How I Assess Gear

Except when reviewing new releases; I'm now going to get back into digging around in the Gambler's Chest while I finish out my thoughts on the Frogdog in preparation for a review on that expansion. I want to return to the philosophies, but gear is one of my all time favourite things, so for a little while now I'm going to dig into the seed pattern system, reviewing it and taking a look at all the options the GCE gave us. Then we'll get into the really exciting tier of philosophies.

However, before that I realised that I've never really laid out my system for assessing gear beyond playing with it a bunch, and then writing about it. Going through my system for how I assess creatures in the Dark Bestiary's introductory chapter on YouTube highlighted that for me. So let us rectify that!

For you guys this time, here's all the things I consider and think about when assessing a piece of gear beyond just the practical experience of crafting and smacking monsters with it. I hope you enjoy this, or at least find it informative.

Survivors, the Grid Tableau and Gear Slots

Before we get into the actual gear, the first stop is talking about the platform for which gear is built, that is the survivor who is carrying/wearing the gear and the gear grid itself. Pre-Arc Survivors the survivor was a fairly random element, we could guarantee some stats via Survival of the Fittest and levelling up would often provide strength, but overall they were something random that you'd try to opportunistically take advantage of rather than build towards. This has changed in the world of the Arc Survivors, they are more curated, measured survivors who offer a higher level of control through Knowledges rather than Fighting Arts. This has broadened the build options a great deal, not only do we now have gear being synergistic with other gear, but it's also providing synergy with knowledges. That's something I'm still getting to grips with, it's a big part of why I've been doing the philosophy deep dives, writing about something and sharing my experiences helps me deepen my understanding further and also I love to see things I've mentioned go out into the wild and be transformed even more by the brilliant players in our community. The entire cycle and back and forth is something that keeps me writing and enjoying the game, I teach you guys things and then you teach me. It's a joy.

The gear grid is the other element that really matters and this more than anything is the biggest factor in assessing gear. We have a total of nine slots, which I number from 1 to 9 in the usual western fashion (left to right on each row) like so:

1 2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

This makes it easier for me to record grids in text form, I can write for example:

Leather Mask 1, Leather Skirt 3, Counterweighted Axe 4, Round Leather Shield 6, Leather Gloves 7, Leather Boots 8, Monster Grease 9, Leather Cuirass Flex.

And that gives me an entire loadout in a small space.

The other benefit is that it makes it easier for me to talk about each gear slot individually, because while all gear slots are the same size, they are not created equal. Here's how I break them down:

• Slot 5 – The Plus

• Slots 2, 4, 6 and 6 – The T's (North, East, West, South)

• Slots 1, 3,7 and 9 – The L's (NE, SE, SW, NW)

The Plus (Slot 5) is the strongest slot in the entire grid because it is the only slot that can support a four puzzle affinity gear card and connect every affinity.

The Even Slots aka The T's (2, 4, 6, 8) so named because they have a T shape available for their affinities, are the next strongest as they support three affinity gear cards, though each slot is 90 degrees rotated from its previous one so they are equal in potential power, but variable in application,

The remaining slots are the Ls, which are again each rotated 90 degrees from the previous one and hold space for 2 affinities each. They have the least potential due to having two sides that are always “blank” and as such they tend to be the best place to stick cards with zero affinities.

In addition to each of these slots being variable in potential power, we're also very limited in their numbers. 9 slots may look like a lot early on, but it pretty soon becomes very tight. On top of the fact that we only have 1 Plus, 4 Ts and 4Ls, all of which limit the range of affinities we can benefit from; we also have to consider that the average survivor needs to dedicate 5 of those 9 slots to an armor set and 1 slot to a weapon. That means many builds (apart from the “naked” ones) end up with just 3 precious slots to try and squeeze other gear in. That has the impact of limiting the overall number of items that can be used and limiting the potential affinity configurations (because 5 of the slots are dominated by whatever your armor set gives you).

One of the reasons that Phoenix Armor is so hampered is because not only does it require 5 slots, but it also asks for two specific affinities that it cannot supply by itself and they need to be in a specific layout. We can see that here.

