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Week Sixty-One -- We Are The Flame

Once again, the stars are right and the manor sits at the very epicenter of cosmic unrest. Cultists rally to their twisted idols and great gongs sound in anticipation of the coming sacrifices. Far below, life-laden shadows pulse to the unrelenting rhythm of a beating heart.

Just a head’s up, this portion of Darkest Dungeon has got some pretty serious body horror elements. Really, the rest of the game is just going to be that way, 

Taking last week off definitely helped. I ended up pretty confident going into this run. Sure, three-quarters of the heroes I chose were suffering from a rather annoying case of vampirism, and we’re still down a primary healer going into what is probably the second- or third-hardest challenge of the game, but you know, it could be worse. It could always be worse.

We talked about the lineup last week but I do want to make a special note of the provisioning this time. There is almost no loot in the Darkest Dungeon proper and certainly no loot that’s worth going out of your way to collect, so there’s no reason not to pack your bags to the maximum allotted amount. The fights are scripted, so there’s not even a Collector to punish you for doing this. I’m not taking Shovels because there aren’t any blockages in the Dungeon, same with keys and things to unlock. Ladanum is generally useless so that slot is taken up by some extra Blood, just in case.

One small mistake I made here is Antivenom is useless for this specific quest -- it’s almost bleed-exclusive. But that’s only a few hundred gold down the drain and though our treasury is dwindling, it’s not dwindling that badly. Anyway, on with the actual dungeon:

The blood of the fallen flows ever downward along these titan spires. The creature fattens itself upon your failures.

that wiki plug is in the original map image. i didn't put it there.

the wiki is indispensible though

I kind of hate this fight because it’s such a tease. The Rapturous Cultist enemy is a support unit with no offensive attacks. It’s still a gateway fight because it has a decent dodge stat, but it tricks you into thinking the endgame is going to be easier than it is. They even put two of them there so they can’t accidentally summon some harder enemies to join the fight before you’re good and ready.

Another endgame tutorial fight, but this one at least has some chest hair, because the Cultist Priest, a writhing mass of tentacles concealed within a cloak, at least has the tendency to do, uh, this:

That particular attack, called “The Finger,” also inflicts a six damage a turn bleed, just for that extra bit of pain. One isn’t hard to deal with, but it’s definitely got to die first every other time we encounter it.

There are four other major enemies between us and the boss. Two of them are upgrades on the cultists we’ve already seen so far and aren’t worth discussing as much. The Brawler bleeds more and the Witch inflicts more stress and marks whoever she targets. They don’t do anything new. One fight starts to reveal the nature of what we are fighting on this questline, though.

That’s the mansion itself coming alive. Whatever our ancestor discovered beneath these ruins is of the earth, knows we’re here, and certainly isn’t happy about it. We’ll talk more about that as the story goes on, but I did want to plant that seed in your mind.

The other enemy is similar, but is part of the boss fight, and I’d rather just go through that.

We’ve seen what the Shambler could do, and like I said last week, the Shuffling Horror is a slightly modified version of that. One of its actions is likely to be shuffling the party, and the other is probably going to be a relatively powerful attack that hits two heroes. As we’ve discussed about the Shambler, it wouldn’t be as much of a problem if it didn’t also come with summons. That priest in the back there? The Horror starts with that, and if you kill it, the Horror will just summon something else.

The Defensive Growth (the other one was called a “Malignant Growth”) is another one of those primarily support units, which is good for focusing down the Shambler, but it does also feature a party-wide stress attack, and if you’ve been paying attention to our party stress values, one of them is getting pretty up there…

Thankfully, at this point in the run, a death isn’t the end of the world. Amani wasn’t going to be able to do any more Darkest Dungeon runs anyway. The action economy of the fight isn’t ruined either . We still have Dismas to bleed through the Horror's pair of actions it gets every turn, and the other two can still deal a decent amount of damage when they're not busy keeping each other alive. While it would have been nice to have a unit who explicitly bypassed the Defensive Growth’s guard, it’s not necessary and Margaret gets a lethal shot off a round or two later.

That being said, the tricky thing about the Shambler miniboss and this boss is that killing the main boss doesn’t get rid of the things it summons. Without the main boss, though, the Defensive Growth falls pretty quickly.

There’s a lot I cut out here. I cut out LordCowCow refusing healing while on Death’s Door because thank goodness it didn’t matter, for example, even if I did want to mention that now because, like, get it together, my guy. But that’s quest one down with only a small bit of sacrifice. If you want to look at it this way, failing the quest would have doomed one member of the team anyway. One death is just the price of admission for the endgame. It might be more next week, for the game’s second, even bigger challenge.

