Darkest Dungeon Catch All

I went to fight my first boss enemy, upgraded my A team and set out. I then realized I forgot to swap my A team in and took my B team to do the job. Luckily they succeeded.

robc wrote:

I went to fight my first boss enemy, upgraded my A team and set out. I then realized I forgot to swap my A team in and took my B team to do the job. Luckily they succeeded.

That's pretty much a movie plot right there.

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:
robc wrote:

I went to fight my first boss enemy, upgraded my A team and set out. I then realized I forgot to swap my A team in and took my B team to do the job. Luckily they succeeded.

That's pretty much a movie plot right there.

IMAGE(http://www.gstatic.com/tv/thumb/movieposters/8045197/p8045197_p_v8_af.jpg)

Movie shot makes sense, because my 2nd position hero was a jester. Kinda looked like Will Farrell.

I've started watching a play through of the full release game. 'Tis rather good.

I had a half day Friday and I've been diving in to these dungeons since then. I'm about 30 weeks in, with many bosses killed, and my first veteran boss slain last night. At this point I haev a good stable of lvl 3-4 guys, but I'm bringing up some lvl 1-2 guys to finish out the rest of the lvl 1 bosses.

My go-to party is vestal/occultist/leper/highwayman. the occultist pulls in the weak ones for the highwayman to point blank shot with some assistance from a leper with some +accuracy gear. Or just a second highwayman to keep flip flopping on point blank shots, plus a bleed attack for enemies with protection.

As I get deeper in to the veteran dungeons movement attacks become much more valuable. I lost 2 party members to the wizened hag because my highwayman and leper couldn't hit anything in the back two rows, and also the leper couldn't do squat from the back and the other party memebers couldn't move to the back fast enough. The highwayman, jester, and man-at-arms are all valuable to me for these reasons.

I'm interested in that comment about healing not being worth it in the late game (the darkest dungeon). How do you increase survivability then? At the moment I'm focused on putting out damage as quickly and effectively as possible, with some healing to keep my alive through crits. I'm worried that the late game will flip a difficulty switch that invalidates my tactics and makes me go back to train a bunch of debuff and disable based strategies that are mostly about enemy attack management while still killing them.

Not that I'm against that, and I love that the game has many strategies available, I'm just worried that the late game has one "solution" that I need to do some longer term planning to get to.

Anyway this game is the freaking best. I love it.

Squee9 wrote:

As I get deeper in to the veteran dungeons movement attacks become much more valuable. I lost 2 party members to the wizened hag because my highwayman and leper couldn't hit anything in the back two rows, and also the leper couldn't do squat from the back and the other party memebers couldn't move to the back fast enough. The highwayman, jester, and man-at-arms are all valuable to me for these reasons.

We're in, very nearly the same place. (Week 31, here.) I've lost four people so far and one of those was to the Wizened Hag (my grave robber, Buffy). That pot is vile!

You're right, though, about the need to have adventurers who can shift around in order. I think if you have one or two that can move within your own party or can shift around monsters, while having most others able to use at least one skill no matter where they are in the alignment (like the Crusader's back of the line Lance ability), you can overcome a lot. One thing I realized about the Leper last night is he has zero skills, none, that work from the back ranks or affect monsters in the back ranks. (He does have one clearing ability, though.)

Had my first two adventurers hit level 5 last night (a crusader and plague doctor), but I still haven't taken out a Veteran boss yet. Just got one of those quests to pop in the ruins last night. Hoping to take a crew out today to go after it.

I expect pain.

ubrakto wrote:

You're right, though, about the need to have adventurers who can shift around in order. I think if you have one or two that can move within your own party or can shift around monsters, while having most others able to use at least one skill no matter where they are in the alignment (like the Crusader's back of the line Lance ability), you can overcome a lot. One thing I realized about the Leper last night is he has zero skills, none, that work from the bank ranks or affect monsters in the bank ranks. (He does have one clearing ability, though.)

That's how I tend to set up the abilities on characters that aren't going into the grinder. Not every class has one, but for the ones that have an attack ability that moves them in the direction of their optimal positioning, I almost always include it. For the classes that don't, I make sure they have something they can use to attack from out of position. Wasting an attack on movement is... wasteful.

Yeah, a useless turn needs to be avoided at all costs. I think that often times it's helpful to ensure your characters that have intra-party movement options also have a higher speed than any statues in your party w/o those options. If the whole party gets shuffled, having your mobile character act first lets you move them such that your statue gets shuffled back where they need to be automagically.

