Big Drumsticks: Aya – Lantern Armor: Beta Content Review (Patreon)

This content comes out with thanks to timberwolfl, Charles and Lawman5014 for providing images and details in advance so I could proxy and test this new content.

Aya is one of the main faces of the Kingdom Death world, she's been an almost constant presence in the world's lore from its first release and she's been through several iterations both for seasonal fun cheesecake minis and actual in universe adventures. She's even got her head on the unarmed survivor sprue, that's how core she is to the world and I'm always happy to see her as she's my second favourite survivor. As we move ahead, please bare this in mind, I'm always excited when I see a new iteration of Aya and her story.

I don't often review the miniature as a part of this series as for the most part the new miniatures are excellent, but this sculpt of Aya is quite the exception. "Thighya" as the community has begun to nickname the character, has an absolutely terrible set of proportions and deformed pose that is honestly distressing to look at, it's like she's some poorly constructed anime android, not a living being. There's a lot of this model that is well done, but everything from the waist down is not a part of that. She's gone from being a well proportioned and athletic looking individual into her newest rendition as proof that Brazilian butt lifts are a cannon part of the Kingdom Death universe. (They're probably just as dangerous as they are in reality).

I will not belabour the point any further than the above comment and as a final I want to say that this miniature is easily the weakest of the beta content miniatures released to date. I may revise this opinion here once I get the actual miniature in my hands and I can paint it, but for now there's no photographed angle (see them here: https://kdm-collector.com/models/aya-lantern-armor-) where she doesn't look like the blow-up doll creation of a horned-up weeb teenager.

I will revise this opinion if the physical presence of the model deserves it. I'm not confident I will, it lacks the style of Willow or the personality of Grimmory.

The Refined Lantern Axe

Aya's beta promotional content comes with three elements, a new campaign specific upgrade path for the Lantern Glaive, a campaign specific upgrade for the Lantern Armor and a new form of proficiency in the first armor based affinity – Lantern Armor proficiency.

We'll walk through each piece in order starting with the Refined Lantern Axe.

Crafting Requirements: 

• 1x Endeavor, 1x Lantern Halberd
• 1x Perfect Bone
• 5x Resources from a Level 3 Monster. 
• Exhausted Lantern Hoard in settlement.

This is the second piece of Refined gear we have seen, the first being the Refined Lantern Sword from Willow (which is what I'd call an excellent sculpt) and this gives us our first piece of flavour failure. The upgrade crafting recipe for the Lantern Sword requires the same additional resources as this axe, but it only needs access to the Scrap Smelting innovation rather than an Exhausted Lantern Hoard.

The Scrap Smelting requirement meant that the Refined Lantern Sword was not campaign locked, you could craft it in campaigns other than People of the Lantern, but this new Refined Lantern Axe for some reason doesn't require Scrap Smelting, but instead asks for the Post Watcher settlement location.

That means this axe is available in only one campaign, and only in the very end portion of the game, which makes it content for an incredibly small section of the community. You need to be playing People of the Lantern and in the Post Watcher game before this becomes at all relevant. In addition to this, we now have two different thematic elements required for 'refinement' of a weapon and that is a frustrating thematic lore inconsistency that suggests these things are not being designed to a consistent world process, but instead just being made up on the spot.

The final awkward part of the weapon's crafting cost is the need to record bones of a certain level monster in the settlement to use here. This is not the first time it's appeared, but it does represent more bookkeeping for a game that is very bookkeeping intensive already. There's not much new to say about that for the Refined Lantern Axe, but we should be grateful, as we will see later on, it could be much worse.

The weapon's stat line is aggressively fine, it has a (2/6+/6/Sharp/Refined/Cleave) stat profile, and there are a few additional things which make this an interesting choice for end game Lantern campaigns – the most prominent of which is the addition of the lantern keyword, which means you can fulfil the lantern requirement of that campaign's end portion without having to dedicate a slot to a lantern. But the rest of this is a little wobbly, and to demonstrate why let's look at the Oxidised Lantern Glaive.

This weapon is the alternative pathway for upgrading the normal Lantern Glaive (therefore its direct competition) and it has several unique advantages over the Refined Lantern Axe that will likely make the latter weapon a less optimal choice.

The cost to craft this glaive is 1x Endeavor, 3x Leather, 7x bone, 3x organ, 1x black lichen, 1x cocoon membrane, 1x iron and while that might seem like a lot more than the Refined Lantern Axe it's important to note that the Cocoon Membrane is gained in doubles via exploring the exhausted hoard (so it costs a portion of an endeavor), Black Lichen is a 'freebie' gained through hunting L3 monsters and the bones/organs can come from any monster, so you can save for this weapon long in advance of being able to construct it. 

This means, it looks more expensive on paper, but in practice a settlement of this age tends to be so rich in resources that the price difference can mostly be ignored – it's down to the bottom line, which weapon is better in when its in the hands of a survivor?

