Mettle, the hidden rating
Every hero has four hidden attributes you never see on the hero sheet: Loyalty, Consistency, Adaptability and Mettle. The game describes Mettle as how much a hero rises, or shrinks, in cups, wars and high-tier events. It usually sits around 10.
Big-Game Player adds +6 to Mettle wherever the game reads it for effect. Scouting reports, which describe a hero’s hidden ratings in words, read the base value, so the trait’s boost will not show up there either.
Where Mettle does its work
Boss rooms. When a party enters a boss room, the game averages the Mettle of the active heroes and turns it into a damage multiplier for the whole party, between 0.85 and 1.18. Each point of average above 10 adds 1.2% damage.
| Big-Game Players in a party of four (others at Mettle 10) | Party damage vs the boss |
|---|---|
| None | ×1.00 |
| One | about ×1.018 |
| Two | about ×1.036 |
| Four | about ×1.072 |
Wars. A war contingent’s strength sums each hero’s level plus 0.4 for every point of Mettle above 10. Big-Game Player adds 6 × 0.4 = 2.4 levels’ worth, about 3 percentage points of the contingent’s strength before placement. Old Soldier adds 5 levels’ worth on top, so the two stack on the same war line.
A hero whose base Mettle is already high gets the same +6, so the trait is worth more on heroes who are naturally clutch and lifts low-Mettle heroes back toward average.
The route it prefers
At a dungeon fork, a Big-Game Player leading the party leans +2 toward the “Lair” side room with its single named foe. With nothing pulling the other way, that means taking the Lair about 80% of the time it is offered. Treasure rooms and Sealed Doors get no lean.
Bounties
Bounty postings list Big-Game Player among their liked traits, adding 5% to the hero’s suitability for the hunt.
Building a boss-killing party
- Stack it. One Big-Game Player is a small edge; three or four turn into a meaningful party-wide multiplier in exactly the fight that decides a delve.
- Pair it with Giant-Killer. Giant-Killer adds a quarter to one hero’s damage against named foes; Big-Game Player lifts everyone a little. They multiply.
- Mind the downside of the average. A hero with very low Mettle drags the party’s average down, which can cancel a Big-Game Player’s lift.
Small hooks
Quest reports have their own Big-Game Player lines, and on pair duty the hero speaks with the “proud” voice shared with Arrogant, Vain, Glory Hunter, Kin-Proud and Ambitious. The hero card links the trait to Bravery and Composure; that link is descriptive and does not change either attribute.
Rarity and history
Big-Game Player has no traits it is barred from.
- Rarity: uncommon, positive · draw weight 45 of 6,365 · about 1 recruit in 57
- Founding draft: any card.
- In the wiki’s archive: first present in the 2.1.8 build (absent from 2.0.7).
Recruiting
A modest positive. It is worth more as part of a deliberately built boss-killing party, or on a war-line hero, than as a lone trait on a single bench player.