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Scrub-Niggurath posted:my problem with the pacing is that it feels like the whole 'characters are meant to be disposable' still applied after they hit rank 3 or so. Because once you start running veteran and champion dungeons, heroes end up becoming a bigger and bigger gold investment. I wouldn't mind losing guys to champion dungeon poo poo if it didn't mean over 30k gold down the tubes. So I end up having to grind for upgrades but can't because my guys are too high level. So it becomes this ridiculous scenario where my only option is to fire/suicide mission some of my guys, losing even more invested gold, just so that I can grind more gold so the replacement guys can compete I had this problem a little bit early on but it mostly disappeared once I upgraded the wagon a few times to increase my roster size limit. By the time you've got twenty or so characters levelled up too high for Apprentice dungeons, you should have at least one fully-geared-out A-team at level 5 or 6 that can do Champion dungeons in reasonable safety. If you're feeling confident enough you might even want to do a Darkest Dungeon run with them to free up their slots in the roster.
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Feb 10, 2016 11:41
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Okay so I've come up with my favorite party of all time: Occultist / (Houndmaster/Arbalest) / Abomination / Abomination I meant for this to be a suicide squad, but the amount of healing and stress healing is actually pretty incredible, I can go into a dungeon with notorches and max stress and come out fully refreshed. Having a lot of fun with it, anyway.
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Feb 10, 2016 11:43
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Chocobo posted:Okay so I've come up with my favorite party of all time: I've had a lot of good luck with the combination of Arbalest and another healer, but personally I'd put Arbalest in the back and Occultist in the third position. There are a few position-4-specific trinkets that work very well for the Arbalest, and I like having the Occultist's dagger skill available for when I need to do damage to the front lines. I guess one drawback is that Occultist is a fair bit squishier than Arbalest and position 3 tends to take more attacks, but in my experience it's not a huge difference and is counterbalanced by the fact that Arbalest can target position 3 with heals but not 4.
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Feb 10, 2016 12:30
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Bad Seafood posted:This game has become my second-most played game on Steam. It may possibly become my first before the end. You answered the letter. Now like me, you are a part of this place.
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Feb 10, 2016 12:57
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Zombie Samurai posted:My new arbalest got vomited on and it made her bulimic.
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Feb 10, 2016 13:10
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Scrub-Niggurath posted:my problem with the pacing is that it feels like the whole 'characters are meant to be disposable' still applied after they hit rank 3 or so. Because once you start running veteran and champion dungeons, heroes end up becoming a bigger and bigger gold investment. I wouldn't mind losing guys to champion dungeon poo poo if it didn't mean over 30k gold down the tubes. So I end up having to grind for upgrades but can't because my guys are too high level. So it becomes this ridiculous scenario where my only option is to fire/suicide mission some of my guys, losing even more invested gold, just so that I can grind more gold so the replacement guys can compete The "characters are meant to be disposable" isn't from the game or the devs, but from people giving advice to new players. The reason for this is that people will play poorly and end up with a guy that just isn't cost effective to fix, but are attached to them so they dump the resources into them (ie level 0 with 100 stress+affliction+poo poo traits). Also, that was written back before the re-balancing was done on training costs, which quickly makes almost anyone worth fixing. If you have full level 3 upgrades it is worth it for sure, and even level 2s are probably worth investing in. You shouldn't need to grind for upgrades if you have a decent sized roster, unless you are literally dumping all your heirlooms into the stress relief buildings instead of the upgrade buildings. If you prioritize upgrades and use a few busts for the abbey for any stress relief things, you should be able to nearly keep up on upgrades across your roster. You can definitely keep up enough to functionally beat the various dungeons with sub-optimal upgrades, but you might need to make sure you're fielding good parties and playing well. Many of the bosses are actually do-able with below level upgrades as well, but really know what you're doing before going into those.
