Screaming Oni Armor Review (Patreon)

Lucy wears the Screaming Oni hybrid armor that transforms the reckless abandon of the screaming armor into a precise tool for maiming monsters.

As we all know, hybrid armor sets that repurpose existing gear cards and turn them into something with a new function are one of the most exciting parts of content that can be released. On top of that I have a great deal of fondness for the Screaming Antelope despite the rough ride it has been through; I still love the art direction the set has with its lightweight hide & fur look and very 1980's leg warmers.

So, if  I wasn't already predisposed to positive feelings about this set APG have tipped things further  towards my bias by including the best survivor in this box. Lucy has been my favourite part of the Kingdom Death world for a long time; so much that I have a full Lucy hunt party for tabletop playing.

However, I have mixed feelings about this particular outfit; I do like the expression on Lucy's face and Kingdom Death is one of the few games that has good curly hair on their models. But the thong and bikini style of this is something I would prefer to see in the pin ups rather than the in game models. I'm also not sure I'm sold on the mask being on her knee rather than covering up her face the way that it is in the artwork – also that stray top piece of hair is just not going to last outside of keeping the model on a shelf. It's a great sculpt, it's just not wowing me as much as other Lucy sculpts have in the past. Also, I hope that when Zachary and Allister get their hybrid armor set models they are also just as skimpily clad as Erza and Lucy have been in this series.

Onto the gear card and the armor set!

Screaming Oni Mask

Requirements:1x spiral horn, 1x skull, 1x perfect bone

This is a really expensive piece of kit to craft as it requires three specific resources, each of which turn up once in their respective decks. Fortunately one can easily save a skull when you find it; and the Spiral Horn is used in crafting the original Screaming Helmet and the antelope remains as easy to smash resources out of as it always has. So the biggest price is the Perfect Bone; you're giving up a Zanbato for this piece of gear, so between it and the set bonus this needsto be very good to justify the price. Expensive gear is absolutely OK, as long as it justifies its price. We'll look if that's the case after we've also examined the hybrid set bonus, but before we move on I just wanted to state how happy I am that this armor set can be used in all three existing campaigns and isn't tied to a specific expansion monster, great stuff.

First element is the blue affinity; which connects with the Screaming Coat by sitting on the right side (slot 6 on the gear grid, slot 1 is the top left); which means that it's already a decent option. It ensures that the armor set still has 2x green and 2x blue for Monster Grease/Lucky Charm and it also frees up the top row of the gear grid to set up an activated Monster Tooth Necklace something that is very much a consideration because of the set bonus having a focus around daggers.

The armor points on this gear card are 2 points too low, but that is a consistent problem across almost all monster gear. But with the hybrid set overwriting this to a 3 it isn't as bad as it could be. I do wish that APG took difficulty to construct into their calculations for armor points, monster specific armor is a lot harder to make than the generic versions AND it's often worse than the basic equivalents. How often have you sat down and looked at an armor set and just wished it could compete with Leather or Rawhide?

The ability is an interesting one, it is a variant of Encourage that has applications in situations where you can't use encourage, either because the campaign doesn't have it (People of the Sun), you're out of survival or you have a shattered jaw. But it also has applications when fighting the Screaming Antelope and Slender Man, both of which can cause automatic deaths if insanity gets too high as it allows you to chunk away insanity as long as survivors are knocked down (that's not too difficult with either of those monsters).

It's a solid enough piece of gear and a fun variant on the original head gear piece, but it's not the thing that makes this armor exciting.

Screaming Oni Armor Hybrid Set Bonus

In a similar fashion to the Gloomleather and Sunlion hybrid armor sets this is an armor set where just the head piece is replaced and the rest of the gear remains normal. These are not as exciting as the hybrid armor sets that mix and match multiple different armor sets, but they do still expand the play space for players.

Here we get 3 armor for all locations, considering that this armor set costs 10 resources to construct, 7 of which are specific named resources, that's a little low. I would expect 4 armor points on all locations for that kind of resource price not three. It's a common complaint and the reason I bring it up each time is that 4+ armor points on a set is where you tend to need your armor sets to be in order to bring them into the mid portion of the game. 3 armor points tends to fall off hard and relies on a shield. It's always a bit disappointing when every single survivor has to give up 6 slots for armor + shield in the mid game.

