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LogicalFallacy posted:Look at all these goofy house names. I'll suggest we go with something thematically appropriate and call the manor Amontillado. Whereas that makes my mind immediately go to Nevermore Manor.  My brother and I have been streaming this for awhile now (it's the "pre-show" to whatever other game we're doing), and I really like it too. We've just now started getting into the Champion-tier dungeons and it's a huge jump in difficulty, which is hurting the enthusiasm a bit; it really feels like you have a lot less room to experiment and play on your terms at that point. Anyway, I'm the Crusader (Elite Knight blue) in that one, but Man-at-Arms or Bounty Hunter would be cool too. Mzbundifund posted:Holy Lance is an outstanding skill. Yeah, I've started to come around on it. Crusader is really mediocre against non-Unholy without it, while with it and a good accuracy buff, you can have him seriously hurt back-rank stressers for your other support/ranged classes to finish off. The only problem with leading with it (so having him start in rank 3) is that he's so slow whoever's in rank 2 will usually go first, and they may not have an optimal move at that rank. It takes a lot of planning around, but Holy Lance feels like the skill that makes him "click."
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Jul 29, 2016 16:41
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True, but Houndmaster is probably closest-- his moves either bleed or stun, he has a mark that debuffs, and all on a class with above-average HP and Dodge. Plus doggie.  I've set up Hellions with bleed/more bleed/Iron Swan before, and in the dungeons where bleed is actually effective she's pretty solid. The big drawback is that the front-rank one (I keep getting If it Bleeds and Bleed Out mixed up) has her "fatigue penalty," which is normally meant to balance out Yawp and Breakthrough (which otherwise "break the math" of moves of that type). Really odd choice that hurts Hellbleed builds unnecessarily.  Edit: v Ha ha, well, nothing wrong with that! No cats in this game that I'm aware of, unfortunately.
Wayne fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Jul 29, 2016 |
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Jul 29, 2016 18:44
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Highwang posted:Seriously though, dark runs are a thing. They just require a certain kit. This is one of the biggest differences between mine and my brother's play styles; I love doing dark runs with the "torch below 26" trinkets and surprise-resisting items and camp skills (I don't think there are any quirks that modify surprise, which is really odd), and he absolutely never risks it. I think the biggest issue with them is just how devastating monster critical hits are on your party, and the "hidden" bonus to their crit chance at dark/pitch black is killer (literally  ). "Playing" with the darkness (extinguish torch to get loot, light back up to "dim") works pretty well, but then you're spending money and inventory space on torches, which defeats the point a bit. citybeatnik posted:WELP things have obviously been rebalanced since the last time I played. Yeah, things have changed a lot. I've only played the game in its more or less "modern" state (after the camp skill nerf, corpses, skill rebalancing like Hellion fatigue, etc.) so it's been really interesting to hear people talk about how it used to be.
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Aug 4, 2016 21:04
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JT Jag posted:I hadn't run into any of the shrines yet, so I just presumed "oh hey, this must be the mission objective. Needs a torch, huh?" Doesn't it say something like "This is a symbol of ruin, place fire if you crave the Void"?  But it is true you don't expect a curio to summon a bossfight, when all the rest either give you stress/quirks or treasure.Been watching the videos so far, it's interesting to see different play styles. I can definitely sympathize with the "cover all ranks" Hellion, though I'm in the group that finds YAWP! and Adrenaline Rush (for use to help offset the fatigue debuff as well as cure status and HP) too indispensable to do that. Iron Swan kind of has a meta choice, since [especially on higher difficulties] back rank targets have much higher Dodge than the front-rank, so you basically choice between maxing out her damage and/or bleed chance and unloading on the front rank, or getting accuracy for the back rank. Plus once that 4th target is dead Iron Swan has no other use. I like it but my brother doesn't, and I can't really say he's wrong. Two notes: one, if Blindfire did ever hit corpses (I didn't play it until Spring 2016) it doesn't now, so feel free to let it fly. I never used it either until we modded in the Musketeer and gave her Sidearm (same move) since I liked the animation for it, and found out it only hits active targets. That plus first-rank accessibility and the speed boost on a pretty decent healer, and it's actually not a bad move. And two, yeah, do not mess around with spiders:  That was the tank going into a 2 webber/2 spitter fight with full health, and died in 2 rounds. Part of that was bad luck (he failed the first Death's Door roll, and you have a 2/3 chance of making it), but still.
