A Discourse on the Flower Knight Expansion (Patreon)

I have been meaning to write this for a while now because the Flower Knight is the expansion that has lost the most stock in my eyes over time and I think it's one of the three or four worst designed expansions in the game at the moment.  Considering it's so beloved I am sure that this is a controversial opinion to hold at the moment, however I think that the Flower Knight (along with Spidicules) shows the endemic problems in design that can happen.  Things which I hope will be avoided in future expansions.

To this end, I'm making this article a public one, because I do hope that the issues and negatives in the Flower Knight expansion can be highlighted, brought to the front and filtered back to the design team.

Before we start, I must preface that I do not think that the Flower Knight is a terrible expansion, I do not hate it, in fact the model and the theme of the monster are absolutely superb, it's a beautiful, elegant creature and that theme has been captured well.  In addition this expansion includes the 'Forest Gate' event, which is so much better than the event it replaces (Overwhelming Darkness) that it's not even funny.

I also like the Tactics cards, the Flower Knight Badge, the idea of the flowers, Petal Spiral, Otherworldly Luck, Sleeping Virus Flower and the True Blade secret fighting art.

In addition; some of the flaws in this expansion could be seen as a 'difficulty reduction mechanic' that is, having the Flower Knight in the game genuinely makes any campaign a lot easier. 

All of this written, let's look at the various flaws in the expansion as I see them:

Vespertine Bow

I don't have a specific problem with the statistical design of the Vespertine Bow, it's an interesting weapon to use with it's two different firing modes and there should be more weapons like this.

However, it's an utterly dominant weapon in an exceptional category of weapons (Range is really strong in KD:M) and it's available too easily and too early on.  It's theoretically possible to build 3 of these bows in lantern year 5 by crit farming the Flower Knight as soon as you can hunt it and on top of all of that the event that is a 'downside' to getting a bow is mitigated by both the potential gain of the Acanthus Doctor SFA.

Essentially, this bow is too good considering how early you can get it and the downside of the bow is mitigated and contains an upside.

Acanthus Doctor

This leads us nicely into the most problematic secret fighting art in the game.  Acanthus Doctor.  As you can see, this SFA is rather potent at making DPS characters because you get high strength and high armor by combining plenty of green affinities on a single survivor.  As you'll see in the upcoming 'Acanthus Doctor' article I have scheduled, there are many different builds you can put together, but the main crux of the issue is not so much the SFA, it's how early you can potentially get one (LY9).

I believe I'd have no issues with this SFA if the Vespertine Bow wasn't such an easy purchase.

Fencing

I think you can see why Fencing is super powerful, 50% chance of ignoring one hit from an attack per round.  In itself this would again not be an issue as it's an SFA.  

However, the Flower Knight's showdown hands out fencing like it's candy because that's one of the aims of the fight.  Like the King's Man the Flower Knight has a defense that needs to be overcome with an SFA. Unlike the King's Man this SFA is really powerful.

You can often get Fencing onto 2-3 survivors in one fight against the Flower Knight and that's pretty crazy.  It's also possible to Luck/Crit/Fist farm the Flower Knight for Fencing + Resources.  So this is a case of another card I'm fine with that is handed out too easily.

Otherworldly Luck

This fighting art can be gained during the sense memory event by spending 1 Warbling Bloom and 3 Organs.  This can then be stowed on the Sculpture innovation and handed out across the settlement.  It's a really powerful fighting art and the combination between how easy it is to get with Sculpture is ridiculous.  This was a super powerful fighting art before you could stick it onto sculpture, it's ridiculous now!

Low Toughness

The L1 Flower Knight has 6 toughness. 6!  That's the same as the Prologue White Lion!  This means that without any extra strength you wound the Flower Knight with fist and tooth 50% of the time.  Add into that the fact that the Flower Knight is built around giving out luck tokens and overwhelming it's defenses via critical hits and you have a monster that you literally punch to death in LY5 and farm lots of flower resources from during the process.  

I mean it, when you go up against the Flower Knight just bring your fists, teeth and feet plus ranged weapons. It's a pushover!

Position on the Hunt Track

I've mentioned this in the article I wrote on herb/mineral gathering recently, the L1 Flower Knight is positioned 2 spaces behind the 'Forest Gate/Overwhelming Darkness' space on the hunt track. This gives the survivors a spot where they can place herb and mineral gathering and get the post Overwhelming Darkness bonuses without having to face a L2 Node 3 monster like the Phoenix/Dung Beetle Knight.  Considering this is a Toughness 6 L1 monster they're fighting you can see why I'm concerned with this matter. It's the easiest place to farm Iron in the game!

