Well, I have now gotten the Fierce Deity set fully upgraded. The combined defense value when this is completed is 60 - 20 per piece of armor, which seems likely to be better than just about any other. Doing so took a lot of effort - you need one of each of the four pieces off the three dragons that fly above Hyrule - first a scale, then a claw, then a fang fragment, then a horn - along with various powerful monster pieces - first Hinox toenails, then I believe teeth, then guts, and then, the last and hardest part: Lynel guts.
Guts, it has become apparent, are only guaranteed drops off of the most powerful version of a monster, and when it comes to Lynels, the Silver ones (which are the most powerful) only show up after you've killed a lot of their fellows.
Lynels, incidentally, are the giant lion-centaurs that will kill the absolute crap out of you until you get really good at dodging their attacks - and the silver ones will break a pretty serious shield in only one or two hits.
Upgrading armor to +4, as well, requires a number of side quests to reunite a band of musicians and then put together a mechanism to get their wagon to the Great Fairy Fountains - some of these are pretty trivial, just as easy has taking a board, popping a couple of wheels on it and a steering stick, and going for it. But the second one I wound up doing required crossing a pretty broad snow field, including a fairly steep climb (oh, and I was out of Big Wheel capsules).
So it takes some serious effort to do this.
But, having a full set of fully-upgraded Fierce Deity armor, I feel pretty darn powerful. And, in fact, because I've been killing tons of Lynels (having had to kill a number of them just to get the Silver-Maned ones to show up) I'm now kitted out with a ton of Lynel bows, which each shoot multiple arrows at a time and thus triple or, at higher levels, quintuple the damage you deal with them (luckily the Lynels also drop a lot of arrows). I think I've gotten better at doing precision dodges as well, which has helped make taking down Lynels a lot easier (the last one I downed to get by sixth Lynel Gut to finish the set, I paraglided in and unleashed with a 5-arrow Lynel Bow churning through Black Bokoblin Horns and got him down to about 5% health before finishing him off with a melee strike).
I think this is one of the things that makes me like Tears of the Kingdom better than Breath of the Wild - because you can stockpile monster parts like all the Lynel horns and hooves that I've been collecting, even when your weapons break as long as you can find a sword or spear somewhere, you can fuse in one of those items and have a perfectly decent weapon to fight with. Because Breath of the Wild had no such system, there was no real ability to stockpile weapon supplies other than simply carrying a bunch of powerful weapons and swapping them out as they broke. Now, even if every one of my weapons get destroyed, as long as I can pick up any weapon (and it's not hard to find some decent ones on those rock piles in the Depths) I know that I'll have something decent to fight with.
I still think we run into the problem that the Master Sword feels too precious to use - even after it's recharged and repaired.
I honestly think that if they wanted to keep the Fuse system in a future game, I could imagine doing something where we have a base weapon that we fight with in all cases similar to other games but making these fusions the temporary thing.
Still, I've got to say that the power fantasy of being able to absolutely clobber things like Hinoxes and Taluses that were once a real challenge to me when I started the game feels pretty good. And having now taken down like a dozen Lynels after the first one unceremoniously one-shot me feels pretty good as well.
(I still don't love having to farm food materials, though.)
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