-r

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Edited April 23, 2023 by radio414

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Week Sixty-Two -- Light The Way

The thing has no name, for it needs no language. Nevertheless, those who would submit to its wordless will are rewarded, in a fashion. The creature's blessings are as repulsive as they are robust. Twisted, half-human monstrosities stalk the flesh-ridden halls, protecting their gestating god.

First thing’s first, a small bit of catch-up from the previous week. Because we have completed a Darkest Dungeon run, we have, to quote our ancestor, “started to see things as they really are.” What this means in practice is every so often when interacting with a portion of the Hamlet, a section of the screen will flicker to reveal eldritch imagery. This is really hard to screencap, but another symptom of temporarily replaces the character portraits of all the heroes and adventurers with a similarly eldritch mood, which only fades when you hover over it, so I managed to grab that.

It’s very funny how the Darkest Dungeon subreddit responds to the semi-frequent question of “what is going on here” by basically being as vague as possible, but we’re not on the subreddit, so fight me. I mean, I imagine the subreddit would yell at me for other reasons. In this run, for example, I was suboptimal with one of Joan’s abilities until after I had already gotten through the fight where it would have been most useful, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about the run.

The goal is those fights in the corners with the Templar Impalers and Warlords. That’s where the Iron Crowns we need to activate with our Hands of Glory are. The Hands of Glory, of course, are mostly meant to clog up our backpacks in the same way that the requisite trinkets clog up otherwise rather important slots. Let’s take a closer look at those trinkets now.

It’s important to note that this trinket actually lies to you. Or rather, it might be coded how it says it is -- I don’t know and I don’t really care to find out -- but the mechanics of the game don’t let this trinket work how it says it does. You can’t reduce stress damage to zero; you’ll always take at least twenty percent of the damage. The damage, part, the thing that will deal twenty-four damage without a sweat, is taken care of at least, though.

Anyway, this provisioning is kind of bad because I was still working off of last week’s information and didn’t pack enough Antivenom. I would probably cut the Holy Water, though that could be useful too. I’d cut the Blood if I could, but alas, Thar’s a vampire.

In terms of party selection, I went over this a couple weeks ago, but Thar and Joan absolutely have to keep Alhazred from getting attacked by the Templars, Sethera absolutely needs to keep Thar and Joan from going insane, and Alhazred absolutely needs to keep people alive.

This dungeon does have a few saving graces. The first is how almost every mandatory fight has a Rapturous Cultist. We’ve been over the stalling rules in the past, but these things heal themselves when given the opportunity, which means two light attacks a turn can last a while, making everyone’s jobs a lot easier. It does mean we have to leave them alive and able to support the multiple Priests and pieces of malevolent architecture in our way, but that’s what the mark synergies of the party are for. When Alhazred doesn’t need to cast a heal spell, he can mark one of the enemies, significantly improving Joan’s damage as he does so. These enemies are tough, but they’re not that tough.

They’re also enemies we’ve seen before in the last dungeon, so besides pointing out the increasing body horror in the background, I’d like to just talk about the three main fights of this run, the ones I’ve been hyping up for weeks now.

These things get two actions a turn, one of which will be Revelation, so make sure your healer is guarded when you fight them, and the other will be a decently strong attack with some sort of negative effect. It’s pretty obvious jut from the name what it’s going to do to you. Body Slam forces the hero to the back of the line and Stinger Stab does an obnoxious amount of blight damage. They have enough health to make the fights a marathon and yet they’re also built to bully anyone trying to keep up with their tempo. The best way to get around this is the Man-At-Arms. Not only does he have the necessary guard, he also has a riposte effect, which swings the action economy back in your favor. Joan the Seraph has one too, but hers has the requirement of only having a third of her health left, which is hard to stay in when your heals can hit for, uh

sometimes.

I’m not going to go through the other two fights because I don’t think it would be interesting to go through the same fight but easier this time. Instead, I will leave you with a couple of pro tips for if you try this dungeon for yourself. The first is, camping buffs last for four fights before wearing off, but you can path through this dungeon so that you can spend one log of firewood to carry buffs between two of these Templar fights. The second is the existence of a bug with this level. I don’t know if it’s still there, but it used to be if you left the room with the Iron Crown without using a Hand of Glory to light it, you wouldn’t be able to reenter the room later, and you’d have to fail out of the mission. Supposedly this has been partially fixed, but I wouldn’t even take that chance.

