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I really don't want more XP. This game gives you way too much XP as it is.
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# ? Dec 5, 2015 20:50 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 13:35 |
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Carcer posted:A neat thing with highwayman comic is that the jagged glass at the end looks like the stress/affliction symbol. The stress symbol itself is a neat little recurring visual motif throughout the game, almost everything in the game displays it somewhat. The family coat of arms, the Necromancer's robes, an upside down version appears in the Warrens, the Drowned Crew's anchor, the cultist helmets, the list goes on and on. I was pretty happy to see it show up in the comic as well.
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# ? Dec 5, 2015 23:12 |
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DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:the darkest dungeon will contain enemies who stress out your heroes by making them responsible for the deaths of children Actually this sounds plausible. Enemies based on who you send in so that there isn't any obvious dream team for the final dungeon and everyone gets hosed.
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# ? Dec 6, 2015 00:46 |
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I'm expecting the Ancestor to show up in some form or another, since he's done nothing but babble in a ghostly voice from the moment the player came near the estate.
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# ? Dec 6, 2015 00:57 |
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Pittsburgh Lambic posted:I'm expecting the Ancestor to show up in some form or another, since he's done nothing but babble in a ghostly voice from the moment the player came near the estate. At this point if the Ancestor isn't the end boss I'll be massively disappointed
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# ? Dec 6, 2015 04:28 |
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Soothing Vapors posted:At this point if the Ancestor isn't the end boss I'll be massively disappointed I'm imagining a two-phase fight where his husk shambles out of the shadows and harasses you with a bunch of bizarre low-damage high-stress attacks, then explodes into an enormous, room-filling cosmic doombringer.
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# ? Dec 6, 2015 05:32 |
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DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:the darkest dungeon will contain enemies who stress out your heroes by making them responsible for the deaths of children
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# ? Dec 6, 2015 06:15 |
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So is this game still set to be "finished" some time this year? Did the full release get delayed until 2016? VVV Man that's way too close to when Xcom 2 comes out Internet Kraken fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Dec 6, 2015 |
# ? Dec 6, 2015 07:37 |
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January 19, 2016
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# ? Dec 6, 2015 07:41 |
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I'll want to see where the story is going, too. From what I've seen so far, the player character is an unseen entity and one of the Ancestor's descendants, who lived at the Estate before it went to hell. When everything was absolutely hosed, the Ancestor wrote a letter to the player character from the ruins of his mansion, then shot himself. The mansion was left in the hands of cultists and undead, brigands took over the roads completely, and the spreading fungi and mutations of the Weald blocked off any remaining access. How the letter got to the player character I don't know, but it's possible that the insane Caretaker brought it with him when he left the Estate, and tracked down the player character to deliver it to him. The player character recruited Reynauld and Dismas and set out towards the Estate in a family carriage driven by the Caretaker, who promptly crashed it and fled to the Estate alone. Reynauld and Dismas carved a path through the brigands, opening a supply line to the Hamlet and allowing entrepreneurs to re-open the abandoned inn, smithy, sanitarium, and so forth. A steady stream of adventurers began to arrive, with varying goals. Many are religious and seek to purge the Estate of evil spirits and things whose very existence is blasphemy; others, such as the Highwayman and Man-At-Arms, are haunted by an immense guilt that's driven them to seek redemption at the Estate. Either way, the player character's been using them as footsoldiers, provisioning them and sending them on quests but not accompanying them as far as I can tell. What's not clear is why the player character is doing any of this. The letter said to reclaim his birthright and deliver his family from the Darkest Dungeon, which is pretty broad. The player could be there to seal off the dungeon and purge the Estate of corruption so as to make it habitable again, he could be there to raze the Estate to the ground and erase the atrocities that took place there from his family's history, or he could be there to rescue somebody from the Darkest Dungeon itself. All we know so far is that the player character is sending soldiers to map out the dungeons, retrieve artifacts, and occasionally destroy one of the Ancestor's biggest mistakes. One thought that comes to mind is that the game only looks like this because it's Early Access, and the full release will have more structure and clearer overarching objectives. Currently all we have is "Caretaker Goals" which is a massive checklist of bosses to wreck and another checklist of hero classes to get to resolve level 6. I'm curious to see what that shrinks to in the full release; I feel like I'm just dicking around and killing bosses for the sake of killing bosses at the moment. Though then again, it's possible that we're actually playing as the Caretaker and just having a jolly good time getting wasted and sending people out to die.
