Screaming Armor: A Requiem (Patreon)

While updating the Early Years visual guide and releasing its expansion featuring “complete picture” I had a few questions surrounding the status of Screaming Armor, which departed from its staple state in the 1.5 guide versions to a 'highly situational' position in 1.6's tier lists. Patron Joseph asked for a post about what versions of the Screaming Antelope cards I would keep – while the true answer is 'The latest version' because I play the game as APG designs it – that's not really a useful or detailed enough answer, it's also no help for people who decide they want to forge their own path through the various iterations that APG released over the years for Screaming Armor. I can do better.

With that in mind, this week we're going to take a long look back at Kingdom Death's most problematic child, the armor set that they just cannot manage to get right, we'll explore its first release in the first version of the game, often referred to as 1.31; then look at the temporary place it sat post second kickstarter, bask in the glory that was the absolute powerhouse that represented the 1.5 edition, scratch our heads at the shrivelled remains of the armor set that was released in 1.6 and finally we'll look at the cardinal sins that cause all of this, the ones that lay behind APG's philosophy for armor and unwillingness to repair flawed past content, in other words perfection isn't a goal - chase the new.

The First Iteration

(Please excuse the slight blurring on some cards, my camera was being very special when I took these and I didn't notice until too late, it's clear enough to read in the large image, plus alternative shots of the important pieces will come later).

This is how Screaming Armor looked when the large obsidian cardboard tomb arrived on people's gaming desks. This armor set provided 3/2/2/2/2 armor points along with insanity gain and a lot of focus around its Slam ability. Its most interesting element was that if you were insane when you departed the armor's defenses would climb up to 5/4/4/4/4 – which is a very solid and enticing level of armor points.

At the time this armor set was out, I was just beginning my journey into content creating for Kingdom Death (as a hobby, I never planned or intended for it to become part of my job) and the community as a whole was very cool on this armor set. I was just beginning to see the power and potential that this armor set had, but no members of the community had really sat down and laid out just how strong this armor set actually was.

You see, as we know these days, it's really easy to get lots of insanity onto survivors and keep them insane, in fact often the challenge when hunting is to ensure that you have one sane survivor to help deal with situations where everyone being insane is a large problem. So near the end of 1.31's time in the sun, which was before the second kickstarter launched back on 24th of November, 2016, we were beginning to realise that this armor set provided a huge amount of armor points, multiple good affinities and had a decent grid layout that supported a lot of styles of play.

It was the beginning of the silver age for this armor set, and that was only the start of where this armor set would go in terms of power. This silver age was caused by the early release of the provisional Set bonus in update #26(https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poots/kingdom-death-monster-15/posts/1766179), showcasing not only that Screaming Armor would move into a spear focused design with its Skewer ability, but also that the +2 armor points to all locations set bonus no longer had the additional requirement of being insane when departing to gain it.

This kicked off quite a few players using that released card prototype as the new set bonus for the armor. It revealed to the community as a whole that the rest of the armor set was very powerful as it featured multiple green affinities, strong defenses and a solid monster armor attack ability. The armor set leapt from being a minority choice to becoming mainstream and the second strongest armor set in the core game overall.

The Second Iteration

What we were not in the least bit prepared for however was the armor set which would actually get released in 1.5. Pictured above, this armor set contained the previous set bonus update and multiple other improvements to the armor set. The Screaming Horns lost its mystifying green down affinity and gained a blue one instead. Giving it not just a natural fit to the Screaming Coat, but also fixing the problems with Warlord Armor in one fell swoop.  The Skirt gained extra armor points and a protective ability and the leg warmers had their insanity gain improved a great deal, both in when it triggered and how much insanity it gained.

However, the blindsiding triumph that took everyone by pleasant surprise was the update to the Screaming Bracers, we'll talk more about that when we look at all the evolutions side by side further down in this article, but the short version is that this piece of gear was a groundbreaking piece of design that suddenly opened up a whole new playstyle. Screaming Armor was not only potently spear focused, but it was also very durable with its 5/4/4/5/4 armor points and it could also be utilised as a 'medic' style build due to how it ensured Acanthus was available in every fight.

This golden age of having a new playstyle was not however, to last. The Legendary Card pack came and delivered some shocking blows, making 1.6 not simply an improvement over the previous version...

The Third Iteration

The Screaming Horns, Skirt, Bracers and Set Bonus card all took heavy nerfs with the release of 1.6. In fact, if you count each individual change as a separate nerf, this armor set took a whopping total of ten nerfing changes to its power level. Which pushed it down to being a 3/3/3/3/3 armor set that cost you 9 resources to craft. About the only thing left intact on this armor set was its synergy with Spears, the Lucky Charm and the Blue Charm.

