Assessing Armor #5: Silk Armor (Patreon)

Before we even start, I think we should just put this right here:

I'm going to preface this by saying this, Silk Armor is a complete mess, we'll go into why, but it's honestly the worst designed armor set in the game by miles and I'm glad it's getting a major change in Campaigns of Death, because it's not worth the effort right now.

So, in that knowledge, lets see why it's bad, what is good about it, and we'll have a better understanding when we see what Adam's team does to change this armor.

(This is one of two layouts most commonly used, I prefer the second one because it activates the Boots and Monster Grease).

Silk Turban

Resource Cost: 1x silken nervous system, 3x silk, 1x hide

Assessment

Efficiency: Terrible efficiency, the silken nervous system locks this gear behind killing a L3 Spidicules, which is usually a LY16+ job (and even later for the average player) and is also an extremely unpleasant activity due to the frustrating nature of how the showdown runs. 

Additionally it's a 5 resource cost head gear. Know what other pieces of head gear cost 5+ to make? The Lantern Helm, even the Green Helm costs only 3 resources to make (plus having TOM on the timeline, which is easier than you'd think). So logically, this should be the second most durable non-Green head gear in the game. It's not, it's basically slightly better than the Leather Mask. 

F

Defense: As above, the defense this head gear provides is awful for the cost you pay. You'd expect something like 5-6 defense. But you get 3.

F

Abilities: On the ability front, this gear is unique and interesting. It has a lot of potential, because ways of manipulating monster behavior are rare and unusual.  It is actually the single best piece of gear in the set (just ahead of the boots) and it is important to stress just how powerful and unique this gear is. You get to turn the monster so it is facing away from you, it's not until you start using this that you realise just how potent a DPS or Support ability this is. It's really good, it's no Rawhide Headband, but it is still a viable alternative option - if it turned up earlier. 

However, it is worth noting that this headband is a little awkward to activate alongside the boots. But I consider it worth doing.

S+

Affinities: Solid, interesting affinities with a right facing green and a left facing blue. These are unusual, however they tend to get locked up by the armor sets insane puzzle needs.

A

Score: This would be the best piece of gear in the set statistically; but only if it was released earlier in the campaign. It's a good item, but badly placed on the rewards, and that holds it back a lot.

D

Silk Robes

Resource Cost:  2x Silk, 1x Hide, 1x Exoskeleton 

Assessment

Efficiency: Just like the head piece, this is an overpriced piece of armor, costing the equivalent of 3 hide and 1 monster specific bone. Even when you take into account that silk is a bit easier to get than most resources, there is absolutely no reason to justify the absurd cost of this item. It's as expensive as the Cycloid Scale Jacket, but nowhere near as good. 

Needs to cost 1 to 2 resources less.

F

Defense: So, you'd think that with the extra armor ability tagged onto the Silk Robes that I'd give this piece of the set a slightly higher score. Well, no, absolutely not. The ability, as we'll discuss below, is marginal and hard to activate, in fact, if you're getting the good parts of the set activated, you're not bothering with the robes at all, because there's no room for them on the grid.

D

Abilities: Two words: Noob trap. The ability on the Robes looks good, when you consider it's combination with the Sash and the set bonus, it looks like it should be really good. But the fact is, it's not, gaining 1 armor to all locations is not powerful enough to require the costs it has here. 

I don't rate this kind of ability at all, it's overkill vs. L1 monsters and it's not enough vs. anything else. It also has an anti-synergy with the set bonus because it blanket buffs every location equally, but the set bonus looks to spread hits around and wear down the highest armor location to protect others.

A good version of this combo is Crossarm Block + Gloom Bracers. Now, if this ability doubled the armor at one location, well we'd be talking about a different experience when combined with the set bonus. 

So, this is a hard pass from me, back to the drawing board with you Robes.

C-

Affinities: I have no complaints about the affinities provided by the Robes, honestly on a different armor set, with a different ability and not this mind-boggling puzzle affinity requirement I would be really happy to be getting these. They're solid, not the best as many body pieces around this tier have 4 affinities, but there are worse options.

A

Score: I really cannot stand the Silk Robes at all, I find them to be the most distasteful and inelegant part of the set. They're basically an ability-less affinity provider with an activated ability that's a noob trap of the highest order. That activated ability would be more interesting if there was reasons to build mongrel sets using the Silk Robes, but there are so many other better choices for the body piece if you're ignoring armor set bonuses, so this one gets a hard pass for me. It's one of two things at the heart of the problems with Silk Armor.

