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Weeks Eleven and Twelve: The Highs And Lows Of Money Grinding

At this point in the run, the plan has been explained, and, barring a dungeon where we’re unable to escape or some unlucky crits, this is about how the status quo is going to be for the foreseeable future, at least until heroes start hitting level 3 and I become comfortable running Veteran-level dungeons. There will have to be brief stops to the DLC areas -- the Courtyard and the Farmstead -- but those can get their own weeks as focus as well. For now, though, I just think it would be best to go through some brief highlights from the last two weeks of runs instead of going into them with any sort of depth.

You can see from the header picture this week that the “Antiquarian makes all our money” plan is going quite well. Not only has she pulled a trinket during camp (you can see that little cup in the upper middle of our inventory), but those items that look like statues and broken timepieces are also worth a significant amount. She finds those basically every time she interacts with a curio or wins a fight. The run ends up making over 21,000 gold, making up for that failed Week 4 run and then some.

It’s not without its hardships, though. None of the campers had any skills to prevent an ambush, so we see that for the first time…

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…Which also leads to another discussion of the surprise mechanics. You really don’t want to be surprised, especially with classes like the Musketeer and the Thrall, since a surprise shuffles the party around, and they’re not great at returning to the original position. A nighttime ambush also, as the name implies, takes place at night, which means no light, so everything becomes just a bit more dangerous. Crits become more likely, enemies dodge more, they deal more damage, and so on.

Speaking of low light, the other hardship is that Alhazred is great at stunning people with his “Hands from the Abyss” ability, but it comes at the cost of the light level, one of those “the Occultist draws his powers out of the depths of Hell” flavorings. Even after the ambush and the looting, most of the fights still look like this:

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You can tell torchlight by that bar at the top, by the way, not sure if that was made clear or not

Thankfully, as you can tell by the stress bars, these are all things the adventurers overcome, Josephine the Antiquarian especially. I would have sent her on another mission right away, but a problem arose. There were only short missions on offer, and I wasn’t really interested on having Josephine gain experience when she didn’t need to. Instead, I put together a bleed party to take on the Weald to get that experience track rolling, but that just led to a different problem. See if you can spot it.

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Okay, so the odds were stacked against you on this one unless you were already familiar with Darkest Dungeon, but what’s happened is I’ve made half -- or three-quarters, even, depending on how you interpret the Hellion’s Breakthrough ability -- of a dancing party that also happens to displace one of the least mobile heroes in the game. The Flagellant can be run from the back row as a support unit, but he’s not great at it, and I gave him the wrong skills anyway.

This means that the faster, dancing classes Graverobber and Sisters both get a turn in to disrupt the party order on my own, and instead of recovering with another dancing skill, Damian the Flagellant can only waddle back to the front of the line, a piece of dead weight being dragged along these fights with a piece of string. It certainly makes fights like the slimes much harder, as a bad action economy makes Cytokinesis much more likely.

I know this especially because this team did get one of those fights, and the enemy-respawning move got used at least four times.

What’s become apparent is I’m resting on my laurels a bit too hard right now. I can skill my way through most of these dungeons, but thank goodness this last one was Short because otherwise, I’d probably either have to do some drastic reordering or retreat for the second time this run (and with some of the same characters too!). This is something I’m going to have to buckle down on as I plan another Antiquarian run for next week, and for that one, it’ll be a Long one.

There are a whole bunch of mistakes one can make in a Long dungeon that will just ruin your day, and with the Antiquarian weighing down my packs and party, there won’t be as much room for supplies. It should work out, but my guard is definitely up after a near-disaster like that.

-r

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Weeks Thirteen and Fourteen: The Long Road to Redemption

Yup! I teased this last time, but it’s a long dungeon ahead of us now, and with some extra consideration as to how the team is going to play out. Now, the biggest problem with an Antiquarian, Shieldbreaker, Crusader, Man-At-Arms team like this one is its lack of healing. Josephine technically has a heal, though its best use is just keeping people off of Death’s Door, and LordCowCow can work as a secondary healer if you forgo one of his other staple moves. The latter runs into a bit of a problem, though: Upgrades.

It’s a small thing, but with the gold we’ve already accumulated and the amount I expect to gain, it’s finally time to start upgrading units. I still want to keep most of the money, though, because of our bank, so I didn’t actually buy Battle Heal, instead relying on Inspiring Cry and planning to stall a decent amount to keep everyone’s health up. Inspiring Cry will also be important for a key feature of Amani’s that I’ll get to once we’re in the dungeon. Speaking of Amani, perhaps the biggest problem with the Shieldbreaker is all of her moves are quite good in various contexts, so she’s going to be expensive to maintain going forward. For now, though, I gave her Puncture because of the Courtiers and Arbalists I expect to be fighting.

The basic plan, besides the stalling, is to take advantage of LordCowCow’s low speed to create a bit of a dancing cycle. Amani will leap forward with Puncture or Pierce, which moves CowCow into position three where he can use Holy Lance. Both of these moves can pick apart the enemy backline, which means there’s plenty of time afterward to stall out a fight on the frontline tanks.

In any case, if we’re planning on stalling out most of the fights, this is probably a bit of overpreparation again. I certainly don’t need the seventeen torches if CowCow is going to be lighting up the stage every other fight, not to mention the two campfires that return the torch level to 100 when used, but it’s better to be more prepared than not prepared at all.

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Spoiler

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I’m not going to say I forgot Thar was compulsive, because I didn’t. I knew the risks. This isn’t even the first time this happened this run, it’s just the funniest. It becomes even funnier, then, when I go to a confession booth just thinking to keep stress down when Thar decides to investigate by himself and ends up relieving his compulsions altogether.

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He's still debilitatingly claustrophobic now, though

But overall the quest goes well. I mean, a grub bites Josephine and gives her Scurvy, which isn’t great, but of all the adventurers to give a disease if I could choose one, it would be her, and it wouldn’t be debilitating even if it was someone else. We make about 30,000 gold, all told between the extra cash Josephine allows in a stack, the extra baubles finds when interacting with curios, and the bonus trinkets Josephine finds lying around at campfires. Speaking of campfires, though, I promised a thing about Amani, and it tends to happen during camps.

See, the Shieldbreaker is dealing with some past trauma on top of all the trauma she’s bound to experience questing around the estate, and this takes the form of guaranteed nightmares she pulls the rest of the party into.

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There are seven of these in total spread across the three dungeon difficulties, and they come with a few gimmicks attached. Most of them are pretty obvious: these enemies aren’t unique to the Shieldbreaker’s dreams, but they are rare, for example, and they’re pretty powerful for the level of the dungeon we’re currently in. The Pliskin in front starts the fight stealthed for two turns, a mechanic we haven’t seen just yet but is about to become really annoying. It means you can’t target it directly for those turns, which is a bother since Amani has an incurable Horror status effect, which means she’ll take 20 Stress every turn until the nightmare is over. This isn’t just a five-turn time limit until an affliction (and, as far as I can tell, she’s guaranteed an affliction if she reaches it), it also forcibly ends the fight if she does become afflicted.

Like I said, it’s a tough fight, but we manage in three. That’s the benefit of upgraded equipment and skills. There are some unique rewards here, but I’ll go over those later, probably the next time she has one. I just wanted to introduce the concept for now.

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This preparation is pretty simple. It’s the Warrens, here are a bunch of characters who are good in the Warrens, including a healer who can take care of all the bleeding that’s going to be going on. I’m hopeful that we’ll find one of those scrolls, but it’s not necessary. I also learned to cut back on food purchases since we can clean up some of the food that’s in there as long as you don’t think about it.

