“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.” – Perfect Hits (Patreon)

This is a patreon request by Helge Thiel, if you have any requests, please do make them as they often bring up areas of the game I've not deep dived into yet, and those are always some of the most interesting topics to research and test.

The Perfect Hit mechanic in Kingdom Death holds its roots deeply in its ancestors and it is as such an interesting, but at times confusing to understand, concept. In order to set the scene correctly, we're going to start by taking a quick little trip back into the dusty annuls of the 1980s and 1990s. Where this mechanic has its origin.

There are two lead schools of attacking in the “dungeon crawler” genre of games, both of which are descended from a different titan of gaming. The first of them is born from Dungeons & Dragons, and it works approximately as follows:

Roll to attack, then roll for how much damage you deal.

This means that there is just one two gate to pass before dealing damage, hitting the target and then the amount of damage dealt. This means that criticals work like this:  

When you roll to attack (using a d20 these days), if you roll within the critical range of the weapon's type (often a 20) then you'll deal extra damage during the damage roll.

It's a relatively lightweight system and that's one of the reasons its so popular, you only need to make two lots of dice rolls and minimal calculations. Hit the target number, maybe get a critical hit, and then roll your damage – which is deducted from the creature's total hit points (there may be more modifiers).

The second kind comes from Games Workshop's tabletop empire (lets not go into Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay at this time, that's a complicated system); and it's a three (four) step process. Weapon Skills between the two combatants are compared, and a target number from 2 to 6 is determined. If the attacker is more skilled than the defender, then the target number will be lower, if the defender is more skilled, then it'll be higher. It's often expressed in the form of a table; here's the one from Warhammer Quest.

As we can see, when it comes to hitting, there's always a chance that you'll score a hit – the maximum number (6) always succeeds and the minimum number (1) always fails. This keeps the system simple and fast, while also employing the most common dice used (if not the best dice, the best dice is the d12).

Then there is a second roll, where the target's toughness is compared to the attacker's strength and there's a second chart to consult. This time you'll find that there are some results that just can't be overcome.

This is where Kingdom Death gets its Strength and Toughness identifiers/mechanics from, but instead of having unassailable numbers at higher differences, the game added the Automatic Wound on a 10 mechanic in order to always provide that chance of wounding. Because (most) showdowns can't be fled from, the game needed to give that glimmer of hope for the players. Even when the difference is almost unassailable, there's always a chance of scoring a wound.

Finally, if those two rolls are beaten then the target would suffer wounds (with the exception of armor saves).

So that gives us the gates of:

Roll to Hit → Roll to Wound → (Armor Saves) → Score Wound(s)

The ones without the brackets are directly the same three steps as the ones in KDM and there is even one monster that even gets the armor save mechanic (The L3 Butcher), and I think everyone who's faced that particular monster knows why it's a godsend that not every monster uses the mechanic. It's very frustrating when monsters have as many wounds as the KDM ones do. Games Workshop monsters typically have less wounds.

So, with KDM having two rolls before scoring a wound, and the designers had a desire to make sure that the maximum rolls were exciting and offered a chance to overcome even the longest of odds; the Critical Hit and Automatic Hit systems were adapted to give us the Perfect Hit mechanic and the Automatic/Critical Wound mechanic.

The naming of these mechanics does cause confusion, because gamers in general are more used to “Critical Hit” as being a thing; rather than Automatic Hit, Automatic Wound. In addition the labelling of the mechanic as a 'Perfect Hit' adds a little extra semantic step that can obfusticate the meaning. But the simplest way to remember what a Perfect hit is; is to consider it an Automatic Hit that may have additional effects.

With that aside; we're now going to dive into the various ways that one can manipulate gaining Perfect hits and the various pay offs that you can get for them. Perfect Hits tend to be the realm of the following weapons:

• Clubs
• Katars
• Whips
• Swords
• Daggers

But other weapon categories can also benefit at times, especially if they have “Scrap” in their title, because those are very prone to gaining “Barbed”.

In other words, Perfect hit triggers can turn up on almost any weapon, but the most significant ones are on Clubs, Whips & Daggers (Plus Katar Mastery).

They are also found on a selection of Fighting Arts, and when we drill into all of these cards we can divide them up into two main groups. Enablers – that increase the chances of scoring a Perfect hit (per dice) and Pay-offs – things that make Perfect hits do more than just automatically hit.

Enablers

There are considerably less enablers than there are pay-offs, so we'll explore those first. But before we do, we need to recognise that there is one generic enabler that everyone can get their hands on, more speed = more dice which means more chances to score Perfect Hits. This was a core part of the 1.5 (and earlier) Counterweighted Axe strategy, because that weapon had the potential to generate infinite automatic wounds, players would build for as much speed as possible and then reduce the survivor's accuracy (through the Bone Witch event) in order to ensure that only automatic wounds were scored. The Counterweighted Axe was nerfed in 1.6 because of this. So you can always pick more speed, but if you do so, it's usually best to ensure that the weapon you are using is either very high strength, or very low accuracy. Just bare in mind, Perfect hits are the one section where players who desire rolling lots of dice to attack, can be gratified.

