Coming Out of My Shell: The Dung Beetle Knight Showdown (Part 2)

The Dung Beetle Knight is much like the Sunstalker and Dragon King in that it presents a real challenge when you are attacking it due to the way that it mixes up its defences with a few curve balls thrown right at the nearest non-fuzzy groin. It also takes the concept of 'monster X weak to certain weapons' to the most focused degree we have seen so far (outside of the lore based weakness of the Watcher). In short, this monster isn't just inventive when attacking, it's inventive when it's being attacked. Whether it's lore, mechanics or just good old pop culture flavour, the Dung Beetle Knight has you covered and this is all a big part of why this monster is so loved.

It's challenging, stylish and goofy in equal measures. It's just good stuff all round and it's probably in the top three showdowns for most players who've experienced it.

Weapon Weaknesses

The Dung Beetle Knight rewards an unusual, but logical, set of weapons. This is due to it having multiple copies of the Super Sentai 'Dab' card Century Carapace, a hit location which is not just Super-Dense, but also does not cause wounds when it is 'wounded' – instead the Century Carapace is archived.

As a consequence, crushing and mining weapons are given bonuses when attacking this location, and they help a lot because not only is the location super-dense, but it also has a toughness bonus attached to hit (and it also triggers Burrow when dealing with the L3+ Dung Beetle Knightbut we'll get to that).

The three weapon types which are given this bonus are all “non-meta” attacking weapons, with Club, Shield and Pickaxe. We'll discuss a bit more about this, but suffice to say, you're not normally going to be smashing the Dung Beetle Knight with a shield (unless you're packing the strain fighting art Shieldarang from Echoes of Death 2) – however a club is a good choice, and if you're hitting one of the club/shield weak locations such as the Filthy Face, you might even smash with a beacon shield.

Super-Dense

As another part of its shell/beetle/calcification theme the Dung Beetle Knight has a high amount of super-dense locations. This combination of super-dense along with weakness to Pickaxes is something that was originally designed to get players to use the Digging Claws crafted from hunts of lower level Dung Beetle Knights because normal pickaxes would be archived after the first hit due to them having frail in the earlier editions. This resulted in the birth of the Tool Belt/Pickaxe/Green Affinity/Shadow Saliva Shawl/Acanthus Doctor builds that used to dominate the community landscape before the experienced players just moved onto less overpowered things – it was because the Tool Belt removed frail from the Pickaxe. Which it doesn't need to do any more.

These days, it's still best to use the Digging Claws, which remain one of the strongest bruiser/tank weapons in the game thanks to a combination of power, late game scaling and hunt utility, but you can also just bring along a trusty old bone pickaxe for hitting those carapaces when they turn up. Which makes this an area where gameplay was improved when going from the 1.3 edition to 1.5 one.

Likewise, the improvement of clubs, especially the addition of the Bone Club, was another place where the Dung Beetle Knight gameplay was improved by 1.5 core game changes.

Parry

As a Knight, the Dung Beetle Knight packs parry as a part of its package, however due to its status of being less sword dependent (and leaning) than most other Knights, it has a lower amount of Parry hit locations. You don't need to figure Fencing into your builds here, because its Parry is both rare and as the location itself describes, it's Untrained. Usually instead of parrying, it's better to just build for critical wounds. Speaking of which...

Critical Wounds

There are a LOT of hit locations on the Dung Beetle Knight that are beneficial to critically wound, so this monster, more so than most, is one that you should be aiming to critically wound rather than normally wound. Critical wounds will disable sword & horn attacks, avoid reflex Ground Pounding and more. One of the best weapons to fight the lower level Dung Beetle Knight (and higher levels if you have Lantern/Cycloid armor; Dragon/Phoenix armor or very high strength) is the Gorm's Riot Mace. This is a perfect combination of Deadly and Club, which not only ticks all the boxes you need for fighting the Dung Beetle Knight but it also disables a lot of the monster's AI cards by forcing it to just take basic actions when you critically wound.

As always, Lucky Charms, innate Luck and Deadly are your friends here. You want to be packing not one, two (or more) survivors with deadly focused load outs when you go into this fight. You'll also want to innovated Pottery if you can, because that turns on a critical wound to cause -1 toughness token.

