Forged from the Heart of a Dying Star: The Dragon King Deep Dive (Patreon)

Part Two: Gear

As always with these deep dives, once we are past the lore section I like to go straight into the gear, gear is one of the main, enduring carrots for hunting quarry monsters. Of course a new monster is always an exciting experience, assembling the often impressive and sometimes dominating miniatures. Shuffling up the new decks, learning how to handle the monster's tricks and mastering them is a wonderful portion of KDM's gameplay loop – but of course, when you become familiar with them, eventually the novelty of the experience will fall off, that's inevitable. In contrast though, the power that gear cards provide from a monster never diminish, and as more gear options are added to the game, they can become even more interesting because revisiting them with new potential combos can create wild and exciting new synergies.

This is a large part of why KDM needs a reasonable and continuous stream of new content, it doesn't need giant floods of it delivered once every few years, small expansions with maybe one large piece every year would transform this game from a niche, hard to get into, experience to a true lifestyle game. Still, for the moment, given how long and deep this content runs, pieces like the Dragon King and the Sunstalker provide a huge amount of content to dig into, thanks to their high synergy with each other's gear pieces. We're not here to explore that, but we are here to explore the Dragon King's gear in some detail – and it's probably inevitable that I'll reference some of the synergies, because in a happy melding, Dragon King weapons are improved by Sunstalker armor and Sunstalker Weapons are improved by Dragon King armor!

Which means that the first place we should take our journey through the little square carrots is the armor set. Which has over time taken front place as my favourite armor set in the game due to its well balanced costing, interesting design and challenging without being frustrating layout. Out of all the end game full sets (with the exception of Cycloid Scale), I find that Dragon Armor stands out as being interestingly flexible and engaging – it's not as overwhelmingly lopsided in power as the Phoenix Armor is (which is either absurdly powerful, or disappointingly mediocre depending on if you're abusing it or not).

Dragon Armor  - The Set Bonus

We'll start with the set bonus, now I still stand by the opinion that no armor set should be designed with extra armor points, those points should be baked into the individual pieces and instead the set bonus should just be some funky extra ability. If we had the armor pieces designed in that fashion then mixed sets would become a far more common occurrence – as it stands without that, set bonuses are overwhelmingly important, so we tend to rarely combine stuff in a selective manner.

Dragon Armor increases the base armor points at all locations from 4 to 5, which is a significant 25% increase in durability. That's decent, but not exciting. The other ability on the surface looks almost as unexciting, you could be forgiven for saying that this is just another armor set with a 'monster move/attack' ability, and that it's a rip-off of the White Lion's Pounce. While the two armour sets do have a surface level similarity, they're thematically designed with different references in mind. The White Lion's Pounce is not even the set bonus, it's located on the body piece, but more than that it's designed to call to mind imagery of a cat pouncing on its prey, hence the high level of synergy with dagger-like weapons.

Dragon Armor in contrast is a reference not just to dragons swooping down on their victims from above, but it is also a reference to the Dragoons from the Final Fantasy series, who wear dragon-like armor and focus on jumping attacks as a portion of their attack repertoire. It also has a far wider level of applications, working with any kind of melee weapon. This means that Leap is often compared to Phoenix Armor's Charge, because they both require a long distance to score the hit and add strength. However, once again, Leap has different applications to Charge. Charge has a scaling amount of bonus strength that can be potentially increased to a staggering level with enough movement (I've used Altered Destiny, a Dragon King SFA, in combination with Phoenix Armor against the L2 and L3 King's Man to charge almost the entire length of the showdown board – we'll talk more about Altered Destiny later in this series. It's a super interesting SFA that can be gained in a relatively consistent manner).

Leap on the other hand provides a consistent bonus to strength, but also offers additional accuracy and if the monster (or reach on your weapon) is sufficient size then you can Leap to the opposite side of the monster and attack every single turn without having to spend survival – this is a massive change from how Charge and Pounce operates and it makes Dragon Armor one of the premium Reach weapon armor sets in the game. Considering how great many of the reach weapons are, this is an impressive niche for the armor set to have carved out.