Just a head’s-up, I probably won’t be able to make a post next week. I’ll try my best, but my end of April is looking a little chaotic, so don’t get your hopes up. When I do come back, we’ll run through a marathon of a dungeon run, one that introduces a brand new mechanic to make it even longer. Until then,

-r

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Edited May 7, 2023 by radio414

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Week Sixty-Three -- The Belly of the Beast

The interminable stone halls are but an antechamber. The creature is vast beyond measure and must be battled from within. Step over the threshold, and let the terrible truth worm its way into your mind.

The best way to describe this mission is to just show you the provisions screen and let you take it all in from there.

I know we haven’t done a lot of Long-length dungeons, so if you don’t remember, those gave you two campfire logs to play with. This scenario, the one “Exhausting”-length dungeon in the entire game, gives you four. Does it deserve such a commendation? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, it is designed to be such a marathon. The map is huge, with fights seen nowhere else in the game, and each one will inflict a massive amount of blight damage that we just have to grind through. That’s why we’re packing so many antivenoms and that’s why we’re bringing Paracelsus along even though she’s still only at resolve level four. Having Battlefield Medicine as an option is worth the extra stress damage she’s going to take.

The entire party, actually, is designed around one core quality: We want to be able to hit the back row as hard as possible. Boudica the Hellion naturally follows from this, given her Iron Swan ability, and each of the other three, Damian, Hakima, and the aforementioned Paracelsus each have a similarly hard-hitting move. This is the most beast-heavy of the Darkest Dungeon runs, so Elmer also gets a bonus while attacking them, and Damian can act as a backup healer in a pinch.

Now, the four campfire logs do provide another interesting mechanical quirk of the run: they take up space. Like the Hands of Glory from the quest before, this run crimps the space available in your pack. I would have loved to bring some holy water, for example, but settled on the extra food to make sure everyone was healed up between fights. I also experienced a slight consequence of not being able to fight my way all the way to the Viscount on our two attempts -- I had to devote a slot to blood to compensate for Damian’s curse.

There is one advantage on our side, though: knowledge. The game wants this run to be a marathon, but if you know what you’re doing, you can turn it into a sprint. Let’s look at the map for a second:

Our goal is that curio location in the middle of the map. On the surface, it’s not that hard to navigate the labrinthine map and reach the locus beacon in only five fights. The game isn’t going to make it that easy, but we’ll get to that when we get to that. The first fight is just some hounds, anyway.

These showed up in the last dungeon as part of one of the Templar fights. They’re threatening, with a few different annoying attacks, but they were in that fight as fodder, basically, to diversify the different Templar encounters. The same is true here. They can barely pull Paracelsus out of position before they get cut, whipped, and bit down. It certainly helps that, with the excess of campfire logs, we’ve already got our buffs set up.

And here is the thing I’ve been alluding to for several posts now. The Mammoth Cyst and White Cell Stalk fights. The Mammoth Cyst is Darkest Dungeon’s version of a Beholder, with a bevy of different attacks, all of them devastating, and two actions per round to spend using them. If it blights you, it’s doing it for eight (8!) a turn. When it’s dealing normal damage, it’s attacking for seventeen, and it’s hitting two heroes as it’s doing so. It’s got 25 PROT, so it ignores a quarter of all damage dealt to it, and it can heal itself. When I say this dungeon is a grind, it’s really this fight that is a grind, and there are several on the map.

And saying all this still discounts the real problem of the fight, which is the White Cell Stalk. The White Cell Stalk, in comparison to its Mammoth counterpart, is pretty easy to kill. It only has 25 health, one action a turn, and no PROT. It has a unique move, however, called Teleport, which does exactly what it says it does -- it teleports the party out of the fight, to a random point in the dungeon. Sometimes, it will even teleport you to another fight! This is where the grind sets in, you see? Every round, the likelihood of the White Cell Stalk teleporting you away, negating all progress and probably setting your heroes up for another series of fights and hunger checks, only goes up.

It’s easy to kill the White Cell Stalk, but the Mammoth Cyst will just summon another one as soon as it gets another action. The one saving grace of the fight is the White Cell will never cast Teleport on its first turn, so you always have time to deal with it.

Still, the fight is daunting. There are a few solutions. The first one is to pray. After all, if you’re teleported to a random point in the dungeon, it’s entirely possible you get teleported to a room closer to your destination. I mean, you don’t have great odds and have to deal with the rest of the dungeon in the meantime, but I’ve seen it done. Better, though, is the same solution we’ve been using for any fight with an enemy with multiple attacks per round -- you just have to DoT them out. This is another benefit of our party composition. Each hero can inflict damage over time. What’s the giant ball the size of a cabin going to do, dodge out of the way?