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# ? Dec 6, 2015 07:51 |
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so the abomination straight up ruins dudes right now. im expecting him to get dialed back a bit. also, has anyone else run into the collector yet? that guy was a fuckin shock, tell you what. paranoid randroid fucked around with this message at 11:06 on Dec 6, 2015 |
# ? Dec 6, 2015 11:03 |
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the player character is pretty clearly going to follow in the footsteps of the ancestor, get corrupted, and go similarly wacky-evil.
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# ? Dec 6, 2015 11:07 |
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then you start new game+
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# ? Dec 6, 2015 11:08 |
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"hmm, i've got a letter from my Ancestors"
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# ? Dec 6, 2015 11:09 |
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Need to go play with the latest patch still, but once you learn (or look-up) curio interactions, and figure out some decent plans for bringing supplies, you should be making enough money to not need "grinding" missions. Also since costs for stuff like stress relief, upgrading, etc have all been scaled to level, the adage of "run level 0 with no provisions and sack them" is slow and boring. If you want to run a lower group for money/heirlooms, do this. Getting a group to level 1 and grabbing the first upgrade to weapon, armor, and main skills is cheap and makes them hugely effective. A proper level 1 party can kill any of the low level bosses in a 0 light run (as of last patch), so even if the patch has mucked with that they should still be crushing dungeons. Aim for medium or long length missions, look at what you want before going in (for example, I want deeds and gold) then prioritize loot. Don't worry about fixing traits or things, but stress relief is pretty cheap. If you're just running them once for a week off for your other groups, you might not even really need to de-stress them. To cycle in a new group, recruit the replacements to run the last dungeon in a set of "2 newbies, 2 level 2s". Now you have a new set of level 1 guys to repeat as you wish, and if any of the other guys were a class that you want to take higher, they're at level 3 and you can work that in. The death's door debuff is the same that was in effect before, it just now persists so that the "oh he got knocked to death's door, better give him a 1hp heal" thing gets nerfed. poo poo like prophet or swine king where in general you don't lose people straight up very often, but is easy to get knocked to death's door now become quite a bit rougher. Though this also makes those loving giants in the weald even worse, gently caress those guys. In terms of general game difficulty, it has gotten harder mostly in terms of them removing or limiting exploitative game strategies. For example chain stunning an enemy to heal/de-stress to full. Other things like corpses make the go-to strategy obsolete (mash attacks at rank1 until win), but open up other things and help out weaker abilities. So the game is harder, but not much so if you weren't relying on a plan that got nerfed. They're also trying to make the difficulty curve over the course of a game more even, which is really hard in any rpg. Edit: the death's door debuff that lasts until end of quest isn't that bad. -2 acc, -5% dmg, -1 spd, +10% stress damage. ZypherIM fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Dec 6, 2015 |
# ? Dec 6, 2015 15:03 |
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All good info. One other thing: higher level missions feature new rider abilities and AI for monsters, generally featuring debuffs that leave the target more vulnerable to other enemy attacks. Sometimes it makes fights more interesting, sometimes it just doesn't do much of anything. The good news is, this means a lot of nasty enemies act in a more predictable and somewhat easier way. e.g. ghoul now likes to open with his mediocre melee attack which includes a minor stress resist debuff (which still means less stress than if he just spammed Howl like he randomly would before.) Bone captains like to use their regular melee on round 1 which now includes a stun resist debuff and then ground pound round 2, instead of randomly deciding to stun the whole party round 1. Blighted giants like to shuffle the party round 1 instead of dropping a tree trunk to the face right off the bat (this one is pretty mean in its own right but can be managed a lot easier than 40 damage crits.)