It is also a “light” armor set; light armor is; logically, any armor set that doesn't have the heavy keyword. Unlike on weapons, where sometimes heavy is beneficial, the heavy keyword is terrible burden when on armor – so Dragon Armor being constructed from metal, but not suffering this downside is something it shares with Phoenix Armor. It also has another 'negative space' advantage in that it isn't flammable, which Phoenix Armor is. This, along with the 4x4 size of the Sunstalker (and Dragon King) is a big factor in why this armor set is so great. A Dragon Armor survivor can stick next to the Sunstalker and hop over it from one turn to the next as long as the Sunstalker doesn't move. With a Reach 2 weapon this becomes possible with 3x3 monsters (Gorm, Phoenix) and with a Reach 3 weapon (technically we have two of these) just about every single monster is a viable target.

This means that you can often consider Dragon Armor to pseudo give certain weapons +2 accuracy & +5 strength in an almost permanent fashion. This allows you to take mid game weapons with interesting abilities a lot further into the late game – Cycloid Scale Armor also does this, however it won't help weapons which are already sharp, something both Dragon and Phoenix Armor will.

For the rest of this breakdown, we're going to go into the individual pieces, which have a range of thematic and mechanically interesting abilities.

Dragonskull Helm

Cost: 1x Horn Fragment, 2x Bone, 1x Husk

The Dragon Skull Helm has a relatively low crafting cost for what you get. You can score 2 horn fragments from a critical wound location and the husk from a different one (along with a veined wing resource). It has two interesting keyword properties, first has the bone keyword for People of the Skull and secondly it has the metal keyword which means Dragon Armor can be used with the Oxidized Lantern Helm instead of the Dragon Helm (Due to the Outfit ability). That's not a super useful aspect at the moment, but if being deaf (via Earplugs) becomes an important piece of protection for certain new monsters it could be relevant.

The affinities on this piece provide for some interesting flexibility, you need to connect two red affinities to get the ability bonus, but the helmet provides you with three slots to do this with. Typically the torso armor will fit in the bottom slot, and the waist armor will fit on the right, but you have the option to use the left facing affinity instead if you want (such as with the Monster Tooth Necklace) and this kind of flexibility is not aesthetically pleasing (we all know the best kinds of grids connect all affinities correctly regardless of benefits because IT LOOKS PRETTY), but it is a great option.

The affinity locked ability is decent, not amazing, but decent. +1 to head injuries is a huge benefit, but we don't really want to be rolling for them in the first place, so one should consider it as a Brucey Bonus rather than the main draw. The other ability does absolutely nothing, unless you already have a shattered jaw, and then it's amazing because it gives you back encourage type survival actions – with a shattered jaw you can't consume or encourage, and some builds require that.

So it's a helm with good protections, decent keywords, average affinities and abilities which are just fine. There are better helms out there, but there are worse ones as well.

Dragon Gloves

Cost: 1x cabled vein, 1x husk, 1x leather, 1x iron

There's not a lot to say about the gloves, for the monster tier that these come from (Node 3) there is no excuse for generic armor pieces that supply affinities and nothing else. Not even the affinities are that great, the green helps the torso piece, but as we'll see when we look at the layout it doesn't do anything else really. I'd call the Gloves one of the pieces that really needs a rework in Campaigns of Death, that blue affinity could be added to the bottom slot as well for start.

Dragon Mantle

Cost: 1x horn fragment, 1x iron, 1x hardened ribs, 1x leather

Easily the best piece of the armor set, the Mantle has an incredible ability because it lets you use up ALL your survival on the hunt and still have the maximum amount available for use during the showdown. There's no survival gain design that's better than this in my opinion and while it's a simple ability, it's really powerful. It is worth noting that the blue affinity on the left is an optimal orientation, but within the context of the armor as a whole it's very awkward.

It cannot be ignored that this is a hard piece to make, the hardened ribs are an elusive component, if you get them you should make the Mantle immediately.

I also like how thematically the design of this armor piece mirrors the Dragon King and has an exposed chest, even if that's a dumb form of protection it looks cool.

Dragon Belt

Cost: 2x veined wing, 1x organ, 1x iron

Dragon Belt is one of the most metal sounding names in the entire game. To be honest I often don't activate this item's ability because I prefer to put the belt in the top left corner (for connecting to the blue on the Dragon Gloves). The affinities here are an example of how not to design affinities with puzzle connectors, because the item has just two affinities and requires both of them to activate it there are a limited number of locations where you can place this item. Just adding another red to the left and a blue to the top would have greatly improved this item, which it needs because the ability on it is – well it's a bad ability. You don't mind having this bonus, but you also typically won't use it more than zero to one times in a showdown, because of that the affinities should have been way stronger/more flexible to compensate for such a mundane and situational ability.

Nice crafting cost though, not too hard to make.

