The mini-expansion Vignette of Death: White Gigalion brought with it four new pieces of gear and as a part of this series I wanted to go into them all with same level of detail the other weapons have received.

The main reason for this is as per my review - these pieces of gear are all game changing members of their respective categories. Because the White Gigalion is essentially a permanent fixture in your games once you have achieved its simple strain condition these items are always available as long as there is a White Lion in your campaign.

As such I wanted to get them into this article series before it finished, even though one piece of gear is technically "armor" and just going back to slip these entries into their respective categories may have gone unnoticed. So they're going here, today. Especially because I think it is very important that each of these pieces of gear is highlighted for their power, dominance and usefulness for most settlements.

Grab your hooked claws and lets get crafting.

Hooked Claw Knife - Dagger

Power Level: End Game

Speed: I just love that this weapon has 3 speed. There are too many 2 speed weapons towards the end of the campaign and its great to see one like this.

Accuracy: Solid accuracy, especially when you consider that you're encouraged to use the Dagger in the blind spot anyway (Cycloid Scale, Backstabber) you cannot complain about this at all.

Strength: 7 Strength is a stunning baseline for a dagger, it's not something I thought I'd ever see and I'm very happy that it's happened. It also doesn't have Sharp so it has strong synergies with Cycloid Scale armor.

Affinities: This bad boy has the Cat Fang Knife affinities and in all honesty it represents such a full upgrade over that dagger to the point of deleting it from the game entirely. This is the reason why you'd hunt an L3 Lion of any kind. This.

Ability: I just love this ability, it's powerful, difficult to exploit and super thematic. Very strong against monsters who tend to flee/blink/run away/charge when wounded - and once you start using it, you'll be pleasantly surprised now many monsters this applies to!

Summary: Power creeping over existing gear is always something you need to be cautious about. But when it's a category of weapon like Dagger, Whip or Katana - that's fine. They all need more options and better end game choices. This dagger is absolutely what you want in the game and its the number one reason to hunt the Gigalion and if you haven't experienced a Dagger master yet, do yourself a favour and get one online with this beauty.

Lion Slayer Cape - Accessory

Power Level: End Game

Armor: 1 additional to the body is not anything you would write home about, but this is an accessory, so that's 1 bonus armor. However the sheer amount of "virtual" armor this accessory provides is where the benefit for this gear comes from.

Affinities: Two solid affinities here, the down green is very enticing because of how it fits in with the leather shield, but the up red is not that useful outside of White Lion Armor (and even there it doesn't work that well). Affinities is not the prime reason why you'd make this gear.

Ability: The survival gain ability is nice, it's always good to have "rebates" after the hunt phase is over, but the real power here is the return of an upgraded version of the Lion Skin Cloak ability, except this time it's not on a heavy piece of gear (so it combos with the Silk Body Suit) and it only works for armor sets with fur armor in them (it's not armor itself). These are: White Lion Armor, Screaming Armor, Dancer Armor and Brawler Armor. (Plus you can also squeeze it into the Lion Skin Cloak Rolling Armor tank build).

If you're not raising an eyebrow at that list, you should be. Screaming, Dancer and Rolling Armor all represent some of the strongest armor sets in the game and this thing just makes them better.

Damage mitigation, from all sources, is an incredibly powerful thing to have. This drops Grab 2 to 1 damage, reduces Retch by 1 which is so potent vs. the L2 Gorm and also helps with hunt damage and so much more. It also has powerful combinations with Griswaldo.

Oh and it also has the bone keyword for earrings and People of the Skull. Boom.

Summary: Top tier piece of protection which pushes Brawler from being eh to very powerful and Dancer/Screaming from amazing to even more amazing. It feels like it was intended to help patch issues with the White Lion armor, but it's better utilized elsewhere.

Dense Bone Arrows - Arrow

Power Level: End Game

Speed: Right in the middle of the old sweet spot. There is an argument that this ammo could have been three speed without any real issues.

Accuracy: 5+ is very strong for a bow, most bows tend to be a bit less accurate than their melee counterparts so this is a strong positive.

Strength: 6 strength + sharp puts this effectively at 11.5 base strength or a mean wounding roll of 17 (11+6). That's a seriously impressive line for any weapon, but this is a LY8 tier "weapon".

Affinities: Normally arrows are let down by their lack of affinities. The Dense Bone Arrows come up trumps again here with an up blue and a right red. Neither of these are in premium positions, but Gorment archer builds (yes they are a thing) appreciate gear that has both of these rolled into them.

