Holding Out for a Hero: Maximising the use of Saviors (Patreon)

Saviors are one of the areas of the game where utilisation of mechanics is not just a straight gain; instead saviors offer the player a trade of sorts, you can somewhat stunt your settlement's long term gains in exchange for a transient boost in power. This is because Saviors ask you to sacrifice 25% of your potential weapon proficiency progression by having a survivor who is likely to retire before they could ever possibly complete the track. Instead of having that form of that potential developmental completion you instead get a suite of unique powers that can be used in order to help win showdowns and score gains elsewhere.

Gaining a Savior

Saviors can be gained in two ways; the first one is the more traditional method which is achieved by building the Hovel innovation in People of the Lantern and then rolling the 10+ result on the intimacy story event. The second one involves an expansion and we'll touch on it a bit later because it allows for saviors to appear late in absolutely any campaign.

Saviors are one of the reasons why there is no correct choice between Survival of the Fittest (SotF) and Protect the Young (PtY). Those two innovations are very close and you can often chart how developed a player's knowledge of the game is based on what they say; newer players will swear by the protection that PtY offers because it allows them to keep their settlement population high enough to overcome losses, intermediate players will talk about how they prefer SotF because of the stat gains and rerolls, but when you get far enough in the game experience a player will come around to understanding that unlike Cannibalize vs. Graves PtY vs. SotF has no true 'right' choice and instead it's a bunch of trade-offs between the two - with the right choice depending on your play experience, planned strategies and campaign.

(This innovation is famously repeatable).

Thanks to face painting, it is possible to generate saviors in SotF Lantern Campaigns, but without heavy manipulation of the Face Painting innovation, you have just a 1% chance of getting them (10 + 10), so the more reliable method is to pick PtY which gives you a 10% + 10% chance of getting the 10 as you only need it on one of the two die. Face Painting stacking is something which can be done, but it usually requires access to a fair amount of love juice (so endeavors can be spent on Founder's Eye rolls) and as such it's not an early play, which is one of the spots in the game where saviors are strongest.

So; this is why if you plan to play with saviors in a campaign you will typically pick PtY and also grab the Gorm expansion. One of the designed downsides of the Gorm is that it often causes Hovel to be innovated in lantern year one (through its story event) and that tends to bloat out the innovation deck with a lot of innovations that have marginal uses. However, if you're intending to exploit saviors as much as possible that is less of an issue because instead of building your power into the settlement instead you release a portion of it into a single survivor.

How good this transference and sacrifice actually is depends a great deal on what you get in exchange, so let us move on to examining the common traits for each savior.

Saviors in General

Regardless of their specific colour, all saviors have a few shared traits, they gain a permanent affinity of their colour (red/green/blue); a bonus permanent stat, a unique ability that ages them when used, a secret fighting art at Age 2 and the Life Exchange ability which means they gain +1 hunt xp in the aftermath, they cannot wear other keyword gear, they cannot trigger the White Secret story event, they cannot use Ageless (no matter how they get the ability) and when they reach Retirement they cease to exist.

So, they will age up to two times faster than a normal survivor; that means they can last at most 7 hunts (with the 8thsuccessful hunt retiring them) and because it takes 2 hunts to start earning a weapon proficiency and another 8 hunts for a survivor to gain their Weapon Mastery you may be forgiven for thinking that all their weapon proficiency points are a wasted. But there are a few methods that can take advantage of the proficiency points they have gained. Skillfull play and planning can skate around those issues though. Either by giving the savior a jumpstart on their weapon proficiency, or by letting them complete it without going on hunts. The first of this can be achieved by having a hunter with a decent set of levels in the desired weapon proficiency spawn the savior and pass on their training through Family. Just having a survivor at proficiency level 4 gives you a savior with 2 weapon proficiency points and enough time to finish it during their remaining hunts. This is an interesting way of insulating your progression (you can even use a savior with proficiency to spawn a new Family savior when they are near the end of their time). The second option is to use Weapon Proficiency progression Innovations like Nightmare Training and Petal Spiral (Swords only). These forms of training do not gain hunt XP so they can be perfect things to pivot into once your savior is a single hunt away from retirement.