The biggest thing though is the sheer number of Persistent Injuries you can generate from critically wounding the Dung Beetle Knight and how many AI situations this will disable. You can break the wings (Beetle Flight), the Mouth (Boiling Resin Spit – which inflicts a wound on the monster each time it's drawn), the Horn (Rhinoceros Charge) and most of all, you can break the Sword – which gives you access to a Regenerating Blade and also disables the Resin Sword Slash plus the Sword Master trait.

Yes, it's unfortunate that this is yet another monster that's especially vulnerable to critical wounds, but given that it allows you to craft the Calcified Zanbato, which is now a generic “Perfect Bone” weapon. You're able to get the tools you need with that (high strength weapon with Deadly) from within the expansion itself. The Dung Beetle Knight is very much a monster that says 'craft my weapons to kill me'.

Recall Ball Locations

There are a few Separation Anxiety based hit locations, these sometimes recall the ball, which if you are the last survivor attacking the monster, can be an terrible situation to land in. However, you can avoid this, by ensuring that the final survivor to act each survivor turn is the one who will push the ball. Do not compromise on this unless you can withstand a round of baller + ball throw and have a very good reason for doing so (i.e. the situation is that desperate). There is nothing worse than taking a risk only to have everyone adjacent to the Dung Beetle Knight get crushed into tiny bits of goo.

You shouldn't even risk this if you are thinking 'well I can just surge after attacking', because what if you're left unable to do that because of a reaction? Do you have a back up? Will they avoid the ball if it's recalled and be able to surge? No, on the whole it's best to be careful and keep them separated.

Botflies

The Dung Beetle Knight having Botflies is an interesting little wrinkle to the monster's place in the world. This disgusting hit location has a survivor disturb a swarm of Botflies nesting in the Dung Beetle Knight and get swarmed by them. If you are a bit squeamish I recommend not looking up what Botflies are, their lifecycle and what they look like. Suffice to say, they are a species which absolutely deserves extinction, and just to make it extra awful, it uses mosquitoes (and other vector insects) to transmit to humans.

The version that we find here hanging out on the Dung Beetle Knight is the adult form of the Botfly, which means they are either laying eggs on the Dung Beetle Knight or hanging out there as a way of getting transported around the world in order to reach better, one can assume this because the pupal stage of the botfly involves growth in the ground. So unless they're hatching from dung that the Dung Beetle Knight has hidden under its armor plates, its safe to assume that the botflies are seeking Screaming Antelopes or White Lions to infest.

This is why the botfly hit location doesn't cause physical damage, the flies are not attacking the survivor with any bites or similar, they're swarming at them and causing distress/panic. Seasoned survivors, who have experienced similar things are aware that these disgusting creatures are harmless to them during this stage. Which is why the hit location gets archived when triggered by a high courage survivor.

And that's the basic tactical plan with this hit location, if you scout it, then you want a survivor with sufficient courage to attack so they'll archive it, if you don't have that, then a survivor with good insanity levels takes the hit instead. Outside of that, this is a low threat 'waste of time'

At this point, we're left with the truly impressive and terrifying portions of the Dung Beetle Knight reactive toolkit, the trap and the L3+ specific trait.

Slam Dunk

Come on and jam!

Slam Dunk is one of the most impressive and terrifying trap cards in the game, this is because it not only causes significant harm to a survivor, but it also removes them from the showdown board, reunites the Dung Beetle Knight with the ball and requires survivors to move near the ball in order to free their now stinky ally from a terrible fate.

Against the L1 Dung Beetle Knight this trap can be almost completely negated with the utilisation of range, a survivor with higher range than the monster's movement is able to hit the trap card, trigger it, cause the Dung Beetle Knight to run towards them, and then because it can't reach – the trap will 'fizzle'. The original design of this trap was meant to be “un-cheesable” (to paraphrase Zach B's comments on one TWIST stream a few years ago). However, like many monster traps, its need to move into melee range for its target, provided a hard counter.