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Feb 10, 2016 14:36
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Characters lv2-4 really shouldn't be getting stressed so much they can't just bleed most of it off from the weekly stress reduction, and if your roster is big enough you shouldn't need to keep sending them out week after week. Characters lv0-1 who get afflicted can get tossed out. Characters lv5+ might risk some high stress but it shouldn't be commonplace, so it should be reasonably affordable to destress them. "All my guys are really stressed" is symptomatic of something being the matter, be it party composition, poor investment of resources, failing to acquire great trinkets when they're offered (if a boss doesn't offer a good Very Rare that you want, don't do them that week), something. One run going pear-shaped and leading to high stress is unfortunate and bad luck can happen. Multiple runs ending like that indicates something amiss. Once I had good trinkets anyone who was still under lv3 just did full dark runs. Pulled in way more loot that way and with trinkets like Moon Rings your guys will massively overpower Apprentice dungeons. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that for Veteran/Champion but you can pull in about as many Heirlooms and about as much gold in Apprentice dungeons. I didn't set foot in a Champion dungeon until I had lv5 skills, much as it sucked to have 6 or so guys out of commission for a while. It's definitely a weird, unintuitive notion, that the "safe" or conservative way to play is to play slowly and stall progression, and they clearly wanted you to do the opposite given NG+'s requirements. But doing it the way they want you to do it is, well, dumb. I think that's the fundamental disconnect with the game design, the designers rigged the slot machine against you and then get flustered when you make very small plays and walk away to a looser machine when it looks like playing on will lose too much.
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Feb 10, 2016 15:43
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I'm no expert at this game, but the  in me has come to believe a few of the skills are head and shoulders better than everything else. It might be nice if these skills weren't so unique and other classes had analogies to them.#1: YAWP. Double stun on the front line, there's nothing like it. Very high stun chance, so high that it's often worth it to just try to stun a 2nd time. Great for the beginning of combat as well as the end of combat, you can stun the last 2 enemies while you heal up if you need to. #2: Blinding gas. Almost as good as Yawp, but you have much less opportunities to get 2 targets. It's also more important to go first since it's usually more damaging and disruptive if the back row enemies get an attack off rather than the front row enemies. #3: Weakening Curse. This is such a great skill on the size2 enemies like Swinetaurs and the Treebranch Smackdown guy, it neuters their damage while you finish them off. Also wonderful against like half the bosses. #4: Target whistle. Lowering prot is so nice against the size2 enemies, it takes ~5 attacks to kill them rather than ~10 on champion. After having dungeon with this team have things go so smoothly, it's annoying to go in with other characters with maybe like a single target stun and have to let them eat so many attacks, they're bound to get into trouble when they don't have so much control as with Hellion, PD, Occultist, Houndmaster.
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Feb 10, 2016 16:24
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Have two lepers on the frontlines with berserker masks and ancestor's pen/signet(or other +damage or +acc items) and you'll make short work of the fat enemies anyways 
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Feb 10, 2016 16:30
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Nakar posted:It's definitely a weird, unintuitive notion, that the "safe" or conservative way to play is to play slowly and stall progression, and they clearly wanted you to do the opposite given NG+'s requirements. But doing it the way they want you to do it is, well, dumb. I think that's the fundamental disconnect with the game design, the designers rigged the slot machine against you and then get flustered when you make very small plays and walk away to a looser machine when it looks like playing on will lose too much. I dunno, I don't think it's that far off the designers' intent. The combination of level-gating lower tier content and ramping up difficulty on higher tier content seems designed to make players bench the leading edge of their roster and spread the load around. The endgame is designed around having 16-20 characters and that relies on getting players to keep running apprentice/veteran missions during the midgame instead of moving up to champion once they have 6-8 level 5s.
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Feb 10, 2016 16:47
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Node posted:That is what I realized, way after the fact. Increase the roster size via http://www.nexusmods.com/darkestdungeon/mods/34/ or editing something in the ini. Should solve your problem without really feeling like cheating.
