Dr Wookie

Darkest Dungeon: Fear is a mind killer, and so is Eldritch Pull

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There's probably something to be said for playing the game in a slightly less than optimal way though. I've been using the sanitarium to remove almost all negative quirks from my core group, and while that has made them a lot more reliable, the game has also lost quite a bit of personality in the process. It's been a long time since anybody actually got stressed out in a dungeon run for me.

 

That's the story I keep hearing about this game. "The negative quirks are a fascinating element, then you get the sanitarium, start rotating out characters between missions and therapy, and that entire dimension of gameplay just goes away".

 

I hope it's a balance issue rather than working as intended, and they're going to nerf to the sanitarium so that you're forced to deal with disadvantages again.

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It seems like there are multiple simple solutions to the Sanitarium. Like have a low chance of removing a positive trait with the Sanitarium. Even if it's only like a 5 percent chance, it's going to make you think about whether or not you really need to remove that negative. Or have some negative traits intrinsically linked to positive. Or the Sanitarium has a chance to actually add a new negative trait.

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I imagine there's definitely going to be a lot of tweaks to the general economy of the game and hamlet management and such. The Sanitarium probably is an issue, but low effectiveness and chances of removing a positive trait are still trade-offs that I might take (since I also recently learned that there's not infinite room for positive traits, I think, and some of them are not that useful).

 

I think it might be something that should be addressed from the side of the hero roster. You have room for 20 adventurers once the barracks are fully upgraded right now (which is five full dungeon running teams) and that just gives you so much room to swap people out and leave them at home multiple weeks in a row to cure stress, get rid of any and all diseases they might have picked up, etc. etc. If I had less people to work with I might have to take along people with leftover stress and such more often. Or they could grow restless if I never end up using them I guess, similar to how they just implemented heroes complaining about wasting time if you cheese a fight by leaving a single enemy alive to spam heals.

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I just got this game and been enjoying it a bit, but it bothers me a lot because this game currently lacks failure state, which makes it oddly 'easy' of a game to play.

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I imagine there's definitely going to be a lot of tweaks to the general economy of the game and hamlet management and such. The Sanitarium probably is an issue, but low effectiveness and chances of removing a positive trait are still trade-offs that I might take (since I also recently learned that there's not infinite room for positive traits, I think, and some of them are not that useful).

 

I think what might be good is to limit not the sanitarium's effectiveness, but its capacity. You can use it to keep one or two heroes in flawless shape, or you can cure the more serious disadvantages across your whole team. Basically make the building into more of a choice, and less of a mechanism for converting resources into sanity.

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Right now all of the problems seem to boil down into simple fact that there is zero pressure for you to progress in this game.


If this game adopted say, Xcom like mechanic where all missions progressively got harder and you needed to keep veterans alive, the current capacity of sanitarium could be used as is without game becoming trivial.  But right now you can just get free units and cycle them through bunch of level 1 dungeons to max out your town (which is IMO the real progression in this game, and it only goes up) at your leisure.

 

This game badly needs some sort of failure state.

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I guess the thing that it already has is you running out of money, which is a place I found myself in after cutting it a little close before one mission and then losing my entire team against the boss (who was one hit from death, too). Although then I just sent out some unfortunate new recruits without any kind of equipment and that worked out alright. I think I had to cancel a couple of missions early so that I'd at least get the treasures they found before they kick the bucket, but I made my way out of that fairly quickly.

 

I don't know that it really needs a sense of urgency or any way of screwing up irreedemably though, it feels pretty okay to just run a quirky dungeon running business, if the quirkiness of your adventurers actually was preserved a little longer, and I maintain that might mostly be an issue of the large overall team size, which is what allows me to keep people out of rotation for long enough to cure several quirks and commit them to stress relief, rather than having to make do with any less than ideal heroes.

 

Although, that part is probably also hard to change. They probably want to make it possible to keep full teams around for easy, medium and hard missions for when the remaining dungeons unlock, since you have to go through the local bosses in succession.

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Say they cap the roster to 12.  What then?  You can still get free newbies every week in full squad force, which weakens all the individuality from the adventurers.  Say they put pricing on getting new adventurers... well then, that's a potential failure state right there.

 

Say quirks can't even be removed.  Then you would just throw out really bad ones and the adventurers at that point becomes too much of a cannon fodder, which is something I don't think you want.

