Leaderboard

←Previous Post Week Sixty-Four -- Hell is in the Heart Okay so listen, On paper, this is an easy fight. It’s manipulatable in ways that I wouldn’t even call cheese, and the boss is pretty easy in obvious ways even besides that. We’ll get to how and why that is in a moment, but for now, I want to thank you for reading along. I’m sorry again for letting all the air out so close to the end, taking a year off and whatnot, but I want to make it up to you by having this be the best post it can be for this fight. We start with some good news. Not that our money was ever in doubt, but I don’t even need to spend it here. I definitely overpack here. You don’t need half of this stuff, but I couldn’t be bothered to double-check the wiki with an opportunity cost so low. For the record, here is what you should be packing: Bandages and Antivenom, obviously Medicinal Herbs if you remember to cure your debuffs ever Holy Water if you ever remember that Holy Water has a use besides curios Aegis Scales if you have Aegis Scales from the Shieldbreaker DLC and don’t decide that, since they’re so rare you might want to save them for an even better opportunity (Note: This is the final boss. There aren’t many other opportunities, but I know how you all think). Blood if you need blood for your adventurers Everything else -- food, keys, ladanum, shovels -- are useless here. Don’t do what I do unless you also get free stuff the week you decide to do this run. That map in the corner? That’s the entire map of the dungeon. That’s why I didn’t post a map of the dungeon with little annotations like I did for the other Darkest Dungeon fights. There are only five points of interest in the whole dungeon (unless you consider the “putting the cosmic in cosmic horror” background interesting), only one of them requiring preparation. In fairness, it is a lot of preparation. A whole game’s worth of preparation leading up to this moment. Three of the points of interest are the same, so we’re going to go through the odd one out first. Halfway through the hallway is a secret room, with a chest containing no loot but a little message: That’s nice. We’ll hold onto that for luck. The three that are the same are three bits of lore blocking the way. You have to physically interact with all three of these to get past, no ignoring the lore here. In all my terrible researches, what I sought was a glimpse behind the veil, a crumb of cosmic truth... I found it here, and in that moment of brain-blasting realization, I ceased to be a man and became a herald… an avatar of the Crawling Chaos. Life feeds on life. In your petty pursuit of family redemption, you consumed those who rallied to your cause, and in so doing you strengthened the Thing, accelerating the end. This is as it should be. It is why you are here. We are chained here forever, you and I, at the end of the world. Free yourself, rouse the Thing, and embrace the ineffable cosmic hideousness that lives within us all. Darkest Dungeon is not exactly at the forefront of storytelling. That’s not a bad thing -- I think this game is fantastic -- but its storytelling has not been its focus for that. This is a funny ludonarrative touch, though. The Ancestor, posing as still a mortal man, has called in his kin to right his wrongs. However, the bloodshed caused by the slaughter of the adventurers you hire is what fuels the ineffable evil beneath the manor. By playing this game, you are contributing to the end of the world. This is why, on the harder Stygian/Blood Moon difficulties, you only have a set number of deaths allowed before you get a game over. That’s neat. I mean, the game says this even if no adventurers have died yet, but then again, the end of the universe is always going to happen in real life, too, whether people die in it or not. So the existential horror is there all the same. Anyway, the final point of interest is the final boss: Your Ancestor. You still foolishly consider yourself an entity separate from the whole. I know better. And I. will. show you. This is a four-phase boss fight designed to test all four of the major fundamental play patterns this game facilitates. The first phase is a combination of grinding through enemies despite growing stress and limited healing. On the opening round, the Ancestor will summon three Perfect Clones of himself and will continue to refresh these clones as you cleave through them. These clones will stress your adventurers out and inflict bleed on them. The actual Ancestor, meanwhile, only appears to have five hit points, but he is immune to all forms of damage*. *okay technically his debuff resistance is low enough that you can debuff one of his bleed or blight resistances and cheese the fight that way but don’t do this please don’t it’s not worth it. Let’s take a moment to talk about party composition. Some of this was dictated by who was left after the first three rounds, but I knew I wanted Yui the Leper for this fight because of his high damage output, and I figured that Skaia the Bounty Hunter would be a good support for that. He does do bonus damage to Human-type enemies, and the Ancestor is somehow still Human-type, after all. Ren is our status-effect support, dealing bleed where possible, yes, but he also has Chain Gang, an ability that has a decent chance to stun two enemies. ABC is our healer, but can take advantage of Skaia’s marks as well if we decide to use any of those. An important part of the action economy for this phase of the fight is that the new summons the Original Ancestor creates don’t also get to act that turn, so you get a chance to clear them before they can