I've been seeing so many people on streams depend solely on the vestal and occultist as classic healers, like the DnD / MMO cleric. A lot of characters have self-heals that seem minor, until you lose your main healer (or they go insane). Some side buffs from them are nice, too, like the hellion's: cure blight/bleed + heal

When the late game comes around, these skills become crucial. It might seem strange, for example, burning the houndmaster's turn to bump his health instead of finishing off a mob, but when you're late in a battle, the party's hp is iffy, and you can do a few self-heals before finishing off that last mob, it becomes a godsend.

Here's a thing I wish I had known going in: when you get a party of level six characters, don't go around taking care of mopping up any remaining bosses, start raiding the Darkest Dungeon immediately.

Because:

Spoiler:

Once your team beats a Darkest Dungeon level, they get the never again state, and will *not* go back in. GAAAAAH. So you will at the very least use 16 characters to beat the game.

Soo... loaded up for the first time since last weekend I think and now the full party of level 4 that I had is all level 3 again. Did I miss something?

Just started playing a few days ago. I haven't noticed any levels lost.

Tyops wrote:

Soo... loaded up for the first time since last weekend I think and now the full party of level 4 that I had is all level 3 again. Did I miss something?

There was a patch on Feb 1 that reduced XP thresholds for levels 4, 5, and 6, and then on Feb 5, they turned them back up again (although 6 isn't as high as it was). I'm guessing you got to level 4 right in between.

Possible? I guess that would explain it.

The game was fun for a while but when I envision the grind to get to the end... I'm not sure I'm up for it.

Just got my first team of lvl 5 guys. I'm still bouncing around trying to kill 5 or so tier two bosses. I'm worried my guys will either die or level up to 5 before I kill all the bosses. Meaning I'll have to grind up some lvl 3 folks.

I like the party management, I'm just worried that success will lead to future grinding. Which feels odd.

I have complicated feelings about this game.

When I'm actually in a dungeon, adventuring, I'm having fun. I love the art, the sound, the subtle humor, all the assets that I crave.

When I return to town, it is only with enormous effort that I can force myself to go onto another mission.

It's very similar to my relationship with Starcraft 2. It could just be the anxiety of losing! I'm not sure.

I'm not certain that I'll ever beat this this game, given how many adventurers that you have to level up, but apparently they're doing a balance change to address the end game grind this March.

I've been keeping an eye on this since it launched but it always failed to click with me. The difficulty curve just seems to be a bit much. I think Jeff Vogel's article sums it up better than I could.

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.ca/2015/0...


The Most Dangerous Form of Feedback

There are lots of different ways you can get damaging feedback, but the Difficulty Fetishists are the ones you must fear the most. They are marked by three qualities:

1. They ALWAYS want the game to be harder, no matter how hard it already is.
2. They will be the loudest, most persistent givers of feedback. They will swarm forums, making them seem more numerous than they are.
3. They are mean and contemptuous to anyone who suggests, no matter how meekly, that the game is too hard to be fun. ("n00b!" "LRN 2 PLAY!" "GIT GUD!")

Now let us be very clear. Gamers who love really hard games ARE a valid audience. I have several such gamers as permanent members of my testing pool, and they are invaluable when I design the harder difficulty levels. However, they MUST be kept away from influencing the default difficulty level at all costs.

Since Darkest Dungeon only has one difficulty level and is intended to be a hard game, you can see the problem. The Difficulty Fetishists dominated the feedback. Now Darkest Dungeon is a brutal and unforgiving game in which, among other things, you have to hack away the bodies of monsters you already killed to get at the archers murdering you from the back.

The result was that the silent majority of content players became very disgruntled and non-silent, and now the developers are trying to find their way back out of the weeds. I'm sure they will manage, though it's a great example of how treacherous trying to please one faction of gamers can be.

This is incidentally the same pitfall that Long War fell into.

Tamren wrote:

This is incidentally the same pitfall that Long War fell into.

Not sure I agree with this. Long War was very much FOR the Difficultly Fetishists. It was for the players who'd exhausted the challenge of vanilla XCOM, and wanted the next step to take their finely honed skills into.

Yeah, but there is a difference between "XCOM+" and "a wood chipper for masochists". Long War introduced a lot of new and interesting things like expanding the class tree, adding more technology tiers and revamping the air combat system. They could have stopped there and made a better XCOM, but they just had to keep pushing and pushing.

This would be relevant if Darkest Dungeon was actually hard. It's not a difficult game, just puts a different expectation of his characters progress.

Now Darkest Dungeon is a brutal and unforgiving game in which, among other things, you have to hack away the bodies of monsters you already killed to get at the archers murdering you from the back.