This means that instead have to look at the difference between the two weapons and we see that the Lantern Glaive does not have Refined, Cleave or the Lantern keyword and it's also got the downside of the two-handed keyword. However in exchange for that it gains +1 accuracy, Barbed 4 and most significantly of all Reach 2 plus the spear and finesse keywords. While Barbed 4 isn't much to write home about Spear and Finesse are premium keywords and a spear in particular is a huge part of why people pick lantern glaives in the first place – even back when they were not oxidized and had the Early Iron downside they were still one of the best weapons in the core game.

So at best, the Refined Lantern Axe is on par with the Oxidized Lantern Glaive (OLG) when considering their power levels, but I'd argue that the spear keyword pushes the OLG ahead of the Refined Lantern Axe and I'd only be interested in the Refined Lantern Axe for Blood Paint builds because it's one handed, which of course means that you're not going to worry about activating Cleave on the weapon. 

This brings us to another large negative in respect to this promotional content release, it does NOT come with a reference card for Cleave, and that means for people who don't have a copy of Badar's beta content they don't have the card for this ability and will have to refer to the glossary. Sure, in this day and age that's not a major downside because you can just look it up online. That still doesn't excuse that this is an expensive premium single miniature from a company which prides itself on being boutique and having a declared ethos of perfectionism. Reading the card should explain the card, and when it doesn't you should be able to quickly look up the ability via reference material provided with the content. Especially when the keyword is as lengthy and involved as one like Cleave is.

Now let us move onto the armor!

Soldier Lantern Cuirass

Crafting Requirements: 

• 1x Lantern Cuirass
• 1x Black Lichen from the most powerful quarry in your campaign. 
• Requires Exhausted Lantern Hoard.

A lot of we've talked about where the axe was concerned applies here also, campaign restricted, extra bookkeeping for settlement resources, but an additional concern is this Black Lichen requirement, because what on earth is 'the most powerful quarry' in your campaign. In the core game we know it'll be a phoenix, but does that mean a L3 Phoenix or does it mean the Golden Eyed King of 1000 years? Because that's technically the highest level quarry in the campaign. But also it's not available unless you have the Mask Maker location – so which is it?

These waters get even muddier when you consider expansions. Is the L3 Dung Beetle Knight more powerful than the L3 Lion God? It's really close between them and that's without even considering TOM (The Old Master). Now this is absolutely something that you can sort out during a game, but there's just no way to get a proper answer if you're asking online. There's no definition for 'most powerful quarry monster' at the moment and it's also going to change from one campaign to the next. It's just sloppy wording and the glossary needs to contain a full list ranking all the relevant monsters under the entry 'Most Powerful Quarry Monsters'.

Adam has acknowledged this situation as being dissatisfying and unclean in the Kickstarter comments this week and there seems that there will be some form of official ranking system, but even with that it's situation that is really messy and unsatisfying and could have been avoided - I'd expect to see that kind of wording on custom content, not official items.

Speaking of messy and unsatisfying; the gear card's visual design is not particularly well done. The art features not just the Cuirass, but also a variant of the Lantern Armor's waist slot item (Lantern Mail) but it doesn't cover both locations. There's a very clear answer to what this item is on the mechanics, but the visual design doesn't lead you there and seeing the SLC and the Lantern Mail in the same artwork makes me wish that this was a Body + Waist item in one, that would have really ramped up the viability of Lantern Armor because the Lantern Mail is a nothing other than a pile of stats armor piece.

There is good news however. Statistically the Soldier Lantern Cuirass (SLC) is a perfectly decent upgrade over the original and it's a relatively cheap cost (once you've worked out which monster drops the right Black Lichen). It provides a large amount of additional armor points along with an affinity ability that you don't really need to activate if you don't want to (Poise isn't super important as an ability, you get it if it works out but you don't need it, and that's far better than the original's essential cross layout demanded). That frees up the armor set to have more builds.

It also provides less movement reduction than its original version while also giving some really big benefits to all metal mixed armor sets, so it's an appropriately statted end game piece of gear. It also represents an overall movement gain if you activate the Lantern Greaves (5-1+2 = 6) so this does a lot to make it even more desirable.

I will however point out that the SLC doesn't fix the single largest downside that Lantern Armor has, and that's the Heavy keyword. This is one of the 'self deleting' keywords along with Fragile and Noisy and it's a huge reason why I don't recommend more than one Lantern Armor set per group, you can pay a massive amount of resources and time investment in this armor set to just have it erase itself and sometimes even the survivor wearing it.

I would have liked to see the activated ability being 'Ignore heavy on all metal armor gear cards in your gear grid' over poise. That would have really pushed this into the perfect position in the Lantern game, but as it stands even without that it's decent. The main problem it has is the one it shares with the Refined Lantern Axe, this is a piece of gear limited to one campaign's end game state, so it's content for the 1%ers.

That means its time to look at the last new concept in the box, and that's the most exciting and interesting of them, one that I hope gets more versions released in the future and that is Armor Proficiencies.