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# ? Dec 6, 2015 16:51 |
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The other thing about running level 0 guys is that you start with 20 stress for entering a dungeon higher level than the character, which also sets you back right from the start. So far full dark runs in the new patch are a lot dicier, which is good. Edit: Can't run from shambler on round 1 looks like. So pretty much going to take some damage from running into one. Round 2 it let me start trying to run. E2: Going to say they've got the "you're delaying combat" setup over-tuned at the moment, or bugged. Having multiple guys damaging the enemy (normal attacks, not stuns/debuffs) and still having reinforcements show up is.. not interesting. I wasn't even trying anything, just my random hodge-podge turned out to be really lovely at killing the last rank 1 guy. I'm liking the new changes to monster abilities, but they really need to do a damage pass on a lot of things. For example the 4 mushroom weald encounter is pretty crazy on the damage it shits out with nothing you can really do about it (front guys have prot and high hp, do respectable damage and bonus to mark, the back guys have solid hp and blight all over the place). Also I either got amazing bad luck, or they tweaked the dark penalties without showing them anywhere. Talking around a 30% crit rate on my guys (usually in a streak, so it'd be 3 crits in 4 swings sort of deal), and if I managed to get up to 33% deathblow resist I would be amazed. This was over 6 or 7 runs. I think they've got poo poo pushed to a spot that a new estate is in a really rough spot, and a new player is probably going to just get frustrated and quit. ZypherIM fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Dec 6, 2015 |
# ? Dec 6, 2015 17:19 |
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ZypherIM posted:I think they've got poo poo pushed to a spot that a new estate is in a really rough spot, and a new player is probably going to just get frustrated and quit. anecdotal i know but im kind of seeing the opposite in my game. the level 1 runs are more or less where theyve always been in terms of difficulty, but at level 2 things have gotten really brutal. i did a coves mission where i got nothing but groups of four spearfish that just savaged me. they pull guys out of marching order with their spear attacks now on top of everything else, you see, and i think i made it about five rooms before my guys fell into a stress cascade and i had to bail. im glad they re-did the heart attack mechanic not to cause instadeath because retreating from the last fight in that attempt topped two of my party members out on stress and made them have coronaries. it was insane. i mean on one hand, its rude as heck. but on the other, wow guys are dying now!! i kind of liked that houndmaster a lot, but dudes are supposed to die in this game. paranoid randroid fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Dec 6, 2015 |
# ? Dec 6, 2015 19:27 |
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DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:the darkest dungeon will contain enemies who stress out your heroes by making them responsible for the deaths of children
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# ? Dec 6, 2015 20:10 |
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ZypherIM posted:I'm liking the new changes to monster abilities, but they really need to do a damage pass on a lot of things. For example the 4 mushroom weald encounter is pretty crazy on the damage it shits out with nothing you can really do about it (front guys have prot and high hp, do respectable damage and bonus to mark, the back guys have solid hp and blight all over the place). Plague doc can easily stun the back row before they can mark, giving ample time to kill them off. Same for teams with multiple long range stuns (vestal, bounty hunter etc.) Arbalest can clear marks. Man-at-Arms and Houndmaster can guard marked characters and laugh at the scratcher's attacks. Teams with frontloaded damage have a decent shot at wiping the artillery before it can mark. There are lots of ways to deal with that encounter; if the front line fungus wasn't so beefy it would be a joke. I find the 2x mushroom 2x cultist fight a lot more interesting. At veteran/champion tier the cultists' incantation has a mark target effect, they're fast, and they're smart enough to switch to push/pull spam after dropping their marks. So instead of unimpressive blight damage they're rearranging your party order while the fungal scratchers bash away for ~19 average damage. It takes a much faster offense or good defensive tactics to handle them.
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# ? Dec 6, 2015 21:37 |
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The Collector feels kinda like a chump. He gets ruined quite easily by any person who can hit the rear, and his heads aren't really that good at dealing damage either.
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 00:32 |
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paranoid randroid posted:also, has anyone else run into the collector yet? that guy was a fuckin shock, tell you what. I just bought the drat game and he showed up on my second quest ever. Really fun
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 00:41 |
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Yashichi posted:I just bought the drat game and he showed up on my second quest ever. Really fun I can see no better introduction to Darkest Dungeon.
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 00:48 |
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paranoid randroid posted:anecdotal i know but im kind of seeing the opposite in my game. the level 1 runs are more or less where theyve always been in terms of difficulty, but at level 2 things have gotten really brutal. i did a coves mission where i got nothing but groups of four spearfish that just savaged me. they pull guys out of marching order with their spear attacks now on top of everything else, you see, and i think i made it about five rooms before my guys fell into a stress cascade and i had to bail. im glad they re-did the heart attack mechanic not to cause instadeath because retreating from the last fight in that attempt topped two of my party members out on stress and made them have coronaries. it was insane. My first level 5 cove fight had my A-team get totally wrecked because I started off on the mini-boss. Super high prot, high damage crab that also liked to put 30 damage bleeds or something ridiculous on my guys every turn. In addition to two healers / buffers constantly topping it off and giving it damage buffs.
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 00:55 |
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DraconicImpulse posted:I can see no better introduction to Darkest Dungeon. My introduction to Darkest Dungeon was running into an Eldritch Altar in the first hallway of the first dungeon and giving it a torch to see what would happen.