The most valuable of enablers would be gear, because gear is typically a higher chance to gain when compared with fighting arts that are mostly random (or SFA/gained from specific monsters as we'll see below). However, there is only one gear enabler out there right now and it's specific to the People of the Sun campaign (which has other mechanics tied to Perfect hits that we're not going to discuss here).

This means most of the time, if you want to improve your chances of getting Perfect hits, you either need to get one of the relevant fighting arts, roll more dice or both. Our relevant fighting arts are:

Timeless Eye

This one technically has a “direct tutor”, in that you can get it from beating the L3 Phoenix with Face Painting in the Settlement. Face Painting is a great innovation, so that half isn't a big chore, but fighting the L3 Phoenix is a very wearing experience for your hunt party if you don't have Ageless survivors and it's also quite a late game feat, which is an area where many Perfect hit weapons do not function to well anymore (we'll discuss how to overcome that later).

If you're aiming to use this as a core part of a Perfect hit settlement, then it is absolutely worth sculpting using the Sculpture innovation. It has a broad, generic use, which makes it always useful. The downside to this fighting art is the blind injury, you can avoid this a lot of the time through clever use of Dried Acanthus. I'd in particular recommend that you keep an eye out for Timeless Eye survivors who are about to reach the final Courage trigger (See the Truth) because that causes an automatic Blind. If you ensure that the survivor has Dried Acanthus equipped when they're close to that threshold, you can archive the Dried Acanthus to prevent that blind injury disabling your build.

The other Enabler is from Echoes of Death I and it's the Dagger focused Backstabber Strain Fighting Art. I absolutely adore this Fighting Art because it's both an enabler (as long as you have the relevant disorder) and a pay-off. Plus, as we'll discuss below, it combines with Timeless Eye and my favourite Perfect hit weapon in order to give us one heck of a fun build that is unique and delightful. This is a well balanced and interesting fighting art, and one that I'd consider a gold standard for the game's fighting arts.

The only reason I wouldn't sculpt this is how focused it is on a single weapon type, you'll typically run just one (or two if they both have Secretive) dagger user with this, and this lack of breadth in it its applications is why, despite Backstabber's strengths, Timeless Eye is the one I'd rush to Sculpt.

Pay-Offs

The Pay offs for Perfect hits are a very wide selection of different things, we have (Secret) Fighting Arts, Gear and even Weapon Proficiency providing bonuses for scoring perfect hits. Which is a big part of why I consider Timeless Eye to be such a Sculpture worthy Fighting Art, it has a broad level of application to a whole variety of different styles and that's a neat thing to have near permanent access to during a campaign.

In order to do this in some kind of structured fashion and not get lost in the weeds, we're going to subdivide each of the different styles of pay off into rough groups and just show an example of each one rather than repeat ourselves over and over.

Barbed X

(The Greater Gaxe still features the old version of Barbed X text)

Barbed is one of the earliest Perfect hit bonuses you'll come into contact with and it's also one of the weakest, it's just a +X strength bonus for each Perfect hit you roll. That's not great, it's a nice bonus, but it doesn't make an otherwise weak/uninteresting weapon already strong. The following weapons all feature Barbed and are ranked in order of how good they are.

• Oxidized Lantern Glaive
• Greater Gaxe
• Scrap Sword
• Scrap Dagger
• Scrap Bone Spear (Also known as a turd on a stick)

The Oxidized Lantern Glaive is an effortless late game weapon that would be amazing even if it didn't feature Barbed, likewise the Greater Gaxe is an incredible early game weapon with its high strength, good accuracy, Deadly and Reach 2 all adding onto the bonus of Barbed 4. Also you can get effectively gives you Barbed 2 for all of your attacks via the Fighting Art Mighty Strike.

As an aside, we can see that Barbed tends to appear on Axes and weapons with “Scrap” in the name.

Survival Gains

Currently capped at +1 survival per Perfect hit, this is a relatively rare set of gains that appears on the Bone Dagger and Black Sword (where it's just a bonus and not the reason you use that weapon). This can be a good ability, but it's not something you build for, and also if you wanted survival gains while attacking, the Manhunter Fighting Art - Abyssal Sadist is way better at the job.

The benefit of this does mean that you can perform more survival actions per showdown, and that is something that can't be understated. At a minimum each trigger = a free Surge or Dash, but it's just not something you build around most of the time. So we'll move on.

Mood Control

(This weapon just needed 1 or 2 more points of Strength to bring it into line with others in its crafting tier)

This one is an absolutely huge one, however it appears on exactly two weapons we have available right now, and they are basically alternative versions of each other. These are the Silk Whip (Spidicules) and the Hunter Whip (Leather Worker). The Silk Whip is the superior of the pair, but it's by a small margin because it archives the mood rather than discarding it.

