@VastleCania said i should do a little screenshot lp and until someone fixes selectbutton removing my webms i might as well do something while waiting cough cough nudge nudge
I bought this over the Klei publisher sale weekend, currently near the end of the game at about 50+ hours, so there are some minor late game spoilers here. the fundamental game loops stay the same for the whole game
this first post will be geared for people who have never played this game, from a fairly late-game mission which isnāt that much different from early-game missions, explaining how the game flows and what you do in its primary game loop, so if you know whatās up just ignore me. i have used no spoilers personally so i donāt actually know anything about the endgame personally and am probably missing all kinds of random stuff.
i had never played this game in early access, so i donāt know what it was like then
this screen shows up every time you start the game. it is very clear that this is a hard, challenging game.
more than hard, i think this game is grueling. it asks for a lot of your time, and it doesnāt really give you the tools to do a lot of things without spending a lot of time and effort to unlock them first.
say hello to The Darkest Potato Estate. it filled me in with The Darkest when i started a new savegame and i thought something really dumb would be good to follow it up with.
thereās a +15% bonus damage in The Weald so Iām going to do something there most likely, probably especially because of the boss i have available there.
I forgot to get a screenshot of ātownā itself so oh well you donāt get one!
hereās the stat screen. short rundown:
- every character has a rank and class, this is a max rank Crusader. heās also one of the starting characters so this guy is anything but a spoiler!
- on the left you have quirks. the yellow ones are āgoodā quirks, the red ones are ābadā quirks.
- bad quirks can be removed at the Sanitarium for a small price, and good quirks can be locked so they are not overwritten for a much higher price. the red icon next to the bad quirk names means that oneās locked and will not be removed without spending a small fortune. bad quirks lock naturally over time so get rid of them quickly!
- for stats: dodge is directly subtracted from enemy accuracy, prot is a flat percentage damage reduction, spd affects turn order, acc mod affects accuracy, crit affects critical rate, and hp/dmg are hp/damage.
- the 5s above his sword and armor indicate that they are level 5. you cannot change a characterās equipment but you can level it up; 5 is the maximum.
- there are two equip slots for accessories named ātrinkets,ā but he doesnāt have any right now. more on that a bit later.
- on the right side, thereās a listing of 7 combat skills and 7 camping skills. you can have four combat skills and four camping skills equipped at any given time. you can switch these at anytime outside of combat.
- the numbers below each combat skill are its level; the higher it is, the more powerful it is. these, too, can be leveled up.
it is expensive to upgrade armor to the max. each level of armor increases evade by a fixed 5 and hp by an amount depending on class.
but mostly, i have this screenshot because i want to draw attention to the hammer resting on the anvil in front of the blacksmith. the handle is attached wrong! how the heck does he work like that? i have not been able to unsee this after first noticing it.
upgrading skills, too, its fairly expensive.
the upgrade screen helpfully tells you what the current level is and the next level will be when you hover your mouse over a skill, as shown. attack skills go up by a flat 5 accuracy per level.
youāve probably picked up that, yes, that is directly offset by the increase of evasion that armor gives, and enemies too will gain the same values or greater so you will have to upgrade to keep up. you can easily invest 20,000 or more into a single character for equipment and skills alone. since youāll need a party of four so youāll need to get a steady source of income to support them!
this is the mission selection. ignore the very confused jester on the right.
the final dungeon, shown in the upper right, is the titular Darkest Dungeon, and is unlocked from the very beginning of the game. you can send a team of level 0 characters into it if you like, but they will probably die. i still havenāt gone into it yet, so donāt spoil me on this please!
there are four areas, the Ruins, the Warrens, Cove, and the Weald. each zone has a theme, with specific types of enemies and content. the Ruins is mostly undead, the Warrens is horrific diseased pig-beast-things, the Cove consists of eldritch fish-men, and the Weald is a mixed bag of humans, eldritch fungal horrors and other fun creatures.
the circles below each zone are the areas you can access. green is low difficulty (lv0~2), orange is veteran(lv3~4), and red is champion(lv5~6). once a hero outlevels a zone, they cannot go back to a lower level zone. you can send a character to a zone they are not high enough level for, but their stress level and gain will be much higher than it would otherwise be.