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Feb 10, 2016 16:57
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Okay, I've never fought the Siren before, and I'm leveling up an Abomination for the first time. Is Occultist/Houndmaster/Abomination/Hellion a decent set of Siren slayers? I want to switch the Houndmaster out for a Grave Robber so I can smash everything as fast as possible, but I'm worried about the Abomination freaking everyone out by the finish. I do have the trinket that makes the transformation do 25% less stress, though.
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Feb 10, 2016 17:01
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Zombie Samurai posted:Okay, I've never fought the Siren before, and I'm leveling up an Abomination for the first time. Is Occultist/Houndmaster/Abomination/Hellion a decent set of Siren slayers? I want to switch the Houndmaster out for a Grave Robber so I can smash everything as fast as possible, but I'm worried about the Abomination freaking everyone out by the finish. I do have the trinket that makes the transformation do 25% less stress, though. I wouldn't wanna take the Houndmaster into the Cove because everything up to the boss has a high bleed resist. I don't remember if the Siren does but its worth considering. The Graverobber is hard hitting and useful with her stun. Abomination shouldn't freak everyone out by the end as long as you're not transforming every fight. His whip and bile are perfectly serviceable. 
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Feb 10, 2016 17:26
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kickascii posted:I'm no expert at this game, but the 1) Yawp is pretty great, but it comes with significant drawbacks. The obvious one is that your hellion takes a huge dodge and dmg hit, which means the poo poo you're stunning better not swing at her and your team needs to clean up. If you're actually stunning 2 guys that is a really hard situation to have happen, so the drawback of "no loving dodge" is really big. It also lasts a few rounds so you don't want to use it in some hall fights because it can last into the first round of a room fight. The next drawback is less obvious, but you're spending a round having one of the biggest hitters in the game *not* attack. Finally, you're taking YAWP over one of these four skills: default attack, if-it-bleeds, iron swan, or self-dot cure. 2) Blinding gas is a lot better than yawp in my opinion. You don't have a strong attack to be doing otherwise, great trinket support for it, and there are mean things in the back. On the other hand, most of the time your party is set up to be murdering poo poo in their back, so a range 2 stun isn't quite as amazing as it seems on the tin. If you don't go before both back enemies it isn't much more useful than someone who stuns 1 back enemy while your team murders the other one. People like houndmaster or bounty hunter can then also stun people in the front (and they have higher base chance to stun). 3) Weakening curse is great for very specific things that you mentioned (vestal gets a version of it but she needs to be in ranks 1 or 2 to use). It is also basically useless for anything else. So it competes with a bunch of other really useful skills (basically everything but his stun you want to take), but being so useful for those enemies that it can be worth it to slot. 4) They changed bounty hunter's mark to give -prot as well, so it isn't unique. It is a great debuff, and works well with marks. If you build a non-marking party though, you'll have higher non-mark damage so it sort of ends up as a wash comparatively (more hits than a marked big guy but less than the non-marked big guy, plus killing everything else faster). Bosses are obviously different, and marking parties really shine extra on them.
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Feb 10, 2016 17:38
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How Rude posted:I'm astonished at how the 15% damage increase on the Leper turned him from "meh" into "holy loving poo poo I can't stop killing things". I think he's fine now that you can focus on dropping +ACC on him without sacrificing his damage. When did the 15% damage increase happen?
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Feb 10, 2016 17:42
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About 2-3 weeks ago, with a recent patch.
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Feb 10, 2016 17:50
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ZypherIM posted:
Ooohh, I didn't realize they changed the bounty hunter mark so it's -prot! The vestal is a character that seemed so good to me in apprentice and veteran dungeons, but once you get to champion she really starts to lag behind. She's bad on the most important turn of the fight (turn 1) and when mobs stop doing medium damage and start stunning, shuffling and critting when they attack, the group heal is not going to bail you out.
