There’s an interesting synergy with the Old Hunting Rifle here. Normally, fighters don’t plan on taking too many shots that have a chance to miss due to the value of ammo tokens on weapons, making the ability to reroll base tokens relatively redundant short of canceling the worst non auto fail token.

With the Old Hunting Rifle though, firing it normally can be quite a crapshoot due to skulls jamming the weapon and screwing you out of a shot at the worst possible time. The ability to reroll said skulls is a godsend in this situation, making it a lot more reliable.

As of right now, there’s two classes that can have level 2 guardian access that also have access to the Rifle: William Yorick and Lola Hayes. Lola is effectively out due to not being able to use the rifle and trigger the reaction on custom modifications together, which leaves our favorite gravedigger. Said gravedigger is normally somewhat at a loss for high damage firearms, but there’s a second synergy available to him: Quicksilver bullets and Will to Survive.

The 3 or more condition on Quicksilver Bullets is usually a bit of an ask. But what if, say, you had a turn in which you didn’t need to pull any tokens? Preload the rifle with some Extra Ammunition, throw a Police Badge at the nearest boss enemy, and you’ll be able to dish out 20 health worth of damage in a single turn, and that’s discounting recursion shenanigans with the Badge.

The biggest downside to this is that Yorick is a bit short on reloading events, and as custom modifications is an event, it doesn’t mesh well with his usual play style of plucking a freshly loaded gun off the nearest warm corpse; apparently servants of the mythos only buy mass produced gear. It’s still worth considering to load up for a big boss kill though.

This is one of my least favorite weaknesses in the game.

Not that Accursed Follower is particularly tough. On the contrary; he has basically zero immediate impact, which is a very good thing in a weakness. It will take a good amount of time for the Curses to have any noticeable impact on the scenario; if you draw him later on there's every chance that the scenario will end before the Curses swing a single test. Occasionally he can have vicious interactions with Mysterious Chanting or something like that, but that's not too common. Plus there are a wide variety player cards that benefit from his Curses.

No, what I dislike about this card are the severe memory issues it causes. This guy spawns as far away as possible on the map and never moves or really does anything consequential. It's like he's designed for you to forget about him. And so almost unfailingly, at some point in the scenario someone in my group will end up saying, "wait, we forgot to put a Curse in the bag last turn. Hmm, how many turns have we forgotten about him?" Honestly, I can barely remember Sister Mary's investigator ability when I play her--and the designers expect me to remember this guy adding a Curse at the end of the enemy phase on the other side of map? Not happening.

The lv0 Baseball Bat has always been a really solid weapon. +2 Combat, + 1 damage, and unlimited* uses at only 2 resources is an insane bargain, even with 2 hand slots. Of course, it's not really unlimited, since it can break on any attack. But Survivor's have enough flexible recursion that if it does break, it's easily retrieved again. As long as you don't do like 2-3 attacks every turn, it should last you the entire game. A perfect weapon for a fighter on the side (or William Yorick).

But that's kinda were its main drawbacks surface. A flex investigator usually wants to keep that second hand free for clues or other support. And this lv2 version doesn't really fix that problem. Instead though, it fixes the other problem: it makes it more reliable for main fighters. You don't have to waste too many recursions on this one as you can choose to just return it to your hand, or if you have plenty of recursion left, you can still discard it for that extra damage, and most enemies will be defeated by that single hit, giving you time to retrieve it.

Ultimately, the argument you have to make as to whether this is a good upgrade or not is if you believe it's worth investing XP towards a backup plan for a particular situation you're kinda hoping is not going to occur too often anyway. Otherwise, you just take/keep the lv0 version which - if you're lucky - does the exact same thing (and can actually be more flexibly be retrieved), and invest your XP towards something that's certainly gonna be useful whenever you draw it.

Also, can I just say it's kinda amusing that of all items, it's not the Lockpicks, the Thieves' Kit, the Hawk-Eye Folding Camera, Darrell's Kodak, Patrice's Violin, Jim's Trumpet, the Flute of the Outer Gods, the Dowsing Rod or any book that requires 2 hands; it's a freaking baseball bat.

I found that the strong point of this card is more on the "Actions performed using Grappling Hook do not provoke attacks of opportunity." rather than to get action compression vs. cost. 2 or even 1 meaningful action inside the hook is not bad if it ignores critical AoO you normally have to take, and can save your friend's action such as Move if you go first. You can always go first as you ignores a lot of AoO with the hook.

The amount of AoO increases the more enemies you have before you Move or Investigate (not Evade), and Engage increase that amount, so the "AoO saves" you get from the hook depends the earlier the order of Engage comes before Move / Investigate in the chain.

The most common play I found that utilizes AoO ignoring is simply when I draw an enemy that hits hard, I want to continue working on clues, and the real fighter is nearby. Just by using move-evade to serve the enemy to the fighter is already good value as the fighter can spend 3 full actions to fight it with no friendly-fire and Retaliate disabled, and I didn't take AoO dragging it. The last one I can choose to investigate or just throw away the action. Saves no action on average, but can't deny the value of ignoring AoO.

Investigation is sometimes useful to not end your chain with Evade. Perhaps you just move to the fighter and engage the enemy away from them to give them a chance to gear up a bit before attacking. You trust the fighter to hit the enemy engaged with you with that new accurate weapon, you can end the chain with investigate instead of evade to get a clue.

A more involved built-in combo is to engage-move-evade to drag an enemy away from a friend and get it exhausted at the other location, or move-engage-evade in the case that you are 1 location away from your friend. In any case you have 1 more action to perform the 2nd Evade to . The plan is normally ruined if you got your own enemy to manage in Mythos Phase too, but the hook guarantees you can do it anyway ignoring like 2-3 AoO in the process. (e.g. If it is engage-move-evade and you have 1 enemy at first before trying to get 1 more, you take 1 AoO to engage, and 2 combined AoO to move.)

This card is very playable with Kymani Jones, often I found I am going for 3 HP discard with the "consult" reaction ability. On average I found I am against 3 too, so an unboosted attempt at 5 + 2 = 7 would allow up to only -1 token to get 3 points over-succeed. In Standard when I add one more from this card to allow up to -2, the chance of discard became much better.