What's in an Affinity: Armor (Patreon)

While working on the information for the weapon part of the series, I got temporarily sidetracked onto armor and then decided that it would be better to go through the armor portion of affinities ahead of weapons because armor tends to represent 5/9ths of your typical build. Few survivors go without armor equipped and those that do are typically either Acanthus Doctors, Crystaline Skin, Layline Walkers or pure supports that use Fecal Salve and positioning to avoid being seen/targeted. 

So armor affinities are very important, they dominate the metagame for Kingdom Death in ways that you may not be able to immediately disseminate, but you have felt the impact. 

Armor's power comes from its combination of protection (either raw stats or evasion), abilities (both set bonus and individual items) and affinities. An armor set can have good stuff in two out of three of these and it will be a decent pick, but it will always be outclassed by those that achieve all three.

It is very simple to determine what good protective stats are, the higher the better, and for the most part strong abilities are also easy to identify. It is clear that things such as the Cycloid Scale Sleeves, Phoenix Plackart or Dragon Armor set bonus are very strong when you look at them because one can immediately quantify what the value of those bonuses are. However, affinities are one of those things that shift around in value depending on what you are doing with your build. 

Having written that, there are trends that determine how valuable a set is. These are as follows:

• 1. How many affinities it provides in each colour
• 2. The orientation of said affinities in each colour
• 3. Does it have a rare colour/affinity orientation?
• 4. How many affinities does it need to activate its abilities.
• 5. How many puzzle affinities does it need to activate its abilities.
• 6. Do you have any powerful items that need specific affinities (such as Red Charm, Green Ring or the Tempered Spear)?

These will determine the value of your armor set, and while you can make many of them fit the situation as you require. The more situations your armor set can cover without stretching, the stronger it is overall because it can be used by a wider range of survivors.

We'll take a look at the absolute queen of armor affinities before we drill into specific information. If you can guess what it is before the end of this paragraph you win some internet points. Yup, it's made from the Sandsquid, Cycloid Scale Armor.

Here's just one of many, many silly builds that can be made with it. This one is far from optimal, but I enjoy using it oh so much.

Cycloid Scale's Prismatic set bonus, in combination with additional accuracy, sharp (if you are in the butt, which this build doesn't do), extra evasion, extra survival and an improved Fecal Salve ability in the feet means that it covers just about every single thing you could ever want for a build. This makes it your first stop in trying to make something work (later versions of this build for example moved onto Vagabond Armor + True Blade), you do not have to try too hard to make the affinities fit and as long as your weapon doesn't normally have range or sharp this armor set does it all the way into the end game. It's basically got one weakness, relatively low armor (and don't worry, Adam's fixing that). 

It is also an absolute anomaly when it comes to armor, nothing else in the game comes close to covering this. In fact when we look at the other armor sets, only Dragon, Dancer and Screaming Armor come close (another reason Dragon is so much better than people realise, you need to come around on this armor set ladies and gentlemen).  Silk would be there, but it's held back severely by availability, a weak set bonus, lack of synergy and sheer number of puzzle affinities it demands - to the point of not working well in a 9 slot grid no matter what formation you put it in, you're almost always compromising with it and that feels bad.

So all of that written, let's dive into some numbers, statistics and look at what they mean for players or potential homebrewers!  I am not going to look at every single armor set, but a few that highlight important things.

Rawhide Armor 

As the first (cheapest and most cost effective) armor in the game, Rawhide sets the baseline standard for which all other armor sets are held to. I have previously expressed the opinion that rawhide is very good (for the players), but it is not great for the overall health of the game. It is a set that is 'too pushed' and the affinities are one of those areas where this is apparent. While it only has a total of 4 affinities, these are designed to slot together in a simple, obvious fashion - which is a good piece of teaching design - but the abilities they unlock are staggeringly powerful (along with a strong set bonus and armor points). So much so that one of them is completely irreplaceable. While other armor sets offer extra evasion (either directly or via lots of green affinities + monster grease) There is no other place in the game that has a reliable, every turn, surge possible way of controlling the monster's AI deck. 

This is why Rawhide sticks around F-O-R-E-V-E-R (and it's one of the things I recommend anyone making custom content looks into, you should be doing some form of AI control somewhere in your expansion if it is mid or late game content). All of the mid to late game AI control is stuck on clubs or in the Blue Ring (which doesn't work every turn). 

However, another reason that Rawhide has such staying power is those affinities. They provide 50% of the requirements for the Lucky Charm or Monster Tooth Necklace and that is very significant due to the importance of luck and strength in fighting monsters.  You get 50% of your needs from rawhide, 25% from the Charm/Necklace and that means you only need to find one more gear card to supply the last 25%.  That's HUGE early on and remains important for a long, long time.