 

Right now I think the problem isn't that quirks don't stay around long enough, it's that the units (adventurers) holding onto those quirks have so little to be invested in because they can be replaced for absolutely no risk (even though technically that's how it is in all games as they just require time for you to replay the game but that little distinction of game failure state really drives the point well IMO).  We need a reason for that lvl 3 adventurer to hold dear to us, because losing that dude should mean something mechanically other than minor inconvenience (I mean all losses in games are that but you know...).  So it's not that sense of urgency is the goal... it's just a surefire means to giving adventurers high value to be attached to.

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There is the part where you can get lucky and get a really nice combination of positive quirks in a hero that you're going to miss not having around. Also the material loss of gold invested into upgrading their weapon, armor and skills is a bit of a reason to hold on to them. Which circles back into economics of grinding through free reinforcements to gain cash, of course.

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Right, and if free reinforcement farming is to be removed, then I think that's pretty close (if not already being one) to being an end game state as adventurers are necessary to continue on with the game.

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I'm currently in deep doo doo. All my best adventurers got killed in the Weald and I'm out of money. I have enough money to maybe send someone to stress relief but if I do then I'll be short on torches and food for the next adventure. But I find myself enjoying the sense of desperation, clawing my way out of the hole with level 0 adventurers doing quick sweeps and abandoning in order to scrounge resources. Adding a failure state would remove that, and I feel that would be a shame.

Also I really wish there was a way to see the turn order in combat.

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Interesting that you feel sense of desperation, because I can't get that sense from knowing that I can't lose.

 

Like why are you doing runs where you have to abandon the runs?  Does the game no longer give you level 1 missions for you?

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I've been there, and it also happened after failing a mission left me with around 200 gold to spare. I picked up new people from the stagecoach to do level 1 missions, but random team compositions (who needs healers) with random negative quirks and no torches or food to avoid stress generation aren't exactly a recipe for success. Had to end a couple of those early after the entire crew got stressed out, better to grab that bit of cash than let them all die in another fight. If your perception here is that level 1 stuff is impossible to mess up then I'd have to disagree.

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I'm probably playing the game the non-optimal way, so I'm constantly getting my butt kicked. I get very attached to my guys so I'll hang onto them and spend a lot of money on drinking/praying instead of dismissing and recruiting new ones.

What usually happens is that an unlucky round of misses on my side and crits from the enemy will almost wipe me out, and even if I manage to survive that round the next encounter will surely lead to the death of at least one adventurer, so at that point I just abandon.

I feel there's been a balance patch though. I went back to it tonight and it felt way easier. Maybe I'm just learning how to play.

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I've been there, and it also happened after failing a mission left me with around 200 gold to spare. I picked up new people from the stagecoach to do level 1 missions, but random team compositions (who needs healers) with random negative quirks and no torches or food to avoid stress generation aren't exactly a recipe for success. Had to end a couple of those early after the entire crew got stressed out, better to grab that bit of cash than let them all die in another fight. If your perception here is that level 1 stuff is impossible to mess up then I'd have to disagree.

 

Level 1 with zero provision and random adventurer is probably tough (some setup can generate light and reduce stress while keeping enemy stunned or tank dmg efficiently), but I just can't imagine how I would end up in that scenario.

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Is anyone still playing this game and having a tough time at it?  Fingus how are you doing in the game so far?  I would like to hear your group composition and its reason (game dev trying to learn player experience thing (no I didn't dev this game, but I'm still curious on learning player experience for it)) if you guys don't mind.

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I managed to pull myself out of the rut by essentially farming low level missions with a rotation of 8 characters abd using the money and heirlooms to upgrade the blacksmith and guild. Stat upgrades matter a lot as it turns out.

My favorite combo so far is an Occultist and Bounty Hunter, since the Mark from his curse synergizes with BH's Collect Bounty. Also getting BH's pull and push abilities help tremendously. After being on the receiving end of it I've come to realize how powerful crowd control is.

I fought the Hag today, and boy that was frustrating. I would even argue that encounter is poorly designed. What happened to me was that since the hag occupies the last two slots and the cauldron the first two you can end up in a situation where your team literally can't attack her depending on the composition. Which is what happened to me. The solution of course is to bring a team that can attack the slots in the back, but since you don't know that going in you can find yourself in an encounter that is literally impossible to win, which I did. And when you lose your three best adventurers and two Ancestral trinkets to that it feels tremendously unfair.