The loss of its armor points meant that it could no longer perform as a damage dealing outfit, and the change to the Screaming Horns, while needed to close out a loophole where deaf/earplugs survivors could gain as much insanity as they wanted (more on this later) sadly came with a puzzling and unthematic loss of an armor point on the one bone location in the armor (nothing about that armor point loss makes sense, not from a thematic or design or balance viewpoint). Finally the Acanthus spawning ability of the Screaming Bracers, the very thing that created this new fresh playstyle was discarded, leaving the arm gear with nothing more than a bonus to interacting with terrain – a useful benefit, but given how adrift the rest of the armor set was now, not enough to salve the hurt of everything else being stripped away.

Mediocrity is the new goal for early game monster based armor it seems. I guess we should stop dreaming about the past and get hyped for the upcoming Gambler's Chest early game armors instead.

We'll take a more detailed look at the evolution of each piece that changed next, allowing us to tease the details out with a visual look at each card next to the other. Starting with the Settlement Location:

Stone Circle

I have written about the overall benefits of the 1.6 changes to this settlement location before, the move of consolidating all of the Screaming Antelope based gear together into one location (and updating others to match) was a huge improvement, for the Screaming Antelope, for future expansions, for Spidicules and for the game in general.

However, there are several key changes that cannot be overlooked. The failure to fix the Boss Mehndi was one, the Lance of Longinus still existing in its current form is another pile of nonsense that should have been addressed (I guess Jesus existed in the Kingdom Death world???) but the big change for our discussion here is the cost of the Screaming Skirt. Not only was it nerfed, but its price was doubled – requiring another generic hide. Do not understate it, that is a massive change for an early game armor piece and it is part of the puzzle that has pushed Screaming Armor down to White Lion and Gorment Armor status (meme/specialist builds only).

Set Bonus

As we can see, the original version was very generic, concerned only with insanity gains and slamming monsters. You could use this armor set with just about any weapon you desired. I used to combine it with both very powerful weapons like the Greater Gaxe, Counterweighted Axe and meme builds such as the Rainbow Katana. It was not a straightforward set to run, you did have to pay close attention to the survivor's insanity level or suffer the consequences when departing – but it was powerful and flexible.

In 1.5 we see that the armor points were made into a permanent part of the armor's identity and the dependence on insanity was sliced off. Also the slam ability was updated with a set bonus synergy that allowed the user to activate a melee weapon as part of their Slam and gave additional power for spears that were employed in this section.

The final version works just the same as the previous iteration, however it has lost a total of 5 armor points from its bonus. This is a massive hit in power and it pushed the armor set down to an unacceptable level of armor. One of the key things to remember in Kingdom Death is that Rawhide exists, and rawhide tells us that for 1 hide we get +1 armor and another +1 armor if we get a set bonus. That's 2 armor points to a location for 1 hide as a baseline value, any armor that follows on needs to respect that return on value or it will be discarded. While there doesn't need to be an exact ratio of 1 armor to 1 hide (plus set bonus) it does need to compensate for any lost armor points. Because Screaming Armor costs a total of 10 resources in 1.6, you should expect its total armor points to come close to double that of what Rawhide provides. Rawhide gives 10 (plus amazing armor piece and set bonus abilities), Screaming Armor should give around 20 – not just because of the number, but because it also requires specific monster resources and they're more valuable than normal. There's some bone mixed into the costs, so about 17-18 armor points would probably be fair. An armor point stat line of 4/3/4/4/3 for example would provide enough of a return to start to make it worthwhile, though 4/4/3/3/4 is an alternative (a lot weaker though, armor points on the body and head are very valuable).

Too expensive is a problem, it's a huge problem when you're competing against Rawhide Armor and Leather Armor – and that's part of why Screaming Armor has fallen to being a Blue Charm/Spear or Lucky Charm/Blood Paint/Deadly build set.

Screaming Horns

OK, so this one was a bit of a monkey's paw situation. While the change between 1.31 and 1.5 was nothing but a positive. There was a rule loophole left in the activated ability where a deaf survivor could gain an unlimited amount of insanity through the Horn activation ability instead of stopping at the 3 insanity that the design intended. As it is possible to make a survivor deaf through the Lantern Helm's Earplugs ability, this meant that under certain circumstances players were able to stall the monster out and then abuse the unlimited cap on Insanity to push insanity to truly inhuman levels. This could then be utilised with either Immortal or the Butcher's Blood Mehndi (Lion God) to create absurd builds – the change to the Counterweighted Axe removed one of these outlets, but Immortal still remained.

However, when fixing the Screaming Horns for 1.6 the armor points were stripped downwards, with it losing a third of its armor points (Again a huge change, even more so when considering that the set bonus also came with a loss of half of its armor points). It seems that our desire to close out this insanity loophole came at a cost, Screaming Armor as a whole was kicked into oblivion during the process.