Slots 4 and 6 are very limited in what can go there due to the puzzle requirements of the best armor piece (Curiass) and the demands for the Phoenix helm's affinity ability. Given that the Gauntlets and Faulds offer no affinities and the Greaves point in the wrong direction, this is quite limiting to build around.

So slot pressure is a very real thing and as such anything that provides slot compression (multiple functions in a single slot) is inherently stronger, and everything we do put into our slots needs to justify the expenditure of that particular slot.

Gear Card Types

Our Gear gives us the five S's: Soak, Stats, Support, Survival and Synergies

Soak is armor points, which allow us to “soak damage” without suffering any trauma, Stats improve our offensive/defensive capabilities (and are something Survivors often also supply), Support is a broad category that covers anything from “healing” to monster control and synergies is a broad category that covers keywords, affinity abilities and more. We'll get into the specifics of each of these as we work through the three main gear keyword categories.

Armor

Armor is our main place where we get access to soak, armor is a very limited type of gear card because you are allowed a maximum of one armor card per survivor hit location (that means a maximum of five). In addition to having that mutually exclusive limitation, we also get rewarded with a sixth card that exists outside of our gear grid in the Armor Set bonus. Often the armor set bonus offers a powerful ability and additional armor points, this is why the usual play styles lean towards building and completing armor sets, while also revolving around armor a lot due to it taking up five of nine total grid slots.

Armor gear is also often a good source of abilities in many different types and affinities. However, it is worth noting that survivors with ways of generating soak without armor points (such as Crystal Skin or Marrowism survivors) benefit immensely from not needing soak via armor, that means they can play more items in their grid and as we'll see when we get to them, items are exceedingly powerful.

Armor's main downside is its obsolescence, monster damage jumps up in steps as you move up the monster levels and nodes. An individual armor set can only stretch its lifespan so far with the assistance of shields (costing more gear slots) or a safer playstyle (such as Archers or Supports, both of whom can utilise distance to ensure they take less damage from the AI cards).

The secondary downside is that transitional period between one armor set and the next, the decision has to be made between leaving the new set in storage until it is complete and continuing to benefit from the armor set bonus, or running a mixed set for a while as you transition. The Gambler's Chest “Clothed & Satiated” armor set bonus has helped smooth out that period by providing a mixed set armor bonus and I really appreciate it for doing that.

Weapons

Our weapons come in two main types; offensive and defensive. Shields are the main member of the latter category, as they provide both soak (additional armor points) and outright protection through cancelling (Block, Deflect). This means they quite often are placed into gear grids along with offensive weapons. Most of the time where offensive weapons are concerned a survivor only wants to run a single one; there are exceptions to this, such as having a whip as a hunt “item”, a paired weapon or an additional copy of a weapon when using a frail one. The largest benefit of shields is that they have a “set bonus” provided by the specialisation and that can be propagated to the rest of the survivors with Shield Mastery, a core reason why that mastery is so important.

Offensive weapons on the other hands offer stats; they improve upon the survivors natural weapon (Fist & Tooth) by potentially offering additional speed, accuracy, strength, luck or even damage (via abilities like Devastating). This is very beneficial and there are few survivors who won't want at least one weapon in their tableau (mostly pure supports, but even they probably want something) however weapons have the same obsolescence issue that armor does, or to be more specific, Strength based weapons become obsolete. That is because monster toughness jumps up as you increase level or node and if we can't keep ourselves at a decent wounding rate the Hit Location deck's attrition starts to overwhelm our weapon damage. We don't want to be hitting the monster and not wounding it, that's only helping the monster.

We can extend the lifespan of a strength based weapon with additional strength, which could come from the survivor, or from an item like the Monster-Tooth Necklace. But eventually we will need to retire that weapon (unless the survivor wielding it is a true gigachad beefcake); fortunately switching to a new weapon is a lot faster and smoother than a new armor set as we are typically replacing just one gear card.