the spokes on each circle indicate the length of the mission. no spokes is a āshortā mission, 3 spokes is a āmediumā mission, and 5 spokes is a ālongā mission. medium and long missions include camping, short missions donāt. in general i feel that medium missions are the easiest ones.
you cannot skip a week. you cannot skip taking a mission. you must send a team of four adventurers possibly to their doom, every week.
i take a boss mission, which is a medium length champion difficulty mission to defeat the Hag Witch.
i decide to bring a team of two crusaders(paladins), a vestal(cleric-type complete with mace-bat), and a jester(bard). why i do this will become evident later! the primary weakness of this team is that nobody can reduce enemy Prot, so i will be doing relatively reduced damage against tankier enemies.
when you pick a mission youāre sent to the provisioning screen. here you can buy a number of items, usually an expedition will run you about 4-6k fully kitted out. you spend a lot of money in this game. i decide on this: little bit of all-purpose, maybe a few too many torches. you always want to buy all the food that is available, so i have 24 rations worth.
the other items are: 1x firewood(you get 1 per camping session, automatically given per mission type), 4x holy water(increases resistances, purifies curios), 6x medicinal herbs(removes debuffs), 4x shovels(breaks down field obstacles), 3x keys(unlocks chests, important), and 4x antivenom(removes blight)
and off we go! the map is in the lower right pane, dungeons are very uniformly laid out, with rooms connected by 4 map tiles worth of corridor. if you succeed in a scouting roll(i did at the start here), you get to see whatās ahead.
you can choose to walk left or right on the upper screen, or you can click on a map location to start walking there. going to mostly crop out the bottom stuff for now.
the red bar underneath a character is his HP, the little squares underneath that indicate current stress level, and the icons above indicate buffs/debuffs. currently they only have the +15% damage buff that the town crier told us about.
first encounter surprises the enemy! which is not necessarily a good thing, but is okay here. it means all of our characters go first.
during each combat round, every character and enemy goes (at least)once. (in the case of surprising the enemy, this means all enemies go at the end of the first round, and then if theyāre fast they can all go first at the start of the second round, and that can really hurt)
thereās two fungal dudes up front, those are tanks and have 50% prot so iāll be doing half damage. behind them is a fungus artillery guy, he has ranged attacks and inflicts blight(damage over time) to party members. and all the way in the back is a crone, she needs to be taken out immediately because she inflicts really nasty debuffs to accuracy/dodge and can add nearly 20% stress per hit.
we start off by having the jester do Solo, which moves him to the front of the party and does a 22% accuracy debuff to all enemies. he has curios to increase his evasion so he wonāt be in too much danger up front, but he can still get whomped pretty hard, especially if the crone curses him.
crusaders have a lunge skill they can use when they are in the back two party slots; it moves them forward one party slot and attacks an enemy in the back two slots. he lands a crit on the crone, killing her instantly.
they canāt hit the front rows with the lunge skill, but they have a different combat skill for that which they can only use from the front two rows.
thatās the main plan for this party: jester solos himself to the front, and then the crusaders alternately lunge the back to shreds until nothing remains, then they sit up front and slowly whack at the tanks until they die from it.
(yes, this is a screen from a different yet nearly identical fight, who cares)
several fights later, my vestal catches the disease Ennui from some corpse bugs. these guys have low HP and are easy to kill, but evasive and fast enough that they tend to go first so sometimes this just happens and you have to deal with it.
diseases give a permanent debuff, this one drastically reduces āvirtue chanceā which is how likely your char is to not freak out when they max out Stress. only a few camping skills can cure diseases on the field, none of which we have, otherwise we have to wait until town to cleanse it off.
stress will not be a problem on this run because both crusaders and the bard can reduce stress in combat, so this is basically irrelevant. it could be very relevant if i didnāt, though!
sometimes, scouting finds secret doors. you never find these without winning a scouting roll, so whether or not you know about these is pure luck! they always contain treasure. i decide to save this one for after the boss.
i camp in the lower left room before the boss after clearing out the encounter on the path. when you camp, everyone gets to rest. you consume a number of food at the start of resting, up to 8, which can reduce stress and restore HP.