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Feb 10, 2016 18:27
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Is there a handy list somewhere of which classes are best in which dungeons? Ie, crusader in ruins, etc?
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Feb 10, 2016 18:41
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I still get good use out of champion vestals, but I think you have to boost her with +healing trinkets to keep her relevant. She can be doing 5-7 healing per party member for her group heal if you boost her up, and she has some fine debuff potential when not healing. Her Profane Scroll trinket is really a role changer - try a position 2 Vestal sometime, you can make some weird and surprisingly strong parties with it.
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Feb 10, 2016 18:41
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How does dodge work in this game? Is it literally just accuracy - dodge = percent chance to be hit?
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Feb 10, 2016 18:55
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AnonSpore posted:How does dodge work in this game? Is it literally just accuracy - dodge = percent chance to be hit? Yup. There's an upper bound at 90% chance to hit, don't know if there's a lower bound.
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Feb 10, 2016 18:56
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Nakar posted:It's definitely a weird, unintuitive notion, that the "safe" or conservative way to play is to play slowly and stall progression, and they clearly wanted you to do the opposite given NG+'s requirements. But doing it the way they want you to do it is, well, dumb. I think that's the fundamental disconnect with the game design, the designers rigged the slot machine against you and then get flustered when you make very small plays and walk away to a looser machine when it looks like playing on will lose too much. I suspect that the difference between the correct way to play the normal game and the way you're pushed to play NG+ is intentional. If they didn't want you to take your time and stall, I think they would've put a lose condition in the normal game--a more forgiving one than NG+, but it would still be there. Part of what makes NG+ so much more punishing than the normal game is that you don't really have any choice but to make poor decisions, push on before you're ready, and take losses because you're on a pretty tight time limit. I don't think NG+ is necessarily an indication of how Red Hook intended the game to be played as much as it is a challenge to force you to play as efficiently as you possibly can. The big thing that I don't think they thought out in NG+ is the death limit. NG+ having a time limit means that deaths are already more punishing than they are in a normal run, and a TPK at Champion is already a massive setback that might well cripple you.
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Feb 10, 2016 19:00
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Mzbundifund posted:The worst part is that you can only have one of each ancestral trinket, so by selling it you put it back into the pool for you to get again later! Fun story. I did my second Shambler fight and got it again. I don't think I'm doing any more Shambler fights.
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Feb 10, 2016 19:04
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Is there a handy list somewhere of which classes are best in which dungeons? Ie, crusader in ruins, etc? well, not really. you need to think about what you're facing in each one, and outfit your guys appropriately with the relevant skills. like, you'd think Don't Bring Bleedy Characters To The Ruins, but all that means is you need to reskill them. it's a very soft sort of "characters are better here" system; more of a nice bonus than something to follow slavishly. Crusader fits the ruins quite well with +unholy damage and stress heal; Plague Doctor is amazing everywhere except Weald, where she is only exceptional; Dogman is probably bad at ruins if he's bleedspecced; Occultist gets +eldritch damage so likes the Cove; Bounty Hunter probably does alright in the warrens with his -prot mark, his +human damage, and the fact that he generally owns.
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Feb 10, 2016 19:15
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Don't rely on Bleed in the Ruins and Cove, don't rely on Blight in the Warrens and Weald. Hellion supremacy is real. Always bring a dog. That's my guide.