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 01:15 |
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amuayse posted:The Collector feels kinda like a chump. He gets ruined quite easily by any person who can hit the rear, and his heads aren't really that good at dealing damage either. How do you fight the new minibosses? Are they just random encounters in Black as Pitch?
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 01:41 |
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Collector just seems to be a rare hallway battle. It can happen even if you are at full brightness, but he doesn't surprise and shuffle your group like Shambler does. I'd say he's comparable to a weaker Necromancer of the respective dungeon difficulty level. amuayse fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Dec 7, 2015 |
# ? Dec 7, 2015 01:57 |
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Pittsburgh Lambic posted:My introduction to Darkest Dungeon was running into an Eldritch Altar in the first hallway of the first dungeon and giving it a torch to see what would happen. This seems like it deserves a combination of and .
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 02:24 |
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paranoid randroid posted:also, has anyone else run into the collector yet? that guy was a fuckin shock, tell you what. He keeps showing up when I'm trying to kill bosses. At this point, I think he might be the mastermind behind this whole affair because he keeps getting Team Rocket'ed and then popping back up right on schedule. The headcage is giving me bloodborne vibes. Dude was totally part of the school of mensis.
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 03:29 |
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The entry for the Collector's encounter in the data files has some tags that imply he only shows up when your inventory is mostly full, which may or may not refer to treasure. No clue how it actually works or if those tags even work.
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 03:34 |
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Maybe I'll try a new estate with full light for level 0s and no light otherwise, see how it goes. Perhaps the changes make no light level 0s lovely beyond annoyance. To be fair, I was still progressing nicely doing that, just felt bleh. I'll argue that a level 0-1 party that doesn't have full upgrades isn't able to handle a 4 mushroom party very well, though after upgrades and skill selction etc it can do fine. A lot of other encounters can be a bit dicey, though with the mark changes I almost feel like the 4 mushroom encounter is worse than the bandit fiesta (big bandit, knife bandit, gun bandit). Most of the things you posted don't work well unless you're at or above recommended level, minus man-at-arms. He actually shines in this case (and fits into my favorite party arb-occ-XXX-man, with XXX being slot 2 dps of perferred flavor). The close 2nd suggestion is basically bring a plague doc with back row stun and cure bleed/blight, which I've found is a bit too strong. I'd like to see the damage or debuff bits of her buffed and monster bits weakened. The perfect example is the big crab in the cove. With no PD, he does arterial pinch for a poo poo-ton of damage, but with her that move does almost nothing (0 to 1 tics). Without that move he is no threat at all, so bringing a PD to cove is nearly mandatory (I won't bring a group to cove without her). You can do it no problem without her, but bringing her entirely for debuff removal nullifies a very threatening enemy, which sort of goes against the spirit of the rest of the game. Basically I feel like the new ineractions of enemy skills are really cool and add a dimension to the AI that was lacking before, and chances for you to act. Sort of a "you see them mark and then you deal with it" situation. The issue I have is that essentially the entry level and lower skill players are being punished even more, which sadly will pull players out of continual play. I've got 100+ hours into the game, and still have a blast, but I can see people not enjoying poo poo that happens. I'd say to exaggerate the AI even more at low levels, sort of a "take a turn or two to build up, then big damage/stress" situation. This would train new players to either counter the encounter as it does poo poo, or proactively kill/scramble the enemies so they can't do the big combo. Ideally the low level poo poo can be done with nearly no risk to the heroes provided proper play. Higher levels introduce new mechanics or more unavoidable stress/dmg. If that throws off the expected rewards per run or whatever, tweak it so higher level dungeons give more poo poo and lower level only gives enough to realistically increase town to a middling level.
