Building a Bloodwitch
Added 2020-05-25 15:43:06 +0000 UTCBy Ripptor
Hello everyone! I’m Rose, part of the CCG team and the creator behind the Veriphidian expansion, as well as playtester and contributor to several other projects across the team. I’ve also released Vignettes of my last two solo settlements, across different Lantern Years for players to jump in and play at different levels.
Mastica
LY15:https://www.patreon.com/posts/lantern-year-15-34818221
LY25:https://www.patreon.com/posts/lantern-year-25-35015648
LY30:https://www.patreon.com/posts/lantern-year-30-35821316
Amalthea
LY12: https://www.patreon.com/posts/lantern-year-12-36632281
Something we’ve heard a lot recently is that my survivors are very strong, so I wanted to share how I build up some of my own survivors to be the god-killing valkyries they become.
In this article, I want to share something new from my Amalthea settlement, as part of a new set of Vignettes to use! I’ve discovered a way to make your very own White Speaker, which is not only unique and fun, but an easy to use build that can be setup very reliably! I’ve dubbed this build as the Bloodwitch, a user of the White Speaker’s blood magic, while remaining separate from the lore.
First, I would define a Bloodwitch as any survivor who gains more advantages from bleeding tokens than disadvantages, in terms of approaching death or otherwise. The fully advanced Story of Blood 4 comes close to this on its own, allowing bleeding tokens to be converted into armor on all locations, or to spend it as survival. However, after the first 7 always causes a 50% chance of death roll. This turns it into a last-chance gambit to avoid certain death, rather than a continuous ability, which loses a lot of versatility.
Instead, we’ll look to the rest of what the White Speakers have to offer. The Storytelling innovation is a powerful source of two major pieces: The Story of the Young Hero ability, and the Bloodskin via the White Speaker expansion. Once you innovate Storytelling, you can gain these both at once after LY13. The Bloodskin is a simple purchasable, and you have a 50% chance to gain the Story of the Young Hero before any modifiers or re-rolls.
With these two, you can heal 1 bleeding token as a free action each turn, and optionally gain 2 bleeding tokens as a free action to gain +1 survival (or +2 survival with the Thrill Seeker fighting art). If you add in the less-deadly Story of Blood 3, you can spend an action each turn to convert the extra bleeding token into 1 Armor at any location.
Each Turn:
- Gain 2 bleeding tokens, Gain +2 Survival, Heal 1 bleeding token, spend an Action to convert 1 bleeding token into 1 Armor.
Simplified, this engine causes: -1 Action, +2 Survival, and +1 Armor.
This can be then multiplied further by gaining the Blistering Plasma Fruit from the Lonely Tree expansion and then consuming it to gain the Nightmare Blood Ability.
(Nightmare Blood: custom image available in the Bridge Size Ability Cards post here.)
The Blistering Plasma Fruit has a 100% drop rate from the Level 2 monster, which you can summon during Lantern Years 12-15 by eating a Lonely Fruit.
Now with the Nightmare Blood ability, whenever you gain a bleeding token, you gain +1 Armor to all hit locations! Adding that to the above gear grid means you now gain +2 Armor when you depart (since you gain 2 bleeding tokens from Bloodskin), and +2 Armor at the start of each turn you activate the Story of the Young Hero ability. The engine now looks like:
-1 Action, +2 Survival, +2 Armor to all locations, and +1 Armor to one location.
Of course, this gets much better if your campaign has access to the Convalescer Strain fighting art.
This is available only if you have the Echoes of Death II expansion, unlocked it, and have it as one of the maximum 5 Strain fighting arts allowed in a single campaign at once. This can be made reliable by only unlocking 5 Strain FAs, but you do then have to draw it and propagate it to the correct survivor in the various ways we already use, or simply wait for a non-hunting survivor to gain it on their own.
Now, a quick ruling interpretation on this card. Whenever you would gain or remove X, you remove X+1. It does not always double, per the Bandages example (Remove 3 instead of 2). This has been hotly debated online as to specific scenarios, but I personally rule in the low to middle ground when things get fuzzy.
In this case, when you would gain +1 Armor to all hit locations from Nightmare Blood, and that gain is multiplied by gaining several bleeding tokens at once, I apply the multiplier first, then add 1. For the engine above, this means gaining (1x2+1) +3 Armor to all locations, rather than +4 ( (1+1)x2 ). This still follows the Bandages example on that card itself, and is still insanely powerful.
Replacing Thrill Seeker in the above grid with Convalescer greatly multiplies all benefits, though it does actually cause us to now run out of bleeding tokens for activating Story of Blood 3. We’ll remove that fighting art from our engine just to streamline things, opening up our possibilities.