Dragon Boots

Cost: 1x King's Claws, 1x husk, 1x organ, 1x iron

Another simple ability here, but this one is very strong and something you'll use a lot of the time. Getting +2 movement, even at the limitation of only during your act (so not when dashing during the monster's turn, which denies dash cancels, a clever bonus which I'm sure wasn't intentional design, because Dash-cancels was something the community figured out after this armor set was released). 7 movement is huuuuuuuge, and the only real 'negative' is that extra movement doesn't help when you are using the Leap ability, so this is more of a modal bonus. It's still good, even if extra movement on boots is generic as generic can be.

The red affinity is also very useless, this armor set would have been much, much stronger if it had a red on the left side, and/or a blue/green instead of the current red affinity.

Affinity Layout

This is one of the more awkward sets to layout (Right up there with Silk Armor, Phoenix Armor and Lantern Armor), but this is one of the two most common deployments. This particular one has some problems, the first is that in order to complete the Mantle and Belt puzzle affinities you have exactly one option at the moment, the Dragon Talon Katar. Which as we'll see a bit further on, isn't really an optimal weapon for this armor set. Also both the Gloves and Boots have weak affinities left hanging out in that blue and that red. The kind of things you'd normally seek to connect these two utilise a down blue and a right red more efficiently.

It's not the worst layout, but like Silk Armor it could absolutely benefit from a revision in Campaigns of Death. So much of Dragon Armor's power is pushed into the set bonus, torso and leg armor – considering the power level of the Dragon King, this set could do with a tune up (especially if they are still going to go through with that INSANE boost to Cycloid Scale Armor that was announced a while ago on the Kickstarter).

Nuclear Scythe

Cost: 1x radiant heart, 2x king's claw, 2x scrap

A lot of what I write here is equally going to apply to the Nuclear Knife, because both of these weapons share the same positives and negatives. However the Nuclear Scythe is the stronger and more interesting of the two weapons.

That said, this is still not a great weapon overall, Scythes as a weapon category are super powerful, but this is the only scythe in the game, which means the two are intrinsically linked and unless we get more Scythes then it's going to remain a weapon with a unique weapon proficiency. So we'll look at that first then get back to the Scythe's other properties.

These two abilities are both top tier, getting a chance at a full reshuffle on a critical wound is a huge benefit (remember that you'll reshuffle the whole deck, including discard pile), this gives the deck a load of refreshes and stops that situation where all the good hit locations are in the discard pile and you need to dive into the trap. Scythe is the only weapon type other than spear which can perform this kind of trapper refreshing playstyle and it's a really powerful option.

The master ability is absolutely bonkers, you get an entire extra activation with your scythe, meaning you can attack up to three times in a turn (with a surge) and one of those can even be a Leap. You can also use the Scythe mastery to ignite the blade, but as we'll discuss below, that's not the best option because a) That causes brain damage, which can pull you out of being insane for the Mastery and b) Devastating 1 isn't better than another entire attack.

Back to the Nuclear Scythe now.

This weapon is a very expensive weapon to craft, not simply because it requires a death blow/L2 + Sculpture locked resource, but because 80% of the time, the survivor who collects this resource dies. This is a bit of a messy situation because it means you need a disposable survivor to deliver the deathblow/collect the heart. So remember to bring a red shirt on every Dragon King hunt.

The issue here is that the Nuclear Scythe isn't very powerful, it's missing around 2-3 points of strength before it'll become something worthwhile without armor set boosts. This is one of the reasons why I recommend running the Sunstalker and Dragon King in tandem, because Cycloid Scale Armor will give you access to Sharp for the Nuclear Scythe which is a solid option, but if you are going solo with Dragon King, the Nuclear Scythe still works well with Dragon Armor's Leap.

The stat line outside of the strength is absolutely fine, which means that this weapon was probably designed with the Dragon Armor Leap Strength boost being considered a permanent part of the weapon's profile (this is something one notices a lot with the monsters who have strength bonuses built into their armor, most of the weapons seem to have their strength pre-nerfed. See also the White Lion, Screaming Antelope and Phoenix weapons (1.6 fixed a little of the Phoenix's issue and the Gigalion gave assistance to the White Lion, sort of).

Last of all there is the activated ability, which as discussed above in the scythe section is not great. Devastating X is great when it's on a slow weapon because it multiplies your damage potential. Devastating 1 is great when it's a passive on a weapon. When you have to spend an activation to get it rolling though? It's not worth it most of the time because you would deal just as much or even more damage with a normal attack. And when you have Scythe Specialisation

If this ability was Devastating 2 then it would be worth the price, as it stands, you're not using a Nuclear weapon for this 'Edge Ignites' ability.

