Laughing Deer guide — Best card skills and loadout

Laughing Deer is one of the original members of your posse in Hard West 2. He’s a melee specialist, chopping down foes with ease as he rampages through the battlefield. Here’s our Hard West 2 Laughing Deer guide to help you with the best card skills and weapon loadouts for him.

Note: We’ll have a Hard West 2 guides and features hub soon, so stay tuned.

Hard West 2 Laughing Deer best card skills and weapon loadout guide

Main skill: Wild Run – Rushes a target to deal 4 base damage and extra damage for every two spaces that he covered. This is a brutal ability that can take out a chunk of an opponent’s HP in one hit, while also bringing you closer to other hostiles for more melee strikes. That leads to numerous Bravado chain kills as long as your foes don’t have a lot of HP remaining.

Weapon loadout: Melee (main) and Shotgun (sub) – Naturally, a melee specialist like Laughing Deer requires a melee weapon (i.e., clubs, knives, or axes). A shotgun can be used in the second slot, switching to it if you need to blast enemies at a wide arc after doing your rushing ability.

Below, you’ll see the card skills for Laughing Deer in Hard West 2. As usual, having a better poker hand equipped means unlocking all the lower-tier skills.

Card suit and character usage: To have the best card skills for Laughing Deer in Hard West 2, you’ll want to have a Pair to unlock Wild Run. Later, you’ll just want to focus on a Flush and Straight Flush for the ability’s upgrades. Meanwhile, Clubs are the ideal suit due to the extra movement distance that’s provided. As for the Five of a Kind perk, Old Man Bill is an ideal candidate for one set. Laughing Deer is a good choice for the remaining set, but so is Gin Carter.

For character usage, Laughing Deer is as straightforward as it goes: rush foes and beat them to a pulp. Likewise, all his melee attacks only cost one acion point (AP), so you can bash the same enemy a couple of times, too. For your Wild Run target, you’ll want to start further away so you can cover more distance and gain extra damage. That’s followed up by more stabs, swings, slashes, and shotgun blasts. You may also use Flynn’s Shadow Swap ability to bring a hostile closer to Laughing Deer if necessary.

Last but not least, you’ll want to watch out for Wendigos. The monsters are able to counter in melee range before you can hit them, which means Laughing Deer might take unnecessary damage.

Hard West 2 is available via Steam.