Engine, Simplified:
Gain +2 Survival and Gain 3 Armor to all hit Locations (all as a free action each turn).
The above is what I would consider the core engine of any good Bloodwitch, and as I’ve stated it’s just so reliably easy to build: Two 100% chance items, a repeatable 50% chance ability, and one to two fighting arts. Additionally, since this takes up so little space on a survivor (1 gear, 1 fighting art) we have a massive amount of freedom with where we can go from here!
As is, this survivor is now a rolling tank of bloody scab armor and survival actions. We could add back in the Story of Blood 3 Fighting art to give her the ability to remove 2 bleeding tokens at any time to gain +2 Armor to a location, but we can do much more! I’ve played with several theoretical build ideas that center around this engine, but for this article I want to show what I ended up with most recently in practice.
My current settlement is an expansion-heavy, Green Knight Armor playthrough, and I wanted to build a survivor who could do a little bit of everything: Tank, DPS, and Support. After I hit LY13, I chose Quinoa, a fresh-faced survivor with Convalescer, threw her into Storytelling and had her gain Story of the Young Hero, fed her the Blistering Plasma Fruit I had sitting around and then had her gain Acanthus Doctor to become a real nightmare!
She now gains a fistful of armor and strength tokens when she departs, and can heal severe injuries in addition to removing bleeding tokens. Here is what she looks like in LY 14, after her first hunt:
Defense: +15 Armor (+7 Gear, +5 Acanthus Doctor, and +3 Nightmare Blood), 17 on Head. Gains +3 armor everywhere per act, and +2 per random Bleed token. +2 Evasion, Ripple Pattern, Block 2.
Support: Reduce monster level effects, 2 bleeding token removal, attribute token removal, severe injury removal, hit location manipulation, and a hunt buff via Sonorous Rest with Reverberating Lantern.
Survival: +4 on Arrival, +2 per act, +2 per disorder or fighting art gain.
Strength: +4 tokens, repeatable increases via Mask
This build is simply incredible. On departure, she gains 2 bleeding tokens, 3+ Survival, 4 Strength tokens and +15 Armor (+7 Gear, +5 Acanthus Doctor, and +3 Nightmare Blood). With no weapons she looks like a pure Support tank, with Evasion, Block, Hit negation, hit location manipulation and the ability to clear tokens (2 Bleed or any negative). Assuming someone brings a Sickle, she can be given any Acanthus from the hunt or the Herb Gathering event to even heal severe injuries. This on it’s own would make her an invaluable team member.
The secret sauce is in her survival generation. She starts the showdown handing out 3-4 Survival to everyone, and each turn she’ll gain +2 survival each turn, as well as +2 survival whenever she would have gained a disorder. Normally this would all go to waste, as you can’t gain survival past your survival limit, but the White Lion Mask allows her to convert all that survival into Strength tokens once she fills her survival limit, and start accruing survival once again.
This means that as the Showdown continues, she actually becomes the deadliest Striker on your team, swinging with the force of a truck, whether she’s going for a shield bash or just straight one-punching enemies. The cherry on top of this is Convalescer adding the Club keyword to all of her attacks, meaning that she will start doubling most wound rolls, and eventually adding Devastating to her Fists, when she isn’t landing her 40% - 50% critical chance.
I’ve used this build across several years so far, and she may well be over-tuned, eventually taking over the entire Showdown. Acid Palms, Metal Maw, the Rust Constellation, or even just having another survivor along with Red Fist pump her even further, and with Sweet Battle she will swell in survival that much faster. I’ve looked at alternate gear builds, such as the Tool Belt and Tools (no Shield), dropping the Mask and adding satchels/potions, adding Greaves for more armor, but I keep coming back to this one and really loving how it just does it all.
And that’s my new favorite Acanthus Doctor build! However, there are still so many combinations that the above will slip into easily: Rawhide and Glaive, the Naked True Blade, and many more. Post in the comments what Bloodwitch builds you can make below, I can’t wait to see what else is waiting out there for us to discover together.