Nuclear Knife

Cost: 1x radiant heart, 2x horn fragment, 2x scrap

Everthing I've written about the Nuclear Scythe above applies down here, with the change that Daggers are a weaker weapon type – we're still in a situation where there are only around three decent daggers and I'm sorry to say that the Nuclear Knife is not one of them. Given that the crafting cost for this weapon is equivalent to the Nuclear Scythe and the scythe is both stronger and has a unique, powerful weapon type I think that the Nuclear Knife is just best left in the box. If you want powerful daggers stick with Acid-Tooth, Oxidized Lantern, Hook Claw or Promotional (10th Anniversary, White Speaker, Grimmory or Halloween White Speaker for example).

Blue & Red Power Cores

Blue Core Cost: 1x shining liver (L2 specific Stand resource), 1x iron

Red Core Cost: 1x pituitary gland (L2 specific), 1x iron

Another factor to why the two Nuclear weapons are so bunk is the expectation that players would employ the two cores and the weapons were based around how they are when you have both in your gear grid. There's no denying that adding Deadly 2 and/or Sharp to these weapons does improve them, but there are some steep costs beyond the resources. Both of these items are completely useless to anyone without a nuclear gear card, and even with a nuclear weapon they do not have an affinities. I would have expected these gear cards to provide a full affinity (in the matching colour) by themselves and/or have matching half affinities in all directions. This would mean that they could passively help out elsewhere while also boosting the nuclear weapons.

Of the two, the Red Core is the one stranded in a worse position, it's significantly less useful than the Blue Core due to how prevalent Sharp is as an ability over Deadly 2. In the late game it's easy to just trip over Sharp by accident and many sharp weapons such as the Lantern Glaive function at an equal or higher power level for less slots occupied. Add into that the Cycloid Scale Armor's sleeves giving out sharp and you're at a point where the only time you'll probably take the Red Core is when you're not using the Sunstalker.

The Blue Core on the other hand is one of the things I'm happy to be revisiting this gear. It turns out that yes, Deadly 2 is worth the slot, for both of the weapons, but especially for the Scythe which feeds off critical wounds. It turns out that with Dragon Armor + Blue Core + Lucky Charm + Scythe you have everything you need to get to a 7+ shot at critical wounds. Which trigger the Hit Location reshuffle and bypass reactions. Even the Nuclear Knife becomes relatively impressive with this set up and the best thing is you can easily migrate this build onto Cycloid Scale Armor, Phoenix Armor or even things like Dancer Armor. It's a genuinely excellent critical wound build that doesn't need the survivor to add much to what its doing (beyond maybe a bit of strength for a Dancer).

So this means that while the Red Core is situational, the Blue Core absolutely is a top portion of the Dragon King suite for Nuclear weapon builds. Which is something I'm pretty happy about, but I still think that these gear cards should be providing affinities or get slotted outside of the gear grid.

Oh and as a last aside, watch out for White Lions, these both have the jewelry keyword which means White Lions may pinch them if you suffer defeat. What you're doing being defeated by a White Lion when you have a Nuclear Blue Core Scythe I don't know. But eh, it's worth remembering.

Blast Shield

Cost: 1x king's tongue, 1x iron

This is very nearly an excellent shield, the problems it has are not in its design, which is fine, but in that it is only a mild upgrade over the Leather Shield while also being light years behind the Beacon Shield. I think if designed in modern times this weapon would have probably been Deflect 1 – which would have given it enough of a power increase to slot it into builds as the 'gain the priority token the first time you block a hit each showdown' is a solid enough ability, I guess. Maybe if it was optional when you gained that priority token, and limited to once per showdown, so you could at least decide when to pull the trigger on the priority token, that might increase the power level enough.

The real wobble is that in truth this is just a bad version of the whip's Provoke ability. And I could see a world where instead of this shield giving you priority target on a blocked hit it could instead give you priority target when you score a hit. Allowing it to be an offensive shield where you draw attention by hitting the monster.

Still, if you are in a campaign which is struggling for leather for some reason (I don't know where that would happen, maybe you sacrificed Ammonia during a fit of madness), then the Blast Shield is at least a cheap craft at two resources – if you are in the portion of the game where you haven't yet got the Beacon Shield online at least.