Warbling Bloom

There are 2 of these cards in the deck and if you're not using them to gain Otherworldly Luck they can be turned into population, weird faced flower people population.  This means each trip to the Flower Knight can potentially increase your population by 2 which means that you have a way to give birth to 2 survivors a year if you play with 'Survivor of the Fittest' as your principle and also you can use these bonus survivors to mitigate the losses that the Necrotic Mistletoe event (Vespertine Bow/Acanthus Doctor).

Vespertine Foil

The Vespertine Foil is awful, it's a really badly designed weapon that is never used by people because it's not worth the upkeep.  I realise that the design idea for this weapon is to have it be used alongside a satchel and ultimately be a temporary weapon that needs maintenance.  However, in practice it turns out that people don't want to pay 3+ resources for a (4/5+/1/Deadly 2) weapon at all because high speed + slow strength, even when combined with deadly and a lucky charm, is a death sentence for an attacking survivor.

When you remove the upkeep from this weapon it's still risky to use, so that's rather telling.  Overall this 'spend 1 flower resource' drawback is terrible, the same way that you don't want a survivor with the disorder Horder in your hunt party.

Vespertine Cello

The Cello would be absolutely fine, except that the Harvester hunt event insta-kills anyone with noisy gear with no chance of being avoided.  This means we have a potentially fun design for a hunt party (musicians) that will not be used in practice because each time you roll a basic hunt event you have a 1% chance of losing 3 out of 4 survivors.

I would add an extra bit of text to the Cello that allows survivors with instruments to spend the survival during the Harvester event. Otherwise this is a cute card with a nice model that just isn't going to be used.

Satchel

The Satchel is one of those gear cards that just doesn't do enough.  You see them on the "no shawl" Acanthus Doctor builds and that's about it.  I'm personally of the opinion that the Satchel should do something extra to encourage people to use it normally.  Perhaps it could add one armor to the body as an accessory, or give a survivor +1 Survival at the start of the showdown or have some kind of bonus when used with a sickle during the Herb Gathering hunt event. 

Ultimately it's not good enough right now and seems to exist just to be used by Acanthus Doctors. That's sad and niche.

Ghostly Beauty

There is absolutely no way to guarantee getting the Ghostly Beauty disorder, which is required for getting the True Blade secret fighting art. This would not be an issue, except that True Blade is required for making Griswaldo (Green Armor sword).  Green armor is a massive challenge to make already, Griswaldo requires a juggernaut blade as part of its crafting, so having it tied to a disorder that can be gained only by chance is a crock.

In my opinion there should be a way of getting Ghostly Beauty during the showdown fight, from the flowers or during sense memory.

People of the Bloom 

This campaign is literally easy mode as all the survivors start with 1 luck and 1 green affinity at the cost of -2 red affinities (the weakest of the affinities), you get regular 'Rare Virus Flowers' and you get access to the Vespertine Bow potentially in LY1.  However, it's getting a revamp in the abyssal woods, so the only real issue here is that it's very underdeveloped and overpowered.  It sort of has a place as being 'here's an easy mode version of the game for people who are struggling'.

Flower Knight Helm

The problem with this is that it's a very good item that just is not going to be used because armor set bonuses are very, very important for survivors.  

I think it should have extra keywords, set, leather, rawhide, lantern, feather and have the Outfit keyword.  This means it can be used with Rawhide, Leather, Lantern and Phoenix armor sets in the core game and the expansion armor from the Dragon King.  I think that makes it interesting at this point.Summary:

The main problem is not any one of these point individually, though the gear issues are in particular quite annoying, it's the combination of it all.  You put all of this together and you have an easy to kill monster that gives out a load of resources, which you can stone circle into basic resources if you want to save them...

...gives out Fencing, provides an easy place to gain population, a safe place to farm iron/acanthus/swamp fruit, guarantees Otherworldly Luck for your settlement and gives you the single most overpowered early game weapon plus the ability to gain one of the most powerful survivor builds multiple times.

Some people farm the L1 White Lion over and over to build generic gear, it's a better choice to farm the L1 Flower Knight over and over.

In addition, outside of a couple of gear items, the stuff you get from the Flower Knight is not good enough because it's either too perishable (Foil, Arrow), too dangerous (Cello) or just too limited in scope (Satchel).  

So, sadly, all I can write here is that as much as I love the idea of the Flower Knight, this expansion is one that should be left for the newer players to experience and shelved for anyone who's become more advanced because it provides too many exploitable opportunities to make the game easy.

Let's leave the Owl in the woods.