Reapokratis – Beta Content Review (Patreon)

Repokratis is a gloomy death obsessed survivor that rarely sleeps. He travels alone, searching for his lost older brother Grimmory.

As always with these we'll start with a brief look at the miniature sculpt; the usual criterial I judge these things on is the quality of the sculpture and how useful it will be in game. The miniture for Reapokratis is on the higher end of their sculpt quality with plenty of X/Y/Z dimensions and physical depth in the sculpt's details. However Reapokratis's two weapons are both ones that are not currently in the game and have no close equivalents. The first one is a kind of bone scythe and the shield while new is similar to a design we've seen on the Lantern Festival shield. It also has a butthole in the middle; which is certainly a choice.

However; on top of the weapons Reapokratis is also not wearing the armor set depicted on the Beta card; the Gloomleather armor is a leather armor set with the new Gloom Cowl. Reapokratis has a heavily mixed set with the Gloom Cowl, Unarmored(?) arms (This type of wrapping also appears on Gloom Armor sets), a Cloth/Leather waist and Phoenix Greaves. Suffice to say this isn't a model that's going to have much use on the table; which is a departure from the previous Beta models.

It's a nice sculpt, but at the moment it's of no use to someone who isn't a hobbist and it's potential future use is unknown.

Let's get onto the two new cards; first up is the new gear card. Which before we get into discussing the mechanics of the cards we really have to talk about the elephant in the room. Which is the Gloom Cowl's physical cutting. For some reason the Gloom Cowl has not been trimmed to the normal size for a piece of gear; it is clear that it is intended to have a top blue and bottom red half blue affinity, but instead this card got through quality assurance with a gigantic border that means the card does not fit into sleeves or gear grids and players are left with the unpalatable decision if they cut this card themselves or not.

It is not like this error didn't happen in the display release either; we can see in the image at the top that even there the card is incorrectly cut. I am not sure what happened to result in this; but it's not acceptable on any level and one would hope that this doesn't happen in the future.

Here's the card itself:



Crafting Cost: 1x Dark water/1x Perfect Organ plus 1x leather, 1x scrap.

It's a very straightforward replacement alternative for the Leather Mask as it has the same armor points and affinities; but it has a stronger ability. Which is a fair exchange because the Leather Mask tended to just go in a gear grid wherever (most of the Leather Armor gear grid is taken up with green affinity cards); so this card is asking for the player to build an alternative Leather Armor set and offers a more offensively orientated bonus instead of extra insanity when departing.

The original Leather Armor is very defensively orientated; so this alternative ethos is a welcome way of expanding the original uses for leather resources. Likewise the way that this can be crafted either with a relatively inexpensive Slender Man resource + leather & scrap (Leather + Scrap is the Leather Helm's original crafting cost) is interesting and the alternative which uses pure core game resources is welcome for players who do not have the Slender Man because of availability. From the start I've praised this modularity as it increases accessibility for all players and campaigns.

The bonus for connecting both puzzle pieces is also quite a hefty one; +2 accuracy when adjacent to the monster is very generically powerful; especially for slow weapons. It is interesting that they've chosen to exclude reach/range weapon uses from this bonus by picking adjacency rather than Melee vs. Ranged but as most weapons (except for the Ink Sword) work when adjacent to monsters this is a simple limitation to get around.

Gloom Leather Armor Set Bonus




Another hybrid armor set; yes please. This one is a very simple switch; it turns the Leather Armor set from being a defensively orientated one while also giving it Frenzy and Immortal synergies. Frenzy/Immortal do not disable survival actions, they disable spending of survival. Gloomleather provides you with an alternative option.

That means this armor set enables a bunch of new builds and breathes new life into one White Lion item that's just been waiting for this opportunity. Welcome back Frenzy Drink; you now have a home.

That's a pretty exciting thing for any piece of gear/armor set to do; it's opened up a new space and given us something to aim for with Frenzy Builds. We've not even lost any armor points; so I'd argue that the set bonus for Gloomleather is situationally better than the Leather Armor one – you'd certainly take a Gloomleather set for your second Leather Armor set in the mid game. Also the Gloom Cloak doesn't use cloth as a resource! HUGE.

Conclusion

The model might be pretty useless (and pretty); and the miscutting may be close to unforgivable; but there is no doubt that this is a good pair of cards for any player looking to add a little variation to their leather experience. It's a simple addition but it expands on an area that we've not had much development in for a while. As such I certainly hope this gets the full update into a proper mini-expansion the way that the Sunlion Armor did and I hope we get a model that matches the sweet, sweet art on the armor set card.