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Aug 16, 2016 00:14
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Jenner posted:Ok so it starts at a 66% chance the next hit will just kill you then I'm guessing it drops to like 50% or something and keeps dropping every consecutive success until failure? No, it's always a 67% chance. There's a mirror quirk that can adjust it by 10%, and trinkets can too; but otherwise 2/3rds basically. The idea is that you fail often enough to not chance it (the first 2 characters we lost, we did on the first Deathblow roll  ), but "odds are" any given hit will be survived, so you have a chance to get your adventurer out of Death's Door. The "mortality" debuff is a further disincentive to play around with it, since the first time you go to Death's Door, you take some penalties (most notably -2 speed, which is really bad) until the end of the run.Psycho Lawnmower posted:I firmly take the route of the Sanitarium. Quirk Removal/Disease Removal is just the way to go; I agree for the most part, except that if the negative quirks are bad enough and there's no amazing positive quirks, I'll just fire a hero and get a new one. Doubly so if you have to pay for stress relief on top of that. Don't feel so attached to a mediocre hero you don't have room if one with the perfect quirks shows up. Doubly so since more people in apprentice tier means more cash runs and an easier time killing all the bosses without levelling up your main guys too much. That being said, ever since Town Events there's a really bad one that starts in champion tier and expects that you've been upgrading your blacksmith (and presumably guild) in step with your heroes' levels, even though that's pretty unlikely. So you pretty much have to keep up progress on those, and that's really demanding on your heirlooms. At least sanitarium, hall, and smith all use different ones (except crests, of course)!
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Aug 20, 2016 05:28
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Halser posted:or you could just use the Graverobber's devastating Lunge move or Duelist's Advance to reset everything. The Crusader is slow as hell so it's pretty easy to sync these moves. I've tried that setup, and it works OK, the main problem being that Graverobber moves 2 with her Lunge and can backstep with the stun move, while Crusaders move 1 and can't (and that Lunge can't hit rank 4 while Lance can't hit 1 or 2). What that basically boils down to is you do that wombo combo once, then you don't have anyone for the Crusader to hit if he's stuck in rank 3, and he can't attack if he slides to the back ranks after Graverobber moves forward. Duelist Advance works better, but he only backsteps with PBS, which (obviously) only moves him to rank 2, and thus can't set up Holy Lance. You basically either accept trading one of a Crusader's skill slots for a 1-off and a bonus if you get shuffled/pushed (and that's not the end of the world, none of his skills are must-haves) or you don't bother with it. Just in case anybody didn't know about this, my brother and I just got done streaming a DD run; and found out that the game rolls for bonus tchotchkes after every fight for every Antiquarian (one time we got two rare antiques in one fight), in addition to each one raising the gold stack limit. The result:  I don't remember who in this thread first suggested combining Protect Me! with a riposte character, but needless to say hero #4 was a man-at-arms, heh.
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Sep 9, 2016 02:53
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grandalt posted:So much money. L1 Long Cove. You could theoretically get even more money on Champion with rubies and sapphires being more common (they stack to 4000 worth, twice as much as emeralds), but you'd be a braver man than me to take the Antique Roadshow to a L5 dungeon! Cove is also probably the easiest for this setup, too: average stress, fragile mooks, and no blight resistance.Halser posted:I think I did. And you broke my 30k gold record, darn. Thanks, then!  I have to admit I never thought of that. And again, Cove makes that setup work really well since you know what ranks the fishmen will be attacking.Mort posted:If I'm running the Crusader in a party like that I'm gonna always bring the stress heal since he can use it from the back. ... Even with a front row crusader I'll almost always bring holy lance. It's a godsend if you get surprised and shuffled. Yeah, sorry if the delicious crouton of truth was buried in my word salad, but I agree with you; I was just focusing on the limitations rather than the opportunities on Holy Lance. The Crusader is so well-balanced that you can pick something like [Zealous or Smite] / [Heal or Inspire] and still have room for Lance and Bulwark or whatnot. I was just explaining that it's risky to build around a charge setup like that, and generally you only do it once (and in both those formations you can only do it twice each without spending turns moving, and twice might not be enough with a mediocre-accuracy dude attacking evasive enemies), so it's understandable if a player would rather not bother with it.
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Sep 9, 2016 05:11
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What level of dungeon was that?