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Spoiler

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Amazing, even though Hak has negative scouting right now, we still manage to find one of these. I’m actually a little unclear on how secret rooms spawn, besides that they can only be found in Medium or longer dungeons and they have to be uncovered when a scout extends two rooms away. But these are great, they hold some gems that are worth even more than an Antiquarian-buffed gold stack and they have a chance to hold one of the three “Head” trinkets. In this case, we get Dismas’ Head, which is a damage buff that goes right onto Boudica. Don’t think about how Dismas is still alive and well. I know you already weren’t thinking about how we’re totally eating swine guts to stay alive but, you know, add that to the list.

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Think about all that loot instead

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Unfortunately, the Dungeon has a sick sense of humor (both puns intended) as a Swine Wretch immediately vomits all over Boudica giving her Creeping Cough, a disease that cuts all damage she deals by a whopping 20%, almost completely negating the head she now carries around in her bag. That’ll need taking care of, but thankfully the plan for this run was always to bleed the enemies out in turn, so between Elmer biting them, Damian lashing them with his whip, and Boudica’s own efforts, the swine are driven back.

The secret room accounts for most of the loot we find on this run, but that’s okay. I mostly wanted to use it as a buffer to get Josephine all cured of Scurvy, and in that regard, it outperformed expectations. Now I just have to cure Boudica of her Cough while still keeping her Rabid. Don’t think about that too much either.

That’s it for this week’s post. I would have gone further, but our efforts in both the Ruins and Warrens have stirred bosses in both, and I need to decide which we’re going to face next, the Swine Prince or the Sonorous Prophet. I guess let me know in the comments if you feel like engaging with that? Until next time,

-r

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Week Fifteen -- The Swine Prince

The ways and rituals of blood sacrifice are difficult to master. Those from beyond require a physical vessel if they are to make the crossing into our reality. The timing of the chants is imperative: without the proper utterances at precise intervals, the process can fail spectacularly.

In terms of gimmicks, the Necromancer chain is probably the least gimmicky of all of them. I mean, it had the “summons undead every turn” thing, but it still was mostly a “deal damage and deal stress damage” sort of fight, just with a bunch more health. Make no mistake, it’s an effective gimmick, enough that several other bosses and minibosses do something similar, but it’s not all the game can offer. We’ll get to the Swine Prince’s in just a moment, but first, there are a few things I would like to do around town.

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Now that we have gold and can expect to get more, we can start to purge some of the particularly unmanageable negative quirks. The “extra food consumed” ones will have to go eventually, but for now can be mitigated just by, you know, remembering to pack extras. This “worse at scouting” stuff, though, has to go sooner rather than later. Secret rooms are just going to keep showing up, and I don’t want to miss any of them. Euryale and Boudica, meanwhile, are recovering from their bouts of illness they got in the last run. There’s an upgrade to the sanitarium that gives them a chance to cure two diseases at once, but, just like real life, I want Boudica to be rabid for as long as possible.

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Speaking of troublesome, Junjeong and Nammo still have a torn rotator and are themselves ravenous, but I sent them on this mission regardless because it’s a bleed-weak area, so that’s how I expect them to do their damage. Ren inflicts bleeds as well, and can serve to follow up on Junjeong and Margaret’s marks. Speaking of Margaret, she and Thar are surprise tools that will help us later. Margaret more than Thar, hopefully, but it’s not like Thar isn’t versatile enough on his own.

He also has a quirk that gives him a bonus chance to scout here, and look at that percentage! That’s even before the bonuses that light gives, which, since I like to keep the light on Radiant at all times, adds an extra 15% chance on top of that. We’re now more likely to scout ahead than not. So yeah, it’s only natural that we find another secret room.

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In this case, the room has two more of those incredibly valuable gems and another “head” trinket: Junia’s Head. Like with Dismas, don’t think too hard about where it came from while our Junia is still alive. It’s probably just another healer named Junia, right? Anyway, it’s one of the more powerful healing buffs in the game, certainly more than the vial Margaret’s got on her for this run, so those get swapped.

There’s only one fight between us and the boss, and it’s not particularly interesting, so I’m just going to skip past it. This is one of those playing with percentages situations. Once the boss is defeated, the quest is complete, which means anything done afterward in the run is just a bonus.

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You’ll notice that this fight is not just against that three-space-big Swine Prince, but also that thing in the back, a pig named Wilbur. Here’s where we’ll talk about the fight’s gimmick. Left alone, the Prince will simply use a move called “Wild Flailing” which, all other things being equal, isn’t that hard to race. It only targets a single adventurer and besides a decent amount of damage, doesn’t have any other adverse effects. But Wilbur has “End This One” and “End These Two”, which will mark one or two members of the party, enabling the Prince to use “Obliterate Body”, and suddenly that damage isn’t just “decent” anymore.

“Okay,” you might say. “I’ll just target Wilbur first then, that way he can’t flag any adventurers.” Yeah, that’s the trap they’ve set. If Wilbur is harmed, or worse, if he dies, then the Swine Prince unlocks one final move in his arsenal: “Enraged Destruction,” which not only does damage to the entire party, it also has a chance to stun them. That’s the trap the developers have set for you, though they only really expect you to fall for it once. There’s a little dialog trigger if you do make that mistake.

Oh, also Wilbur pointing at you does damage somehow. There’s an achievement for dying to him (I do actually have this one) and a subreddit called r/fuckwilbur, which I think you can imagine what kind of posts go there.

The trick to making this fight easier, then (I almost said “easy” but there are still chunks of damage flying around, so you do still have to be on your toes), is to make Wilbur useless. Classes like Man-at-Arms Thar can guard the marked adventurers, which is one way to take care of it, but what works the best is one of the Arbalest classes, Margaret the Musketeer, in this case, using their flare ability to clear the marks altogether. Between that and Thar/Ren stunning the Prince every other turn and inflicting damage over time on the other, the beast goes down pretty quickly. He even dies unexpectedly to some bleeding, so I don’t even get a good screengrab of it.

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Wilbur’s activity also changes after his Prince dies. He also has a multi-target stun attack, but it does much less damage and hopefully is more an annoyance than a threat (though, again, r/fuckwilbur). What’s important here, though, is that his life isn’t directly tied to the other, so I can get a good grab of the kill.

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The rest of the dungeon is just more fights and curios, digging for more loot, but I won’t show you much of those either, since you’ve seen all these enemies before, and only one of them had any actual pigs in them which is, like, the whole point of the Warrens. I could show you my intricate inventory management (sarcasm) or how Margaret got addicted to weird pig wine, but- okay actually that is probably interesting.

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That’s what you get for drinking it without cleaning it with herbs first! Now you only want to drink more of it!

but yeah that’s really all there is to this run of the Warrens.

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Next week, I’ll probably tackle the other available boss, the Sonorous Prophet, but I might do some runs in the Weald or Cove first, depending on the rewards offered, so be sure to check back in for that. Until then, as always, thanks for reading!

-r

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40 minutes ago, Sethera said:

Nice! Now hopefully we won't have to worry about pig vomit...

unfortunately this game can technically go on forever so there will always be pig vomit.

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Weeks Sixteen and Seventeen -- The Cove Is Going To Be The Death Of Me

I ended up deciding to do the latter this week, pushing up the Weald and Cove levels a bit so I can introduce the boss fights for those a bit sooner. Technically I succeeded, in that, by the end of this post, the Wizened Hag is unlocked, but, well, we’ll see about the other one.

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It will be a lot easier to deal with the Prophet eventually when our Plague Doctor isn’t begging for food, so Paracelsus is sent to the medical ward to deal with that. Meanwhile, the Weald mission has a trinket that will be rather helpful for her, so let’s look at the lineup to go for that:

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This is definitely not a party composition I would have used earlier in the run (or maybe I would have -- remember that post where I just messed up a bunch?) but with the addition of some trinkets, Yui and The Goliath have enough accuracy to deal with most anything, and besides that, we’re taking Sethera along as well to boost it even further, completely negating their drawbacks. ABC is serving double-duty, as both a healer and another decently heavy hitter in the lineup. I expect the fights to be quick.

