Strain Preview and Review of Echoes of Death III (Patreon)

Ahead of a full review, which depends on whenever the stuff actually gets to me (historically I always get my stuff very late, it almost sometimes feels like I'm being deliberately left near the back of the queue so I can't review this stuff before too many people buy it), here is a review of the Strains, Strains Fighting Art and Resource because Wilting Moon kindly shared the images on the discord a few minutes ago. Thank you for that.

The thoughts here are based on knowledge, experience rather than actual game experience. I will revise and update when I get my own copies and have a chance to put them into some physical test games. However, at this stage I have enough experience to be able to understand how anything new fits into the existing setup of game/expansions/promos fairly well.

Sweat Stained Oath - Strain

This strain unlock is pretty darn rare to achieve. There are only a few select swords which can be gained on the hunt, most typically the Steel Sword, but also Excalibur (White Speaker Sword Hunter) and the Sword of Silence (Fade). The challenge here isn't scoring the killing blow, you can engineer that with relative ease (especially if it is a Steel Sword you have gained), It's getting the sword in the first place, which is a low chance per basic hunt event unless you have the above mentioned promotional basic hunt events.

So, once again, this is promotional content that leans on other promotional content to increase the chances that you will get to engage with it, but it is at least unlockable by even someone who owns just the core game.

Sword Oath - Fighting Art

Yay. More book keeping. 

So this is a decidedly average fighting art, with a few situations where it rises up to become something a bit better than normal. Devastating 1 isn't really the best ability outside of nemesis fights, or the late game where you are trying to crush monsters as soon as possible rather than drag things out for the farm.

But the other issue is, this is tied to a single weapon and your character is in it for the long haul when this happens. So you want it to be a weapon that scales for as long a time as possible. The best candidates are the Steel Sword and the Black Sword, both of which can be gained relatively early on.

The other problems with this fighting art are the Sentient drawback, the requirement to use a sword, the way that this is useless for a weapon trainer who isn't on sword already, the sheer number of wounds required to activate it (18+ is quite a LOT) and the ridiculous downside that you can lose this fighting art if you suffer the Flee brain trauma.

So this one is interesting, but has just too many downsides stuck onto it. Pretty fun if you spend your time playing Seven Swordsmen or People of the Skull (Super Bone Blade) though.

Material Feedback - Strain

APG really, REALLY want to push the hoarder disorder don't they? It comes up a lot more than it should considering how crappy an experience it is to play with. 

This trigger gives you some form of decent compensation for archiving. But it has the problem that you need to hoard 4 resources, and that is a massive kick in the teeth for any settlement which isn't in the end game. So this means that most players who will unlock this are going to be those who can get to lantern year 20+ and are very good at keeping key survivors alive from one showdown to the next. That means this is, once again, like most strains, a 1% player base thing. 

I do like how when you first trigger this, you don't get to remove Hoarder from the survivor who gains Stockist. So you end up with a Stockist who steals resources and weakens their newly gained ability. It would have been a much better idea to have hoarder removed when the strain is first triggered.

The main trick here is to make sure that all hoarders you get when you are seeking to unlock this fighting art art Archers. Because for some unfathomable reason, this doesn't work with 'ranged' keyword weapons, just bows. Only bows. Because APG says "screw people who like thrown weapons" as a matter of policy.

Stockist Fighting Art

Another bow ability here. I mentioned in the section above how late game settlements have a lot of spare resources, well they do, and that means this fighting art is again a 1%er to make use of. You don't really want to be using this in an early game settlement, which often has just 1-2 resources kicking around. That's a nerf on your bow strength/range, but any time you have 6+ resources, this is a decent ability.

Stockist has been balanced better than the previous bow Echoes fighting art (Rolling Shot) was, because you need to concentrate to be able to use this, which means you have to spend a turn doing nothing at all before you take the shot. That is a fair exchange when you have the ability to gain shots that are in excess of 15-20 range and strength.

The real piece of balance here is the 'once per showdown', which actually moves this fighting art right down the rankings to a relatively below average fighting art, so much so that I'm not sure it's worth having... Except, in combination with the Dense Bone Arrows this makes whatever specific bow you have almost irrelevant, all you'll care about is speed, abilities and accuracy.