Even when I brought a perfect team to take her down I got screwed. She put my level 2 Vestal in the pot, and when she dropped out if the soup At Deaths Door the Hag was able to take two turns before anyone was able to do anything and landed a deathblow on her. Again, there was literally nothing I could do, which is frustrating.

I don't mind hard games, in fact I love them. Big fan of Demons/Dark Souls and I'm currently playing SMT4. But while those games are hard they at least feel fair. In Darkest Dungeon I feel I'm very much at the mercy of random number generator, which is not a good feeling. I want my strategic choices to matter, and feel that with enough skill and wit I can recover from a tough situation. Having to retreat from a dungeon because four Rabid Hounds critted me eight times in a row while my well equipped team does nothing but miss for two rounds really diminishes that feeling.

I'm wondering if some sort of rubber banding would help the game. Just subtle things like adventurers On Death's Door having less of a chance bring targeted, or a higher dodge chance. Even if you're thematically presenting dread and despair the dip into adversity and then recovering from it is in my opinion a much more satisfying arc than just getting fucked by a harsh uncaring universe.

I'm a game developer too, so I think a lot about this kinda stuff. I think this thread has the potential for really interesting discussion regarding how to balance design and mood.

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Thanks Fingus for detailed response.  Yeah I got my party wiped too when I ran into Hag totally blind (up to that point my entire gameplan was focusing down the first 2 slots).  Sounds like you had some trouble after that though, what comp did you bring?  I use 2 Helions at front (used two self camp buffs before the fight), Jester at third and Vestal at last with first 3 built to focus on bleed, which seems to reliably kill her before the pot puts the unlucky party member at death's door.  Same party for Swine King too (bleed stack is really reliable).

 

But other than that single blind wipe I'm actually finding the rest of the game to be trivial.  Like I have 30+ hours in ATM (split into 10 and 20+ because that first 10 hour save got corrupted) I believe and I had total of 6 deaths (4 from that blind Hag wipe).  That's why I'm curious about other people's experience with this game cause Darkest Dungeon seem to have the reputation of being a very hard game and I just can't see how.  And it's not like I'm super good at games overall cause it took me many tries to reliably beat FTL on hard mode, found Dark Soul to be challenging, took about 8 hours to beat Volgarr... so I'm curious as to why there seem to be such a huge discrepancy in this particular game between me and popular opinion on its difficulty.  Is it simply because I approach any games with farming tactics by farming first?  I mean the primary party wipe on Hag wasn't a big deal for me cause I had 10+ members waiting with 3 newbies coming in every week with some bank rolling as backup because I farmed a lot to prepare for the worst (best party wiped, which indeed did happen).

 

As for my regular tactics I don't even do anything fancy... Few group types I run is that double helion setup which focuses on killing 2nd and 3rd position using two 'if it bleeds' + jester's mid bleed attacks..  And then I use highwayman front with tank and 2 support where highwayman just bounces back and forth between first and second slot using pointblank and duelist's advance.  Jester generally makes stress management pretty easy as I can just let one mob live while spamming its aoe stress reducer (the game's mechanic to dissuade me from this kicks in too late and too little that I can just power through).

 

It's also interesting that you find Bounty Hunter likeable because I found him pretty lackluster (though he looks badass)... like that combo with occultist you describe, I found it to be too unreliable because the order in which your members go is critical for that to work (occultist go first to mark), which may be telling why I find this game trivial because I just stack members that have zero synergy with each others outside of very simple stuff like "healer heals party members".  For specific example is the way I build my crusaders.  I use smite, accusation, lance and inspiring cry.  Smite for single target, accusation for occasional AOE (totally swappable with stun), lance to get him back into proper position if pushed or surprised, and inspiring to stress heal.  He basically has zero input on other members and doesn't really need anything from others.  Even my tactics are pretty bare bone... I don't even try anything fancy with positioning either.  Just beat up the dudes that my party can focus fire and kill the fastest (helion group would be center two, highwayman group would be first), and try to save least dangerous enemy so I can heal health and stress (jester or crusader for stress healing).  Also as for interactable objects, I don't touch any of them unless it's 100% safe like crates or meat when I have medicine.  I wonder if this game might tricks people into trying fancy stuff... when it is just best to brute force because the game is very simple.  I'm certainly not doing anything smart... if anything, I'm baffled because of how simplistic my gameplan is for this game and it just seem to work reliably.