Brawler Armor

In contrast, brawler armor comes with decent stats (4 armor across the board, insanity gain + the Lion Skin Cloak), but very few other relevant abilities. While the abilities it does have are solid to great (Cloak is amazing) - Brawler has a grand total of three affinities (1 green, 2 red) and that is a great harm to the various things it would like to be doing. As a Fist & Tooth tank focused armor set it would prefer to be pushing up evasion, luck, accuracy and strength as much as possible (instead of having to rely on getting that from Dark Dentist or Acid Fists).  You're going to be up close in the monster's face and you need all the help you can get when you're using a weapon with such poor baseline stats late game.

This is because it is constructed from the (completely irrelevant) White Lion Gauntlets, the ability free Skull Helm and two of the weakest parts of Phoenix Armor. It's not really a fault of Brawlers as a whole, but if you wanted to use Phoenix Armor parts, you'd be better off having it as an entire set, which is also very tanky, but just works better (and Phoenix isn't that great on the affinity tree).

Dragon & Screaming Armor

These two sets sit right near the top of the tree for light armor, they have an absolute boat load of affinities and it makes them incredible platforms for whatever builds you so desire to make. In particular, when dealing with Sharp weapons, Dragon streets ahead of anything else as a baseline platform.

Screaming edges out Dragon on the Affinity front though, because Dragon has a lot of puzzle requirements baked into it, in particular the chest is very important to activate but it demands being sat in the 5 slot (dead center), but also the awkwardness of the waist piece result in it often not being activated (it is hard to find a left and up blue puzzle on the same gear card).

Now, with all of that to one side, lets get into some specifics.

Affinities, locations and orientations

One would assume that affinities across armors would be relatively equal in their distribution.  And while that is true when you consider the total numbers of all affinities when you look at their orientation and the demands of the armor sets, there is a clear slant.

This includes all the armor sets currently released, plus all of the location based accessories (Manhunter's Hat, Trash Crown, Spidicules Rings etc etc) and we can see a few interesting things from this.

For a start, while armor across the game provides affinities in (almost) equal quantities, the puzzle demands from their gear pieces slant more towards blue and green, with those two colours being approx 50% more needed than Red. We see this in the way that builds are assembled in game. Outside of the occasional Red Charm/Bone Dagger spam meme build, most armor set builds seek to stack blue or green affinities.

When we take a bit to look at orientations, we can see that each colour in the game has a very dominant placement for armor sets.  

Blue is far far more likely to be up or down (37 total placements) vs. Left or Right (12).  Green is slightly more orientated on the left and right, and a bit deprived on the Up. But Red shows some very heavy bias, there are close to twice as many red affinities pointing right than any other single category and they make up just shy of 40% of the current affinities. That's also an issue because...

Whoops! So yeah, Red affinities in KDM are somewhat in trouble when you compare them to the other two. They're in less demand for armor set abilities and they're concentrated in what is arguably the worst orientation. 

Now, there are limitations to the way that I have performed this analysis, because I did not tease out a difference between a red right and a left right red gear due to a desire to pull things together (and not create a ton of categories, therefore more noise), the Red situation is not as bad as it seems, often red gear comes with other affinities. However, when you are searching in general for a red affinity you are more limited by the available armor than the other two colours.

Location Orientations

Here's another fun one to look at, affinities, orientations and the locations they are clustered around.

This chart is the important one when it comes to creating custom armor, because it establishes the trends for each and every single location type.  As we can see when we move through them, the main colours for each location are:

• Head: Blue or Red if bone based. Rarely Green.
• Arms: More likely to be Green or Red than Blue.
• Body: Well distributed between all three types.
• Waist: Mostly Green & Red
• Legs: Also mostly Green & Red.

So survivor colors trend from Blue Red at the top towards Green Red at the bottom and this ties right into the themes I was writing about last time. Blue is the color of the mind, while Red is the color of the body and green is the color of nature. We see more green around the portions of the armor set (and survivor) where they connect with the ground, with reproduction and the world directly.  

Blue flows from the head to the body, while green flows from the body to the waist/limbs and red permeates throughout.  It honestly would be interesting to map all of this in a 'heat map' style across an outline of a human. But that is not something I have the time or capability to do.

Lets look at the needs of each body part before we wrap this up. These are more strongly defined, but they feed into the same themes (which makes sense when you consider how puzzle affinities work).  The Head focuses around blue requirements, The arms are slightly more red than the other two colours, the body is more in blue and green while the waist is heavily green and (surprisingly) so are the legs (thank you Leather & Dancer Armor for that). While there are some differences, they are not significant.

The simple way to remember this is as follows, when you design an armor set, you should mostly be looking to keep your blues up (near the sky) and your greens down (near the ground). Red can go anywhere.

Summary

Affinities are a key portion of unlocking the true power of many gear cards you may be interested in. Strong abilities like the Spidicules Rings, Shadow Saliva Shawl or Gloom Cream have very limiting restrictions baked into their balance and knowing what armor sets will help with this is a key strategy. Likewise, not designing custom armor sets that immediately unlock powerful existing official gear is also very important. Be cautious of creating an armor set that connects to the Green or Blue rings naturally as they can cause huge imbalances in the game.

Finally, remember, blue at the top, green at the bottom, red wherever (but try and avoid that red right facing affinity unless you want to maintain the status quo).