Nuggets of Gold: The Dung Beetle Knight Deep Dive Part 2 (Patreon)

One of the most fundamental things which should be considered when deciding what monsters to add to your campaign is the carrot. The carrot is; as you are probably aware, the reward for interacting with the given monster. Monsters with too little carrot in comparison to their stick (punishment) tend to be less popular with all players (King's Man, Phoenix, Spidicules, Lion God, Lion Knight) while those with too much carrot for the level of stick the monster delivers also enjoy lower popularity (Flower Knight, The Hand and for very experienced players sometimes the Manhunter).

There are however some monsters that have a really great balance of carrot to stick; and these ones have become the chase expansions. This dynamic list includes the Sunstalker, the Dragon King, the Gorm, the Slenderman and of course the Dung Beetle Knight.

So, the rewards gained from a good monster result in things which are satisfying for the players; this can be crafted gear, or statistical gains, or unique experiences or just a really well designed showdown that requires skill and knowledge to master. The monster doesn't have to be a big old loot piñata; in truth that becomes boring after the initial novelty wears off; likewise it doesn't have to have ridiculously overpowered gear – as long as the fight is interesting and the rewards are appropriate for the level of challenge the monster players are going to engage with it.

The Dung Beetle Knight (DBK) manages a lot of this with its mixture of powerful gear, a unique upgrading system and challenging fight. But it also achieves a lot of its success with its narrative and artistic design. That's something we looked at last week, so this week we'll be looking at the gear. Gear is something that the DBK has a unique spin on; this monster is incredibly splashable – by that I mean it's unique amongst the monster of the game because it can be the focus of multiple hunts in a row the way that something like the Dragon King or Sunstalker demand, or it can just be an occasional hunt where you just grab one or two gear cards and then forget about it for the rest of the campaign. That's such a fantastic and underrated facet of monsters which I hope we see more of in the future. Variety is the spice of life in the plain of stone faces!

Now, in respect of Black Harvest and Calcification, I've written about those in detail. You can find them by clicking the 'Dung Beetle Knight' tag at the bottom of the post, so I'm not going to repeat stuff on those two here. They're a semi-complicated subject after all.

Rolling Armor

The first thing to look at in our journey is the armor set. Rolling Armor is probably the most interesting and versatile armor set in the entire game. The set bonus isn't that impressive, it has a good armor point bonus and allows you to ignore the first case of knock down per round. Those are both great to have, but they're not build arounds – they're just work horses.

The impressive portion of the armor set is the individual pieces; now due to none of the Rolling Armor set having the armor keyword, you can combine these parts with other armor sets. This means that each piece serves double duty; not just as a part of the complete Rolling Armor, but also as supports for individual builds.

The Scarab Circlet looks like a relatively simple and straightforward gear piece. 1 Armor to all locations, plus an additional strength when you get your survival dropping to 0. But the important thing to note here is, this isn't limited to 'once per showdown' what that means is, for survivors who can regain survival repeatedly, such as through the Fighting Art Abyssal Sadist seen below; you can pump your strength over and over for the entire showdown. Allowing the wearer to scale until they have a guaranteed 2+ chance of wounding. There are plenty of ways to gain survival in a continuous fashion in the game, so keep an eye out for this fashionable combo.

The Century/Calcified Shoulder Pads & Greaves are the next thing to consider, they are a popular addition to other armor set builds (especially the Shoulder Pads) because they increase armor and provide a chance of negating a hit. Often the Shoulder Pads are slotted onto a different armor set's grid in order to give that little bonus armor and hard dodge – less often the Greaves are used, because of the reduction in movement, plus the Ripple Pattern being located on the shoulder pads – but mostly it's because 7 pieces of armor really limits what else your survivor can do except attack and tank hits to the face.

The Rainbow Wing Belt is one of the most versatile items in the game because of how it interacts with Early Iron. While in 1.6 we now have a lantern to help ignore this; in 1.5 and earlier this belt was the sole way that survivors could effectively use Early Iron weapons and not get frustrated. That interaction, where it allows you to reroll all 1s rolled the first time you get them (therefore reducing the chances of rolling a 1 on a die to 1%) is still very useful. You can also use this with unwieldy weapons, such as the Whistling Mace, to mostly negate that downside also. There's certainly room for an Abyssal Sadist, Whistling Mace, Rolling Armor survivor as a viable AI control attacker. You just need a good baseline of strength to ensure that you can get rolling on the wounds.