 

Again I want to emphasize that I don't want to come across as "hur hur look how better I am at this game hur"... I'm curious as to how this game is approached by others so that there can be such huge gulf in perceived difficulty when the game system is relatively simple because I am positive I'm not special at figuring out games.  Hence more specific planning and thoughts you can provide, much more appreciative I will be because I think the game is failing at some point of teaching its players how the game works.  So again, thank you Fingus for the detailed reply, exactly what I was looking for and would love to continue discussing the decision processing in more depth here if you don't mind.

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Short reply since I'm going to bed. But I suspect that people's impression of the game and their tactic going through it becomes colored by the first few quests, and the random nature of the game can have a profound effect on that. And not just emotional impression. I think that am early wipe or a bout of insanity can severely throw off your progression curve.

I'll follow up with a more detailed reply tomorrow. Your tactic is certainly interesting and I have some thoughts on it.

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I haven't played much of it lately, but everything has been going swimmingly for me outside of occasional boss surprsises. The game definitely loses a bit of difficulty not only when the quirks start disappearing, but also when you get a chance to fully customize your party and start seeing the big picture of what skills they have on the whole vs. what they have unlocked at the start. Like, right at the beginning of the game I thought that plague doctors were of no use at all because I happened to pick one up right after getting out of the tutorial (when I didn't have much choice in who to take) that didn't have any of his actual damage abilities unlocked, so no noxious blast, no plague grenade. At that point it looked like he was doing a similar thing to the vestal I picked up as healer, except for being much worse at it. I still haven't gone back on plague doctors, but I've definitely noticed that even classes I like sometimes start out with skills that might have given me a different initial impression (and that also feeds into the troubles with level 1 cash grinds if you're in a position where you have to take any volunteers available).

 

My only real loss after learning the ropes was against the Swine King, or Prince or whatever. I think this was the second version anyway, which means I must have lucked my way through the first fight of that variety. For the medium Swine boss I learned that it's apparently not ideal to kill the little swine first, since it makes the big guy enter rage mode. He kept doing this one move which targeted my entire party and had a pretty good chance of stunning, plus he went several times in a row at that point. So even though my entire party was still stunned, he'd have a chance to stun them all again, just in case. This was right before they implemented the increased stun resistance after clearing one to address that kind of permanent stunlock, but I got to see why they would first. Between the early attacks I got in on him and people occasionally dodging or resisting those stuns, I still got him down to one hit from death, but my entire party was at death's door and stressed out in various ways by that point, so they all managed to whiff or throw a fit on what few attempts they got to hit him, and he kept hammering down until they all fell.

 

Which is the point where I had to earn back some cash for supplies and upgrades by throwing new recruits into the meat grinder and since then no real hiccups. Which I'm still not sure is a real problem, the fact that the game allows you to brute-force your way through stuff, in the sense that you're sort of equally responsible for the kind of experience you want to get out of it. I'm definitely in a unique position approaching this, and you probably are too, because of my experience with roguelikes and other such challenging games, most people probably find this a lot more challenging as it is because they simply don't approach it with optimization or brute force on their mind. Making it more challenging for us is probably going to force everyone more in that direction of farming and preperation, which I wouldn't want to see.

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Oh yeah, and I actually don't mind that it's pretty easy for me at all.  It scratches that basic RPG itch pretty well (well not anymore cause only thing left for me now is to get few classes to level 6 but it's early access and every game ends somewhere) as it is, albeit with few mid to late game problems that we were discussing earlier.

 

I think you are spot on about first impression on the classes.  I kind of 'lucked out' on my plague doctor.  The first freebie I got came with the two plague grenades, stun, and debuff removal, which IMO is pretty much the optimal way to use plague doctor.  I might swap out grenade for bleed if going into weald (that swamp place) but bringing her there is probably a mistake to begin with to to high poison resist over there.