All of  this is, of course a lot of work, and it also denies your savior access to their more splashy abilties (which all require aging up to use); but it is a way of having a more passive form of savior play. Spear + Blue savior is a common trick employed in this manner because the Blue savior has enough extra affinities to combine with the Blue Charm and Screaming Armor to provide a very dependable core game only spear/trapper build (where you cancel the trap when its drawn by you and 'safely' force a reshuffle of the Hit Location deck for other survivors).

So, this is all to say that you can utilise saviors in a very low level passive manner if you're concerned about losing out on weapon proficiencies, but as a player who typically only levels up 3 weapons at a time – I don't need to worry about that and instead I tend to lean heavily into the use of saviors, burning through them as quickly as possible for the unique benefits they provide. So we can discuss that it is now time to go onto each savior in specific.

Red Saviors

Red Saviors gain +1 red affinity, +1 strength and the following abilities:

Unfortunately for Red Saviors, automatic hits are not a particularly great benefit, the important part of any attack is the wounding section and while you have a higher strength than normal, you are not particularly useful vs. Quarry monsters where slow, luck/critical wound based play is prevalent because of how many extra resources that can generate.

There is a portion of the game where Red saviors can shine however and that's in nemesis fights. Because most nemesis monsters do not drop resources for critical wounds, they are less beneficial and instead you can concentrate on just dropping a nemesis monster as fast as possible in order to protect the rest of the survivors. A good Beast of Caratosis trigger at the right time can turn the Level 2 King's Man from being a massive, slow grind into shorter one with a burst finish.

The other thing that red saviors can be set up to do is through the Red Charm, because they have that +1 red affinity, they are more able to utilise the Red Charm for an Unstoppable build. Here you will pick a relatively decent speed and accuracy weapon and five red affinities in order to always have a 50% shot at wounding the monster. The benefit with this is mainly for settlements that are struggling to get out of a death spiral, because your weapons are probably a bit too weak (caused by not having enough resources gained due to failing hunts) this build can let you take any weapon, no matter how poor its strength is. With Unstoppable a humble bone dagger has a 50% chance of wounding even the Gold Smoke Knight. It is honestly an edge case use, but it is one that can help a settlement navigate through some very poor resource drop periods – when one of your survivor's weapons can be any old piece of nonsense, you can concentrate more on armor and other survivor weapons.

Green Saviors

Green Saviors gain +1 evasion, a green affinity and the following abilities:

It's clear that Green saviors are constructed with the concept of tanking at the heart of their design and that's where they excel. In fact, they are so synergous with tanking that Green Saviors in Leather Armor with Monster Grease are one of my preferred mid game tanking options, especially when I have access to an offensive orientated shield that another survivor can work on completing. Tanks are a great option for a survivor who isn't looking to gain weapon proficiency because they can concentrate on activating block every turn instead of attacking. While Dormenatus is a solid ability, Grace of Drmenatus isn't so hot – the best time you can make use of this is when your survivor is not going to retire with its activation, so the savior can also benefit from the boost to armor points they provide. It's a great moment, where everyone's worried that death is coming knocking for their survivors and then you get to tell death “NOT TODAY.”

That's pretty much it however, Green saviors are powerful, but they don't have a lot of directions you can put them in, a big part of that limited flexibility is because the Green Charm just doesn't do much for them, its death preventation is irrelevant vs. ceasing to exist and if you want a lot of green affinities you can often get more from other pieces of gear/armor (Cycloid Scale Armor anyone?).

Blue Savior

I don't think any veteran of KDM will be surprised to learn that the Blue savior is the strongest and most useful of the three, in general blue based affinity effects lean into either luck or mental (deck) control. These are both things that the blue savior is strong at.

Just on the baseline portion of this, you get a survivor with +1 blue affinity and +1 luck. This means that just one Lucky charm, one extra blue affinity and a second blue affinity anywhere in your gear grid becomes a critical wound on a 7+. That means your savior can passively generate additional resources during showdown quarry fights and provide more than enough compensation for the weapon proficiency you'll miss out on. This also means that your savior has a 40% chance of critically wounding any location with a critical wound location regardless of toughness, and you might realise immediately that this tramples all over the Red Savior + unstoppable builds as long as you can critically wound the given monster. Oops.