The last "armor" piece, the rubber bone harness, is the hardest one to construct and therefore it's the one that most players will pass on unless they're building the armor set. It has a lot of neat affinities, but the ability it has is relatively situational. If you want this effect, you can get it more simply through the Dragon King showdown where you can get Altered Destiny punched into you by the Sad Dragon. This Harness can be used to help negate nonsense like the King's Man's Silent Hymn, or with Harvestman in order to undo the negative movement tokens gained there. It also has synergy with the exceedingly rare 'Super Hair' secret fighting art gained from cooking the L3 Lonely Tree and the new Halloween costumes also interact well with this. But ultimately, I think you're not building this one except for completing the armor set, or corner case builds.

Finally, as a fun aside, you can combine Gorment Armor and Rolling Armor into the same gear grid in order to get two armor sets active on the same survivor. They're going to have to punch everything they fight, but if they have Acid Palms and Fist & Tooth buffing fighting arts, you can do it. It's a meme build for sure, but considering how good the individual parts of the two armor sets can be, it is edge case viable.

The Weapons

The DBK only has three/four weapons; only one of which can be crafted, and the others are all gained through calcification. The first of these is the Digging Claw:

The Digging Claw is my pick for the most versatile and interesting Katar weapon in the game. It has just about everything you could want from a weapon, especially when Calcified. It has good stats, a good weapon type and it even helps out during Mineral Gathering thanks to that pickaxe keyword (though it breaking is quite a heartache, so be careful with those rerolls).

The Calcified version gains sharp, which means it can be stacked with Monster Strength armors (Dragon, White Lion, Phoenix) to gain incredible levels of strength and unleash easy damage on the monsters you face. So it's completely worth calcification - get as many as you want - it's a great weapon for a tank because of how incredible Katar Mastery is.

This is also one of the weapons I use paired. That extra +1 speed is great when you have a weapon that's this powerful as the baseline.

The Calcified Zanbato got better with 1.6's release because the Zanbato – though rarer to find now – doesn't require White Lion parts. That means its easier to insert the DBK into any campaign as long as it uses the core crafting locations. This was a great move and some smart future proofing – though I do hope we get more cross expansion/monster crafting stuff in the near future. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of the Slender Man for example.

The stats on the C.Zanbato are pretty great, in fact the only thing it's missing is Sharp – but that means you can use this with Cycloid Scale Armor and have a super powerful crit farming weapon that doesn't care so much if it misses. Removing Frail from the weapon as well is a huge boon. Ultimately though, what we have here is a weapon that does what the Zanbato already does, but better. You know the drill, it's great with Leather, it's Great with Cycloid Scale, it's Great with Phoenix and of course it clicks well with Rolling Armor. This is just that classic weapon, but better.

Finally we have the Regenerating Blade; this item is gained either by breaking the DBK's sword during the showdown by scoring a critical wound on the correct location, or by killing the L3 DBK. Now, as we'll discuss next week, the L3 DBK is an absolute beast of a monster. So if you want this weapon early, you'll be better off running crit builds vs. the L1 and L2 DBKs.

In item form this gear card is pretty unique in that it allows survivors to regrow a lost limb. Which tells us a lot about how the weapon works for the DBKs, it's alive to some extent and able to repair its own damage.

However, when you calcify this weapon you get the Calcified Juggernaut Blade. This Grand Weapon has Block 1, making it a hybrid offensive/defensive weapon and it also gains absolutely crazy levels of strength when you aim to get tokens on your survivor. It's important to note that tokens includes not just +stat tokens, but it also includes -stat tokens, bleed tokens, the priority token and anything else that uses the word 'token'. There's a lot you can do with this weapon, for example, if you combine it with the Scarab Circlet/Abyssal Sadist build mentioned above, you can really scale your strength to the moon!

The Items

So that's the weapons, what about the items?

Well there's a mostly solid bunch here, the weakest of the items is still something I'd consider using, and the strongest of them are two which I consider to be near the top of their respective categories. This is another example of why the DBK is such a well designed expansion. Most of its gear has broad uses, and the few items which don't are still better designed than other similar items elsewhere in the game.