Luck weapons become obsolete less quickly, this is because critical wounding targets don't shift, you can either critically wound, or you cannot at all because there isn't a critical wound option on the hit location card. Luck weapons like to have a high strength if possible, cause that increases the range at which you can wound normally, but a high luck weapon (through weapon, item or survivor) doesn't need that at all as long as the monster being fought can be crit wounded.

This makes luck/deadly significantly stronger than strength, except in the cases of monsters like old Billy Butcher who no-sell crits by virtue of having almost no valid hit location cards.

Speed is a very interesting element of a weapon, a range from 1 to 3 is absolutely fine for a normal weapon, with the only real wrinkle being the lower the speed the higher the accuracy you want because that helps keep your activations impactful. Nothing hurts more than swinging with 1 dice and rolling a miss.

At higher speed what we get is a greater level of variance and total risk, high speed strategies are naturally more skill intensive as they require a greater understanding of the Hit Location deck and the various outcomes, this is where Paired weapons can excel if you can afford the slot. That is because with a paired weapon you have two options to attack with, either the fully active max speed attack or a “vanilla” no abilities attack at the normal speed (it depends which weapon you're activating). You get to tailor your speed, but it is also worth noting that a single 4 speed weapon and a separate 2 speed weapon would often be more effective than Paired.

Next we have accuracy, which is simple because want as much of that as possible due to it making the results of an attack more predictable. There is space for high speed, low accuracy as long as you're comfortable with the wild unpredictability of each attack (and we consider that when looking at baseline weapon states), but outside of that you always want accuracy if you're confident you can convert hits into wounds. Strength/Luck is the driving force behind what makes most weapons "meta" because converting hits into wounds is more important than converting attack rolls into hits. Both have the same punishment of not scoring a wound, but once you draw a hit location card that deck gets to deploy its game plan against you.

There are also abilities and keywords, but I'm going to peel them off into their own category further down this article. But I will briefly mention here that Range/Reach is a really strong ability because it increases the number of squares you can attack, thereby effectively increasing your character's movement. Having good distance from the monster reduces the potential number of reactions that can hurt you and also reduces the amount that the AI deck will select you as its victim for the round. Putting Reach on a weapon always makes it better because it's providing more tactical options for positioning.

Items

Our third category is our most strongest one, items. The reason items are the strongest kind of gear card in the game is because they do not need to scale with monsters. Bandages are as good in LY1 as they are in LY30. They can also offer us every single one of the five S's, and when they have activated abilities, these are almost always things that the monster can do nothing at all about. That's really powerful.

Items are always things you end up judging on a case by case basis, but the generic crafting locations are your baseline to compare to and that is what I use. Is there a new card that removes bleed? Then check it against bandages and the First Aid Kit. Increases Strength? Compare it to the Monster-Tooth Necklace and so forth. We have incredibly strong and flexible items available to us from very early in the game and any later crafted gear cards have to justify themselves against the generic options either by being more powerful (or at least more powerful in the right situations), or offering something unique.

In truth, this is the category where one goes most by “feel” and play, you get a good feeling for what kind of items are going to be strong, but until you play with them it is difficult to be entirely confident.

A good example of this is the Crimson Crocodile's Blood Lantern Compass; this is offering a new form of Hit Location scouting when compared to the older versions and I thought that it felt powerful, but due to the new way it was expressing itself I wasn't sure. After playing with it though I was confident that it is extremely strong, effectively allowing for HL Filtering (getting rid of undesirable hit location cards) without needing an entire survivor devoted to it. I'd been correct in my initial assessment, but I couldn't have begun to realise just how strong the item was until I saw it in action.

Crafting Cost

Judging crafting cost requires a few different elements to be taken into account, knowledge of the resource decks is a huge assistance in this and becoming intimately familiar with the Basic Resource deck in particular is something every player should aim to understand.

The nutshell version of this is generic resources are less valuable than perfect generic resources; monster resources are more valuable than that. But there's also the question about individual resources, their value is tied to not just their scarcity but also to what gear can be crafted with them. For example, the White Lion resource deck's Eye of Cat is a REALLY valuable resource because it turns into the Cat Eye Circlet all by itself and that's a ridiculously powerful gear card.