Ability: So in addition to Sharp, we have our first set of arrows with unlimited activations. This is an absolutely bananas change to how arrows work and to demonstrate why, here's the previous 'king of the arrows':

Now make no bones about it, the Sunshark Arrows are amongst the most powerful weapons in the game right now, they were held out of the Top 10 because of the activation limit, but everything else about them was great.

The Dense Bone ones offer the following over the Sunshark Arrows

-1 accuracy

+ bone keyword (yes, that matters, there's a "naked" bone archer build that's really good now).

+1 speed (going to 2 speed is absolutely fine, as mentioned above)

+ Infinity activations

Yeah, this simple little ability in combination with a mean wounding roll of 17 represents the largest power creep we've seen so far in this game.

On top of that, these arrows do not really care what bow you're using, while you will want a decent bow for wounding if you are still training Bow mastery, that's not essential here at all. You can just roll the Catgut Bow for the entire campaign and "upgrade" via the Strategist fighting art (or you can stick with your precious Vespertine Bow if you're Gollum).

Summary: The Vignette of Death makes it clear to us that the White Gigalion is considered a LY8 monster (check the pre-made survivor cards for this proof) and that means its in the same power tier as the L1 Sunstalker. Likewise the costs are comparable; the Sunshark needs 3x small sunteeth, 1x bone, 1x sunshark fin and 1x salt while the Dense Arrows need 1x hooked claw, 3x Great Cat Bone, 2x Leather and 2x Iron. While Iron and Leather are upgraded resources, anyone who's fought the Sunstalker can tell you that getting that Fin is not an easy thing to do at times - The very basic and generic costs of the Dense Bone Arrows mean that it's not even really more difficult to craft than its predecessor.

Dense Bone Arrows are one of the strongest weapons in the game and they've flattened out bow progression even further than it was before.

Oxidized Beast Katar

Power Level: End Game - Lantern Only

Speed: Two speed is not good when your accuracy is so low, however we have an option to jump up to 4 speed by using this paired. While that is a solid result and 4 speed 7+ accuracy 11.5 mean strength is worth it - you have to oxidize not one but two Katars and that's a hard ask when you're also trying to Oxidize a Ring Whip, a Glaive and multiple Beacon Shields.

Accuracy: Terrible accuracy here, you're going to want to use this one in the butt as much as possible and even consider things like the Sunspot Lantern that give you extra accuracy while also filling the 'lantern' critera for the end part of People of the Lantern.

Strength: Great strength here, this is a solid base to work from in order to threaten most of the monsters you'll face. Especially in conjunction with the orange dice.

Affinities: I like this combination of affinities a lot. Especially when used on paired gear. It's actually the same set up as the Acid-Tooth Daggers. You can stack these up and down from each other on the grid and just need one more up/down red affinity to complete the set.

Ability: With two speed, this is a marginal ability, but if you manage to get to the paired set then having +4 per 10 (or 9/10) rolled on an attack can really become significant.

Summary: Expensive, very, very expensive. But it does give options for players who want variation in their late game gear and are tired of glaives/shields/ring whips for the win. I appreciate the existence of this item, I just regret its high cost and lantern only gating.

Conclusion:

The White Gigalion gear is all without exception powerful end game options, the Katar, while a People of the Lantern only piece, finally provides a form of progression for Katars outside of LBK -> Digging Claw -> Calcified Digging Claw which is very welcome. The Hooked Claw Knife is one of only three truly viable daggers (Cult Speaker Knife, Acid-Tooth Daggers being the other two) and it has pushed Daggers from being a sub-optimal meme choice into being a mid to late game powerhouse thanks to the monster based strength boosting armor sets of Cycloid (best), Dragon (second best), Phoenix and White Lion (still a meme).

The Lion Slayer Cloak represents a massive boost for armor sets that use fur, the most notable of these are the Brawler Hybrid and the Screaming Armor sets. Screaming Armor was already a top tier set and now its moved into a commanding position while Brawler armor has become a strong option for a damage mitigation tank build.

The Dense Bone Arrows, despite the drawback of being 'just' an ammo rather than a true bow, are the largest eyebrow raising element of this collection. They far exceed the power of the Sunshark Arrows, which were already one of the strongest "weapons" in the game and they make the bow you are using almost irrelevant (apart from range and mastery gains).

While questions can be raised about the balance for some of the above items (especially the Dense Bone Arrows power creep), there is no doubt as a player that these pieces of gear increase the viability of Katar tanks and Dagger DPS.

It is however a real shame that a combination of the Hooked Claw resource and the White Lion Tail resource was not used to design some end game whip...

Speaking of which, that's the next entry in this list. Coming up soon!

Content

Overview:

Lion Slayer Cape - Accessory

Conclusion:

Files