The main attraction to this armor set however is the Flay set bonus ability. This replaces the spear focus for the original set with a dagger focus that powers them up a great deal. The wording is a little unclear, it says that “your 2 highest attack rolls” become automatic Perfect hits. This text is asking you to consider your two highest rolls as Perfect hits; you don't change the numbers rolled, so the question is if one normally hits on a 7+ with a dagger and you roll a 6 + 5, do these both become a Perfect hits instead of the missing? It's hard to say, the clear part is that the result of 1 is a miss no matter what, but between that I'm not sure because the card is missing the word 'successful'.

If the card said:

“If you are attacking with a dagger, your two highest successful attack rolls become automatic Perfect hits.”

Then we'd know exactly where we are with it, without that the current wording seems to be suggesting that you get to hit on a 2+ with two of your dice no matter what. That doesn't seem right and I'm inclined to believe that if your weapon has 2 speed and hits on a 7+ then all rolls of a 7+ become Perfect hits and the rest become misses. That seems like the likely design intent, but beta gear is going to be fuzzy at times – one could easily make a clear argument that it makes daggers always perfect hit with two of their dice (except on a 1). Beta cards eh? Let us move on.

Here's a list of the Daggers that benefit from Perfect hit synergies and the benefit you gain per Perfect Hit:

• Bone Dagger: +1 Survival
• Acid-Tooth Dagger: Automatic Wound
• Cat Fang Knife: +1 Strength token
• Oxidized Lantern Dagger: +1 Survival
• Scrap Dagger: +2 Strength for the rest of the attack (Barbed 2)

And here's a list of the Perfect hit Fighting Arts (FA) that have Perfect hit synergies (that can work with daggers):

• Combo Master: +1 additional attack roll
• Crazed: +1 Insanity
• Mighty Strike: +2 Strength
• Backstabber: Devastating 1 (Strain fighting art)
• Suppressed Shadow (Automatic Critical Wounds – Sunstalker Showdown SFA)

The most notable of these are the automatic wounds or strength increases. The Scrap Dagger for example becomes a very viable weapon when you're getting +4 strength, but a survivor with Mighty Strike can apply that to absolutely any dagger (even the ones not listed here) and that's super interesting if somewhat situational to set up due to the variance in gaining Fighting Arts.

The Acid-Tooth Dagger (ATD) is the one that is the biggest winner, it basically turns every hit from a single ATD into an automatic wound if you wield one, I'm not sure if you keep using them paired with this armor set though because the first two 10s you roll are the ones that eat up the automatic Perfect hits, instead I think you go pure single dagger unless you have stuff like Combo Master.

Suppressed Shadow, the Secret Fighting Art that you can gain from the Sunstalker if you are able to trigger the event that gives it; is the obvious pinnacle of this. But it is hard to structure getting that because you need to have a dagger wielding survivor who is able to survive having over 5 bleeding tokens without dying. That's achieved through the FA Unconscious Fighter.

There are Sunstalker hunt events that can help a survivor gain this FA on the way to the fight.

So yes, despite the armor points being a bit lower than what is optimal the set bonus here makes up for that a lot. This is the final piece we were missing to make dagger builds viable without having to craft the really busted stuff (Cult Speaker Knife, Ghost Dagger, Tempered Dagger etc) and there are a LOT of synergies with fighting arts that previously were not that interesting.

The only real issue here is that dagger mastery/specialization do not interact with Perfect hits in any direct manner, they focus around the wounding portion of the roll. But the truth is the dagger proficiency cards were not the problem with daggers, it was the low strength design that held them back and this armor set goes a long way to fixing that.

It is worth noting that the armor set does not interact at all with the Mastery; the mastery is as follows:

That means any Perfect hit tricks you've been packing won't help you; here you'll need raw strength to overcome the monster's toughness and that's a little bit of a shame. However, it's always been the case that you need survivors with high strength to use daggers – perhaps in the future we'll see a novel dagger proficiency that synergises better with Perfect hits.

Summary

They knocked it out of the park with this one; while the miniature is a tad too skimpy in her outfit, she still has a great pose and expression – plus it's Lucy! The helmet is interesting without being brokenly overpowered and the set bonus is absolutely great, daggers needed this kind of boost and what we need to do now is try and convince APG to also give thrown weapons and whips the same level of care and attention that daggers have received in recent times.

For a player with all the expansions and all the promotional content (that is dagger based) this one is an absolute must have because of how it expands the game's play area by easing the passage into using daggers in a meaningful manner. I sincerely hope that whatever beta armor Zachary is poured into is focused around whipping and Allister's beta armor gets thrown weapon synergies because if those two weapon types can receive support in the same way that Daggers have done then we'll have a nicely rounded selection of different weapon types to use offensively once a settlement is beyond the traditional levelling of Spear + Shield + Fist & Tooth