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Halser posted:Also, more cheese, kinda, for the people that want heads: I'm amazed to see so much trouble getting those things. The first 3 secret rooms we found each had a head, just like that. Speaking of the Collector, the guys noted that you can actually see the heads in his cloak. The art for this game is so good that most of my thumbnails have just been zoomed-in crops of what's on the screen, and that was no exception:  Couldn't pass up a man-at-arms taking damage from seeing his own face in the mantle, heh. The 5-pack of kai-rurr-jen's Charms also made me think if the game has some kind of internal way of grouping trinkets, so that some are more or less common in some games than others (and thus throwing some RNG into trinket-based builds). Like my brother hasn't gotten a single one of those, or [more vexingly for him] any Man-Slayer Rings; and we're in the 80s in weeks and with the nomad wagon maxed out for at least the last couple. And when Mog was streaming she'd never gotten a single Blasphemous Vial (nigh-on essential plague doctor item) while the two of us had each gotten and sold a couple.  With so many trinkets you'd expect the dice to favor and disfavor a few, but it makes you wonder.
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Sep 12, 2016 18:03
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paragon1 posted:So what does the narrator actually say when you go to fight the hag? I didn't catch much of it through Chitlin laughing his rear end off. I was going to just link you since we'd all probably rather hear Wayne June than just read him, but Ben and I talked over him too when we streamed it; I forgot we didn't stop doing that until later. Fortunately, we do have subtitles turned on, so: "I had collected many rare and elusive volumes on ancient herbal properties, and was set to enjoy several weeks immersed in comfortable study. My work was interrupted, however, by a singularly striking young woman who insisted on repeated calls to the house." I don't have too much of an opinion on the rewording (I did chuckle at "nah" instead of "Resisted"), but somebody who hasn't played the game as much as we have is probably just going to be confused. If it's not too much work (like switching the files), maybe leave the boss and Darkest fights "serious" and have the grinding/levelling ones redone? Also, I think you were overselling Shadow Fade a bit. It only moves her back 1, and it has the base 100% rate (good stuns like Blackjack, Uppercut, etc. are 125%). It also only hits the first 2 ranks, so it's useless in the Hag fight compared to just selecting Move. I never use it outside of Lunge strats, since there's usually something she needs more, like Pick to deal with the front row, darts for high-Protect enemies, etc.Krumbsthumbs posted:Arbalest, Houndmaster, Occultist and Hellion (my preferred team for this fight). Mark-n-kill is the best way to do it, but I'd be nervous about a team with limited mobility and rank dependency like that (if she dunks the arbalest, that really sets you back). She's pretty vulnerable to bleed, so last time I beat her was, yeah, Dogman and Hellion, but with Vestal and Highwayman as the other two. Duelist Advance is great for putting your formation back together (and PBS goes a long way toward knocking over the pot) and gets free hits off Tenderizer, and you can tank the Vestal's speed down with the Sacred Scroll or something to make sure she goes last and gets the heal off before the Hag's next turn. Cythereal posted:Don't have this game myself so I'm just spitballing, but the plague doctor sounds like it would be good here if you can build up her HP. Blight up the hag and then don't worry too much if she's put in the pot. In addition to what Halser said, the Hag has above-average Blight resistance, and you can't afford to lose turns in that fight. Plus the Doc is probably taking the spot of a better healer, and you want to get whoever fell out of the pot enough HP to survive a hit. But yeah, the Hag is a really well-done fight, she's tough and because she directly takes away team members instead of just attacking their numbers, it scales up against player min-maxing. At the same time, she doesn't do anything else like move or stun your team and she has no special defenses, just average dodge for her tier and decent but not insane HP. Plus one way or another the fight is over pretty quickly, we'll wish we could say the same about the other Weald boss. v The Gamepedia has those sound files? 
Wayne fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Sep 13, 2016 |
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Sep 13, 2016 05:21
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Krumbsthumbs posted:We have a max of 28 slots for people, so at least 2 of the 15 classes will not have a double up. I left out a 2nd PD and a Bounty Hunter, but what did everyone else do? Cheat.  Seriously though, you can dig through your DD folders and find the stage_coach, and open the file in Notepad and change the unit cap each upgrade gives you. Ben and I ended up going up to 36. We mostly use it for alternates (like I think we have 2 musketeers plus one arbalest) and to do gimmicks, like one recent video where he hired 3 jesters fresh off the coach and an antiquarian to go on a dark run to see if they'd make it out or not.