There are three fights left on the optimal route through this dungeon. The first is another filler one. Remember, these fights are meant to wear you down as you make your way back to the Mammoth fights that block the way. Still, we haven’t seen an Antibody yet, nor has a Polyp appeared onscreen, so let’s just show it off real quick.

Polyps are annoying for the same reasons Hounds are, while the Antibody at the front plays a support role similar to the White Cell Stalk. This one can’t cast Teleport, though, so it’s a bit safer to take out the other enemies first. The real fights are just ahead, though.

Oh, you thought we were done with Templars? We didn’t even bring any of those protective relics, but you thought we were done? I mean, this is a watered-down version of those boss fights. It only has one action per round and it can’t cast that backbreaking Revelation attack, but it can still do all the other attacks we were worried about Templars doing. The most stressful part about this fight to me personally was how Boudica could never seem to land a hit on the thing. She’s wearing an accuracy-boosting Focus Ring. I just thought one accuracy trinket was enough.

Still, we fought through enough of these in the last dungeon, a watered-down version isn’t going to scare us too hard. Let’s just move on to the final fight, the thing guarding the Locus Beacon:

Ah.

No matter what you do, you are going to have to fight at least two Mammoth Cysts and run the risk of being sent away and having to grind back. One thing I didn’t mention before was how the game will give you the decency to remember your progress. You don’t have to fight through all 158 of the Cysts HP every time you come crawling back. Still, you’d like to get it all done in one go.

The sprint strategy worked, though. We were in a good enough position after keeping our fights to a minimum to manage these two grinds effectively. Boudica got put on Death’s Door at one point, but it wasn’t ever worrisome. She never got a Deathblow check before Paracelsus healed her back up above zero.

That leaves just one more dungeon left to complete the game, and the fourth Darkest Dungeon fight is more one long boss fight than an actual slog like the ones that have come before. That being said, there is a small yet urgent matter that I’d like to take care of first…

See you next week for that.

-r

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Edited March 17 by radio414

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Week Sixty-Four -- The Shrieker Part Two

Ahhhh.

I gave a list of reasons this blag didn’t update in my announcement post, and they’re a little embarrassing, so I won’t reiterate them here. It is good to be back, though. I find Darkest Dungeon is one of those games that’s pretty easy to come back too. The actual control scheme is a point-and-click affair. The actual mechanics are complex, but the front-facing ones are, put simply, “make their number go down and your number not go down.” I was able to get through this fight without much effort, though I would have liked some actual reward for all that trouble. But we’ll get to that in just a moment.

We covered most of the Shrieker mechanics in the last blog post about it. Last time, though, was more a struggle for survival. 16 damage was more of a threat than it is now. I mean, it is still a threat, and the Shrieker gets three threats a turn, but we’ve scaled to match. There’s never a doubt that we can’t survive.

But what my screenshots fail to capture (I do not understand my new computer but the screenshots are kind of lame. I’m doing my best with what I’ve got, but it’s something that will not work next week) is that the Shrieker is still annoying. It’s a bird, which means just like real life, it’s got a high DODGE stat, and though I’ve got Sethera on buff duty and some accuracy-boosting relics, it’s able to sidestep at a few key moments is not great. It also has very strong resistances at Champion-level. This is a bleed-focused party composition, and a 95% bleed resistance makes someone like Damian only inflict his premier status effect only half the time. We lost four coin flips over the course of this fight, each of which would have meant an extra fifteen damage getting through.

So we don’t kill the Shrieker this time. That’s fine. The goal for quest completion was survival. We just needed our trinkets back, and we got them. We could have gotten some better shrieker quirks than we ended up with if we’d won (Sethera ended up with Corvid’s Appetite, which increases how much food they eat), but all of these heroes had already braved the Darkest Dungeon and come out the other side.

This week also gave us an opportunity to make sure my chosen party for the fourth and final run through the Darkest Dungeon is in as tip-top a shape as we can manage. Yui, Skaia, and ABC, which one of you would be most likely to sacrifice yourself for the greater good? Just out of curiosity, I mean.

-r

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Edited March 24 by radio414

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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

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[LordCowCow 839]

Damn ABC called out

I did nothing to help in this final battle but I will gladly take credit as is my right as mod.

[radio414 903]

4 minutes ago, LordCowCow said:

Damn ABC called out

I did nothing to help in this final battle but I will gladly take credit as is my right as mod.

You contributed to the first Darkest Dungeon run. That counts for something.