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Spoiler

There’s a brief scare where the initial scout reveals more blockages than I was expecting, like, I wanted to use some of them to dig up some graves and get some loot, but we turned out to be just prepared enough to make it through the creeping rotten plantlife of the Weald without injury, so I suppose I can’t complain too much. Anyway, this is a Skirmish mission, meaning we have to win all the room battles in the dungeon, so let’s go through all the ones this dungeon has to offer us:

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Oh, it’s just the one. Okay. Technically, this composition exploits a bit of a party weakness, in that neither Yui nor The Goliath can hit the back two rows effectively, so in theory, the back two enemies can mark to their heart’s content while the first two rows deal increased damage to marked targets. In actual practice, the Leper and the Thrall both hit harder than either of them even with the marks, hard enough that it’s not even a race, and the two Fungal Artillery in the back are almost useless without anyone to follow up, so I just stalled out the rest of the fight to heal back up.

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I turned down the torchlight for the remaining fights in the hopes of, you know, getting something more for my time, which only led to this fight being a little bit difficult (just to note, it's a hallway fight so it didn't count for the quest). You can see the modifiers at the top there. And again, this is the theory versus practice portion, because, in theory, this fight should result in a lot of stress, both Yui and The Goliath can actually knock the front row back a step or three, pulling the Cultist and Madman up to a waiting fist/sword. And Sethera can stress heal.

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So yeah, overall, easy, but it’s a short dungeon done mostly for the reward relic, so that’s to be expected. There’s no Collector here to ruin our day.

No, the day ruining comes with this next run, Let’s just get right into it, then. Since the header image is what precedes doom, I guess I can explain exactly why I touched/torched the Shambler Altar knowing exactly what would happen to me. The Shambler is a powerful miniboss, perhaps the most powerful miniboss in the game. The Clapperclaws that the Shambler summons every turn are like little snowballs -- they’re fast and they get out of hand quickly, so you need to keep them in check in addition to all the bleed and blight you need to handle from the Shambler itself. It also guarantees the fight will take place in darkness, and it always surprises the adventurers, so you start with a shuffled party every time.

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It is beatable, though. It always attacks every hero, so the Highwayman’s riposte ability helps out a lot, and the Shieldbreaker can pierce through the Clapperclaws’ slowly-rising PROT. The Vestal keeps things alive, and the Plague Doctor’s blight also gets through the Clapperclaws pretty hard. But you have to be on your game, and your adventurers have to not miss every other attack, because then, well, this happens:

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Basically, everything that could go wrong did. Misses, failed stuns (mostly caused by me not reading the Shambler’s resistances -- its one high resistance is to stuns), and an ill-timed shuffle put heroes on Death’s Door real quick. I’m actually fortunate Junia didn’t get killed here, and I think Amani took a deathblow check as well. So yeah, we got the heck out of there real quick.

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I don’t even like the Cove all that much. It smells like fish and there are ghosts in there. On the other hand, it was definitely a bout of overconfidence, but it’s a lesson learned with minimal consequences, so I’ll probably be overconfident again. I can already feel it brewing with what I’ve got planned for the upcoming week, but I can still be hopeful. I just hope it isn’t all I have.

-r

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Week Eighteen -- The Crimson Court

The courtyard and gardens surrounding the manor were once a point of pride for the diligent custodians I employed. Great banquets and lavish social affairs were hosted here under the stars.

Despite the expectation of propriety normally ascribed to those in our position, we mocked the stoic melancholy of the moss-covered fountains and cherubic statues, our salacious trysts half-hidden in the hedgerows, our morality, slipping ever-deeper into the mud.

This is another instance of me doing DLC way before I intended to talk about it, but I was tempted with a cool trinket, okay? It’s not my fault (it is my fault). At the heart of the Crimson Court DLC, past the Districts and the Flagellant class, is the Crimson Court itself, a new location that, when breached, changes the game, making it even more complex. We’ll get to the modifiers when we get to it, but first, we should talk about the breaching process in the first place.

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“Short” and “Apprentice” are misleading descriptors for this quest. It’s definitely on the higher end of Level Two, and definitely would be a Medium quest if they didn’t want you camping here. The only reason I’m rushing to do it now is because it, like every other quest in the game, cycles through its rewards, and this week’s, a scouting trinket for Hakima and Elmer Fudd, is particularly valuable to me for reasons we have discussed already, so here we go.

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We do have other advantages, other ways to prepare. We’ve gathered enough deeds that we can upgrade the Blacksmith again, which means that all the Level Two heroes can basically act as Level Three in a pinch, and this is exactly the sort of pinch we might need them for. I am taking Hakima along with us even though he’s still Level One because of the strength of his kit, plus he brings along dog biscuits to buff him for the difficult fight that I know is coming. This is basically a boss dungeon, just without the opportunity to camp beforehand.

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Technically this is a risky team, in that Alhazred is not the class you want solo-healing, especially in something this long that can grind you out, but Junia’s in the shop right now after losing that Shambler fight, and it’s not like he won’t have his uses. He does have a pull and can hit the backline besides, so that’s two reasons, anyway. I just have to be aware of it and heal early before the riskiness of his heal backfires on me. We talked about Hakima already, which just leaves Boudica as our heavy hitter who can also inflict bleed when she needs to and Sethera, another bleeder with a buff and a stress heal that will be very useful in ways I will explain once we get into the dungeon which I guess is… right now.

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Okay, so this is a lot to try and explain all at once, but this is how it’s introduced, so I guess here goes. The map, like the tutorial dungeons at the start of the game, is scripted. Unlike the tutorial, though, you don’t even get a chance to see it until you’re already going through it. You only see pathways beyond the next room by either rolling really well on your scout chance or by actually reaching that room in question. Even better, you still have to roll to actually see if there are traps or enemies ahead even though the game says “scouting” when revealing nothing at all.

The other new feature on this screen is the torchlight. To compensate for these dungeons being longer than basically anything else in the game, the game doesn’t expect you to worry about torchlight as much. Instead, torches are relegated to providing an accuracy buff and the torchlight is now “Bloodlight,” which provides a small buff to Bleed chance and any Stress damage.

Speaking of Stress damage, there’s one final change: Exploring an unknown dungeon is stressful (just like real life!), but only inflicts stress some of the time. In the Crimson Court, the maddening whine of all the mosquitos inflicts one randomly-assigned point of stress per tile. Again, this is technically a Short dungeon, so that doesn’t matter much for this dungeon, but it absolutely will going forward. It’s just another way the game grinds these heroes down.

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Is it just a running gag to show Sethera getting beat up by all the gross things? Don’t worry, Seth, you get a heroic moment later on.

I’m not going to go over every single enemy in The Courtyard while I still haven’t done that for the other areas yet, but I will go over the gimmick. Almost every enemy here has a move called “The Thirst,” which does a few things. First, it’s vampiric, in that when it deals damage, it heals the user as well. The second is that the users are vampiric, and getting a taste of blood is going to transform. These mosquitoes in question don’t do much more besides turning red, but they do still get a bunch of new, worse abilities. The more, ah, regal of the enemies get much more apparent transformations.

The third thing that The Thirst does is, well, it’s vampiric. It makes you a vampire. It won’t happen every time -- Seth’s okay in that screenshot, for example -- but it will happen. It’s called the Crimson Curse, and that’s why we brought that Blood with us way back on the provisioning screen. To feed any potential infectees. Being a vampire isn’t all bad (just like real life!). It comes with a speed boost, and it cures any other diseases you might have, but that incessant craving for blood does add one extra meter to keep track of, and it will kill someone if you’re not careful.

Oh, and it can spread between adventurers.

Oh, and Alhazred got infected.

