Darkest Dungeon

[AnOminous]

And I'm pretty sure the Epic Games Store exclusive must have had something to do with the design decisions.

I knew to be leery the instant those chinks were involved. Fuck EGS, ruining another franchise.

I was willing to cut some slack based on the original and how much it improved after release, but nope, EGS is shit, it is a cancer on everything it touches.

 

[Meat Target]

Okay, noob questions:

1. What do I do when I run out of money, and quests are too steep for fresh recruits to get more?
2. What's a good team and provisions loadout for the ruins necromancer? My party is usually drained halfway through the dungeon, even after camping.

 

[Asian tech support]

What do I do when I run out of money, and quests are too steep for fresh recruits to get more?

Go to the wiki and figure out which curios give what. Knowing what they all do and what you need to feed them with will save you a lot of gold at the sanitarium and on stress relief as well as net you more money than you would otherwise. Wikis are whatever but I don't think there's any shame in using it for curios. I still use it even after 300 hours.
The antiquarian increases gold stacks and generates random gems and crap during runs. She's dead weight tho so I don't really recommend it.
You can probably make the most bank at the ruins.
If your entire roster is resolve 0s and 1s and runs keep wiping, it might make sense to start anew. I've gotten myself into some dumb spots before on bloodmoon runs and just restarted.

What's a good team and provisions loadout for the ruins necromancer? My party is usually drained halfway through the dungeon, even after camping.

The default foursome of PD, vestal, highwayman, and crusader will mess up the ruins something fierce. It's why they give it to you off the bat.
The most important stats in almost every case for characters that want to hit things are speed and accuracy. If PD and highwayman can consistently go first, you should be in a good place. Open with blinding gas or disorienting blast and take out the backline. The acolytes (female cultists) and courtiers (goblet skellies) should be a priority. Basically, anything that does stress damage. Let the crusader stun the frontline and by turn 3 you should be cleaning up most hallway encounters.
Disorienting blast is a monster of a skill. It's a stun and it clears corpses although with that particular party comp you have no trouble with reach. Most stuns don't work on bosses though. You can swap skills at any time when out of combat.

Spoiler: provisions guide

Spoiler: gold guide

That guy makes good videos.
Sorry if that was disconnected and not that useful. I'm falling asleep.

 

[Pissmaster]

1. What do I do when I run out of money, and quests are too steep for fresh recruits to get more?

You can always send new recruits into easier quests (Clear 90% of rooms), and pull them out before you get a total party wipe. As long as you're collecting artifacts like busts and deeds, you can upgrade your town, and that's still progress.

Darkest Dungeon's a game that took me a looooong time to grasp but it eventually clicked. Party composition is everything. Always make sure to pay attention to how you place your party members as according to their best placements on their character sheet. Like for example:


@Penis Drager 2.0's preferred position is right on the front line, so that's where he goes whenever I have him in the party. Always check the preferred position.

 

[Sister Miriam Godwinson]

The antiquarian increases gold stacks and generates random gems and crap during runs. She's dead weight tho so I don't really recommend it.

Don't you be disrespecting mah gurl. She is anything but dead weight, though I admit making her effective calls for slightly unorthodox thinking.

Her best friend is Highwayman with Duelist Advance. Put him in spot 2 and her in spot 1, open with Duelist Advance so he gets riposte. Use Protect Me! on him so he gets marked, gets bonus dodge and extra protection. Spam Invigotating Vapors for even more dodge for him and the entire party.

Anything that can attack only rank 1 and 2 will die against the spiky ball of seething hate that is Dismas, and so will the backline if it falls for the mark. Put Man at Arms in spot 4 to spam Bolster for even more dodge and laugh as the enemies can't land a single blow.

Won't work in Champion dungeons of course, but this strategy makes tiers 1 and 2 easy money.

 

[WULULULULU]

Lol. Called it that DD2 was shit from the start. Dumb niggers could have given the base game QoL improvements and x64 support but noooo, we gotta copy Slay the Spire like the cannibalistic indie developers they are.

 

[Wallace]

Okay, noob questions:

1. What do I do when I run out of money, and quests are too steep for fresh recruits to get more?
2. What's a good team and provisions loadout for the ruins necromancer? My party is usually drained halfway through the dungeon, even after camping.