The Shimmering Mane on the other hand varies immensely in how valuable it is; at its absolute lowest rank it's two hide (which is really good early on due to Rawhide), but if you have access to the Mask Maker settlement location or the Gigacatarium then there are pieces of gear it can be turned into, the Lion Slayer Cape in particular being a very powerful accessory.

In the basic deck we also have resources that shift around in value, early on broken lanterns are not worth much because the survivors lack the technology to utilise scrap, but that changes and when a settlement is mature; the scrap becomes incredibly important due to it being used in Weapon Crafter gear and as a foundational part of iron for metal gear such as the Blacksmith crafts.

The hardest part of this is when you're facing a new quarry monster; you have an entirely new resource deck, crafting location and gear cards to contend with. You may not know how rare certain resources are, and even if you do know that scarcity, the gear that you may craft with them might not be good for the situation you are in, or even at all.

It's something that you can develop over time though and again the Generic locations are the best way to start practising and growing your knowledge. There's only one skull in the basic resource deck, so is there gear in this campaign later on that will use a skull (like the aforementioned Blood Compass Lantern)? If so, it's probably valuable, but if not maybe it's going to be best used for a Skull Helm in order to prevent early head trama. All of that will come with time, especially if you're thoughtful while crafting and also assess how good the crafts were after using them. If you're constantly cutting a gear card from everyone's grids before departing maybe it wasn't worth the investment at all.

Lifespan

Another thing one wants to consider is the average lifespan of the gear card you have crafted, the longer a piece of gear can remain viable, the more efficient it is. This is part of what makes that first Rawhide Armor set so strong, it'll get passed down through the survivors from the frontline tank to the damage dealer and then to the Archer/Support. It isn't uncommon for one survivor to be rocking a Rawhide set right near the end of a campaign because of how efficient and powerful it is in the hands of the right survivor type.

Weapons and Armor naturally have shorter lifespans than items (as discussed above), this makes them more expensive than other options, and one of the things one may need to consider is how long a particular gear card may be viable. If it's unique, or best in slot then getting it early can pay out because you have one less slot to worry about filling for the rest of the campaign. A good example of this is the Phoenix Arc Bow in the core campaign, craft that and an archer can sit on it for the rest of their days.

This is something that at times is obvious, because there are no other options, but at other times the lifespan limitations only comes out through play. One can on average expect Node 1 weapons and armor to become obsolete over time, but Node 4 weapons/armor should last until the end of the campaign.

Affinities

There are four types of affinity that we commonly get on gear cards, Red, Green, Blue and none/blank (aka White). The reason for mentioning four is because the no affinity state does matter; Kingdom Death has some gear cards that care about zero affinities on the gear grid. That means we do need to acknowledge its existence, but also we don't have to worry too much because an unconnected half affinity is also effectively a blank slot. That makes it very easy to achieve a zero affinity build if we desire that.

In respect to the other affinities, the most desirable orientations vary. The more affinities we have on a gear card, the better, because it can be effective in a wider range of slots, and gear cards that provide affinities while also helping to complete their own affinity ability demands are also better than ones which demand without assisting. Armor sets, with how much they dominate the gear grid of the average survivor, are a good example of this. Crimson or Screaming armor are a superb affinity armor set because they have zero demands, but provide a whole bunch of affinities. Singing or Leather Armor are solid examples of middle grounds where they do most of the work, provide some spare affinities and also need a bit of help finishing things off and Lantern Armor is a great example of a set that needs a lot of help while also having a really rigid layout due to the cuirass and greave puzzle affinity demands.