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There are ways to cure it, but they’re all super tough, so, uh, that’s fun. 

Anyway, I said the map was scripted, so here’s the map:

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The fights and curios are fairly straightforward. Despite all my angsting and moaning, this is still a Novice dungeon, and these are some of the more powerful adventurers we have and Hakima. The quest isn’t even about fighting. We’re just looking for three Thronging Hives to burn with some special torches that are totally different from normal torches I swear you guys. The only interesting fight to mention is the “Croc Alert!” boss fight, so let’s jump straight to that.

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This is our first encounter with environmental hazards, now that I think about it. The only thing to actually kill here is the Crocodile/mosquito hybrid waiting there at the far end. The plants have inhuman dodge capabilities, they only exist to make sure you can hit different rows of combat. This is why we brought an Occultist with us. He can make sure the Crocodilian is right where Boudica can hit it for maximum damage. Hakima and Elmer can hit anywhere and negate one of the Croc’s turns with a well-timed stun, and Sethera’s accuracy buffing Battle Ballad helps with the similar debuff of the Croc’s.

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That doesn’t mean it’s all peaches and cream, though. The Crocodilian can still pull adventurers towards it, inflicting not-insignificant bleed and damage and disrupting the party. There was a brief moment there where Boudica had to use Breakthrough to rush back to the front again, and the Jester is best at hitting the middle two rows, so there’s a bit of tension there. But with a bit of luck -- we didn’t see the particularly devastating combination this boss can pull out -- everyone manages the boss fight relatively healthily.

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Told you so.

Now, the story reason behind this quest was that burning the three Thronging Hives would clear the Courtyard of the vampiric vermin for good. Unfortunately, the opposite happens. Instead, now that we breached the gate, the whole Estate is infested, which means we’re going to see more than just Alhazred get infected in all likelihood. The infestation will only get worse and worse until we defeat one of the three leaders of the swarm. In order, they are the Baron, the Viscount, and the Countess. We are… not ready for any of them.

On the bright side, we do get a cool new cutscene.

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In those younger years, my home was a hive of unbridled hedonism, a roiling apiary where instinct and impulse were indulged with wild abandon. A bewitching predator slipped in amidst the swarm of tittering sycophants. Though outwardly urbane, I could sense in her a mocking thirst.

Driven half-mad by cloying vulgarity, I plotted to rid myself of this lurking threat in a grand display of sadistic sport, but as the moment of murder drew nigh, the gibbous moon revealed her inhuman desires in all their stultifying hideousness!

See you next week,

-r

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Oops missed an update. But glad I can stress heal. That seems pretty useful in a game where everything is out to get you. Also, the shambler looks super creepy.

Also, dang it, I hate mosquitoes! And anything that sucks blood! No wonder I was so hard on that croc. But it looks like we'll be seeing more of those bloodsucking spawn soon.

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Weeks Nineteen and Twenty -- Risky Business

Our first step on the road to clearing the Crimson Court is to defeat the Baron, which requires a rather hardy party of resolve levels 3 or 4. Meanwhile, all of the adventurers currently in the lineup are either level 1 or two, so that’s another timer that’s been imposed on us here. I was going to do a boss run this week, but the reward trinket was the same for both of them and it wasn’t one I felt worth pursuing. It gave bonus damage against a very specific miniboss called The Fanatic, and, all things being equal, I’d rather just not encounter him if I can help it. So instead here are some highlights from this week’s crop of runs.

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The first is that yes, the bloodsuckers of the Crimson Court can be found anywhere now, which means so is the threat of the Crimson Curse. Alhazred is already infected, remember, so he needs blood to survive, and we only have eight or so vials. This will actually last a while, but if the Curse spreads or we need it to activate some curios in the Courtyard, well, it’s just nice to have as much as possible.

Also of note in this screenshot is the party. There aren’t any healers because they’re all either level 2 already or dealing with some particularly high stress. I chose to go with the “you can’t get stressed if there’s nothing to stress you” route, with the only theoretical hitch being if Amani had a nightmare while camping. In that case, the hope was that four speedy damage dealers could manage things. There wasn’t a nightmare, though, so I was worried for nothing, really.

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It also helps when adventurers crit. That’s a stress heal too.

The other run I did this week followed a similar strategy, replacing dancers who could pierce through armor with burly bleeding types. This one ran into a few more problems, mostly in how burly bleeding types tend not to be the fastest in the bunch, which means the disease-spreading pig vomit tends to, well, spread diseases.

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Don’t you hate it when a pig vomits on you and you get the common cold?

No immediate stress healer meant that The Goliath also came close to going on a rampage, though between some key camping skills and his own stress reduction, it didn’t actually happen. Instead, I guess we get to talk about the Falconer’s gimmick.

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This is the Talon Brigade. The Falconer used to be among their ranks before she realized exactly what it meant to be a brigand, but the Talons don’t take leavers easily. Every encounter with her in the party has a chance to be one of these, ones similar to the Brigands we’ve seen already, but slightly buffed and altered to fit Quinn and Bird’s aesthetic. The back row where the fuselier would be, for example, has replaced their blunderbuss for a bow and arrow. It’s a more difficult fight than a normal one of these would be; the “miniboss” gets two moves a turn and can shuffle this party that really doesn’t want to be shuffled.

They leave special feathers too, which can be sold for a small amount of gold. The other thing they can leave behind, though, is a key quirk called “Marked by the Flock” which makes the game treat any such hero like another Falconer -- they’re someone who Mother Talon deems needs to die. If all four adventurers are so marked, she might even decide to do the killing herself. But that’s for another time.

There will definitely be a boss fight next week, which is good because this run through the Warrens also triggered a town event.

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So not only are we making money, we don’t have to spend anything to make this expedition a success. I mean, besides upgrades and making sure anyone left behind is ready to go the week after, cuz there are, like, five bosses up for grabs and they all gotta get done, you know? See you next week for that.

-r

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Week Twenty-One -- The Wizened Hag

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 had a bit of trouble putting this party together since I put Damian, Ren, and Amani all in the medical ward for the week, the former two to deal with their fresh new diseases and Amani because I didn’t want her ravenously gobbling down food anymore when I wasn’t expecting it. The problem is that all three of those heroes are particularly good against who we’re about to go up against, all being able to hit the back rows and bleed as necessary. I didn’t want to use Boudica because she’s in danger of leveling up and I want to use her elsewhere. There’s also the gimmick of the Hag fight to take into consideration. It’s one of the trickier ones, but we’ll get to that when we get to it.

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Before we get to, you know, the team, I just wanted to point out the center of town where the events take place. I haven’t before since the Crimson Court forces one on you until it’s opened and that one’s just mosquitos, but the Bumper Crop event we got last week makes acclaimed artist Grant Wood canon to the Darkest Dungeon universe, so that’s cute.

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This is similar to one of the parties I took into the Weald last week, except this time I remembered who was getting shunted into the back. Instead of Doggo the Abomination, who’s useless back there, it’s Margaret, who excels. Margaret also is our only healer, but it’s important, in my opinion, to have a healer who can actually fight the Hag. Hak and Elmer can go in either spot two or three here, so Audrey is completely free to lunge forwards as soon as she gets the opportunity. With the help of some speed trinkets, she’s almost guaranteed to do so at the start of every fight.

Hak got the scouting trinkets, including the one he picked up from the Crimson Court, and Skaia got the damage/accuracy trinkets. We’re a bit overprepared, but that’s what free supplies will do.

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The sixty-percent base scout chance means we avoid most of the fights, only having to face two before the hag herself. It also means we easily find a secret room, unlocking Barristan’s head, a powerful protection trinket, for future parties to use. The one thing I want to note is how I forgot the Fungal Scratcher counts as a Human enemy, which means Skaia the Bounty Hunter gets bonuses while fighting it, turning one of the more problematic enemies thanks to its relatively high damage reduction into a cakewalk.