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Feb 10, 2016 19:18
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Is there a handy list somewhere of which classes are best in which dungeons? Ie, crusader in ruins, etc? I don't have a link to a list, but my thoughts are: Ruins: Crusader of course, guy is solid anywhere but just wrecks face here. Tons of hit points, tons of damage, there's a reason they give you a Crusader and send you to the ruins for your tutorial dungeon. Plague Doctor too, everything is really weak to blight, and the size-2 fat skeleton, the skeleton with the shield, and the gargoyles all have high PROT. Blinding Gas is great vs. goblet skeletons. Grave Robber is great for high-accuracy goblet skeleton sniping, and she also has a good blight attack to use against the beefy skeletons. Weald: Highwayman is pretty strong here - he's accurate and has a strong bleed attack. Everything here bleeds. Bounty Hunter is great too - bandits, cultists, and that annoying dodgy crone are human, and both the hag boss and the bandit cannon boss are human-type enemies. Jester is surprisngly ok here too. Lots of bleed vulnerable foes and that stupid crone can pour out a surprising amount of stress while she dodges all your attacks. Hellion for the same reasons. Very good bleed attacks, and her Adrenaline Rush lets her delete all the stupid blights on herself. All these classes have flexible attack positioning, so they are less bothered if the stupid giant shuffles your party. Warrens Houndmaster shines here - everything here is Beast type, so his normally mediocre damage is a lot stronger. His stun as always is lovely. He's great on both of the bosses here. Leper is good here. Most foes have high HP and mediocre dodge. He can also delete all the corpses in a fight which really neuters the swinetaur's ability to deal damage. Vestal I like for my healer here, there are many foes that can target past your first two ranks, so you'll be getting damage spread over your party, and her ability to party-heal is stronger than single-target healing. Her Illumination attack strongly debuffs enemy dodge, which is great when you've got a Leper in the party and you run into a madman or something. Graverobber I like here - she and the Vestal can usually kill a stress dealer on the first round of combat. Her Snuff Box camping skill lets her cure diseases, something you'll probably have to deal with here. Her blight darts are less reliable here though, consider other skills instead. Cove Occultist is great here. Bonus damage vs. everything. Try him in rank 3 so you can make use of Sacrificial Stab. Man-at-arms is really good here. His basic attack can penetrate all the way to rank 3, and both the sword fish and the shield octopus have no way to target past rank 2, (once they're in ranks 1-2 themselves) so he can guard your other frontliner and absorb all the damage himself, which synergizes well with the Occultist's strong one-target healing. Plague Doctor is nice - there's a lot of bleeding from the octopus and giant crabs, and everything here quite vulnerable to blights and stuns. Crusader is fine but nothing amazing for general use here, although he's usually able to one-shot the suicide-bomber zombie. Bring him to the Sunken Crew boss though, he makes that fight a joke.
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Feb 10, 2016 19:19
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Bring Tacticians. Don't bring phobes.
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Feb 10, 2016 19:22
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kickascii posted:Ooohh, I didn't realize they changed the bounty hunter mark so it's -prot! Just chuck the healing scroll and healing book/healing head-in-a-sack trinkets on her and she can more than handle most damage-related stuff I regularly run double Lepers up front with Berserker Masks on both and it takes some incredibly bad luck for them to drop below half health. And even then, their self-heal combined with her group heal can do 15-17 a turn, assuming no crits. Her base heal with the group heal with those trinkets is 7 on everyone or 10-12(22-24 crit) with the targeted heal, which generally does very well even with her low speed. A vestal/PD/leper/leper team works real well, even if they get shuffled it's not the end of the world since the PD can still stun something from any position, cutting down on stuff targeting you while you move about, assuming the worst-case scenario of the lineup shuffling to leper/leper/PD/vestal. Just took care of the Swine God with a vestal/PD/leper/MAA team, the MAA did nothing but spam the speed/dodge buff, meaning everyone had +27 dodge and +15 speed, which resulted in some of my guys going before Wilbur. Which is weird. But yeah, Swine God couldn't damage through the Vestal's healing + super high dodge on everyone resulting in the "random flailing" attack instead of Obliterate (x) attacks because Wilbur couldn't land marks on anyone.
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Feb 10, 2016 19:24
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Mzbundifund posted:I don't have a link to a list, but my thoughts are: Thanks for this
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Feb 10, 2016 20:00
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Redemption against a hated enemy on my way to the Brigand 12 Pounder! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AjnaUohsEs Lyrax posted:Bring Tacticians. Don't bring phobes. An Unholy Hating Crusader is a thing of beauty.  A dude with a phobe and claustrophobia turns people abusive. 