Download LY 14 Vignette:
Happy Hunting! ~ Ripptor
Comments
I don’t think that assessment is either accurate or fair to other members of the community who have explored these ideas previously. From the article: “I would define a Bloodwitch as any survivor who gains more advantages from bleeding tokens than disadvantages, in terms of approaching death or otherwise.” Red Ring builds absolutely satisfy this definition. From your earlier comment “unknown to the community” There are discussions & articles around from late 2017/early 2018 exploring the combination of the Red Ring with Story of the Young Hero Bandages/Bloodskin Nightmare Blood in exactly the same way shown here to create survivors that recover survival & armor points, in addition to dealing automatic wounds to the monster. That’s more than ‘one shared card’. As a result I don’t agree with your claim that this is a ‘new idea’ (though I don’t doubt you came up with it independently). Rather it iterates on an existing combination known to members of the community through the addition of the more recently released convalescer fighting art to improve the efficiency of the build. When used in combination with Gloom Man, the red ring can trivialise the game, but there is no requirement to do so, and it’s perfectly capable of creating other viable builds which I don’t think are fair to dismiss as a ‘weak player’s crutch’. When correctly combined with another survivor using the gloomhammer, located before (in turn order) the survivor using the red ring, the ring will trigger most rounds, typically inflicting 6-10 risk free wounds (in addition to any others dealt via attacking normally) over the course of a 3-5 round showdown. It’s certainly capable of killing a L3 DBK in 3 rounds without survivor death as part of a well rounded hunt party.
Peteg87
2020-05-31 09:46:59 +0000 UTCYou're question here belies a lack of understanding. An engine is a set of cards that work together for a result, so there is no shared engine between the two. There is one shared card, which is not only used for a different result, but which is put to much better use here. RRoD is a weak player's crutch, in order to win without having to play the game. Sacrificing 3 survivors to sit in a corner for 40 Rounds in order to deal 20 Wounds is inherently weaker than being able to kill a level 3 DBK in 3 Rounds with zero deaths. Of course, the build above requires a skilled player to pilot rather than a weak player to sit out a showdown and 'win' via exploiting Gloom Man, the real core of RRoD. I believe the best way to illustrate that point would be to ask, would RRoD make the above build better? You could easily slot the Red Ring into the Rawhide armor setup, for instance, and every four rounds it would deal 2 automatic wounds, which for me would mean 0-2 free wounds per showdown, if it lasts 4 rounds. That's not worth much, but it's an option. If you want to also add Gloom Man, you can trade the ability to attack and deal 2-4 Wounds per round to sit and be untargettable, so you can deal more wounds over time with zero skill. The monster will still target the other 3 survivors, and even if they die the monster controller tile still passes to them, so you still have to wait 40 rounds to do 20 Wounds of damage. All you had to do was trade the lives of 3 survivors, lose access to all critical hit rewards (Permanent Stats, Extra Resources), and decide to not play the game in order to 'win'. In short, the RRoD build contains one shared card, no shared engine, does something completely different and does so far less effectively: In the Risk vs Reward calculation, you Risk more and are Rewarded with less, from the actual resources gained to the actual enjoyment of the game you are playing. Someone once finding a cute exploit does not compare to the new idea presented above, let alone eclipse it as you are trying to do.
Rose
2020-05-27 15:00:57 +0000 UTCIs it unknown? The builds provided here are just weaker variants of the RRoD, which has been known about for years, and would also be a ‘bloodwitch’ per the definition in the article. RRoD uses the same core SotYH bleeding engine, just focusing on auto wounds rather than armour point/survival generation.
Peteg87
2020-05-27 07:50:10 +0000 UTCBy the way, Grinning Visage is also ridiclous with an build like the Blood Witch/Convalescer;).
Cinemancer
2020-05-26 21:15:07 +0000 UTCSure. Its an fantastic and exciting build (and little known), and yes Boiling Blood is absolutly easy exploitable in its self, with an "Blood Witch like Build" evan more. Would love to combine that one with the Strain Fighting Art "Story of the Blood" Level X (3+), but thats just a "worse" Blistering Plasma Fruite like Ability. I am extrem in Love with the "Story of the First Hero" Event/Ability (the Roll a 10 Resultat is pure Power). Wonder what the "Calcified Blistering Plasma Fruite"/Update#65 will bring^^. PS: Whats "Naked True Blade?" Thx in advance.
Cinemancer
2020-05-26 20:18:07 +0000 UTCIt's always exciting to find something new! Hopefully this helps a lot of players find this combination, since it was widely unknown to the community when I asked around. As for Boiling Blood, it is unfortunate how easily exploitable that SFA is, it makes powerful builds nearly by accident!
Rose
2020-05-26 14:51:47 +0000 UTCPlayed a similiar build last week, that works fine with Transcended Masochist. That many tokens are really funny and flexibel with "Super Hair-Ability". It works incredibel with Fens Rose Knight and his SFA Boiling Blood (Blood Tokens counts as Strenght Tokens) and the combination of Red Fist. Favorite Weapon for that one is Juggernaut Blade (its easy to get 30+ Strenght).
Cinemancer
2020-05-25 21:57:28 +0000 UTC