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But anyway, here’s what the boss looks like:

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The gimmick of the Hag fights is the cauldron occupying the first two rows. This is why I said it was important to hit the back two rows, as it’s almost impossible to shift them around. Unlike the obstacles we’ve seen elsewhere, though (remember the weeds we saw when fighting the Crocodilian?), there’s one extra step involved here: The Hag can throw you into the pot and start cooking you alive.

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This is a bit cruel to type out when it’s Skaia, like, a named forum member trapped in there, but you’re not actually supposed to do anything about this. Sure, they’ll take damage every turn (not every round, but every time someone takes an action), but it will never kill them -- they always scramble out once they hit zero HP, and the Hag has relatively low health for a boss. You’re supposed to race the cauldron. So while it does suck that the main damage dealer of the party got thrown in, that’s why we brought three other potential damage dealers. I might bring a Vestal next time since she can do a relatively decent amount of damage and I forgot the Hag’s main attack was an area-of-effect one…

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But otherwise, it’s a pretty easy fight overall. Margaret gets the kill this time, for those keeping score.

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See? It's fine. It's fine. It's fine!

I could have doubled back and taken on a few more fights, but I dropped some food to take the loot from the secret room, so hunger was starting to set in. We’ve got a bunch more bosses available to fight, though, and with the bleed squad out of the shop, it’s time to see what the Inchoate Flesh is all about. See you for that next week.

-r

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Week Twenty-Two -- The Incholate Flesh

My zeal for blood rituals and summoning rites had begun to ebb, as each attempt invariably brought only failure and disappointment. Progress was halting, and the rapidly accumulating surplus of wasted flesh had become burdensome.

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Unlike last week, this team was easy to put together. Three adventurers with strong bleeds, a stress heal to get Dismas back down (not that he particularly needs it), and Junia to run support. Our trinket sets are getting stronger all the while as well, even if it’s a little difficult to show that off. I’ve tried to make a point of noting the particularly powerful pickups, and perhaps in one of the off-weeks, I’ll talk about what I tend to look for in these little doodads.

The run itself is pretty easy. That happens when you have a party as upgraded as it can be. Even better, Dismas got a damage buff early on from some suspiciously-aged alcohol, which meant he was regularly dealing dozens (plural) of damage. Not much could stand in the way.

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Though Sethera did get hit with some spider vomit, so it wasn’t all great.

Pretty soon, we found ourselves up against the Flesh.

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The Flesh is at once the most chaotic and yet the simplest boss in the game. You can even see the four things it can do in this screenshot here. The heart in front will heal it, the head bites you to inflict bleeding, the spine will stun you, and the butt will give you a blight attack. That’s all each part will do. The stats won’t change either, so you can reasonably predict the order these things will attack. What does change, though, is the boss itself, changing its forms every round to new ones. For example, here’s what it changed into in my second round:

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So that can be annoying if it decides to give you damage that you didn’t adequately prepare for. For example, I spent our antivenoms on a few spider fights before making it to the boss, so those two butts back there (talk about a beast with two backs!) could pose a problem if things started to spiral out of control.

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The good news is that, unlike some other bosses who would just take up the four enemy rows, each of these parts counts as its own enemy, and you only need to kill one of them. They even have a shared health pool, and it’s not larger than any of the other bosses in this game. This is why Sethera the Jester and Damian the Flagellant are so good here. They both have an attack that hits two things and inflicts bleeding, so both of them have their effectiveness doubled here. It is Dismas who gets the kill, though.

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The rest of the dungeon is unremarkable, though we do find a secret room with loads of money in it, which basically funds all the pre-run upgrades and provisioning by itself, so that’s great. Next week, we’re fighting The Siren, which I’ll actually be trying a strategy I haven’t tried before, and we’ll also be introducing one more element to the game, one more timer we have to deal with. Until then,

-r

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Week Twenty-Three -- The Siren

My lofty position wasn't always accompanied by the fear of office, and there was a time when I could walk the streets or raise a glass in the tavern without concern for molestation. Faithful as the tide, one precocious village waif made it her hobby to shadow my every errand. It was charming then, troublesome later.

Before we get much further into the actual fight, here’s that extra timer the game has decided to throw our way:

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The Fanatic is a miniboss that is technically entirely optional to face. He stalks the estate searching for those infected with the Crimson Curse, but you don’t have to indulge him by sending any out in parties. It’s not like he’ll attack the Hamlet or anything. The chance of his spawning is affected by two factors: whether or not the heroes are in our party, and how severely the Court’s infestation has taken hold of the estate. More clearly, he might not bother with a party that only has one vampire in it, while he has a 70% chance of spawning against a full vampire party, and he’ll only bother to check when the infestation level reaches medium.

That’s why we got this event in the first place, by the way. The infestation has grown. It’s not at its peak yet, but it is going to be noticeable.

But let’s not focus too hard on that aspect of the game just yet. The Fanatic also can’t spawn in a boss dungeon for reasons which are kind of funny but not worth getting into right now, so let’s just focus on the bosses in front of us.

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I want to be a bit clear here that while this party does have some strengths against the Siren, namely how three out of four of the adventurers are passable when the Siren inevitably, well, allures someone out of position, the fourth, Yui the Leper, is a bit of an oversight on my part. There are two reasons why I thought this party would work (to be clear, it did work, but if you’re trying to replicate my teams beat for beat, uh, don’t), one I’ll talk about now and one I’ll talk about later. I thought that, like the Hag before it, those freed from the Siren’s song would be deposited at the front of the team. Either that’s a trap the game sets for you or just plain inconsistency, but the opposite happens. They run to the back, which is bad news for the Leper.

The choice to bring the non-combatant Josephine is also suspect, but it’s mentioned by the wiki as a possible strategy and she can play secondary healer/blighter along with Paracelsus, so it’s a bit of a dice-roll, but this is what we’re running with.

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She can dodge pretty well, for what that’s worth.

There are a few things to go over before we get to the boss proper. The first is that I’ve occasionally mentioned there’s a curio in the Cove that will cleanse adventurers of negative quirks when encountered, so I have a screenshot of that now that I’ve found one just to prove that I’m not crazy. In this case, Paracelsus uses it to get over her fear of Eldritch creatures, which is good since this is an eldritch creature-heavy place.

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Seriously, with all the Bas-Reliefs we’ve seen you’d think we’d have found more than one of these.

The other is that nobody in our party has a camping skill that protects the party from ambushes, another factor I had in mind when going into this, but still unlucky to run into one right outside the boss room.

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Really sprung on the effects budget here.

We’ve had midnight fights before, like, the Shieldbreaker’s nightmares technically count as ambushes, but this is our first ambush proper. As implied by the name, a nighttime ambush always surprises the party, and always takes place in total darkness. This is why we’ve been avoiding them for so long, the darkness makes it risky and it’s a drain on resources even when we win.

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At least nobody got sick from this, though given she’s a plague doctor, maybe that’s not so surprising.

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Okay, so here’s my other misconception about this fight. The wiki gives you the impression that the Siren tends to allure the party member with the lowest resistances, so I thought that if I buffed the rest of the team besides Josephine it’d put the odds more in my favor that the Siren would act how I wanted it to. As for if it works? Well, let’s just get to the fight.

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The Siren takes up two slots of space and has two actions, but like most every other boss fight, that just means the other two spaces can be taken up by the things she pulls to her side. As has been alluded to already, that includes adventurers.

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Yui no! She’s not wearing a raincoat!

Okay, so that black bar is my doing, because I didn’t realize there’d be mermaid nipples in a game rated T for Teen. This is a good Christian forum so blocked they go. More pressingly, though, is that the strategy didn’t work. The siren immediately went after Yui, which means not only do we have to deal with being down a person, we have to deal with the heaviest hitting adventurer in the game on the opposing side for a turn. While I would recommend the wiki for most things, boss fights are apparently not one of them.