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Oct 10, 2016 20:15
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Nuramor posted:And? How'd it go? I actually uploaded it and was about to link in case anyone wanted to just watch it, when I realized it's post-Darkest Dungeon (1st one done), so spoilers.  Long story short, we don't lose anybody, but there were some very close calls and a lot of teasing of Ben when he realized he forgot to buy Finale or Dirk Stab on one of the jesters, and antiquarians can't heal once they get to rank 1 or 2; so he had to spend more time moving and trying to manage HP than we planned. It was pretty intense! Grapplejack posted:The comic is pretty explicit about MaA being the sole survivor of one of the canon's strikes, I think? If I'm reading it right, that particular comic is kind of messy. Yeah, I like the backstory comics as a way of setting mood, but they don't really do it for me as, y'know, backstory. Like the Grave Robber one; all it did was show she used to have money and a sweet house and now she doesn't, and you could gather that from her barks and the patches on her clothes. The Occultist's was cool, though, and if they really did imply Dismas killed Reynauld's family, that's a neat way of connecting the stories that makes them actually amount to something.
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Oct 13, 2016 01:22
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Pea posted:After only 2 weeks, I already have several great memories. Nice. Honestly, while I'm not surprised HW's more casual VLP was the first Darkest Dungeon LP here, I was kind of expecting a "make your own narrative" SSLP because of how well the game lends itself to that.DOTs absolutely aren't a trap, they can be essential to efficiently dealing with high-Protect enemies. You mentioned the Octocestus guys; they're a great example of how you can stun and bash away at them, it's a lot faster to spam blight on them. Multi-rank moves are a bit more dubious. In absolute terms they do do more damage (Hew is a textbook case: it's two hits at 60% damage for a total of 120%), but spreading it out across 2 enemies means both take less and thus both are more likely to survive and hit you back. You don't get points for damage efficiency, you do best by killing their dudes and keeping yours from getting hurt. But the thing is, that's abstract theory too. Multi-rank moves help clear corpses, they can spread DOTs (which are also good for clearing corpses), pick off wounded enemies that a single-rank move would be overkill against, and get more chances to inflict critical hits (except of course for moves that take a crit penalty like Grapeshot). They absolutely have their place. My brother clowned the boss of the new Darkest-level town event dungeon our last stream mostly on the backs of Hew and the Jester rank 2+3 bleed to constantly keep him taking stacking DOTs while wounding the mooks to 1-hit kill range for the others. The thing is, it's not that the multi-rank moves are bad, it's that you only get 4 skill slots and most classes already have 3-4 essentials. Grapeshot is occasionally the right move for a highwayman, but is it right often enough to pass up Advance plus the other melee/ranged moves depending on how you have him specced? Hellions are probably going to want Hack, Swan, and If it bleeds so they can hit anywhere, and probably either YAWP or adrenaline. Can you spare a slot for Breakthrough? I usually can't. In short, it's not that multi-rank moves are the wrong answer, they're just less likely to be the right answer, so when you play for maximum paranoia like HW does (or used to ) those are the ones you leave behind.
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Nov 12, 2016 06:39
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Hunt11 posted:Any advice for lowering the mortality rate for Champion level missions? That's kind of the thing, isn't it? Short answer: spend about twice as long in the village prepping as you're used to. Champion is calibrated such that you're only going to be likely to succeed at something if you're above par in some way, like with quirks or trinkets. You not only need good team composition, but your heroes need to individually be strong too. Make sure their weapon or armor (depending on role, hellions obviously go weapon first) is maxed out and get the other as gold allows. Speaking of gold, hopefully you locked in quirks when your hero was lower-level and it was cheaper, or be prepared to grab some antiquarians for a cash run or two! Long answer: OK, by now we probably all know that DD encounters go 1 of 5 ways: * A team of all melee bruisers (swordfish, dogs, mushrooms + gladiators), * A tank or 2 and back-rank snipers (skeleton teams do this a lot, plus the "mixed shroom" teams in Weald), * A tank and back-rank stressors (very common), * A team of all of the above (like the 3 brigands or the skeletons with a courtier and arbalest), * A breather fight with fewer than the normal number of enemies or things like maggots. Sometimes these aren't obvious: gargoyles are actually breather monsters, but they look pretty tough. You have to be able to handle all of them efficiently. If you're bad at clearing the back ranks, you'll get too much stress. If you can't manage focus fire, you'll spend too much time healing and have to hope for a breather fight to catch back