The trick is to treat new recruits as disposable. Use them up and throw them away. Keep the ones that get a lucky quirk or two; those are the ones you invest money into training. If they end their first run stressed as hell and with no good quirks, toss them. Save money by buying fewer or none bandages or antitoxins, since it's okay if a few unlucky fucks die.

You can also try dark runs where you don't bring torches. More danger but more money.

 

[AnOminous]

You can probably make the most bank at the ruins.
If your entire roster is resolve 0s and 1s and runs keep wiping, it might make sense to start anew. I've gotten myself into some dumb spots before on bloodmoon runs and just restarted.

But if you aren't in Bloodmoon/Stygian, usually the cheese tactic of picking up some suckers from the stagecoach and just collecting gold until you're too messed up to continue works eventually.

Disorienting blast is a monster of a skill. It's a stun and it clears corpses although with that particular party comp you have no trouble with reach. Most stuns don't work on bosses though. You can swap skills at any time when out of combat.

Necro is an exception and is fairly weak to stuns as bosses go. Just throw Blasphemous Vial on PD and go wild. CRU's attacks also have a hefty bonus on Unholy types so generally you want at least VES/CRU from the original team, and there are few teams that PD can't help.

I generally want to stun Necro on round 1 and possibly round 2, though without some serious bonus to stun (such as you can get with Abomination), it's more likely to be successful alternating turns with stun.

It's worth killing him if only to get to Prophet, who has one of the few top-tier boss trinkets in the game (most suck). Prophet's Eye makes even Vestal's relatively feeble backline attack effective as a finisher and seriously increases the deadliness of backline Musketeers/Arbalests/anyone you'd put in back.

The main thing is you want to delay him moving back to the back with a stun and cause substantial damage before he gets off his minion summoning. Preferably stack multiple DoTs on him like PD's Plague Grenades.

Antiquarian is invaluable but not generally recommended on boss levels unless you're up to it. If you're already having trouble I wouldn't advise it. However, when you do bring Ant along, and also have HWM, a very effective strategy for making her at least minimally useful is having her use Protect Me on HWM then having HWM trigger his Riposte attack so an attack on either of them results in an immediate counterattack. Also if you have her along make sure you always use her to interact with curios.

 

[Pissmaster]

 

[Meat Target]

Do the Workshop mods disable achievements?

 

[WULULULULU]

Do the Workshop mods disable achievements?

No. You can install any mods you want and it will not disable your achievements.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

The first big update came out. It's mostly adding new enemies and rebalancing a handful of them. No hero or Mountain rebalance, so I'm not super motivated to play again.

They did finally change it so that the first inn spawns all pets though, which has some potential coolness.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

Another update.

The big change was the death blow system. Heroes work the same as before, but enemies now get Death Armor instead of DBR. It's guaranteed death protection. You can break one per hit, with certain abilities that burn through it faster. It makes things harder, but less random. Items and abilities have been reworked accordingly. Generally, enemies with a lot of DBR now have a lot of Death Armor instead. I THINK it's a good change, but I'm not sure yet.

Focused Fault got a complete overhaul... again. Token theft is gone, which is good. Suppression has been reworked to punish positive tokens instead of crits. I don't think this is much better. DOT already rules this fight, and most of the game in general. Why do direct damage teams need to be punished for existing? Why do the devs have such a hateboner for direct damage? Blind immunity is gone, thank God. Seen tokens accrue faster, but there are now some ways to get rid of them, such as stealth or forcing a miss. There's a huge number of changes to this fight, too many to go into, but here's the bottom line: It's much easier to get him locked onto a single tank, but your defense best be immaculate, because his damage has been reverted to the previous 60 point crits. Poet ruled version 2 of this fight and really suffered from the changes. Now it's pretty much Vanguard, or Carcass with Stone Mount. Flagellant... well, he's great in every OTHER Mountain fight, but he just can't handle the big nukes on this one. Runaway also might be really good here now...

