Kamau finished a dungeon! He can gain one new ability from this list:
Adrenaline I: +1 Atk if HP is 5 or lower.
Dauntless II: Once per dungeon when reduced to 0 HP, regain 2 HP at the end of the turn.
Heavy Strike I: Once per dungeon can make a melee attack with +3 Atk.
Heroic Effort II: +2 Atk against enemies with twice as much HP or more.
Light Sword Proficiency: +1 Atk when wielding a longsword or similar weapon.
Shield Bash: Gain an Atk bonus from a wielded shield equal to its Def bonus -1.
Throw Shield: Can use a shield as a ranged weapon, dealing damage equal to the shield’s Def bonus. The shield must be retrieved afterward.
I’m in favor of MORE options as opposed to just buffing some stats. We had a lot of downtime turns where Kamau couldn’t do anything productive. So my choice is:
Shield Throw
I actually really like shield throw. We’ve seen before that ranged damage is sometimes really important, and being able to have the option to dish it out is better than not having the option. I don’t see us having Kamau go shieldless anytime soon, so this enables an additional ranged option in any team Kamau is on basically at 0 inventory cost. That’s good in my book. It’s not going to be impactful as consistently as heavy strike or light sword proficiency, but we have way more ways of gaining damage on Kamau than we do of giving him a ranged attack.
Until someone throws the shield where we can’t reach it, or we forget about it, or the votes shift and we don’t retrieve it…. Hard no.
Word of god is that we can auto-retrieve thrown weapons at the end of combat. This is a bad argument against the ability, because it assumes that we would vote to throw a shield somewhere we couldn’t retrieve it when that wasn’t our best available option.
Building our kit around the worst thing a malicious actor could do means we should never take situational abilities, and only take +1 abilities forever.
Look, we went back and forth and side to side through this dungeon as the votes shifted around and around, even though that wasn’t very efficient, and we had arrows noclipping because we made a mistake. I don’t think the extra bookkeeping is safe.
Heavy Strike. We’ve seen what Kamau can do with Cleave now, and getting him some additional burst damage will help with either mowing down mooks or 1-shotting big bads.
Shield Bash.
Would this enable counterattack while interposing?
Counterattack already works during interpose per LSN. It just hasn’t ever happened.
the issue is that Kamau has only a single hand and if we use it for shield and interpose then any counterattack is trash dmg. Unless we get Shield Bash that makes it actually do some decent numbers.
I know it is only a 20% chance, but wouldn’t he also need a weapon? I can’t remember what Kamau was wielding when he finally countered. What I think is that maybe shield bash would then give Kamau a “weapon” with which he would be able to strike back.
I also think this is not the first time I’m having this exact discussion. Deja vu.
Kamau can already punch while using a shield (we did it this dungeon at some point). He doesn’t need a weapon to counterattack, it just wouldn’t do much damage.
Light sword proficiency. Heavy strike is really nice, but it turns out that sometimes 1 extra damage is all you need to enable another enemy death, and being able to access it consistently is really helpful. Light sword proficiency also works with the hilt, so we’ll be adding 1 dmg to Kamau’s kit forever if we take it now.
Oh it works with the hilt! It sounded like a weird thing to be in his arsenal but now it makes sense.
Given how much damage he has been taking recently, although I’m sure we are trying to avoid that, I feel Adrenaline 1 might be a good investment.
It’s not a bad pick later, but it’s strictly worse than Light Sword Prof, which is a +1 always vs Adrenaline, which is a +1 sometimes.
I had forgotten the hilt counted as a light sword when I wrote this. Idk why.
Throw Shield