up. And some of those teams have location-specific mix-ups: crabs in the Cove can do massive DoT, and the giants can do massive damage, unlike other "tanks." The Cove also has the shieldfish, so tanks in the matchups there are about twice as common. Now, how you go about that is up to you. My brother prefers to deal with back ranks with a mark team, to debuff dodge and use the extra damage to get faster kills. So he uses arbalesters, houndmasters, etc. a lot more than I do. So let's start there: if you're using a dogman, you can put him in rank 2 and have an above-par* stun (nigh-guaranteed if you spend a trinket on it) as well as a mark. With that mark ability, that opens up bounty hunter (normally you won't use him unless you have someone in support who can mark too), who is a damage-dealer who also has an above-par stun. So that's 2 slots and most roles covered: you can stun tanks, mark + kill either rank (depending on who marks and who attacks) and do "primary" (that is, buffed or un-penalized) damage flexibly. What does that leave? We need a healer, and we could use a tank (who has to be rank 1, which means no abominations). We want our healer to be in the back, so that means healbot vestal or occultist, the latter who can also mark. * "Above-par" meaning it has a higher base rate, in this case 125% vs. 100% on things like crusaders' stunning blow. Above-par moves probably don't need to be further boosted with trinkets unless you're going after enemies resistant to them, which means you can equip trinkets to boost other things. So we end up with (rank 1 to 4) Bounty Hunter / Houndmaster / Occultist / Vestal. Having an average-HP/dodge frontliner means we'll probably pick a defensive trinket on top of the obligatory Accuracy one on BH. So something like Sun Ring + Heavy Boots. HM will get a bleed-boosting trinket unless going to Cove or Ruins, in which case we'll boost speed instead (always good). Occultist always gets an Accuracy trinket, and the other depends on your moves: normally I'd use Daemon Pull, but since this team can hit rank 4 easily, maybe boost debuff or crit instead. That ended up being really long, but that's basically the thought process. Always assume the worst on Champion, and realize that doing one thing well is a lot better than covering multiple roles poorly. You have be able to rely on your plans working out most of the time. When they don't, it's good to have a team that isn't too rank specific. Lepers are really good, but if they get shuffled.... And always play to the class's strengths. Like for crusaders, stunning blow will rarely work as-is and it's not worth giving them a stun-boosting trinket, so it's better to focus on their damage or healing, depending on what you need. More than anything else, though, always boost accuracy unless the hero has a quirk like Natural Swing or (type) Slayer. Oh, and count on enemies getting a series of crits in a row, not much you can do to avoid that. No matter how well you prepare, there's always a chance that, say, you get a team of spitting pigs who all go first, all crit and at least one inflicts a disease like Rabies or Hysterical Blindness, so in 1 turn you have someone afflicted and worthless for going forward. Sometimes DD hates you and you have to bail, and all you can do is accept it and try again. Anyway, sorry that ended up being a bit long; I've been wanting to organize that stuff bouncing around in my head for awhile and I guess now was the time, heh. Hunt11 posted:I have made some mistakes which have not helped (healer head combined with vestal battle scroll is a horrible combination) Yeah, that's one reason why I stress Accuracy so much. Profane Scroll is good times, but it forces her into melee and doesn't boost Accuracy, you basically have to dedicate the other trinket slot to fixing that lack, or give her the healing tome and accept you're rarely going to attack with her. Good thing the Scroll boosts everything else she does, though!
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Dec 5, 2016 00:36
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I've been catching up on this one, and Highwang, while normally I'm the last guy to backseat somebody else's game, your last Siren run was killing me. You had two guys with Riposte, a boss who does all AoE moves and one debuff, and then kept complaining about how long the fight was. Anyway, just wanted to say it's still entertaining (for good or ill ), I'm glad you stopped the weird mod, and I hope things pick up for you on the employment and holidays front.  Yapping Eevee posted:The best Bard in a videogame is Deekin Scalesinger, the kobold companion from Neverwinter Night's expansions. Obviously. Yeah, he's pretty great and gets points for actually being a bard by trade. If you count "music magic" you have a lot of JRPG characters (Ar Tonelico, obviously, but Tear in Tales of the Abyss comes to mind too) and "tricksters with perform skills" adds people like Shantae. Hmm... the Bard job in FF5 was fun, wasn't that the one with the song that inflicted Stop on all enemies? Any time you run into bards breaking the game in a game, remember they were actually overpowered in 1st and 2nd AD&D, it wasn't until 3rd standardized everything that they become more "master of none."
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Dec 13, 2016 05:25
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