i tried this a little earlier, and it’s surprisingly effective, so i’m going to share it in case other people are interested.

thorns of agony is a bad charm and you will not sway me. it is a good set of training wheels for early game, but by end game there are better charms to swap it out for.

however.

the one merit it has is that the damage output of thorns is equal to your nail damage. in the overworld, this is piecemeal and frankly useless; almost everything dies in one to three hits, especially by the time you have the pure nail. but in boss fights, that extra 13/17/21 damage when you’re close enough to the boss can stack. trading a nail hit’s worth of damage with the boss when you get hit is decent, but the soul requirement for healing is still kind of awful.

but not if you have this build:

[image description: a screenshot of my charms menu. I have on Thorns of Agony, Dream Wielder, Grubsong, Grubberfly's Elegy, Quick Focus, and Shape of Unn. end image description]

behold the tank build. this is... scarily effective. i scampered around in godhome for an hour earlier testing most bosses with this build, and i pretty consistently ended fights with 5+ masks. dream wielder gives you two casts of soul/two heals and a much shorter dream nail wind up, grubsong and elegy in conjunction give you almost a full heal when you take damage, quick focus and shape of unn let you slug away from danger at the speed of light. and all of that in conjunction will net you way more soul than you need to replenish the damage you take from running into bosses face first. i beat like 50% of godhome with thorns damage only, i kid you not. this is extremely effective.

another thing about this build is that sometimes, if you’re close enough, your thorns can double hit. so you’re dealing two nail swings worth of damage and getting almost a full heal from doing so. i also deliberately restricted myself to thorns damage only; if you’re also doing regular nail hits, this build will probably render you near unkillable.

there are some drawbacks to this build. it doesn’t work on bosses that deal double damage by default, so don’t go bringing this into pantheon five or any ascended arenas. grubsong and elegy give soul based on the number of hits, not the amount of damage taken, so you’re trading two masks for one heal. it also doesn’t fully work on bosses that can’t be dream nailed (ie the dream warriors, lost kin, and broken vessel). for those i traded shape of unn for weaversong, and it works about the same. you also have to be fairly strategic about when and how you get hit; you still get soul from getting hit by projectiles or whatnot, but the thorns damage will get wasted. not a concern if you’re just playing casually, but if you’re doing a thorns damage only run (which is very fun, i will say, and not as difficult as you may think) then you have to try to make every hit count.

i didn’t test this out on uumuu because i’ve done minions only runs and they make the oomas Extremely unpredictable, and also shape of unn doesn’t really work in its arena, so that might be an exception to this. not sure, someone else can try it. i also didn’t test it on oblobbles because they’re mostly an aerial boss, but i imagine weaversong might make it work. but besides them and the double damage bosses this works for Everyone. and i mean Everyone. it works for GPZ, it works for sly, it wrecked collector, it works for watcher knights, it would probably work for soul tyrant but it was pretty decent against soul master. i’m simultaneously delighted and flabbergasted by this discovery.

anyway, happy tanking.