However, they both lack strength outside of the early game and will need support from one of the strength boosting armor sets (and items) if you want to use them for longer than the first 5-10 lantern years. I really do hope that this aspect of whips gets more development and support in the mid to late game.

Stat Gains

This is the first of our categories that also involves Fighting Arts to a heavy degree and while there is a lot of 'Abyssal Sadist does this but better' you do get a wide variety of options.  Crazed is a very minor bonus in that it gives you a little insanity per Perfect hit (usually good, but troublesome vs. Screaming Antelope or high level Slender Men).

On the gear front, the Steel Sword effectively gives you a bunch of temporary strength, but oh boy is it a LOT and the Cat Fang Knife (CFK) gradually gives you more and more strength tokens. Unfortunately the CFK suffers from a terrible base strength, so you need a lot of strength to get it going and that bonus just isn't super helpful.

The really interesting one is Katar Mastery that gives you additional evasion for each Perfect hit, this can scale up your evasion and add onto additional evasion your survivor may have as a base line. This allows them to start off dealing damage and then pivot part way through the fight into providing an additional tank focused around evasion – which can be very helpful if your main tank is suffering from armor point attrition. Unfortunately just one Knock down can completely cancel all of your scaling, so it's a hard sell.

Additional hits

Often the ethos in combat is don't roll too many dice, but with the right weapon and stats this is not automatically the case. And the two options we have here for additional hits back this up, the new 1.6 Sonic Tomahawk has great accuracy and strength which means rolling more attacks (effectively gaining a variable speed bonus) is fine because the weapon is worth those additional hits. You can also get Combo Master, which gives you additional attack rolls on Perfect hits.

Now it is always worth noting that Legendary Lungs is another version of this as it has a lower floor to activate. You're getting an extra dice per hit, but only once per attack. In contrast Combo Master triggers even on the extra dice (if you roll more Perfect hits) and that can be very exciting because it lets you import this to any weapon you feel that the additional attack rolls would be helpful for. This means it can work as an enabler for other options in the enabler section.

Monster Control

While the Perfect hit for club specialisation is in essence additional strength, the core game clubs have a different direction in that they cause monster control of various types. The Skullcap Hammer reduces the monster's speed, or to put it another way – it makes one of their attack dice automatically miss. Very strong.

The Whistling Mace has a super interesting ability, it allows you to filter your way through the AI deck because you can look at the next AI card and stick it on the bottom of the deck. The weapon itself is unfortunately pretty bad, it wants lots of extra strength and the Rainbow Wing Belt to help make it work, which is a lot of effort for any weapon in my opinion.

There is also an incredibly “fun” interaction with The Hand, in that the Whistling Mace will let you filter through the AI deck very quickly and get to Applause faster. And a brief nod to Thundermaul, because it's absolutely a Nobo (non-combo) with Perfect Hit builds so watch out for that thing messing up a survivor's grid.

Automatic Wounds

The 1.5 Counterweighted Axe, the previous King of the world

We've left the best for last. Automatic wounds, while the original champion for this was the Counterweighted Axe in 1.5 and earlier. It has been heavily changed in 1.6 in that it only triggers once. It's still an Okay weapon, but it doesn't have great stats, so it's not the flagship weapon it was previously.

This means that the new darling on the block is one of my personal pet weapons, the Acid-Tooth Dagger has a balanced and reasonable version of the Automatic Wound ability, in that you draw the Hls and get to automatically some of them. This means that it does everything you want a high speed weapon to do, it scales with more dice rolled, it loves Backstabber, it loves Timeless Eye and it will shred just about anything.

There is also the ability on Katana specialisation and that's something which is available early on in People of the Sun, but it can also be gained by killing an L3 Sunstalker in other campaigns. While this mastery does have the 'eventually your survivor leaves the settlement' drawback, this can always be managed by reducing your Weapon Proficiency through various effects and it's also just a sweet story design. We should hopefully see Katanas develop further as the game gets more content. It's still a great ability and worth the hassle far more than the Twilight Sword Mastery ever was.

Supporting Perfect Hit Weapons

Most Perfect hit weapons lack strength for the late game, fortunately we can bolster this not just with survivor stats, but also with armor sets. Cycloid Scale Armor, Phoenix Armor and Dragon Armor all provide big strength buffs for survivor attacks and I can highly recommend using one of those with the weapons listed above. They'll do wonders and the only thing to figure out is which one applies best to the given weapon. Here's a Hint, Acid-Tooth Daggers LOVE Cycloid Scale Armor.

And that pretty much puts us at the end of this deep dive into Perfect hits, where the mechanic's design history lives, what different kinds there are and a few hints about the kind of builds which can be done. If there's a lot of interest we can do an article or two into some example builds, but that depends on your reaction!