Oh, the wiki also says don’t bring a Leper because if they get mind-controlled you’re in for a world of hurt? And also a no on Doggo the Abomination too, you say? Well, listen, uh.

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when the furry becomes a scalie

You’ll notice in that screenshot that the fight’s not going so great. Josephine’s got a Death’s Door debuff on her, our secondary damage dealer has turned traitor, and everyone’s currently hurting a bit. We do have some positives in our favor, though. The Siren isn’t actually great at fighting, mostly relying on her allure and a few lackeys she can summon to actually grind out fights. She has a stress attack and a bleed attack and that’s pretty much it for direct offense. Of course, one damage is always enough to deal a death blow, but that’s the advantage of having two healers. It’s difficult to be caught without one. Between that and our overprepared provisioning, it’s not hard to stay in the fight.

The biggest advantage, though, is that Yui can do, like, fifty damage when he crits right now.

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One more boss down. There’s just one more we can do right now, then, the first Prophet fight, and after that, we’ll be dangerously close to the next big jump in difficulty as more and more adventurers reach Level Three. We’re already seeing quests pop up looking for medium-leveled adventurers, pretty soon they’ll be crowding out everything else. Let’s hope we get everyone there all the same then, hm? See you next week.

-r

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i came out of exile for the express and sole purpose of posting this image that i spent like half an hour on, and will now return to my exile

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Week Twenty-Four: The Sonorous Prophet

Excavations beneath the manor were well underway, when a particularly ragged indigent arrived in the hamlet. This filthy, toothless miscreant boasted an uncanny knowledge of my ambitions and prognosticated publicly that, left unchecked, I would soon unleash doom upon the world.

I dunno, man, like, if you weren’t doing shady stuff unweaving the fabric of reality maybe random guys wouldn’t call you out on it is all I’m saying.

Anyway, it’s not that I’ve been avoiding the first Prophet fight, it’s just that there have been other things I wanted to get to first. This fight has also not been offering the best trinkets, and while that’s infuriatingly still the case, it’s the best opportunity to level up some of these characters, and also the reason I’ve been holding off on levelling up Boudica despite how good she would have been against, say, the Hag. So here’s our lineup.

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Now, this lineup is good for exactly one thing: killing the Prophet. It is not great at getting to the Prophet. Thar the Man-at-Arms isn’t exactly the best in Rank Three, and Joan the Seraph isn’t great without a mark party to support her, so grinding through potential four-on-four fights isn’t going to go great, but at least Euryale is here to keep everyone healthy through all of those, and it’s not like adventurers with level two equipment are going to struggle too hard, especially with the trinkets we’re bringing along.

Speaking of shiny new trinkets, though…

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The music boxes fall in the same category as things like the heads, except instead of finding them in secret rooms or Collector loot drops, they have a chance to drop when defeating a Madman enemy. It’s a low chance, and the Madman is an uncommon enemy to start with, but it’s always exciting to see one. I don’t know if the Aria Box is going to see much use outside of preparing for a Shieldbreaker nightmare, but there are others I’ll be sure to point out along the way.

It’s possible this is wrong. I mean, Joan nearly hit 100 Stress a few times after getting too much wine on her clothes.

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This is why you don’t wear white on a dungeon outing. That and, you know, all the blood.

So Euryale is basically on “keep that stress down please” duty, hopefully her throat’s not sore from all the singing. Then again, she’s an accursed gorgon so maybe she has bigger needs than a throat lozenge. The hardest fights are when there are two of these Courtiers, but thankfully there are enough other fights to recuperate in, and once we get to camping, Joan’s stress has stabilized around 50, just in time for the boss.

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The flavor of this fight is that the Prophet is holed up in some chapel and you have to smash through the ruined pews to get to the altar. Each pew is actually worth a lot of money if you do destroy them, but it takes far, far less time to just bring people who can hit the back row. In this case, I only brought Boudica, but that’s because of the actual gimmick of the fight: the Prophet can see the future.

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The Prophet gets two actions a turn, and one of them is always a move called “Prognostication,” which will foretell where rocks will fall on the adventurers at the end of the round. These rocks are the Prophet’s primary offense, his other two moves are more of the “pick off those at 0 health already” types, or a stress attack called “Eye on You,” (because of course it’s called that). You can play around the rocks, though, by using adventurers who can guard the squishier members of the team. Guarding also increases their PROT, so they won’t even take much damage once they’ve used the ability a few times.

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I brought two such guards just in case, as the Prophet can also stun multiple characters to keep them from guarding the targeted characters, so it’s just a bit of redundancy to keep things rolling. Add in Euryale’s ability to cure the Blight from the Prophet’s other attack, and it’s pretty smooth sailing for the four rounds it takes for Boudica to get the kill.

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There are two Novice bosses left to tackle, but we have to fight through the Weald and the Cove to get to them first. There’s also unlocking the Farmstead area as part of the Colour Out of Space Legally Distinct Color of Madness DLC, which will take its own week as well. Plus, the infestation is only growing bigger, and I fear we’re going to have to wait to deal with that for a while, lest it just catch up on us again. But these are decisions for next week and beyond. Until then,

-r

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Weeks Twenty-Five and Twenty-Six: Pushing Onwards

It’s good to see other blogs updating on the site again. I guess you could call this a Nuzlocke run also, given the limited cast forcing me to play outside of my favorites and the grim specter of permadeath looming over the whole affair, but unless someone else has a medium-sized knowledge of Darkest Dungeon that they haven’t told me about, I don’t think there are any races happening anytime soon. Let’s just continue on with the run.

At this point, where multiple adventurers are hitting level three, we’re about to hit the first big difficulty spike in the game, but we have a few things to tackle before we get there. The first is obvious: we need to get the rest up to Veteran level so they can tackle those dungeons without a stress penalty, and Quinn and Bird are still stuck at level one, so they’ve got to get grinding up. I mentioned the Color of Madness DLC last week, that needs opened at some point, but it only counts as a short mission the first time through, so I’ve definitely been holding off on that. There’s also the matter of the two remaining bosses of this difficulty wave: the Sodden Crew and the Brigand 8-Pounder Cannon, and we need to grind through a few missions to get to those as well.

There’s one final problem: The Shieldbreaker’s nightmare sequences are also tied to dungeon level, and while they can continue to spawn in the more difficult dungeons, their difficulty goes up to match, and I’d like to avoid that. It’s a weird timer, since it’s a 50/50 occurence and has to happen on medium or long dungeons, so there aren’t that many more opportunities for Amani to have them, but we’re incentivised to go on longer dungeons anyway to keep our gold up and increase our experience faster.

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That being said, we are tackling a short dungeon first because it’ll unlock the Sodden Crew quest. This is a tricky party because The Goliath doesn’t have anyone to help him heal all that stress he’s been building up, which turns it into a stall composition that really can’t stall for too long, but it shouldn’t take long and there are two stun options in the party, so it’s not like we can’t make do.

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I didn’t forget about the Band of the Hawk Talon (Oh look who’s watched Berserk), but I did forget how annoying they could be. This is the second fight I ran into them on this run, and the first introduction to their Cultist-analog there in the back. You know it’s a modded enemy because she’s barely wearing any clothes. These things are still manageable, but I don’t know what the level spike is going to bring, and while I do know what the miniboss Mother Talon does, I’m still dreading when we get a few more adventurers marked by the flock.

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Thankfully, that doesn’t happen this time, but the aoe attacks do put a pinch on The Goliath. I was hoping to contain things mostly by focusing damage away from him, but I guess I need to do a better job of that, maybe with some actual guarding. At one point, he gets up to 99 stress, and the only reason he didn’t hit 100 is because he managed to dodge a key attack and healed himself back down later. 