However, we can get a good idea about what orientations are generically good because we have the generic crafting locations in every campaign. They provide a nice baseline for us to judge from because they are always available. The main demanding pieces are listed below along with the specific demands they have:

• Monster-Tooth Necklace – 2 Red (offers to connect to left facing red)

• Lucky Charm – 2 Blue (offers to connect to left or right facing blues)

• Monster Grease – 3 Green (offers to connect to 1 right facing green)

• Leather Boots – 2 Green (MUST connect to 1 left and 1 right facing green)

• Lantern Greaves – 2 Red, 1 Blue (Must connect to 1 left, 1 right facing red and 1 down facing blue, last one can be supplied by the Lantern cuirass)

• Barber Surgeon coloured charms (Red, Green, Blue) – Demands 4 of the matching coloured affinity elsewhere in the gear grid, supplied one whole affinity of the matching colour

• Scrap Sword – Demands 2 red and 1 blue in the gear grid. Supplies 1 up facing blue

• Zanbato – Demands 1 down facing red and a green anywhere in the grid, supplies 1 right facing grean

• Counterweighted axe – Demands 1 down facing red

• Scrap Lantern – Demands 1 red and 1 blue in the gear grid

The ones we especially want to pay close attention to are the puzzle affinities; that's the specific orientation demands and also we want to pay close attention to the "stat buff" cards due to their generic usefulness. When we tease those out of the above list we get:

• Left Facing Red

• Down Facing Red

• Left Facing Blue

• Right Facing Blue

• Down facing Blue

• Left Facing Green

• Right Facing Green

So these are our baseline “best” affinities, especially the ones that connect to items (in bold) because items almost never become obsoleted by monster scaling in the way that weapons and armor can be. In fact the Monster-Tooth Necklace and Lucky Charm do a lot to help weapons scale for much longer than their normal life span because they improve their respective weapon's wound securing potential. The Lucky Charm in particular is incredibly strong because of what I mentioned above, Luck scales an infinite number of lantern years in this game and is normally either super powerful or (almost) completely useless. Monster Grease is also really special because it's kind of a “best in its category” item due to that scaling evasion. There are few items that provide evasion to this level and often they have a drawback like the Shadow Saliva Shawl from the Sunstalker.

The various quarry monsters also have a lot of impact over this, you should be keeping an eye out for affinity or puzzle affinity abilities because often they will give a strong reward for activating them. Any time something has that little box with those coloured squares or puzzle pieces one should be sitting up and paying attention because the juice is usually worth the squeeze.

Abilities

Abilities are a very wild part of the game to try and assess, sometimes they are straightforward like extra strength/luck or keywords like Devastating X. But at other times they may offering unusual things and you might not even have anything you've experienced before to compare them to. As such this is a pretty wild category, but the Bold type abilities like Deadly, Reach X and similar are familiar friends and can be quickly assessed.

Also, most abilities are positive (Frail and Sentient being two common negative ability exceptions to this), that means the more abilities you see on a gear card, the better it is, which is a helpful yardstick to begin measuring with. It's only when you have lengthy abilities that are short sentences that you need to assess on an individual basis. If they just provide a bonus, that's often a simple point in favour of the card, if they require a condition to be met, then it's a little harder because one is comparing the upside against the downside. Reach/Ranged are super strong in particular due to how they give more spaces where you can attack the monster from. Ranged tends to be bigger numbers, very safe and Reach can combo with monster armor movement+attack abilities as they are normally set to work with melee weapons. A Reach 2 weapon getting to target 12 spaces with your Pounce is better than just 4 that a standard weapon gets.

Affinity abilities are included in the upside/downside category because they put extra demands on your tableau as a whole. You need to jump through a hoop to get that bonus. Time to work out if it's an easy hoop to get through, if it requires weird gear that is on the grid just for affinities, or if you can achieve it with an armor set you already have. It's all quite situational at that time and sometimes it simply may not be worth ir. However, you often can't be sure until you try it out, so that's when I have to grind up to the right part of the game and then give the gear card a fair shake. Once I start playing with it, other ideas may get sparked even if it's not performing in the particular load out I've tried to pair it with.