It's worth noting that at the same time that the Screaming Horns insanity loophole was explained to APG, they were also informed about similar issues with the Gorm (Hiccup), The Butcher (Menace vs. Fecal Salve), Screaming Antelope (Chow Down & Instinct issues) and the Gigalion's trait Vicious (you can make the Gigalion dance back and forth out of attacking range of the survivors and effectively lock it in place doing that while you set up various things, stand in a corner killing it with the Red Ring, or Fecal Salve + Amber Poleaxe passive it etc etc). However none of those have been addressed at this stage and it is unlikely we'll see anything done about anything other than Hiccup in the future, because the opportunity to solve these issues was the 1.6 Legendary Card Pack, and the design team didn't do anything. So I guess they're fine with those monsters being problems, just like they're fine with the Screaming Antelope being such a hot mess that any variants of it are going to require almost completely new AI and HL decks.

Screaming Bracers

Now we've covered a lot of what happened to the Screaming Bracers, what they represent is just the absolute worst of the flailing that the design team can do at times. This piece of gear has changed focus and power level more than is reasonable and it's been left in a very generic and uninspired place.

One can only hope that in the future the medical capabilities of the 1.5 Bracers returns in some form, because it was a unique and exciting part of the build. But it's also a bit of a shame that the original 1.31's ability wasn't preserved in some form (or moved to the footwear) because that was also an edge case useful and interesting ability.

1.6's text just has improved terrain interactions, which is not a bad thing, but the set needed compensation for having so much stripped away from the bracers. There was no softening of the nerfs to leave the armor at a reasonable power level however, this deer was beaten until it was dead, then flogged a bit more to be sure.

Screaming Skirt

A relatively simple set of changes overall, I absolutely do not agree with the removal of that 1 armor point during the transition from 1.5 to 1.6 and this is one of the pieces where I sometimes consider leaving in the old version (and if I didn't do this patreon weekly and played just for fun, I probably would). There's just no doubt that the correct version of this piece was the 1.5 one.

Screaming Leg Warmers

The Leg Warmers got a buff in 1.5 and avoided any nerfs afterwards. There's no doubt that the change was a welcome one, in 1.31 the Leg Warmers helped to keep your insanity topped up in order to get the set bonus active when departing; because that was no longer needed we got a fair stronger ability that works on arrival at the showdown – that's a better spot because it ensures that a survivor wearing these always has insanity when starting the fight, nothing that the hunt phase can do will stop that. This means that this leg gear helps for Sentient gear in addition to giving your survivor protection.

The Problems that Future Faces

So, with all of that, what now? What does the future hold? Well as I've stated before, as players, if we're not going to mix and match the best of the above parts to get some kind of thing that works for us personally, well the armor set has a few niche uses, but it leans hard on shield to help keep its defenses hard enough that it doesn't fall off as soon as you start to approach the mid game.

As for what APG need to do? Well it is my honest opinion that their balance assessment of how to design monster based armor is flawed from first principles. We have four early game monster armor sets in White Lion, Screaming, Gorment and Spidicules – all four of these are worse than the generic equivalents they compete against and for three of them (not Spidicules) it is because their baseline armor points are just too low by around a whole point across every single location. At times these armor sets are harder to make than even Leather Armor – I'm sure that more than a few of you can recall the pain of trying to get a Handed Skull or Spiral Horn in particular.

However, where the Screaming Antelope is concerned, the rot sits a lot deeper than just the armor set. The entire Showdown is a flawed mess in a way that the Flower Knight and Lion Knight share. There are broken mechanics baked into the core of all three of these – and while the concepts can be fixed for all of them, they all pretty much require an overhaul of both the AI and HL decks. The 1.6 Update provided the perfect place for this to be achieved, unfortunately this opportunity was squandered and the Screaming Antelope remains a big old resource Piñata for survivors to whack – even if you're not resource farming as much of the resource deck as possible it's still a showdown with a huge amount of Acanthus available to grab on top of having an abnormal number of hit locations that drop resources on critical wounds. It's a monster that needs a heartfelt, enthusiastic and meaningful amount of love from APG's design team, but given how far behind that team is with, well, everything. 

I wouldn't even want them to spend the resources on it, I certainly don't want them to spend the resources on a Vignette for the Screaming Antelope – Nukealope sounds like a fun idea, in principle, but then when you consider the collapsing foundation of a monster that it would have to build up from – the fact that they'd need to replace more cards than they did with the Gigalion by a magnitude (plus some more). But maybe that was always the goal, if the Screaming Antelope was a well balanced, challenging fight with good rewards then there would be no need for players to need new content... So, perhaps this is just a monster we should all close the book on and accept that it'll always be a hot mess.

A hot mess with neat spear synergy, lots of blue affinities and blood paint. Ah, good old Blood Paint – if I could fight nothing but an Antelope Bladder to craft you, I would, every time.

Also, before I forget...

WHY ON EARTH WASN'T THE BOSS MEHDNI UPDATED TO HAVE THE SYMBOL KEYWORD SO IT WOULD FINALLY WORK WITH THE NECROMANCER SECRET FIGHTING ART IN 1.6.? IT'S JUST SUCH A MISSED OPPORTUNITY! I MEAN FREAKING HUNGRY BASALT DIED FOR THIS....