gained from wearing this armor set in People of the Sun. For a start we are getting an additional +1 evasion and +1 speed (Baseline survivors in PotSun have +1 evasion anyway, so we're going to want to leverage that).

In addition, we also get the ability to complete the armor set faster than normal by wearing the Cloth – the only real meaningful loss here is 1 armor point, as I demonstrated in the build above, the armor set doesn't need the skirt's affinities to work. That moves up the speed at which you can get a complete set and also reduces the overall cost of the armor by two hide. Hide is a horrifically scarce and important resource early on for all settlements, so anything which reduces the amount you need is a significant boost that cannot be underestimated. This armor set comes online probably a whole lantern year earlier than the White Lion version would and you don't even need the Hellfire Secret Fighting Art to wear it.

The Pounce Upgrade is also nothing to sneeze at; going from three to four squares of movement is one of the significant breakpoints for movement abilities and getting to jump over models/terrain is also really useful in so many edge cases. This is very much one of those improvements that you don't fully grasp until you've had time to play with it, but at the simplest of examples, it now allows you to leap over the top of a Phoenix sized monster in order to move from the front to the blind spot, that's something which is typically more difficult to do for a 5 movement survivor.

I'm not at this stage in my testing sure if this is enough to make the White Lion set viable in People of the Sun, but it is certainly an improvement over the current situation, where you can only wear it if you have the Hellfire SFA, and if you have that SFA the campaign is usually at a power level where White Lion armor can't keep up anyway. It does seem to help improve the early game a LOT however, so much so that you might even end up making more than one set of this armor because of how strong its synergies with Monster Grease and Survival of the Fittest are.

It is also not tethered to Daggers and Katars the way that the original White Lion Armor design was; this is a very significant switch, and even though you lose out on the strength and armor point bonuses that the original gave you – this release of the restriction allows you to give +1 speed to weapons that can greatly benefit from it. Frustratingly the single best combo I would want to use is with the Skleaver, but that is a Sunstalker specific resource, and for reasons which are thematically and mechanically clear – hunting Sunstalkers in People of the Sun is not something I would consider.

In the end, this is a great start to the Beta releases, I'll do a full review of the entire thing when the physical copy gets to me some time in the coming months, but I think on the whole that this is nothing but a positive addition to the game. It's interesting, it adds options, it costs defense to do that and it has the potential to make White Lion Armor pieces somewhat more relevant on the experienced player's table.

The buffs to the People of the Sun campaign are also welcome, they were not really needed, but this doesn't create more direct power, it instead offers a diversity of options that were not there before. More options, more choices, more edge case gear cards, these are all great things for the game.

The only main downside in Sun is that you can't wear the mask and the helm at the same time in order to get access to the White Lion Armor set bonus – but given how the rules for armor sets are written, if you could wear both – you'd get both set bonuses and that's not a door which should be opened any further than it already is (DBK + Gorm Armor already stacks and it's amazing with Acid Tooth Palms). So I am fine with that one.

I do think the accessory inclusion is a bit of a thematic fail, and it means that the Lion God items still need to find a proper home. But it may just be the case that these items need a re-haul in Campaigns of Death or the Silver City – I've tried for many years now to get a build that is worth the downsides of acquiring and equipping those three items and it's never really worked well enough. It comes to the old issue that if you can kill an L3 Lion God, you don't need a Lion God Statue in the first place.

So yeah, that issue to one side. This alternative armor set is the kind of design I hope to see more of in the future and I am sure we'll be coming back to this mask when I've had more time to try it out with different weapons!