Honestly the biggest garbage about this is the way that it doesn't work for all ranged weapons, this was an opportunity to make thrown weapons more powerful and have a cool surprise synergy with Shielderang (Echoes II), but it was squandered.

Carnage Worms Strain

Oh boy. This is one of those ones you're going to have to really build a settlement around making if you want to unlock it. I really don't think this one was tested (not that I ever get the impression that the Strain unlocks are tested at all) because it's ridiculously hard to achieve.

You need:

1. Cannibalize Death Principle (No Graves) - which is the weakest principle in the game.

2. Sacrifice Innovated

3. 8 Endeavors

So as a thought exercise, try and figure out how you get to 8 endeavors without building Cooking + a 30+ population settlement under the yolk of Cannibalize. (6 Player game? Multiple Tinkers? It's tough).

It's absolutely ridiculous, and I have serious doubts that anyone other than the most dedicated of solo players will unlock this, and when they do, they'll likely have to dump the settlement they built for the job because it will be shredded by sacrifice.

Dark Manifestation - Fighting Art

So this one is either occasionally useful or utterly broken. One can assume that APG will be closing out the Insanity gain loops (Gorm, Screaming Horns, Butcher) with Wave 3 content. But until then there are too many ways to create "infinite" insanity survivors. and that means they are able to abuse this fighting art to help crush monsters. (Also don't forget the Legendary Phoenix which gives out 1000 Insanity).

Even without that level of abuse, this is a very good fighting art that will let non-Immortals drain away unwanted extra Insanity in exchange for meaningful boosts. The most useful of these is also the cheapest. Getting +2 strength for 3 insanity is a decent deal and there are certainly survivor builds that will make great use of this. The Block bonus isn't as useful because you have to pick it at the start of the round, but players who like to control the monster AI may find this helpful (it's also decent against the GSK).

Ashen Claw Strain

One has to wonder if this is a hint of what the Ivory Dragon expansion is going to include, does the Golden Embers providing regenerative/altering effects for the crab mean there will be something similar for survivors who slay the GSK?

This unlock is another 1%er unlock, but at least it's compensation for losing against the GSK, and honestly pretty decent compensation at that, with a good fighting art and a good vermin card that tutors the fighting art. This is especially important when you consider that winning against the GSK has exactly the same results as losing for the settlement, so you might as well throw that first fight and get this unlock.

Armored Fist - Fighting Art

This one is just good. It helps complete F&T, it makes F&T a viable strategy for fighting and it has some very cool interactions. Gloom Bracers or Green Ring anyone? Also, because it can be 'tutored' with the Fiddler Crab Spider (see below), you have a more reliable way of getting access to this, so you can actually spend time building a loadout that works for Armored Fist and not worry about what happens when that specific survivor dies.

This is also one of the first times that Silk Armor's set bonus is actually relevant for anything, because it can be used to keep your arm armor intact for as long as possible.

Really cool fighting art, probably the best designed Echoes fighting art we've seen alongside Shielderang. This is the kind of thing I wish we would see more of, it also makes me sad that we don't have a better system for gaining fighting arts (instead of having to just wait for Romantic).

Fiddler Crab Spider - Vermin Resource

At a start, this new vermin increases the amount of Hide that the Vermin deck provides. But its main use is consuming it to get access to the Armored Fist fighting art. I love ways of tutoring fighting arts as they increase strategic options and this one is a good one.

Summary

As before, these fighting arts vary immensely in power. I do not think Dark Manifestation is good for the game as it stands right now (Insanity abuse is too easy, and too prevalent), while Sword Oath is just very meh (like Swords typically are in KDM) and Stockist just fails through being so limited in scope, bows didn't need another tool in their quiver.

Still, Armored Fist is a phenomenally well designed entity, despite how long it takes to unlock and it is going to become a new darling for players and grid builders alike as the years progress and I think this is a better set than the previous two Echoes were, though there still are strong concerns to be had about how much actual testing has been done with these.