Against a Dung Beetle Knight with Beetle Flight or the higher level Dung Beetle Knight variants however, this cheese begins to disappear because those Dung Beetle Knight are so fast that there's not really sufficient range. I think that's a pretty good way for the difficulty curve on this monster to work, the L1 version has a trap you can negate with smart position play, which means you can get used to how the rest of the monster operates and then the L2+ versions force you to deal with the trap, either through clever use of trapper mechanics (Spear, Blue Charm) or just taking your lumps as part of the price for a deck refresh and cleaning up (hah) the aftermath of a trip to smell world.

Burrow

This ties nicely into the escalation of the big, bad. Still the single most powerful trait card in the game, burrow offers death for survivors with only a few, preset, forms of mitigation. This trait card updates the Century Carapace locations to make the Dung Beetle Knight's reaction on the card to involve travelling an infinite distance before bursting from the ground and causing direct severe injuries.

This card is an absolute blind-side for players who are used to the typical monster difficulty curve of 'get a couple of new traits that change the fight a little bit, plus more health, speed and damage'. Instead this card just destroys survivors who are not set up with one of the pre-designed forms of mitigation. Which are:

• Spend 4 Survival
• Attack from a Stone Face (created by Strategist) – which works once
• Trash Crown away the Century Carapaces and then reshuffle the Hit Location deck (The Trap Card, Scythe or Crest Crown works here)
• Use multiple forms of severe injury mitigation (Unbreakable + Dried Acanthus for example)

This isn't something you can soak with normal severe injury mitigation because it hits you with not just a severe body injury, it also causes Arm → Ruptured Muscles, which is a severe injury that disables fighting arts. There's not many survivors who are OK with that.

Fortunately, each Century Carapace Hit Location is archived once its dealt with, and unless you're being unwise, silly, or you are just unlucky, it is rare that the Dung Beetle Knight will build itself a replacement. So often a deep settlement survival pool in combination with survivors taking turns to trigger Burrow works well. However, that sky high toughness on the L3+ Century Carapace might cause some survivors to balk, and with good reason. Tackling the L3+ Dung Beetle Knight is a top 1% move. Your average player will not normally do this, and not just because it requires specific set up and targeted play, it's also because the reward for beating the L3 Dung Beetle Knight just isn't good enough. It is a Juggernaut Blade, but you can make one of those by breaking the sword on a lower level Dung Beetle Knight and calcifying it – if you really must – because it's a decent, but not awe inspiring grand weapon that has a lot of similar power level alternatives; Calcified Zanbato, Skleaver, Dragon Slayer, Perfect Slayer and so on. I like the weapon, I just wish that a non-shield weapon with Block 1 was as useful as just having a shield + other weapon.

So yeah, you beat the L3 Dung Beetle Knight for the bragging points and sense of achievement, not really for the victory rewards. Though it is something you'll seriously consider when making Green Armor because you might not have the time to calcify a broken blade. 

Summary

So before we wrap up in anticipation of the visual guide next week, I'll bullet point the key sections that you want to internalize before fighting this most excellent monster.

• Ensure that at the start of the monster's turn, the Dung Beetle Knight and Ball are separated.
• Do not take risky attacks that might link the two together without room for someone to push the ball.
• Bring good clubs & shields
• Consider building a Tool Belt + Pickaxe survivor (add Acanthus Doctor to this build if you are struggling)
• Get as much luck as you can
• Remember to start the showdown with the stinky survivor as far away as possible and Dash.
• You will want Dash + Surge for this showdown if you can get them
• Without Surge, one survivor each turn will have to separate without doing anything else.
• The Level 3+ Dung Beetle Knight is way harder than you think it is from just looking at it.
• You can negate the trap if you shoot it from a higher range than the monster has movement.
• Don't rely on Frail weapons (this is just good practice in general)
• Evasion, Block and Armor Points are all as good as always
• Riot Mace is amazing
• Digging Claws are good
• Calcification of Zanbatos is great
• Trash Crown is one of the best Hit Location Scout cards
• Take your time and think, because the ball moves in a non-standard way that can fool you.
• This monster is one of the top ones in the game, both in respect of fairness and power.
• Have fun!