Mostly no hero changes, except that Occultist got buffed into the stratosphere. You know how I said that Wyrd would be a good heal if the threshold was changed from 33 to 50? The threshold was changed from 33 to 50, This is HUGE, and turns Occultist into a fairly competent healer. Curses now get 2 status stacks by default rather than 1, and the upgrade makes it strip buffs first. This makes Occultist much less upgrade intensive. I somewhat liked Ritualist before, contrary to popular opinion, but he's actually legit now. On top of that, Malediction got a massive buff, making it last longer and turning him into a good DOT support.

Also I forgot to mention the changes to infernal torches last time, mostly because I don't use them. But they do have a lot more variety now instead of just being the same with different numbers.

EDIT: One other thing I forgot. If a hero dies and you make it to the inn, you can now pick the replacement. This is excellent and makes a run less likely to be wasted due to a single death... if you can survive the cultist fight. Also, you can now change hero paths at the inn, for a price. I think this is mainly to allow you to select a path for your replacement hero, but it might has a few other edge case uses. Say, switching to Monarch just before the Mountain...

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

@Lord of the Large Pants is all the complexity makes the game better or worse? The original was fun enough with usual character building, positioning and buffing/debuffing. From your descriptions the second installment just sounds so convoluted with tokens and shit.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

@Lord of the Large Pants is all the complexity makes the game better or worse? The original was fun enough with usual character building, positioning and buffing/debuffing. From your descriptions the second installment just sounds so convoluted with tokens and shit.

No idea, never played the first one. The second one is... well, they're trying, God bless their little hearts.

 

[Sister Miriam Godwinson]

@Lord of the Large Pants is all the complexity makes the game better or worse? The original was fun enough with usual character building, positioning and buffing/debuffing. From your descriptions the second installment just sounds so convoluted with tokens and shit.

It's... Different. You definitely have more control over the fights and are practically never at the mercy of RNG, though it still plays a significant part. DD2's greatest flaw is the lack of replayability and being extremely vulnerable to the silver bullet comp. You find a crew that works, you run through the SAME regions five times, kill five act bosses and there is zero incentive to play anymore.

No longer do you have to come up with a specific strategy for an area and its enemies, you are guaranteed to hit all four and a half biomes during the run. They look pretty, but by the time you beat the boss number 2 you have seen them all, no new challenges/mechanics are introduced, and you are left with having to make 3 more runs that play out absolutely the same.

 

[AnOminous]

Okay, noob questions:

1. What do I do when I run out of money, and quests are too steep for fresh recruits to get more?

Just hire retards you can throw away.

1. What's a good team and provisions loadout for the ruins necromancer? My party is usually drained halfway through the dungeon, even after camping.

Anything that can hit the back rank. This is almost all bosses in the game. Can they hit the back rank? This should be every hero.

He ALWAYS starts up front. This is a good time to stun him. This will merely delay the move he does next, which is summoning a bunch of shit and moving to the back row. So unless you have some ridiculous team (which I usually try to have) which just kills him on round one, stun him, and get ready to throw back line attacks at him immediately. You should really have him at half-HP at most by the time he does this.

And then, basically kill him until he dies.

The stun/stall meta is the ultimate winning meta for this game. No enemy comp can't be beaten if you use this.

 

[Asian tech support]

You wanted the crusader? Hope you're prepared to fork over at least $10. I'm assuming this isn't Raynauld because he's fucking dead. Might be fire-centric as well considering the wording in the blogpost.

 

[Kane Lives]

If it's just 2 heroes, I'd honestly pass, but I find it interesting they chose to do Crusader + someone new, rather than another of the old cast like Houndmaster or Arbalest.

 

[Asian tech support]

If it's just 2 heroes, I'd honestly pass, but I find it interesting they chose to do Crusader + someone new, rather than another of the old cast like Houndmaster or Arbalest.

Tbh, I didn't expect them to capitulate and add the crusader at all. This reeks of nostalgia bait as the crusader's absence is one of the most noteworthy non-gameplay related complaints. I'd guess the original plan was just for this new character, the duelist or whatever but that's not very interesting. Slapping the crusader on top, now that's a winning strategy. I'm still not buying it tho.

As for the arbalest specifically, I think the new path system has allowed the sharpshot highwayman to occupy the arbalest's niche, barring an inevitable arbalest rework. A lot of the old characters niches are somewhat invalidated by the system, though I think it's overall a good thing.