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 08:15 |
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ZypherIM posted:Most of the things you posted don't work well unless you're at or above recommended level, minus man-at-arms. He actually shines in this case (and fits into my favorite party arb-occ-XXX-man, with XXX being slot 2 dps of perferred flavor). The close 2nd suggestion is basically bring a plague doc with back row stun and cure bleed/blight, which I've found is a bit too strong. I'd like to see the damage or debuff bits of her buffed and monster bits weakened. The perfect example is the big crab in the cove. With no PD, he does arterial pinch for a poo poo-ton of damage, but with her that move does almost nothing (0 to 1 tics). Without that move he is no threat at all, so bringing a PD to cove is nearly mandatory (I won't bring a group to cove without her). You can do it no problem without her, but bringing her entirely for debuff removal nullifies a very threatening enemy, which sort of goes against the spirit of the rest of the game. I feel that this is a problem with the crab design more than the PD. I find that cure bleed/blight is balanced by how extremely situational it is: even when there's someone to cure, there's often more important things to spend actions on (obviously not talking about the crab fight here, since that one's a no-brainer.) Conventional healing is handy because you can you can easily let someone take 6/9/12 damage from DOT and find a time to heal it off later when you have a chance, but curing bleed/blight is now or never and if you had to stop to disable/kill something your chance may be gone forever. I'll agree that rookie parties aren't going to be able to reliably alpha strike fungal artillery (even if they know how to build a party capable of it), but really the only dangerous part of the fight is that they naturally focus fire. The scratchers do scary amounts of damage but the artillery is really weak; the apprentice level AI spends half its time pinging already-marked characters with 1 damage marks and even if they decide to use their blight attack it's not that strong, so the group as a whole doesn't do much more than an average amount of damage and the damage output is concentrated in the front rank (which has no particular resistance to stun, providing another avenue to handle the fight.) So yeah, a pretty rough fight for new players but it should be a decent learning experience.
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 15:44 |
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PD isn't mandatory for cove at all. Bleed resist trinkets and/or bandages counter arterial pinch just fine. Even a stun buffed with trinkets (eg hound master with cudgel and stun stone) will work in a pinch. (Pun absolutely intended.)
Wafflecopper fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Dec 7, 2015 |
# ? Dec 7, 2015 15:51 |
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I really like the houndsmaster, he can sit on the back row, toss out a bleed on all enemies in a single turn, then he can block one of your dudes who is getting pummeled and consistently self-heal. Really great. Also the changes to the Leper have made him a lot stronger, consistent self-heals for 6 and the occasional crit heal for 12 are pretty amazing. Curious what role the merchant will play. Spends money to pacify enemies? Something like that? Pittsburgh Lambic posted:My introduction to Darkest Dungeon was running into an Eldritch Altar in the first hallway of the first dungeon and giving it a torch to see what would happen. I just fought my first shambler and jesus christ that team was not at all prepared.
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 16:08 |
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Zaphod42 posted:I really like the houndsmaster, he can sit on the back row, toss out a bleed on all enemies in a single turn, then he can block one of your dudes who is getting pummeled and consistently self-heal. Really great. Apparently the plan is he has a blunderbuss you can jam treasure and items into to make it do damage (possibly with different effects depending on the item).
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 16:09 |
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I haven't played this in a long time but am getting a new computer soon and that feels like a good time to dust it off. Does the game have cloud saves or am I going to have to start over?
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 17:04 |
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So I bought this semi-blind after seeing it on a stream and it owns quite a lot and while I don't regret my purchase one bit, I did not catch that it was in Early Access so I'm planning on going cold turkey until the game's finalized. Just one thing, though: what's the story on the Backer-exclusive class? This falls well within Caveat Emptor but is Merchant said Backer class or is it going to be something else?
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 17:23 |
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Cape Cod Crab Chip posted:So I bought this semi-blind after seeing it on a stream and it owns quite a lot and while I don't regret my purchase one bit, I did not catch that it was in Early Access so I'm planning on going cold turkey until the game's finalized. Just one thing, though: what's the story on the Backer-exclusive class? This falls well within Caveat Emptor but is Merchant said Backer class or is it going to be something else? Merchant is for everybody, the backer-exclusive class is just a reskin of an existing class.
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 17:25 |
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Cape Cod Crab Chip posted:So I bought this semi-blind after seeing it on a stream and it owns quite a lot and while I don't regret my purchase one bit, I did not catch that it was in Early Access so I'm planning on going cold turkey until the game's finalized. Just one thing, though: what's the story on the Backer-exclusive class? This falls well within Caveat Emptor but is Merchant said Backer class or is it going to be something else? Several things. First, the merchant isn't being released until after the full release, post the end of EA. Second, the merchant comes free to everybody. Its just a backer-designed class, not a backer exclusive class. There is a backer-exclusive class coming I believe but its just going to be a class variant on something that already exists AFAIK.
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 17:27 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 13:35 |
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Gabriel Pope posted:Merchant is for everybody, the backer-exclusive class is just a reskin of an existing class. Cool, that's a relief. I'll still be gazing at it forlornly, I bet, but the game as it exists right now was worth the price of admission anyway. Knowing there's more coming down the line is both tantalizing and excruciating.
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# ? Dec 7, 2015 17:27 |