E

Silk Wraps

Resource Cost: 1x Silk, 1x Thick Web Silk

Assessment

Efficiency: One of only two well costed parts of this armor set, the wraps require a silk and a monster specific resource which is silk/hide. That's actually a good cost and compared to the head, body and waist and it sort of highlights how bizzare the costs for the rest of the armor set are.

A

Defense: Same as the rest of the set, would be scored higher if you had access to the full set in a timely fashion. It's slightly worse than leather, but points deducted.

D-

Abilities: N/A

Affinities: This has a sort of useful, but not really that helpful pairing of left green and down red half-affinities. The awkward design of the armor set means that you're generally unable to use both of these affinities, so you get flexibility in positioning, that's then countered by how inflexibly all the puzzle piece abilities are in the set.

C

Score: For a generic, bland item, this one isn't bad, but it's not good either.

C

Silk Sash

Resource Cost: 2x Silk, 1x Bone, 1x Hide

Assessment

Efficiency: The cost is not great considering the tier of this armor. Waist armor is typically low cost to build, and most of the armor around this level represents that. This 

Defense:  You can't get access to the set bonus for a long time, and because we do not have partial set bonuses in KD:Monster; you won't be using this item often, because there are no patchwork sets that care about  this gear, affinities or its abilities.  So I have to score it down accordingly. Yes, you're going to read this a lot here, but it matters.

C

Abilities: See the Silk Robes for most of the text, however it is worth noting that you can activate the Sash a lot easier with the combination of the Silk Turban and a Leather Shield (don't use the boots because you want them active as well). Therefore it scores slightly higher, but this is still an ability that fast becomes useless.

D+

Affinities: Green Affinities are great, however they are generally best used for tanks. If you're tanking with Silk Armor, you're probably doing it wrong. But the Left Green, Bottom Green half-affinities are still relatively easy to utilise and combine just fine with the Turban and Leather Shield.

C+

Score: Better than the Robes and the Wraps, but still really damn awkward to use. The puzzle pieces and cost are huge detriments to this piece of gear and it's the second worst part of this set power wise.

 D-

Silk Boots

Resource Cost: 1x large appendage, 1x silk

Assessment

Efficiency: Just like the wraps, the boots have a very reasonable and competitively priced cost. But they are a straight up better item than the Wraps, possibly the second or maybe even the best piece of the set.

S

Defense: Higher than most other parts, because of the ability, which allows you to convert survival into insanity. It's very important to note that this ability doesn't have an activation symbol or a trigger, so it's like encourage, you can use it at absolutely any time you desire as long as you are not doomed. So it's effectively a "dodge" for intimidate actions and other things that cause brain damage.

A

Abilities: This is the other ability (apart from the head) that I care about activating on this piece of gear. There are a huge amount of tricks you can undertake with this gear, the simplest of which is the anti-brain damage - but it's also one of the few gear items I rate for use in a mongrel set, because it works so well alongside the Phoenix Plackart. It has that right facing green-half affinity which will combine with the plackart,  and it allows you to spend 1 survival to stay sane and cancel hits via the plackart's awesome ability. Honestly, the combination of the Silk Boots and Plackart - in addition to a few other pieces of armor, can result in one of the most wonderful mongrel sets. I'll write about it after we discuss the Phoenix Armor if someone reminds me.

Additionally, the boots are really good for survivors who use sentient gear, it is a disaster to have such gear switched off, the Boots stop that happening.

This is all without considering that the boots give you +1 movement and Choreia (one of the Spidicules expansion innovations) gives you easy access to Harvestman (8 movement base). A 9 movement survivor can dash cancel any monster with 8 or less movement, essentially cancelling all their attacks forever as long as you have dash + survival.

S+

Affinities: I've got a lot of time for the positioning of these two affinities, generally there's a lot of things you can combine with them to get them activated, such as the Plackart or Monster Grease. It's just hard to activate them in the Silk Armor set, because its layout is garbage.

A-

Score: Easily one of the brightest spots in this armor set, I think that the boots are a well designed and balanced piece of gear. Even the affinities are in the right places (unlike the Sash and Robes) and the abilities are amongst the strongest in the game. 