Lantern Armor Proficiency

As it stands right now, we only have Lantern Armor Proficiency (both as a card and for some reason the glossary entry, it would be a shame if Lantern Armor is the only place where this exciting new mechanic is used). So as a criticism, I can tell you that creating a specialised entry for 'Lantern Armor Proficiency' instead of a generic one that covers all kinds of Armor Proficiency is sloppy and substandard design work.

The concept of Armor Proficiency is this, if you are able to select a weapon proficiency, you can instead choose the relevant Armor Proficiency instead if you are wearing a full set of that armor. So that means, survivors wearing full Lantern Armor can forgo their weapon proficiency and work on improving their capability with an armor set instead.

In order to do this, they have to suffer damage during the showdown (way easier to achieve than scoring a hit with some weapons) and then in the Aftermath they get to gain a proficiency rank. At the right level of proficiency they unlock the Specialization, then at Mastery level the settlement gains the Mastery and everyone wearing the matching armor set can also use the specialization even if they don't have Lantern Armor Proficiency.

The way this specialisation manifests itself is as an additional set of bonuses on top of the normal armor set bonus, which is a huge thing for creating more variation in builds, while the Lantern Armor Proficiency doesn't create new space for the armor set to exist in, it does tighten up everything about the armor set by adding more points, ignoring negative stat modifiers and powering up all weapons perfect hit ranges (along with making all weapons clubs in addition to their normal type). There's a huge amount here and you'll have to look at the image above to get the full breakdown.

The main portion of this I'm going to look at is the Opposing Force ability, but before we get onto that it is worth noting that with this mastery, Acid-Tooth Daggers become a viable weapon for end game lantern armor because they become clubs, which gives them sharp and increases their accuracy – plus they get more automatic wounds and access to both Dagger and Club masteries. There's going to be some really fun builds using the Storm constellation survivor + Lantern armor in People of the Stars now. But any good Perfect Hit weapon (such as the Counterweighted Axe) have now become very viable Lantern Armor weapons with some work and the Skullcap Hammer continues to grow in power when combined with Lantern Armor.

Just to break down everything a Lantern Armor master gets for their weapons it's this:

• Ignore the -1 Accuracy on the activated Lantern Helm and still get the Earplugs benefit
• Ignore all movement penalties on whichever version of the Cuirass you're using
• +1 Armor to all hit locations
• Gain +2 movement if you activate the Lantern Greaves (to a typical 7)
• Gain the Opposing Force ability
• All weapons are clubs when attacking meaning:
• +1 accuracy to all weapon attacks
• All weapons are now sharp
• +1 to Perfect Hit Range of all weapons
• Access to Club Specialisation on any weapon (and mastery if you double up this survivor's masteries).

The only real downside here is again the inability to ignore the Heavy keyword, that's the main thing which is holding back Lantern Armor's position in the end game rankings, and it's a shame that we got not one, but two failures to address that in this content.

Opposing Force is an odd little ability and one that I think you're not going to use too often. Be aware that activating this against a monster like the Sunstalker or Spidicules is not really viable because they have between 11 and 16 movement – and also watch out for monsters that turn up with infinite movement such as The Watcher. It does however work quite well against monsters like The Hand, who teleports just about any distance, but mechanically only has 5 or 6 movement on its printed card – this is because The Hand's teleportation is different from its movement.

This ability is mostly a corner case option, sometimes it might only stop a monster going somewhere unexpected, but at other times it may stop actions such as Grab from having an impact on you. This is not a super powerful Mastery ability, but it didn't need to be when it's also packaged with something that strengthens all your weapons by turning your Lantern Armor into budget Green Armor (The Green Plate gear also makes all your weapons into clubs when you attack).

What we should be pushing for however is to get more of these Armor Proficiency cards into the game, unlocking more proficiency abilities allows for more variation of playstyle and can even patch critical downsides that certain armor sets have. Imagine a White Lion Armor Proficiency that provides a bulk of extra armor points plus a way to ignore reactions on one of your hits per attack. Imagine a Silk Armor set that gets bonuses which allow you to ignore affinity requirements for the abilities on your Silk Armor so you can use whatever layout you desire. The opportunities here are endless, and while I don't think that this Beta content is the best content we've seen in a long time, Armor Proficiencies as an overall concept are every bit as interesting and exciting as Novel Weapon Proficiency (Willow's Beta Content) was and I hope we see more of these developed for armor sets which are underutilised or severely depowered such as White Lion, Screaming, Silk and Gorment.

Summary:

I do think that this is the worst of all the printed Beta content released to date, two of the items are only going to be relevant to 1% of the game's playing population (People of the Lantern, End Game) and the third one - the Lantern Armor, while exciting and promising for future design space doesn't quite do enough for the armor set it comes with because of that heavy keyword failure and it also represents an armor set that doesn't get built in much quantity because of its late game status, extreme power and high crafting cost.

Add onto all of that mixed bag the rather terrible miniature sculpt, plus the failure to include the Cleave reference card and we end up with a product that I think everyone except the most die-hard collectors and lovers of Lantern Armor in People of the Lantern can live without. This is certainly Beta content at its lowest point to date, as even the White Sunlion Armor had something to offer for early campaigns that were not People of the Sun.