The Blue Savior's abilities are:

Because of these, there is a wonderful playstyle where you can cycle through blue saviors very quickly by aging them up to Age 2 and then bursting the monster with a Lucernae's Lantern to generate as many resources as possible and then making sure that the savior will cease to exist at the end of the showdown, ready to breed a new one (note, Cease to Exist =/= Death for Graves, so you will have less endeavors doing this). This can give a settlement a hugeamount of additional resources while trivialising early game monsters. The cost however is that your population may struggle to maintain its level, so sustained use of this may be tough.

In addition to this, the Blue Savior can also make good use of the Blue Charm as mentioned near the start of this article. While there is no deadly spear (at the moment) you can still stack the Lucky Charm and have a 30% of scoring critical wounds. You'll notice in the Lucernae's Lantern SFA that it also ignores the trap and forces a reshuffle, while that's an expensive trigger (hunt XP/timewise) it's a guaranteed way of resetting the hit Location Deck, but it's not really the most efficient way of doing so.

Interesting Additions

Before we close this article out there's a couple of final interesting things to note. First of all is the Lonely Tree, the Level 3 version of the Lonely Tree has an AI card that, if drawn (and it should be drawn because the L3 tree uses the Life trait instead of losing AI cards when wounded), gives the victorious survivors the Drifting Dreaming Fruit strange resource. When this is consumed, the survivor will become a savior, that means you have access to multiple saviors at the same time, something that can be quite beneficial. Of course, once one of the saviors dies, you can't replace it, so this is a temporary additional savior.

Secondly, while a huge amount of work has been undertaken to try and ensure that you can't abuse saviors by making them ageless (something we used to do a lot in 1.31). However, you can still have a savior who does not gain hunt XP because of a neat little loophole (which I expect to be closed in Campaigns of Death). When you are playing with the Lion Knight, you can get a Hideous Disguise onto a survivor, then this will allow them to gain the Ageless Apprentice secret fighting art via the Death Blow in a later showdown.

Now the Hideous Disguise is a cursed, other item, so normally a savior cannot equip it. But if a normal survivor goes through the process mentioned above and gains Ageless Apprentice, if they eat a Drifting Dreaming Fruit then they will become a savior, the Hideous Disguise will be expelled (because saviors cannot equip other gear) and they will be able to use their abilities without gaining hunt XP because Ageless Apprentice doesn't grant the Ageless ability, it instead provides an alternative way to get a similar effect. It's pretty busted when you can Lucerna's Lantern or Grace of Dormentus multiple times per showdown!

To be completely honest, I do think that this loophole should be closed out as soon as possible, it's a fun quirk and it is delightful to have a Blue Savior who doesn't age out of reality. But if you start exploiting Lucrena's Lantern you will quickly find that the monsters melt away because the game system isn't robust enough to handle a mechanic like this being employed multiple times - the game's design intends for saviors to be able blast a monster once per showdown/lifetime. A lot of work was set up to try and stop saviors being able to dodge/roll back the clock on their hunt XP, for example the Slenderman Gloom Cream has the other keyword to ensure that they can't touch it. So it seems only right that this loophole should get closed as well. 

Summary

When correctly employed, saviors can provide a huge boost for a settlement, enough of one to offset the downsides their existence has. Perhaps the strongest use for them is to take Blue Saviors early on and use them to burst monsters down while generating large amounts of resources through their Lantern SFA, then pivoting into Green Saviors for the end portion of the campaign where the nemesis monsters scale up in power a massive amount and extra armor is welcome. Sadly there is not much room for the Red Savior, because unless the opponent is immune to critical wounds most of what the Red Savior does is surpassed by the blue one. This is not a huge deal in my opinon, because the sheer variation in style between the Green and Blue saviors is a decent enough selection of options.

Until next time, remember that the flame that burns brightest, burns quickest and stay safe in the darkness.