S

Silk Armor

Resource Cost:  1x silken nervous system, 9x silk, 3x hide, 1x thick web silk, 1x large appendage, 1x exoskeleton

Assessment

Efficiency: As mentioned above, the very fact that the complete armor set requires killing a L3 Spidicules to make it, means that the efficiency of this armor is the lowest possible in the game. It's possibly the only F I'm going to give out in this series but I do it without hesitation.

16 resources for this armor, 16! For 17 you get Cycloid and some of those are salt, so super easy to get!

Utterly ridiculously poor efficiency, looks pretty though, so it has value for style hunters.

F

Defense: Don't be fooled by those "gain 1 armor to all location" abilities, which are marginal at best and the 'relocate hits' ability. This armor set is worse than leather armor for defensive purposes, especially because its cost basically makes it a late game armor set - so I have to base my score on how good it is only in the late game. Which is not good at all.

D

Abilities: Two good abilities and two that are newbie traps. The abilities are not really what's wrong with the armor set, but honestly those +armor abilities are just a waste of time. The set bonus likewise is completely wrong for the armor set, this is not a set that a survivor tanking hits would use, so it's pretty irrelevant here - I would score the set bonus ability higher on a different armor set, but context matters.

So overall, this gets a:

B-

Affinities: Bad, bad, bad. This armor set is a prime example of what goes wrong when you jam too many puzzle affinities onto a thing. The head and boots justify having their puzzle abilities because they are so powerful, but the waist and body do not. I can see what the thinking was behind making this set, but I can also see why Zach Moroni no longer works for Adam Poots Games LLC (He's responsible for Spidicules, Lion God, Lion Knight and Slenderman, 3 of these expansions are always in the bottom half of the rational person's expansion rankings for good reason).

E

Score: Well, this thing is almost a complete failure of a set, it lacks any sort of focus with abilities that are designed around suitability via 'regeneration of armor points', without sufficient focus to support that, but also with the best ability of the armor set is a purely offensive one (the Turban), which allows you to be in the monster blind spot pretty much permanently - so why on earth isn't this set themed around that?

E

Yeah, there are a few limited bright spots to this armor set, but honestly you should not be building it unless you are deliberately handicapping yourself for some kind of challenge run. Which honestly sucks to write, because like a lot of the Spidicules expansion I absolutely WANT to be saying that this stuff is good, Silk Armor is one of the most beautiful armor sets in the game and it should be as good strategically as it looks - as opposed to a mess that I can't even figure out what weapons would work best with (because it's a late game armor set in an expansion with only early game weapons and it has pretty much no weapon synergies apart from a newly created synergy with the backstabber strain fighting art and daggers - but Cycloid is still better at the job). 

It's sort of a man with no home, everything it does; is either too late in the game (hat), better used on a mongrel armor set (boots, hat) or just bad (body, waist) outside of the early game. It feels a bit like leather armor, but leather/vagabond is just a better choice as it's earlier and cheaper.

Silk probably should have had it's armor abilities moved to a different set, and be turned into a proper support armor set with more stuff about monster manipulation, or it should have become an aggressive evasion based set that could have been combined with katars or the scimitar for some benefit. Instead it's just stranded, being too expensive for what it does and not good enough when you can finally afford it in full. It's not even good in PotSun, despite being a usable armor set.

So because that's such a downer, as a bonus, lets talk about the real Silk Armor before we finish - The Silk Body Suit.

Silk Body Suit

Resource Cost: 5x Silk, 2x Hide, 1x Spinnerets

Assessment

Efficiency: It's a hefty cost at 7 resources, but what you get in this gear card is 1 or 2 armor to all locations against every hit, for the entire showdown - this does not require any armor slots to use either.

S

Defense: Damage mitigation is one of the most powerful things in the game, this gives you a huge amount as long as you work with its limitations (no metal armor, no heavy armor). Fortunately for us, Rolling Armor isn't "armor" and Leather Armor is insanely good.

I can't stress enough how powerful this piece of gear is defensively - and it works with Crystal Skin.

S+

Abilities: As above. Really Good.

S+

Affinities: N/A

Score: One of the best items in the game, only held back a minute amount by a lack of affinities, the inbuilt limitation of no metal/heavy, the flammable keyword and the fact that it's unique. I honestly believe that the Silk Armor set died for this gear item, but we never use it with silk, because it's better on Leather/Rolling/Cycloid/Screaming.

Oh and also it's not gated in any fashion, so you can get it at the time you transition to the mid game monsters and it turns them into weaklings.

S++