Keywords

Keywords outside of the “this is our property” trio of armor/item/weapon are an interesting lot, unlike abilities keywords do not do anything by themselves and instead describe properties that the given gear card has. These properties may end up interacting with other things, soluble gear could get archived by water or fire, heavy gear could weigh a survivor down and noisy gear could just turn you into a sad clown. It varies a lot, but some of the most important ones to pay attention to are:

• Heavy – can be really problematic when something is happening that would involve gravity

• Whip – Can be life saving on the hunt

• Two-handed – does nothing until you suffer a dismembered arm, really bad news for spear and bow users in particular

• Noisy – Is a death sentence waiting for execution when you are on the hunt

• Fragile – Might randomly archive itself

• Jewellery – Victorious White Lions will steal one of these

• Finesse – Has synergy with some other gear

• Ranged – Is going to be powerful and have Range

• Arrow – Needs a bow to work

• Consumable – Can be eaten, which is usually a benefit

• Soluble – Might evaporate or wash away (usually monster dependant)

• Instrument – Has many strong synergies, exceptional when not paired with noisy

• Pickaxe – Can be used during mineral gathering

There's also material keywords; metal, leather, bone etc. which can be very important when considering if a given gear card buffs them (or if playing People of the Skull who all have a thing for bones) or an Outfit gear card can replace a given armor card in a set.

Learning all the places where a given keyword might get triggered takes time and experience, it also changes with each and every single campaign because different monsters bring different textures to the entire campaign. The simple version is noisy = very bad, heavy/two-handed = sometimes bad, fragile/soluble = sometimes self archiving and the rest are generally neutral to positive (Plus consumable runs the entire gambit from good to self archiving, but it's never outright bad).

The Fly in the Ointment

There's one other big impact that is very hard to assess and is more something you'll come to understand over time and that is the monsters in your campaign. The monsters, especially the Quarry ones, provide a huge amount of influence over what is good or not in your personal campaign. For example in the core game Katars are very strong early game due to Luck, but without massive luck scaling via something like the Death Mask they disappear entirely from the options because there's no Katars after the Beast Knuckle (and that isn't a big enough upgrade over the Lion Beast Katars to make it viable). In contrast Spears in the core box have a load of development options, running from the very start all the way to the end of the campaign. This is part of what makes the Screaming Antelope's armor set stronger than the White Lion one because it has more options to pair with it in the core game.

Also, many expansions are partially constructed "in a vacuum" where they have been designed without explicit links to other monsters, we get exceptions to that of course (Lion Knight, Slender Man), but for the most part the game feels like we've been left to play with how say Spidicules gear interacts with Crimson Crocodile gear and that is a fun, organic thing for players to get stuck into. It's sandboxy and while sometimes it creates game breaking stuff (Red Ring of Death, Pre Legendary pack Counterweighted Axe Butcher); this is a cooperative game and we don't need to engage with the parts of it that make our personal experience unfun.

This cross proliferation of expansions of course changes from one campaign to the next and its something you develop a sense for as your experience with each monster grows. Experimenting with different combinations is the best thing that can grow your capabilities here, it takes time but it gets easier and faster the more you do it. You'll come to understand the developmental pathways for a given weapon type based on your quarry/nemesis monster selection over time. Or you can look at what each crafting location offers and work out what monsters you need to slot in if you want to use a given weapon all campaign. Katars? Then you'll want probably the White Lion and the White Gigalion if playing People of the Lantern, the Crimson Crocodile for the mid game and/or the Dung Beetle Knight or Lion Knight to round that out until you reach The King.

Final Rambling Words

I hope you found this one informative and helpful, while putting this idea onto paper I personally felt right from the start that this is a "significant" piece of work from me. Going back through all of the gear for the youtube videos and then starting on the Dark Bestiary made me be very reflective about my assessment of the game elements. With the Gambler's Chest, Black Knight, Killenium Butcher and Frogdog all showing a growth in design maturity from Team Death, I've been able to better reconcile the older gear. Some of it is still bad, but the future directions seem to be solid and there are few serious issues left with the 1st generation gear, many of which will hopefully get dealt with when Campaigns of Death comes out (noisy/harvester and thrown weapons getting a mastery are two very important elements of the game that need addressing in my opinion).

This acceptance of some things being just what they be has helped me in detaching away from the less good parts, we've tried getting them fixed, we've even succeeded in some cases (Legendary Card Pack), so maybe the other short comings will get addressed in the future. If not? Well that's that and now you all know the foundations for my personal gear assessments, which hopefully helps you in your reading of my future assessments and your own personal ones!