Is there a reasonable way to grind to turn these useless level 0 meat shields into something useful with little risk? I notice even the low level quests seem to get tougher so you can't completely cheese it just by grinding low level shit over and over again like DSP. So even later in the game, when you have to train up some replacements, it's still a harrowing nightmare.
Yes, but it's complicated.
Provinces and Shit:
The bulk of the estate will gradually "level up" each area as you explore:
The Map fully leveled up, from the chronicles of The (The) Kiwi Farms Estate
Each area starts at level 0 except for The Courtyard and Darkest Dungeon, which have their own bullshit.
As you adventure, you build "XP" for your estate's zones, representing your team exploring them deeper and gaining access to their secrets. When a zone levels up, the quests become slightly harder and a boss fight unlocks.
Levels 0-2 will have almost entirely Novice rank quests, with periodic Veteran.
Level 3-4 will have predominantly Veteran rank quests with a smattering of Novice and Champion.
Levels 5-7 will be almost entirely Champion with a few Veteran and Novice.
The province won't level up until you beat the boss, so you can abuse this to keep the province artificially lower in level, though the game scales missions to your roster so you'll likely get more Champion and Veteran missions as more and more of your roster becomes inveterate. Additionally, how long the game's gone on serves as a modifier; you start to get more veteran missions around week 16, and you'll start to get more Champion missions starting week 35 or so (this also is when Vvulf starts prowling around; beware).
Provided you rotate each area you go to and build each character up slowly but steadily, you will, essentially,
always have at least one Novice and one Veteran mission available
every single week.
Now we get to the tougher part, which is character leveling.
Character Leveling Made Easy:
Character level determines their base status resistances (including disease) and how likely they are to become virtuous. Note that just leveling up doesn't really make the character any stronger; you need to train and upgrade for that shit. It just boosts your resistances and gives a bonus against stress gains.
Each level you gain unlocks new levels for your skills (upgrade these at the guild), new levels for your weapons and armor (upgrade these at the smith) or both. These are what you need to do to actually level up, and this is
not a cheap process, as weapons and armor, in particular, cost thousands of gold to upgrade to max. This is also why upgrading the Smith and abusing the Lost and Found event is
fucking important.
Characters max at level six.
For the most part, a successful mission of any kind will level up a level 0 character to level 1.
At a certain threshold, characters will refuse to do lower-level quests. Level 0-2 characters will do Novice quests but level 3 will refuse, since they will, if upgraded, outgun the locals by a substantial margain and won't gain any real experience or face any real challenge for doing so. Similarly, level 3-4 characters will do Veteran missions, but Level 5+ will refuse and will only do Champion.
There is a town event that allows you to bring any level character to novice or veteran rank dungeons, which is a great opportunity for you to get a team of level sixes together to butt-fuck the Novice-level Shambler when it happens.
Interestingly, the
reverse isn't true: There is
no restriction against bringing low-level characters to high-level dungeons. In fact, this is a great way to level up quickly, since the XP gains from a high level dungeon is much higher than it would be otherwise (this is why Crunklord in the Kiwi run jumped to level 3 in one go).
Be forewarned, however: It imposes terrible risks. Low-level characters will have trouble getting status effects to stick in high-level dungeons, will not be able to hit more evasive high-level monsters, and will be using lower-level equipment, meaning lower HP, lower evade rate, and lower critical hit chance and damage and speed. There is an achievement for sending a team of level 0s to the Darkest Dungeon, in fact (to the best of my knowledge, this is a death sentence, due to Stress).
One big problem with bringing low-level characters to late-game areas is that they will start with tons of stress and gain
noticably more. Stress goes from being annoying to a threat that can and will kill with this shit in mind. The bigger the level difference, the more stress they will gain (to a maximum of 60 for bringing a level 0 to a Darkest difficulty mission). Each level difference adds 10 stress and +5% stress gains.
If you have a character who survives going to the Darkest Dungeon, he/she will refuse to ever go back to it. However, this comes with a boon in trade, as they will boost XP gain by other party members by 50%! Additionally, the Ancestor's Portrait Trinket boosts XP gain by 50%.