I've never quite understood this complaint against the corpse system, and it does kind of strike me as the complaint of a person who's just never really understood how important positioning is in this game, and how you can easily use it to your advantage. If you find yourself often hacking away at corpses in Darkest Dungeon, you dun goofed. Corpses are not something that inherently make the game more difficult, they're just another system, and if used well, they can often be used to your advantage. If you've ever trapped a melee enemy behind a bunch of corpses, you know what I mean.

I think he's making a lot of assumptions about how much feedback Red Hook took to heart as well. My understanding is they always intended the game to be quite hard, which is obviously going to rub some people the wrong way, but saying it was unintentionally from listening to difficulty fetishists seems to kind of rudely dismiss the studio's own agency.

I agree with Vector. This is not a hard game. In fact, if played correctly, it can be quite easy ... and therein lies the rub. The game requires you to plan your missions, characters and progression based upon your understanding of the game mechanics. It's like any other min/max game. There is a learning curve but If you are willing to take the time to min/max, you will do very well. If I had to complain about the game, I would say that, at times, it gets a little too tedious as a result. I can certainly see why it would not be everyone's cup of tea. You just have to know what appeals to you in a game.

Regarding corpses: don't forget you can turn them off. The devs have stated that they would have put them in before hitting early access and think of them as a core part of the game, but understand that some people don't like it, hence the toggle option.

I don't really mind them but I don't really like them either. I would like them more if your party left corpses.

The good thing is a perfect release is in sight. Or is that just...a trick.. of the light.

Copingsaw wrote:

I agree with Vector. This is not a hard game. In fact, if played correctly, it can be quite easy ... and therein lies the rub. The game requires you to plan your missions, characters and progression based upon your understanding of the game mechanics. It's like any other min/max game. There is a learning curve but If you are willing to take the time to min/max, you will do very well. If I had to complain about the game, I would say that, at times, it gets a little too tedious as a result. I can certainly see why it would not be everyone's cup of tea. You just have to know what appeals to you in a game.

If DD is in fact not a hard game then a case could be made that Red Hook has failed to deliver on their original vision, which was to create a highly difficulty and unforgiving dungeon crawl. The brutal difficulty is an actual design pillar for the game! So on this aspect did Red Hook succeed or did they fall short?

From my own limited experience and from taking the general temperature of this discussion, I'd say they've done a pretty good job of things. Jeff Vogel is only talking about the outlier effect. His position is that DD was in a good place challenge-wise but the game has since skewed further down the masochist's path because of the insatiable difficulty tolerance of the vocal minority. But is this not the developer's core audience? And listen to this feedback they did and still, their brutally difficult game is, eh, not that bad after all... for those outliers bothering to post detailed feedback on the forums. I'm willing to bet DD is more than challenge enough for the overwhelming majority of the players who've jumped on train and stuck it out.

Vogel is really just warning other developers out there about the pitfalls of adhering to the wishes of the difficulty committee. Theoretically, there could be no end in sight if you go down that road. And as the difficulty gets iterated on (escalated), the game gets pulled further away from any newcomers coming into things fresh. There's nothing wrong with well-crafted, hard games. This is just somebody bringing up the point: hey it's okay say enough is enough.

Hm, was there a recent patch that informed you when you were about to go on a run without trinkets equipped? This is something I've done many times but I don't recall seeing a warning before. Maybe it only warns you in veteran+ runs.

Anyway, even though it makes the game slightly easier for the absentminded like myself, I appreciate it.

Now they just need to add the same warning for going into the dungeon with no EQUIPMENT.
Yeah, I just accidentally did that. My crew did surprisingly well, but not having the correct items for each Curio does limit the loot quite a bit.

Sam

Maclintok wrote:

Vogel is really just warning other developers out there about the pitfalls of adhering to the wishes of the difficulty committee. Theoretically, there could be no end in sight if you go down that road. And as the difficulty gets iterated on (escalated), the game gets pulled further away from any newcomers coming into things fresh.

That is another wrinkle with game difficulty. When someone has been playing any game for a while and knows the ins and outs of the combat, etc the game can seem a lot easier than when you are coming in fresh with no knowledge of mechanics. 'Levels' that seem laughably easy to experienced players can be very tough and intimidating for someone trying to learn a game.

I'm looking forward trying to the game. I'm not sure I'm the kind of player who will click with it. I'm definitely not a min maxer. I'm more of a 'let's jump in and see what happens' type player . I hope there is a demo but it seems unlikely these days.

SamF7 wrote:

Now they just need to add the same warning for going into the dungeon with no EQUIPMENT.
Yeah, I just accidentally did that. My crew did surprisingly well, but not having the correct items for each Curio does limit the loot quite a bit.

Sam

Seriously. Had a run a while back where I forgot to buy torches. Not as bad as not buying food, sure, but it did not lead to a particularly successful run.