Damage Per Swing (DPS) Survivors - No Aim, No Brain, DPS Main (Patreon)

We're getting close to the end of this series, and now it's time to look at my least favorite class in the game (or any game), DPS (which originally meant Damage Per Second) characters. They are a very difficult and subtle class to play to a high degree, but the low skill floor on DPS characters and the personality type they attract makes them a very unpleasant and unappetising type in my eyes.  However, the class itself in Kingdom Death, once you get past the people who want to fling buckets of dice across the board and scream 'I'M GOING TO HIT YOU IN THE BALLS!' at the monster while they assault your miniatures with their roll; well there's actually a very high level thinking person's class there. 

In short, the best players of DPS in KD:Monster are those who understand probabilities, statistics, positioning, AI, HL and more cerebral things such as when not to attack at all. Theirs is a constantly shifting world that changes not just from one monster to the next, but from one round to the next one. They are completely dependent on their tank and support survivors, but they get to do the "flashy" and "fun" job of rolling dice and scoring wounds.

Before we get into things in detail I think it's important to go for a full fundamentals approach to this class, because there will always be at least one survivor on DPS and there are often at least two such survivors. In fact, early on you're likely playing just 4 x DPS because you don't have any other choice!

DPS comes in a few different types, with varying skill levels required and a huge difference in the difficulty to use.  I'll break them down to their basic categories here, but be aware that survivors are on a sliding scale and often become hybrids.

Slow and Devastating

One of the best choices for newer players, is the Slow but Devastating style that is exemplified by the Zanbato.

The aim of this style is to roll as few dice as possible per wound, by leveraging abilities such as Devastating or Savage to cut into the monster's life total with less potential reactions.  When you are not seeking to 'crit farm' a monster, this method of monster killing is easily one of the strongest ones there is.  So against most nemesis monsters this leaning on Devastating is very powerful.

These survivor types are also low maintenance for the Support/Tank because they encounter few reactions. However they can also drag the fight out into a lot more rounds, so you want a very patient and capable tank with Block and high Evasion if you are going this route.  

They can get away with lighter armor than most because they encounter fewer reactions, so often you'll see them rock something like Rawhide that supports them surging more often.

There is also a subset of these types who use slow weapons without Devastating. The Calcified Digging Claws from the DBK is the pinnacle style of this because it's a Speed 1 weapon and that combines with Katar Specialisation (cancel 1 reaction per attack) to give you a survivor who is "immune" to non-trap reactions. This is one of the best ways to kill things like the Lion God.

Deadly

The second style of survivor seeks to leverage luck as much as possible by using a deadly weapon in combination with a luck charm (and possibly more benefits). Now most of these builds will have either 9+ or 8+ (20 to 30% chance) of scoring a critical wound on locations that they can crit. In the early game these survivors are your main way of generating extra resources so you can keep momentum going. 

The classic early game build is as follows:

The Monster Grease is a 'flex spot' and it's here because in the very early game this survivor needs to perform tanking duties against the early game monsters as well as DPS ones, later on you can drop the Monster Grease for something else.

If you are playing with the Gorm expansion then you can even drop the Fecal Salve because the Rib Blade (Slow/Deadly hybrid build) and the Riot Mace have an appropriate blue affinity to match to the Lucky Charm.

You can stack further on Luck with the Milestone Event - First Death: Graves (50% chance of +1 Luck), the Sleeping Virus Flower (LY5 Flower Knight event/L3 FK), the Death Mask, Bow Mastery and a few other places. But these all tend to be 'impermanent' bonuses, that is ones which are tied to keeping a survivor alive because either they are the survivor's own traits or they are on a irreplaceable gear item.

This is why getting past 8+ critical wound chance is very rare, so you should generally be considering 8+ as in the top 10% of crit farmers and be very happy with it. Going past that is something the game resists, and it well outside the normal bell curve. In other words enjoy the times where you can crit on a 7+ or better, they are not the norm!

It's worth noting that having Luck allows you to run with less strength than other builds, and I'll go into that in some detail when I break down the strength and luck thresholds. It's counter intuitive how it works, but once you understand you'll be in a whole new world.

It is very important to state that the effectiveness of crit builds varies depending on the monster, they are almost useless when facing the Butcher for example and should be kept on the bench.

High Speed

The hardest style of DPS to play, and therefore the one that is for the most advanced and skilled players is the one that people (especially war gamers) gravitate to first. That is high speed aka roll lots of dice to attack.  

White Lion armor is a known 'newbie trap' for this, because it gives you a huge bucket of dice and encourages you to wield paired weapons. This results in survivors who tend to die a lot more than average.

However, when you become experienced with this style, you'll realise that there is an art to it. The basic principles of a build like this require a lot of strength and an opportunistic way of attacking. You're not going to attack every turn, because hitting the trap neutralises all those dice you've rolled. Instead you're going to swing just when the HL deck is as large as possible.

Also, reactions are a nightmare for survivors like this, and we'll discuss in more details about the various ways that you handle reactions. Suffice to say, in high speed builds you're either looking to go for very high Luck (hard to achieve) or very high strength because it at least mitigates.

A Romantic Principle Vagabond Armor (Promo) wearing survivor (They count as a Sword Master) wielding a Black Sword (Gorm) is an example of one relatively easy (and hugely overpowered) High Speed build.

You get 4 attacks, hitting on a 4+ with a base 31 strength weapon. It's enough to wound anything in the game right now on a 2+.

Another version of High Speed Builds is the Bone Dagger, White Lion Armor, Red Charm build. It seeks to ignore the toughness of the monster and always wound on a 6+.

These builds however always need something to do when they can't attack, so they generally have 1 or 2 generally useful support items, this gives them something to do on their downtime.

 High Speed/Inaccurate/Perfect Hit 

This is a really "cheesy" version of the above build which was refined from my exploiting of the Counter-weighted Axe.  In essence, you get as much speed as you can in combination with a weapon that automatically wounds on a perfect hit (CW-Axe, Acid-Tooth Daggers, Sunring Bow and so on) or a Club in combination with Club Mastery.  You then send this survivor to the Bone Witch to reduce their accuracy so they only hit via the Perfect Hit on 10s (or 9 + 10 with Timeless Eye). They then either score an automatic wound without drawing a HL card (CW-Axe) or they have a ridiculous level of strength (Clubs) for wounding with or they get to automatically wound the HL cards they have drawn (Acid-Tooth Daggers, Community Edition CW-Axe).

This style is basically a safer version of the Red Charm build and the only downside is it cannot generate extra resources because it cannot critically wound. However, once you are set up gear-wise and you don't need those extra resources (or you are fighting a nemesis monster) then this style of play can decimate even the toughest of monsters. 

The Red Ring of Death build is an extreme version of this style. (And by extreme I mean, broken).

Finally, there is one more kind of "DPS" which is another one of the classes I created and brought to popularity. We'll talk about this one in its own post, because it's one of my favourite ways to play when I'm not the support or tank.

Next time I'm going to dive into the various 'thresholds' for strength and luck and explain some basic rules that are easy enough to memorise so you can be sure that your builds are good enough for the job! I'll also discuss some of the weapon types in detail and expand on what makes them good (or bad) for a DPS player to choose!