 

So with that build, you got your two poison grenades that doesn't exactly kill things outright, but has the most powerful DoT you can get, so that's nice on big creatures while others clean up smaller ones.  The stun grenade is some sweet stuff against full pack if you can get her speed up a bit to move fast.  Bleed/poison removal can be very handy at higher level when those things can tick for 8 dmg (when stacked).

 

But on the other hand it took me a while to appreciate the helion because my first batch of them were just loaded with those skills that debuffs her and didn't have her brokenly useful bleed attack.

 

Still trying to figure out exact purpose of gravedigger and occultist... I think occultist is bit too poor ATM, especially if you upgrade his heal beyond the 2nd rank as the bleed from it gets just too crazy at max level.  The whole pull/push mechanic is nice design on paper, but in practice I find it not so great when other classes can just help you kill the target... like every range targets that gets gimped when pulled to first 2 tiles, helion can just one shot it at third spot and those guys usually come in pair of 2 so two helion == easy two kill right off the bat.  Gravedigger is like bounty hunter to me, fast and easy with positioning at the cost of damage, which isn't worth it with current overall balance IMO because I don't think target picking in this game is sensitive enough to warrant that trade off (better to just deal extra damage to whatever).  But I have a suspicion that speed might have some sort of group calculation and ambush aspect, as I've seen a very fast unit in overall slow group going way after all the AI units move, while my slightly faster group tend to have easier time with turn priority and ambushes.  But these are just observations, so who knows.  But if they hold some truth to them, then I can see gravedigger being this light unit you bring to ensure your party doesn't get screwed over in turn order.

 

Two classes that I got a bad impression but started to hang onto really fast is probably the vestal (obvious healer) and jester (browsed through skill, saw party stress heal, was instantly sold on the class).

 

About Swine dude, yeah I read very similar story ("I hit the little guy and got stun locked to death") when I did little research on him after my Hag debacle and avoided that pain through the power of internet.

 

Also been watching this guy Northernlion (I love that dude, he's my online rolemodel) play this game and man it's really eye opening how different some people play this game... like he does stuff that completely catches me off guard (in poor ways for him), so it's super interesting how some people just get completely caught in the theme of this game and don't bother to min max their party and also how some games just fail to teach certain players how it works (watching him and ManVsGame playing Xcom was something else, as neither figured out how cover exactly works).  Makes me appreciate games that just clicks with me without any tutorials even more.

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Haven't played for about two weeks but I've beaten Swine, Hag, and Necromancer with Crusader, Hellion, Vestal, Jester. I agree that a 2 Hellion load out (replace the Crusader) would probably work better (Crusader trades raw damage for spot healing, free torch, and stress resistance). I had touch-and-go moments with the bosses but haven't lost anyone yet; I guess I was on the lucky side of the equation and had enough surplus healing to keep deathblows at bay.

 

I've seen spamming on the DD forums about how 4 Hellion parties are ideal due to front-loaded alpha strikes and ability to strike all enemy ranks; I would agree with this, given the caveat that if things start to go south, you're operating without a buffer.

 

Trying to level each class to max resolve to see how they play, but the four classes above seem to be the best all-rounders and and the rest are situational for certain dungeon types. If there's another marking or heavy stunning class I could see the Bounty Hunter getting prominence as a heavy hitting finisher (collect bounty, finish him) with control mechanisms (pull, stun grenade).

 

Edit: I would have probably gotten killed by the Swine boss but I was spoiled about the rage mechanic in another board and so knew to <spoiler> until the boss was down.

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I was a bit angry about that at first, but it's probably one of the more exciting parts of this whole playthrough, the clawing back afterwards. Sometimes I don't want to go too far towards ideal results. Like all those spotless missions in XCOM endgame? Gets kinda boring.

 

That Hellion probably got another nerf coming I guess. Maybe just to her insanely strong pendants at least. I played around with the Grave Robber for a bit, but that was before the stage coach even presented me with a Bounty Hunter or decent Jester so I was just looking for somebody who could attack from third position. Probably not a lot of use beyond that general versatility of moving up, then fading back with stuns and self-buffs. Now I use the Bounty Hunter for hitting from the back line, stuns and pulls. Or just the Jester.