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Feb 10, 2016 20:29
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ZypherIM posted:2) Blinding gas is a lot better than yawp in my opinion. You don't have a strong attack to be doing otherwise, great trinket support for it, and there are mean things in the back. On the other hand, most of the time your party is set up to be murdering poo poo in their back, so a range 2 stun isn't quite as amazing as it seems on the tin. If you don't go before both back enemies it isn't much more useful than someone who stuns 1 back enemy while your team murders the other one. People like houndmaster or bounty hunter can then also stun people in the front (and they have higher base chance to stun). Likewise, a lot of people say AoE isn't effective, but it's perfectly effective if you get kills with it. Hew + Zealous Accusation from a Leper/Crusader combo (or double Hew, but I don't like risking a two-Leper shuffle) can paste an awful lot of front row enemies, and when a bigger two-space enemy's in range they just swap back to Chop + Smite. Likewise under the right circumstances having a GR use Flashing Daggers gives you better results than Dagger Toss and if you get double crits (which isn't unlikely for her) it can make an entire game. While on the subject, I think Hew's decent enough at corpse clearing that you don't necessarily need to slot Purge. Not that you can't or shouldn't (unless you have a PD or Occultist), but I like having both Withstand and Solemnity.
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Feb 10, 2016 22:13
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 Good lord champion bosses are tense.
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Feb 10, 2016 23:04
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Which one did you choose to
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Feb 10, 2016 23:06
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He's potentially got 3 healers in that group, if they went first he might be able to heal both!
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Feb 10, 2016 23:13
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Red Hook is doing a stream with some art for the new class. Was the Merchant, but they're calling her the "Antiquarian" now. Apparently not totally nailed down but she's supposed to be "intentionally not balanced" and weak (they described her having weak buffs and the like), but allow for things like better loot rolls, allowing gold to stack higher, or having different interactions with curios. So basically a character that takes up a slot in exchange for better payoffs and contributes very little to combat.
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Feb 10, 2016 23:17
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Nakar posted:Red Hook is doing a stream with some art for the new class. Was the Merchant, but they're calling her the "Antiquarian" now. Apparently not totally nailed down but she's supposed to be "intentionally not balanced" and weak (they described her having weak buffs and the like), but allow for things like better loot rolls, allowing gold to stack higher, or having different interactions with curios. So basically a character that takes up a slot in exchange for better payoffs and contributes very little to combat. How very Etrian Odyssey.
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Feb 10, 2016 23:21
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This Occultist just needs Eldritch Slayer and he'll be pretty darn swell.
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Feb 10, 2016 23:27
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Nakar posted:Red Hook is doing a stream with some art for the new class. Was the Merchant, but they're calling her the "Antiquarian" now. Apparently not totally nailed down but she's supposed to be "intentionally not balanced" and weak (they described her having weak buffs and the like), but allow for things like better loot rolls, allowing gold to stack higher, or having different interactions with curios. So basically a character that takes up a slot in exchange for better payoffs and contributes very little to combat. That sounds terrible.
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Feb 10, 2016 23:30
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AngryBooch posted:That sounds terrible.  I can already see the obnoxious "4x ANTIQUARIAN NO TORCH CHALLENGE RUN NG+ SUB FOR NAME" by overgrown manchildren on Twitch.
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Feb 10, 2016 23:32
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Nakar posted:Red Hook is doing a stream with some art for the new class. Was the Merchant, but they're calling her the "Antiquarian" now. Apparently not totally nailed down but she's supposed to be "intentionally not balanced" and weak (they described her having weak buffs and the like), but allow for things like better loot rolls, allowing gold to stack higher, or having different interactions with curios. So basically a character that takes up a slot in exchange for better payoffs and contributes very little to combat. That sounds great.
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Feb 10, 2016 23:33
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