The DBK Errant Badge is much like the other two Knight Badges (Lion Knight, Flower Knight) in that it gives access to tactics cards which are a powerful and unique aspect of the Knight expansions and one worth experiencing. I would rank this one as the middle one of the three, it's the only one you have to craft, which makes it a little worse overall as the other two are free. But the armor points to all locations is nothing to sneeze at and in the right build it's superior to the +1 Evasion the Flower Knight badge offers.

If you want to read about tactics cards, I wrote about it a while ago here. I'll revisit that topic when/if we get more tactics cards. Overall though? They're good.

A very straightforward single use (per showdown) item, the important thing about this one is that in addition to its single use ability it also has two decent affinities and an automatic passive +3 survival when departing. This is one of the gold standards in dependable, solid, but not game breaking design.  If you need survival, this item has your back so chow down!

Most of the Bombs in KD: Monster are a joke, they are prohibitively expensive single use items that only the richest and most wasteful of settlements would entertain. However, the Beetle Bomb demonstrates a more interesting form of bomb with its passive affinities and more significantly having a once per showdown ability rather than an 'archive on use' ability like the other two options.

This means that even if you fail to give the monster the debuffs on activation this item is still providing some form of value to your survivor through its affinities. That's why I consider this item to still be worth paying attention to, it's only a 50% chance per showdown, but the impact of that item is huge, and even if it does nothing – it still contributes its affinities and doesn't archive itself.

Hard to get. Absolutely incredible. If you do find this one during the post showdown Spelunking of Death it's going to become a staple for your hunt party. Rerolls are really good. All hail King Crimson.

We've saved the best for last, the Trash Crown is one of those items which is deceptively powerful, on the surface you could be forgiven for thinking that this item is strictly worse than the Cat Eye Circlet because that item rearranges the top three cards of the HL deck, while the Trash Crown looks at four, discards three of them and must keep the trap card if that's what you drew. Seems pretty bad right? Well, the truth is a little different.

As any experienced Magic player will tell you, Sensei's Diving Top is a very strong card with its ability to look at the top three cards and rearrange them. In fact, anything that lets you look at the top cards of the deck and fix which one you draw is very powerful – especially if it also lets you discard cards you don't want into your graveyard.

Now the Monster Hit Location deck is no different from a deck of cards in any card game in that there are variable desirabilities for the different cards in the deck and anything that lets you sift through these to reach the ones that you personally want to see is strong, this is known as filtering (sometimes the process is called scrubbing in KDM) and what it does for the Hit Location deck is manifold.

1. It speeds up drawing the trap card.
2. It increases the number of hit locations you get to see and select from to be next on top.
3. It speeds up the reset of the hit location deck, returning desirable resource locations to be drawn again faster.
4. It absolutely dunks on things like Battle Pressure (nice bonus)

This means that if you can handle the trap, because you've gotten used to dealing with that mechanic and have built the party to handle it (Spear Specialisation anyone? But just being tanky also works well.) Then you now can increase the odds of only having to hit the hit locations that you want to faster, those juicy ones that pump our resources on critical hits (Shimmering Mane!) It also means if you want to avoid specific hit locations (Century Carapaces) or wound specific ones (Spidicules Legs) then the Trash Crown lets you get through all of the chaff in your search for the best. All thriller, no filler!

(The weird head slot design of it does make it tricky to fit into a build also. Consider using it with Vagabond or Rolling Armor).

Now one of the new issues we have to face is the price of the Trash Crown went up significantly with the changes to the Zanbato cost. The Zanbato used to be so cheap that it was something you'd actively try and turn into a Trash Crown because you could easily have three or four of them sitting about cluttering up the place. These days, it's not so easy, so you probably can't aim for making a Trash Crown all the time (unless you can't move for tripping over a Perfect Bone) and instead have to work with one naturally turning up as a consolation prize for a failed calcification. It's certainly a more balanced price for the item that's for sure.

It's also worth noting that every single amor piece above also counts as a support item for other builds! There's also promotional content linked to the DBK, things like the Ancient Eggpoots all need the DBK in order to be used, so watch out for those.

And that's the main carrots involved with the DBK, next time we return to this series we're going to pour through how it affects the hunt phase – but before that we're going to take a look at the promotional content of Grimony and his Gussy Knives!