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Kingdom Death Seasonal Content Review: Halloween Survivor - Flower Knight Costume
🕑 Added 2022-12-09 08:00:05 +0000 UTC
Exclusive to Halloween, this Halloween Survivor wears a Flower Knight costume while trick or treating, and will not 'leaf' without some sweet treats. The Halloween Survivor - Flower Knight Costume includes a unique decorative base insert, Pattern gear card, and Pattern card for use with Kingdom Death: Monster.
Before we get into a look at the miniature and the pattern gear card I do want to highlight that the value proposition on this piece of content is honestly kind of awful when you consider that last year we got four of these survivors for $60. This is a quarter of the content for half the price and that's a pretty crazy level of inflation to experience – I really like this series of survivors dressed as monsters; but it is hard to defend how little value is in this year's release.
The miniature on the other hand is very pretty; it's captured the style of the Flower Knight in a clever and evocative manner; in particular I like how the flower knight's bustle is replicated through ribbons, vines and stitching. I also appreciate that the coded female Flower Knight's halloween survivor continues that. One element in particular that I want to note here where the physical construction of this model surpasses last years offerings is the base; we now have a sculpted base. Excellent.
Flower Costume Pattern
Requirements: Survivor with Flower Addiction disorder, 1x lantern bloom, 1x sighing bloom, 1x leather.
It cannot be understated how easy it is to craft this gear; you get a survivor with Flower Addiction during the introductory story event and as long as they do not go hunt the Flower Knight they never lose it. You can also get Flower Addiction from consuming a Sighing bloom if you need it due to an unfortunate loss of your key survivor.
[Flower Addiction Card]
Also the Flower Knight is a monster that just explodes resources everywhere like a halloween piñata so you'll almost always get the Lantern & Sighing Blooms from just one hunt. All you need is leather already in the settlement (or the ability to make it immediately) and you're good to go. About the only serious difficulty here is the requirement to do it all at once because of the fleeting nature of the Flower Knight resources thanks to their perishable keyword – so you might occasionally not get both relevant blooms at the same time (however I tend to get 8+ Flower Knight resources from the L1 Flower Knight even if I'm not trying to farm hard, so that's a rarer situation).
The Flower Costume
Previously the best of the costumes was the Big Bite costume which either inflicted a rather inconsequential bleeding token or the benefit of +6 insanity to all along with the standard +1 armor points to all hit locations (which is a consistent benefit across all costumes and it along with the affinities are the consistent major upsides to these outfits – I'm not going to re-discuss how you can use these without activating all the affinities in order to get “bad” shields for survivors, 5 armor points is good, always will be, but getting it with a shield in the package is usually preferable). The Lion costume was +1/-1 Strength tokens, the antelope was +1/-1 movement tokens and the Gorm was +1/-1 armor points to all locations.
The Flower costume continues this design; however due to the Flower Knight's thematic being based around luck we've got either +1 or -1 Luck tokens for all. That's a bit of a serious hitch for a settlement; a hunt party can pivot around bleeding tokens or +/- strength tokens, but Luck is something that's absolutely massive; you always need it, you never want it to be reduced and the only survivors who don't care are survivors that decide to never attack and they're a rare breed.
Even if you do not normally play a build with +luck, the single 10% chance of ignoring reactions is absolutely huge for survivors – getting -1 Luck is effectively an infinite drop in your critical wound chances. There are however situational ways to make use of this in somewhat abusive manners and we'll discuss a few here.
The first of these is just sheer brute force via rerolls; you can get them through Survival of the Fittest, Scholar of Death and Infinite Lives; while Survival requires rotation of new survivors to keep them going, the other two are renewable sources. Just one reroll pushes the odds of getting the positive result to 75% and that makes the item mostly worth using, if you've got a second reroll sitting in the wings then you're in a really great spot.
The second option is to have survivors who can negate negative tokens in some fashion; this is candidates like Altered Destiny (L3 Dragon King SFA); The Mask Maker's Man Mask and the L3 Lonely Tree/Cooking reward Super hair. These are all not particularly easy to get however; with only the Man Mask having the potential to turn up early (either randomly through the Mask Seller hunt event or via crafting from the Mask Maker settlement location gained via Butcher rewards).
Each of these works in a different fashion; Altered Destiny turns the -1 Luck into +1 Luck; the Mask allows you to spend the negative token as a survival; flushing it away and Super Hair allows all survivors with the SFA to spend an activation to move tokens around between them. This lets you dump all of the negative tokens onto one survivor; whichever one doesn't need luck and get the positive ones onto the survivors who are using Deadly.
There is one final area where this costume can be used; in showdown fights against monsters that cannot be critically wounded most of the time (Butcher is the main example of this at the moment). You can wear this costume for +1 armor to all locations and not worry about the luck tokens at all. Making it a pile of good affinities for your tank (Those green affinities are lovely) and because the Butcher only has one hit location that can be critically wounded you can bring along a single founding stone for the death blow (if you have HL scouting like the Cat Eye Circlet or especially the Wisdom Potion) because that's not affected by luck tokens. So there is a spot for this costume; even if it's only when fighting the Butcher.
The last area where this has potential is in combination with the Summer Cyrus Beta gear; specifically the Sighing Sarong; this gives you a reroll token on arrival and you can spend that to improve your odds
Conclusion
All of this is a lot of effort for a variable benefit; half the time everyone will gain a +1 Luck and do great, the other half the time they'll be utterly screwed and you're doomed to a miserable; but because forcing that through reroll is expensive without replenishment methods.
This does not mean that the Flower Costume is a bad item; but it is very situational. It is either going to be incredibly powerful to the point of feeling busted thanks to that +1 Luck and builds that either ensure it happens or can ignore the downside; or you're not going to use it outside of showdowns against monsters like The Butcher. Because you don't haveto craft it if you draw the pattern you can leave that recipe sitting in your settlement's pile of options and then make it if you have ways of utilising it effectively.
The big important thing I do want to stress is that I love this series of survivors dressed up as in game monsters and I want to see a set of patterns for the original 4 Halloween survivors also; but the Halloween Flower Knight Survivor is the worst value we've had for this series and I hope that this is not what next year's new Halloween costume content is going to be patterned after because it's a situational costume, plus one miniature and that is just not good enough for this MSRP. I'd suggest that people vote with their wallets and not pick this up next year unless it's for under $20.
Comments
Sean Daly
Ah okay - Although I have not cracked open the Halloween Survivor 2 box yet - the pictures on the KDM site seem to give the appearance of less quality/courser detailing in that set compared to this newest release . The older set is not my taste at all ( although I have it ) . I am liking the vibe of the newest release however - I hope they continue with that level of detail going forward - it looks like a regular pinup .
Fen
To be clear, it's The Croc/Lion/antelope/Gorm set. Not the set that came before that.
Sean Daly
That old set of Halloween Survivors from 2021 which KDM had previously released - and which in my opinion looks a little naff/dated/boring ?