even do any of their nonsense. That’s why Ren’s stun ability is especially useful. It just tilts things even more in your favor. Now, the reason you are fighting through all these copies of Ancestors is that, as the fight goes on, he will occasionally mess up and summon an Imperfect Reflection instead of the normal Perfect ones. These reflections are your opportunity. Each Imperfect Reflection slain deals one damage to your Ancestor. Like I said, he only has five health, so after five Imperfect Reflections, we’re on to Phase Two. The flesh is fluid, it can be changed, reshaped, remade! This phase of the fight tests positional awareness. These Absolute Nothingnesses the Ancestor Summons are impossible to even hit, let alone kill (don’t look up the video, that person ruined their life doing something stupid), and each move the Ancestor makes shuffles him around these obstacles. You have to always be able to hit every row because you don’t know where he’s going to be. Normally, this would be where Yui would struggle. He can only hit half of the enemy formation, after all. But that’s where Skaia’s Come Hither ability comes in, pulling the Ancestor two spaces forward on every hit. The Ancestor has pitiful Move Resistance in this phase of the fight, so he will almost always be in range of Yui’s blade. The pull also marks the Ancestor, which means ABC and Skaia also get to do extra damage to him when they get an opportunity. Anyway, the worst thing the Ancestor can realistically do here is shuffle your party. He gets Yui at one point, sending him all the way to the back of the line, but we have an opportunity coming up to crawl back to the front. The flesh is immortal, it is undying. Pray it does take not too hideous a form. The Gestating Heart phase is as close to a Rest phase as you can expect. The Heart will progress to the final phase in three turns, but if you can clip through all two hundred of its hit points before then, you get a head start. Hitting the Heart even heals you, though it also has a chance to inflict some Blight as it does so. it also has an area-of-effect Blight attack, but that’s negligible at this point as well (you did bring Antivenom with you, right?). Yui in particular can chop through all that health pretty quickly, and so the final phase begins. Behold the heart of the world! Progenitor of life, father and mother, alpha and omega! Our creator… and our destroyer. I love this image of Yui healing stress from killing the Gestating Heart with a critical hit while simultaneously glimpsing the eldritch horror in the center of the world. Maybe he’s just seen it all at this point. Anyway, this fight is a simple race. The Heart deals damage. You deal damage. Who can deal damage faster? That being said, the Heart of Darkness has a pair of tricks up its sleeve. The first trick is this: When it drops below two-thirds health, it uses a special move called Come Unto Your Maker. This is a unique attack. Instead of the monster AI choosing a hero to, uh, Come, it allows the player to choose who is being hit with the attack. The reason for this is that the output of the attack is a dead hero 100% of the time. There is no rolling for Death’s Door. The hero dies. A nice touch is the various reactions the selected adventurers have to being considered. Hovering the mouse over each of your party members causes them to say something. Here are the ones for the heroes that came with us: Yui the Leper: “Spare the others, I am ready.” Skaia the Bounty Hunter: “...hm.” Ren the Wraith: “Do what must be done. My sacrifice will restore the honor I have lost so long ago.” ABC the Arbalest: “Please no, I want to live!” I chose Ren for this. He was useful, and he will be missed, but perhaps his biggest mistake was joining a party with three forum-named characters in it. I do want to keep the forum-goers alive as long as possible, of course. Anyway, the second trick the Heart of Darkness has is that it uses Come Unto Your Maker a second time when it drops below a third of its health. Like I said, this last phase is a damage race, and with only two party members, it’s a race the Arbalest would be middling at at this stage. Also, ABC has the least forum reputation of you three, which is the best and most objective metric for this thing. Never mind that the Arbalest was begging for her life, right? Despite all this, the heroes do have an advantage in the action economy sense. The Heart of Darkness only ever does one move a turn, so between Skaia and Yui both wailing damage numbers in the thirties at it, the Heart folds quickly, the final blow coming from Skaia’s axe. Well, this was a journey. I enjoyed this immensely. It’s nice to play a good video game sometimes, huh? Commiserations to ABC for being the only forum-goer to die. You don’t have to get banned if you don’t want to. There is one final cutscene that plays upon the Heart’s defeat. I know the LP started with a content warning, involving suicide, but what follows is more suicide. Victory… A hollow and ridiculous notion. We are born of this thing, made from it, and we will be returned to it, in time. The great family of man… a profusion of errant flesh! Multiplying, swarming, living, dying… Until the stars align in their inexorable formation and what sleeps is roused once more, to hatch from this fragile shell of earth and rock and bring our inescapable end. So seek solace in a manner befitting your lineage and take up your nugatory vigil, haunted forever by that sickening prose echoing through the infinite blackness of space and time… Ruin has come to our family. Thank you all for reading, -r ←Previous Post