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Finding one of these stress heals didn’t hurt either

Once things are stablized, though, it’s not a hard dungeon, and it does achieve our goals. Quinn hits level two and the Sodden Crew is unlocked.

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The next week offers a medium-length Weald dungeon, so of course we’re going to take that down. This party is slow, but this is a Room Battles mission, and I want to clear out those difficult fights as soon as possible. The possibility of Amani having a nightmare only makes this even more of a necessity, given how those fights can devolve out of control. We also took an extra scouting trinket, which means we can get some more gold -- we were actually drifting low on funds from all the upgrading we were doing to our party.

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I’m not sure if this is a problem or not. Like, yeah, Yui getting rabies is not great especially for this fight -- the Leper already has below-average accuracy and this just made it worse, not to mention we don’t have the greatest accuracy trinkets, but at the same time, the places where I really want Yui on the team are these giant boss battles, and most of them really have dodge worth worrying about, so maybe we’ll keep Yui rabid a bit longer. It is a bother for these dog fights, though, since that’s kind of their whole gimmick. They’re fast, which exploits a weakness I intentionally put in the party; they always get to attack first, and they have a high dodge, which the accuracy debuff of Rabies exaggerates.

Fortunately, both LordCowCow and ABC have heals, so they can stall a fight out if we need to, but it’s still something to think about in the future. Maybe the actual Yui can chime in if he wants to be rabid or not.

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You’ll notice the gems in our inventory, all that scouting did land us another secret room, but there were no nightmares forthcoming. Amani has one more run at Level Two in her, so we’ll see if I use her for one of these bosses or just throw her into a Long dungeon to get the extra coin flitp, but that’s also a decision for the future. For now, we’re slowly but steadily progressing forwards. We can’t fight that second Weald boss yet, but we can take on the Sodden Crew or the Color of Madness next, depending on how I feel next week, so look forward to that.

-r

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Week Twenty-Seven -- The Sodden Crew

Prying eyes had become a nuisance along the old road, and so I undertook to receive my most curious deliveries by way of marine shipments. A sheltered jetty was accessible by a narrow stone stair off the back of the manor, and a discreet system of pulleys could hoist even the heaviest prizes up the rock face from a securely tied dinghy below.

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Well, that’s a good start to the spooky season. Even if the general strategy for this run has been “don’t use the stress-relief activities unless the adventurer is afflicted,” and therefore this event isn’t particularly threatening, it does give us a Halloween backdrop to this week as we prepare to face off against a quartet of zombie sailors.

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You can really tell how insignificant you are against the uncaring vastness of the cosmos.

Anyway, here’s the plan:

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There’s a slight mistake here, in that I didn’t exactly remember how The Crew fights actually worked and didn’t think to double-check a wiki. I would not recommend an Arbalest or Musketeer for this fight for reasons that will become obvious. You really need people who can hit the first enemy row, too, and neither of them are effective at it at all. Besides these reasons, I wanted a second ancillary healer to back Paracelsus up in a pinch, and she can also serve as the initiation for the Mark tactics that Skaia and Joan facilitate.

The actual dungeon leading up to the fight isn’t all that exciting. We got another secret room, so we’re really regaining all that gold we were spending before, and Skaia got a bit better, both through finding one of those soothing corals and being judged by Joan for his sins.

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This damages Skaia in exchange for a buff so I assume Joan does that “hold your hand to the fire and the Light will cleanse all impurities thing”

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I know, I know. I said “quartet” earlier, and this lineup clearly only depicts three crewmen. And true, this crew gets three actions per turn, and takes up three spaces, but that’s just because the fourth hasn’t been called up with the very first command: “All Hands On Deck!”

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All Hands On Deck does two things: It summons the fourth member, the Drowned Anchorman, and pulls a party member to the front of the lineup. This is why Margaret was a bad pick for this venture, though she thankfully resists the pull forward on this particular occasion, given how useless she and ABC are in that position.

That did leave Joan to take the Anchorman’s attack in her stead, though.

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This is the gimmick of the fight. Being chained up by the anchor immobilizes the adventurer, making it so they can’t leave the front row, and also brings them into the realm of the drowned, inflicting a decent amount of stress damage every turn (that is, every time someone does something, not merely every round) and healing the Crew for a small amount as well. In this way, it’s a reverse Hag fight, where you want to kill the Drowned Anchorman as quickly as possible to mitigate the healing and stress. Thankfully, the Anchorman only has 14 HP at this level, so both Skaia and Joan can take care of it pretty quickly, just in time for the Crew to summon another one with another All Hands On Deck.

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The crew itself has a few more tricks it can do. Drink with the Dead is a stress attack, Boarding Clutch can inflict some bleed, and Mutiny is a debuff, but these are manageable so long as you don’t get caught in the attrition game the Crew wants to play with you and get forced to spend turns simply moving your party back into position. In the end, although I made fun of myself already, it’s Margaret who gets the kill on the boss, so never punished, I guess.

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I do have to note, this week finally pushed the Crimson Court infestation level to “High.” I don’t know what I’m going to do with that information, though. I don’t think we’re prepared enough to actually deal with that, so I’m probably just going to ignore it and take my chances. We do have a decent amount of blood stockpiled, so it’s not like Alhazred is going to die of thirst any time soon. How I ignore it, though, I haven’t quite decided yet. See you next week.

-r

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Weeks Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine -- The First Veteran Dungeon

I mean, I say that, but I decided to do a long Apprentice dungeon first. I wanted to get as many worthwhile quests in as possible before getting priced into actually starting the Veteran-level grind and a dungeon run with two campfire logs seemed like the optimal time to finally get Amani to have her second nightmare. This one gets all the adventurers besides The Sisters, who were a bit behind, up to level three, so that’ll be good for the future.

There’s also the matter of the event we’re working under:

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So we don’t even need to work to get Doggo those last few experience points. Not even going to think about what he’ll be doing in the meantime. I’m sure it’s fine. The Cove lineup I am taking is a bit fragile outside of The Thrall, and worse still, doesn’t actually have a healer most of the time since Audrey’s lunge will knock Junjeong out of position, but it’s got three heavy hitters against the high-PROT Cove, so the real goal is to just play the best defense is a good offense and hope that our high-level equipment and trinkets suffice. Some of that is also “expecting to get ambushed” jitters, since, again, Amani’s probably going to call in some snakes to fight us, and we want to get rid of those asap.

Before we get into any of that, though, let’s talk about the infestation:

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Now that the Crimson Court’s infestation level is at “high,” we’re going to see a whole bunch of these egg sacs all over the dungeons. Breaking them open doesn’t require any trinkets, and results in a fight with some amount of bloodsuckers, including at least one Gatekeeper. Defeating a Gatekeeper before it runs away is how you get Invitations, which are the currency used to do Crimson Court runs. We have one from opening it in the first place, so I’m just going to leave these alone. They’re more trouble than they’re worth for now.

Anyway, the kill-first-ask-questions-later strategy works, so the only fight really worth talking about on this run, despite its length, is Amani’s nightmare.

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The biggest problem with this fight is that the Rattlers -- that’s the non-stealthed ones -- have 24 health and are fast enough to even outspeed Audrey, which means we’re dealing with their ripostes for the start of the fight. They even guarded the stealthed ones, so Amani couldn’t destealth them with Expose if she tried. Still, the fight only lasts three or so rounds, since after beating down those, the Pilskins only have 12 health each, enough to be one-shot by any member of the team. I do regret throwing away our antivenom, like, right before camping, but it’s not a huge problem.

Next dungeon!

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It was either starting Veteran dungeons or trudging through the Warrens. The map has become such that it’s only offering one Novice mission at this point that isn’t the Farmstead, and while I wouldn’t hate that, I got tired of waiting for the Weald to give us the last mission we needed to unlock the last Novice-level boss. We also need to start preparing for Crimson Court runs, and a decent bleed team with a touch of stress heal will do well there.