Ultimately this is another gear card that needed some slight further improvements or tweaks to give us a reason to set aside the Leather Shield. In a future campaign where maybe the Leather Shield doesn't exist, this shield may get a new lease of life.

Blast Sword

Cost: 1x horn fragment, 3x organ

I really, really want to like Swords with Block on them, it's thematic as heck and takes into account part of what made the sword such a dominant weapon for a fair period in time. Now we have the Novel sword specialization that combines with the Blast Sword's block by allowing an attack at specialization level the Blast Sword has gotten a buff for owners of beta content.

With Novel Swordsmanship this weapon is nearly good enough to use. The problem it has is one you're going to read time and time again when we look at Dragon King weapons, it's strength is just not good enough. A weapon you get from the L1 Dragon King should have enough strength to challenge the L2's toughness without outside help. It's toughness 15. Even at L1 it's  Toughness 13. That means the average strength roll of this weapon being between 9 to 10 is absolutely unacceptable. At a minimum the Blast Sword should be 6 strength and I wouldn't even consider 7 strength to be too high. It just seems that it is once again a victim of

The weapon doesn't even work well with Cycloid Scale Armor because then it just becomes a generic 4 strength sword. You can't really take advantage of the Blind Spot Sharp bonus the Sleeves provide AND the Novel Block/Attack because you're just rarely going to be attacked when in the blind spot.

As such, this is a weapon which needs to be revisited in Campaigns of Death. Design is fine, affinities are fine, resource cost is fine, strength is 2-3 points too low and that's a deal breaker.

Dragon Chakram

Cost: 1x horn fragment, 2x organ, 1x leather

Can anyone tell me why this is made from just one half circle? I'm not complaining about the costs really, but thematically I would have loved this to be two horn fragments and no organs.

Ultimately this is a low strength thrown weapon. Thrown weapons are dumpster tier due to not having a weapon proficiency and strength 3 for a Node 3 monster weapon is just a joke. If you want to throw things, get the Shielderang strain art.

Sorry Xena, I'll never stop campaigning for Thrown Mastery to become a thing, but it seems that Poots hates people and cultures that use them. Next!

Dragon Bite Bolt

Cost:2x radioactive dung

Say it with me. Needs. More. Strength. This is the worst of the arrows out there because most of the time it's just straight damage. There is a tactical use for this bolt where one can surge during a flow step and if you wound then you can push the monster far enough back that it will cancel the rest of its attack. Sort of an alternative, inverse dash-cancel.

That doesn't make up for it having the same attack profile as the Claw Head Arrow WHICH COMES FROM A L1 WHITE LION! 8 to 10 strength seems more correct, not what we have here. Or if it triggered its ability 'on hit' rather than 'on wound' that which could additionally give it a new life.

Also, this is a nuclear arrow made from poop. So it's at least it has that going for it.

Shielded Quiver

Cost: 1x Cabled Vein, 2x Veined Wing, 2x Leather

Well if you wanted something good for arrows. Here it is. In fact. I'm just going to review this one in a meme format, because you should just craft it 100% of the time and enjoy doubling all your arrows in your grid.

(Note, you can't stack both quivers together because one of them holds the arrows outside of your gear grid and the other one needs them to be in the grid. Which is a neat piece of design.)

Talon Knife

Cost: 2x King's Claw, 2x Organ

Talk about shooting yourself in the King's foot. The Talon Knife is a weapon that explicitly a weapon that hates being paired because you want to roll as few dice as possible and as accurately as you can. There's a build which uses one of these, plus Dragon Armor (Or Cycloid Scale) and a Lucky Charm to scale accuracy as much as possible. Even then you don't really need a second Talon Knife because Savage only triggers a maximum of once.

Honestly, I like the ability on this one, I feel that (once again) it's 1 or 2 strength too low for what it is and the affinities are really good. So this one can get use as a mid game Katar if it's combined with Sharp Sleeves (Cycloid Scale) or the Leap/Charge set bonus. That's an old story though, there are so many weapons with interesting abilities/keywords that only become viable when you wear them with Cycloid Scale/Dragon/Phoenix Armor for additional strength.

That written, this is still probably the best weapon in the Dragon Armory outside of the Scythe and it has a place in the game and one of the better mid game Katars (behind the excellent DBK Digging Claws). You just need to pretend that Paired isn't printed onto it.

Next time we're back into the gritty mechanics, so pack your radiation suit and RadAway, because there's going to be a few meltdowns.