 

I am kind of fond of the Occultist though. The Vestal is definitely the more reliably healer, but I don't mind the bleed to much since most folk seem to resist that reliably, which turns him into something of an erratic healer. Sometimes I get exactly zero points out of healing out of that guy, other times he instantly patches a comrade back up to full health. Most times it doesn't seem to be necessary to be pumping out heals constantly, and in those cases he just offers a bit more damage than the Vestal, I think. Abyssal Artillery is pretty good for targetting the back lines, or you can bring the debuffs. Didn't get to test the synergies with the Bounty Hunter yet though.

 

Outside of boss runs and other missions that require extra safety, I've also taken to sending people out for torchless runs. With upgraded skills, weapons, the buff from total darkness and battle ballad, crit chances get around 30% easily, and at that point, people seem to be landing them reliably enough to take care of the extra stress. The usefulness of EVEN MORE LOOT! definitely rubs up against the limits of the backpack though, plenty of times when you fill that up with good stuff either way.

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Trying to level each class to max resolve to see how they play, but the four classes above seem to be the best all-rounders and and the rest are situational for certain dungeon types. If there's another marking or heavy stunning class I could see the Bounty Hunter getting prominence as a heavy hitting finisher (collect bounty, finish him) with control mechanisms (pull, stun grenade).

 

Bounty hunter's execute has to be one of the weirdest skill, design wise.  I mean, it lets you kill stunned target faster... except that stunned targets usually needs to be killed the least because they are... stunned.  Like, what's up with that?  It's puzzling.

 

I was a bit angry about that at first, but it's probably one of the more exciting parts of this whole playthrough, the clawing back afterwards. Sometimes I don't want to go too far towards ideal results. Like all those spotless missions in XCOM endgame? Gets kinda boring.

 

That Hellion probably got another nerf coming I guess. Maybe just to her insanely strong pendants at least. I played around with the Grave Robber for a bit, but that was before the stage coach even presented me with a Bounty Hunter or decent Jester so I was just looking for somebody who could attack from third position. Probably not a lot of use beyond that general versatility of moving up, then fading back with stuns and self-buffs. Now I use the Bounty Hunter for hitting from the back line, stuns and pulls. Or just the Jester.

 

I am kind of fond of the Occultist though. The Vestal is definitely the more reliably healer, but I don't mind the bleed to much since most folk seem to resist that reliably, which turns him into something of an erratic healer. Sometimes I get exactly zero points out of healing out of that guy, other times he instantly patches a comrade back up to full health. Most times it doesn't seem to be necessary to be pumping out heals constantly, and in those cases he just offers a bit more damage than the Vestal, I think. Abyssal Artillery is pretty good for targetting the back lines, or you can bring the debuffs. Didn't get to test the synergies with the Bounty Hunter yet though.

 

Outside of boss runs and other missions that require extra safety, I've also taken to sending people out for torchless runs. With upgraded skills, weapons, the buff from total darkness and battle ballad, crit chances get around 30% easily, and at that point, people seem to be landing them reliably enough to take care of the extra stress. The usefulness of EVEN MORE LOOT! definitely rubs up against the limits of the backpack though, plenty of times when you fill that up with good stuff either way.

Ah the neverending struggle of designers in regard to persistent progression vs snowballing...

 

Occultist is IMO the best example of what this game should be all about...  Lots of interesting  skills with bit of ROFL RNG related skill (a heal that could possibly end up hurting you more?)... too bad about current balance (combat allows and favors quick and decisive end outside of griefing loner for healing) that makes him bit too 'cutesy', exact opposite of helion which is all about brute forcing.

 

I think it would be cool to see overall damage nerf to EVERYTHING in the game, including the enemy so that we are encouraged to consider control elements more than now.  Like say, everything did half the damage.  I think occultist and bounty hunter's pull/push's value would dramatically increase, along with 'fun' factor involved.

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Overall damage nerf would limit the alpha strike dps group considerably (4x Hellion) with the side effect of increasing the value of +crit% (simultaneous killer + stress reduction).

 

There are also easy/punishing ways to discourage stacking, such as traps or corridor conditions that bleed/blight/stress all characters instead of just one (favoring support characters), room-specific conditions (room inflicts blight during combat), global conditions ("The Darkness Comes", extra stress to all characters but Occultists, favoring bringing Crusaders for stress resistance).

 

I guess I"m waiting to see what'll be in the last two dungeon areas.

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