camping skills can reduce stress, give buffs, clean off bad status. in this case, most of what i have are stress reduction or debuff cleansing so i donāt get much out of this. the bard gives a +5% critical bonus to one of the crusaders.
if nobody uses a skill to prevent an ambush, thereās a chance you can get ambushed with no light at after resting. this always surprises your party, shuffling your team order randomly. vestals and crusaders both have one for this, so weāre good.
and hereās the Hag Witch, with her witchās pot!
every boss has three tiers, so iāve already fought her twice on the lowest and veteran difficulty levels. so you just get Grade Up versions of each boss in this game, which isnāt a bad thing and often requires more dedicated teams at the higher tiers.
whatās in the pot? well,
you are!
if nobodyās in the pot, she picks a random party member to dunk into the pot at the start of each turn. the pot does 10% of max HP for everybodyās turn, so up to 50% damage total per turn. it drops them out if they reach 0 HP.
this is a surprisingly lethal boss fight, especially if she dunks the same high HP char in over and over since they take longer to heal.
she is considered to be in the back two rows and can only be hit by attacks that reach that far, so you can 100% guess my strategy right now is to just have the crusaders lunge her to death. it is entirely possible to go into this fight and not be able to hit her at all, if your team only has melee. iām currently kicking myself for not moving the vestal to the front before the fight started, but moving her up is an easy fix.
aside from that, she has āMeat Tenderizer,ā which whomps the whole party. if a critical lands on a party member, stress is applied to everyone, so that can add up pretty quickly if you have no way of reducing stress.
she only has about 140HP so she goes down pretty quick. she also only ever picked the jester to dunk in over and over, which is actually like the best possible result!
honestly surprised how many crits iām getting! was only around 15%/20% for the two crusaders but they rocked her good
she drops a very, very nice book that iāll probably equip on someone for a future fight
the quest is done, and i can leave the dungeon at any time by clicking a button, but i still have to raid that secret room, so we keep goingā¦
one last encounter on the way. thereās a tree branch carrying fungus dude here. heās pretty cool. his main gimmick is, um
he fucking hurts.
he can whallop either of the front two characters, and does more damage than the crusader has HP. this does not kill, it brings him to Deathās Door.
getting Deathās Door even once adds a permanent debuff until quest end, reducing damage, accuracy, and some other stuff i canāt remember. if a character is hit during Deathās Door, including by damage over time, he must resist a Death Blow to survive. if he fails, heās dead and gone for good, never to return. healing him even the slightest bit will get him out of that state, and will not die even if the next hit brings him back to it. the debuff remains though.
the cultist in the back, like the crones from above, can inflict debuffs and stress rapidly, so we want to take care of her quickly.
the jester has the skill Finale, which he can oly use from the very front of the party, which does massive damage to one enemy and then shuffles him to the rear of the party and inflicts a massive debuff on him for a few turns which reduces damage, accuracy and dodge dramatically. you can probably see the cycle here where he Solos to the front, and then does a Finale to get out of there, and then throws buffs up from the back row.
in the secret room is a chest, which we open with one of the Keys we brought along when Provisioning. if you donāt use a key, you donāt really get much of value, but instead we get theseā¦ thingsā¦ which are worth 2500 gold each. absolutely worth hauling keys to the end!
a fine haul.
heirlooms are used to upgrade the town. I donāt really need that many anymore and should probably prioritize money, but so many crests were dropping i couldnāt help but fill up my inventory with them. we get a decent amount of busts and deeds, too. i needed a lot of these to let the blacksmith upgrade my equipment and the guild upgrade my skills.
at the end of each mission xp is given to any characters that need it, and diseases and quirks, both good and bad, are alloted out to characters randomly. in this case our vestal had a random good quirk replaced with Steady(-10% Stress), which iām considering spending the money to lock, and Reynauld picks up The Black Plague, which we definitely need to get cured.
and back at townā¦
Fuck.
so thatās darkest dungeonās game loop! you organize a party, you raid, and you try not to have anyone stress out in the process.
i donāt know if i will do more posts like these, but i figured chronicling one mission wouldnāt be a big deal. also the hag is one of my favorite bosses for being incredibly silly
feel free to discuss the game in this thread in general