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There are two ways the dungeons get harder with the increased dungeon level. The first is pretty self-explanatory. Enemies get harder. Basically, every stat they have gets a little worse to mitigate, whether that’s health, resistances, or damage dealt. In the case of these Fungal creatures, the Batteries get an extra 10% of PROT, and the Fungal Grabbers jump from 33% to a whopping 50%.

The second way is the introduction of new enemies. These are not the first two-tile normal enemies we’ve seen, since the Brigands have some on their teams as well, but these are also significantly beefier than even those. The Ghoul is the first one we encounter.

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The Ghoul has a lot of problems to deal with, not the least of which is how every one of its attacks deals a significant amount of stress. It also negates 40% of its damage and is pretty beefy besides. It’s also universal -- it can appear in every Veteran dungeon, so you can’t avoid it. We’re lucky we didn’t encounter it with something more threatening than these grubs, because it could easily get out of hand if we also had to deal with, say, some rabid wolves.

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We also encountered some Ectoplasms, which now have the ability to start out combined, just to mess with you even more. Thankfully, this almost makes the fight easier. I mean, we got really lucky resisting a bunch of stun attacks, but normal slimes don’t get that much harder and bleed just as easily as everything else in the Weald somehow, which means there’s really just less room for Cytokinesis to do its thing.

Overall, these were some pretty successful runs. I think I hit every goal I set out for these two weeks, including some lucky Quirk cleanses in that Cove run. Next week, I’ll open up the Farmstead, and we can finally start talking about the last DLC offering. Hope you like the color turquoise. Hope the color turquoise doesn’t drive you mad.

-r

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Week Thirty -- The Color of Madness

Blight had struck the harvest again that year, and the miller was desperate. He came to me, hat clutched tightly in filthy fingers, stinking of sweat and manure. Seated comfortably in my observatory, surrounded by telescopes and other delicate apparatus, I recognized his misfortune as an opportunity, and I agreed to lend him my expertise.

Okay, so, like, the Farmstead area is an endless mode with two introductory quests, which is cool and not the only addition The Color of Madness adds to the game (we’ll get to the other addition at the end of the post), but, like The Butcher’s Circus that followed it, the game isn’t exactly balanced around it, so it falls a little flat overall. It’s especially boring to screencap for the same reason I haven’t been including too many action shots from combat; it’s a little hard to form a narrative throughline, especially one that isn’t just “they did this and I did this.” So instead of a rather short post this week detailing exactly how I killed twenty guys, I thought I’d do that thing I promised and talk about trinket selection instead.

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There are three big factors I take into consideration when deciding what trinkets to use. The first, and perhaps the most obvious, is “how likely is this to make the fight end faster.” Damage boosts, speed boosts, and accuracy all fit in here. The longer any given fight lasts, the more likely something is going to go wrong.

The second is fight avoidance, for the same reasons, really. Why fight if I don’t have to? That’s what scouting trinkets are for. At this point in the game, and at the radiant torchlight I prefer to play at, we can get scout chances of over 50% easily. This has the additional benefit of adding to our coffers, since proccing scout chances is how you find secret rooms, and those are worth oodles.

The last factor is healing, since the base healing in Darkest Dungeon is designed more to stem the bleeding than actually top back up. Currently, for example, Joan the Vestal’s Divine Grace party heal is a flat 3 health each for party members that have, at minimum, about 30, but with the right trinkets, we can bump that up to 5, a much more significant chunk. Add in the occasional crit heal, and she can easily keep several people alive just by herself.

Now, you’ll notice I didn’t mention including any of the drawbacks and, if you’ve played Darkest Dungeon, you’ve seen how debilitating some of these trinkets can be. Dismas’ head, one of the best damage trinkets in the game, also increases an adventurer’s stress by 25%, which makes sense given that, you know, they’re carrying a person’s head around with them (and that person may or may not still be alive). Indeed, being more vulnerable to stress is one of the most common drawbacks on these trinkets. Another one, reduced speed, can also be problematic. But I refer you back to factor one here. I don’t intend for these fights to last long enough for stress to get to matter (ideally, they’ll take maybe 10 extra over the course of the dungeon this way, which is manageable), and in the case of speed, that can either be planned around by ensuring a given adventurer is last in the turn order. For example, you might want the healer of the team to go last so they can actually heal round one, or maybe you want to coordinate a dancing party to actually shuffle the party order around how you want. These things require thinking ahead, and, admittedly, I don’t always think ahead, but that’s my thought process.

Speaking of thinking ahead, though, back to The Farmstead. This team’s a real thinker.

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The big problem with putting this party together is that this is one of two remaining Novice-level missions I’d like to accomplish and I want my sole remaining Level Two damage dealer for the other one. That being said, ABC can make a pretty good impression when she wants to, and Paracelsus is actually rather good in these fights since her blight stacks quickly, including two of the few multi-target moves that don’t suck. The only real head-scratcher, I suppose, is the inclusion of Josephine, especially on the front line where she can’t spam her party dodge buff. My reasoning basically lies in her versatility, at least as it compares to the rest of the party. Ren really needs to be in the middle to be at full effectiveness, and the other two adventurers really need to be in the back, ABC especially.

An additional bonus is that this is a team with two healers, including Paracelsus’ Battlefield Medicine, which will cure the blight our team is sure to take, so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice. Anyway…

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After breaching the walls of the Farmstead (what is it with this game and dramatic entrances holding back untold horrors?), the endless waves begin. As I said before, this is an endless mode. At the end of every turn, if there are two or more spaces free on the enemy side, more will spawn in. You’re grinding against the inevitable here. Like so:

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I know it looks the same but that’s because these are still level two adventurers with level three equipment. The fight was always going to be a lopsided one.

“But wait,” I hear you say, “If this game has permadeath, how can you ever expect to do well at an endless mode when you can’t send in key heroes?” The developers have accounted for that, firstly by offering loan heroes as soon as the actual quest is unlocked, who will only participate in the endless mode (not that we’ll encounter any on this save, I think, since we turned the stagecoach off), and also in that the endless mode doesn’t actually have permadeath. Instead, if a hero dies in the farmstead, they’ll instead get lost for a week or two and come back.

That being said, infuriatingly, this only takes effect during the actual “Endless Harvest” quest, which means we’ve got this one and a boss fight to deal with while permadeath is still on. This is not adequately explained and is probably one of my bigger frustrations with the game, it just happens.

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The other thing to watch out for here is this Seeds of Madness mechanic. Things don’t stay dead in the Farmstead, so any corpses left behind will turn into these crystalline structures at the end of a given round. If you leave the dead bodies alone another turn, they explode (just like in real life), inflicting both damage and stress on the party. Thankfully, their health is miniscule, and if an adventurer does destroy one of these crystalline corpses, they regain a small amount of health as well (again, just like in real life), so it’s more of a distraction to give the farmhands a chance to actually hit you than a serious threat like the Cove’s Thralls are.

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Anyway, the fight isn’t super interesting, just long. Josephine gets close to Death’s Door as we closed in on 20 kills, but it was never actually an issue. We get to the results screen, which has some new graphics and a handy counter to tell us just what the game will expect later…

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There’s an achievement for scoring 300 kills, but we’re nowhere near that level yet.

…but for now, that’s really all there is. The crystal shards we get aren’t worth much until we get more of them, the best way to get more is to keep doing Farmstead runs, and we’re not ready for the Miller boss fight. Now that we’ve released the seal on the place, there is a wandering miniboss, but I’m not interested in encountering that guy just yet either.

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Just so you know which dungeon to avoid. It moves each week.

No, we’ve got the Brigand 8-Pounder Cannon to fight next. Stick around for that.

-r

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