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Week Thirty-One -- The Brigand 8-Pounder

Simple folk are by their nature loquacious, and the denizens of the hamlet were no exception. It was not long before rumors of my morbid genius and secretive excavations began to fill local legend. In the face of my increasingly egregious flaunting of public taboos, awe turned to ire, and demonstrations were held in the town square.

Here it is, the most fearsome boss fight of all of Darkest Dungeon, the one I’d been putting off for so long not because I just had other, better things to do than trek through the Weald and unlock it, but because I was traumatized from past experiences even daring to face the thing. It’s… some guys. Okay, some guys and their pet siege engine. It also inadvertently highlights the absurdity of Darkest Dungeon’s positioning system because we’re about to fight a giant cannon by standing in front of it and hoping it doesn’t go off in our faces.

But I get ahead of myself. Here’s the lineup:

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I’ve been using The Sisters as a healing unit so far, which makes the frontline choice look a bit suspect on the surface, but that has been ignoring the damage the Nammo half of the duo can dish out. More importantly, Junjeong can give her sister a riposte, which is going to come in handy. That’s why I’ve been saving Dismas too, for this moment where he’ll be the most useful. It’s a bit risky, what with all this dancing around our front line is going to do, going into the grindiest boss fight in the game without a healer, but with some good speed trinkets, we should be able to keep much of it off our backs, and worst comes to worst, Nammo has a Shadow Fade similar to the Grave Robber’s, so she can hop back and start healing people back up.

The other two adventurers are taken from the limited pool of those who would even go on this mission in the first place. Not that either of them are bad, just positioning them got a little awkward. That’s another reason I didn’t take any healers with me. It’s less detrimental to take an underleveled healer into a dungeon than any of the damage dealers, especially when trinkets are thrown into the mix.

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Most of the fights up to the 8-Pounder are like this. We win a surprise roll, take out two of the enemy fighters, and clean up the rest afterward. Which is good, because again, we don’t have quick access to healing on this squad. It also makes them boring to screencap, but we’ve been over that before. I will show you this fight also, though, because it contains an element that I thought I had to opt in to see.

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That guy in the front? That’s the Gatekeeper I mentioned before. It runs away after a few turns, but if you do manage to kill it before that, you get an extra invitation, an extra chance to run through the Crimson Courtyard. Speaking of, I really thought we were about to see the Sisters get Cursed here, given how every attack seemed to target them and they’ve also got a negative quirk reducing their disease resistance, but we were fortunate enough to avoid all that.

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Yeah, just some guys and a siege engine. Granted, it’s a hard-to-kill siege engine. It’s got 20% PROT and a permanent buff that prevents another 25% damage on top of that for funny game design reasons (armor-piercing attacks weren’t a thing when the boss was created, so to keep the boss from getting cheesed too hard by the Shieldbreaker, they split up its damage prevention). It also is impossible to debuff or inflict a DOT on unless you’re more dedicated to that specific outcome than, you know, fighting the boss. We’ve fought the other parts of this group before, though. They’re just standard Brigands. That’s why ripostes are so important, because otherwise we’d have to spend time on that Fuselier rather than the actual dangerous part.

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Let’s talk about the gimmicks of the fight. First, when I said this was the grindiest boss fight in the game, it wasn’t just because of the boss’s armor. Every turn, the 8-Pounder will summon one or two more Brigands, in a manner a lot like the Farmstead, except this boss came first, so it should be the other way around. One of them is guaranteed, it’s that Matchman in the third slot there, and the other one is randomized. We’d be spending time on a lot of Fuseliers, is what I’m getting at. And the reason you don’t want to spend time on the Fuselier is because you need to dedicate yourself to killing the Matchman every turn. If you don’t, he’s the one that lights the fuse and the cannon uses a move literally called  “BOOOOOOOM!” and, just like real life, the more Os in a BOOM sound effect, the worse it is.

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But yeah, as long as you know what you’re doing, this is probably the boss fight with the least amount that can go wrong. The Matchman, especially at the level we’re doing this fight, is incredibly slow and fragile, so it would take a lot of misses for him to be able to actually go through with his job. I also didn’t realize Junjeong, Nammo, and Quinn also had a bit of mark synergy, until we actually got to the boss fight which even makes the cannon’s armor look like cardboard. It’s Nammo that gets the kill because of it.

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One of those ethereal images is to indicate speed. The other is familial trauma. Figuring out which is which is left as an exercise for the reader.

And that’s all the novice-level bosses! Now, I do have a confession to make. I’ve been dancing around this because I want these bosses to seem impactful, but outside of the Darkest Dungeon itself and the DLCs, these are also the only bosses. The other two difficulty levels, Veteran and Champion, only have retreads of these with tougher stats and scarier names. Instead of the Swine Prince, it’s the Swines King and God, for example. It’s a disappointing decision, but I do understand it from a story perspective. The plot of the game summed up is basically that “Local Man Ruins Everything” meme, which is a bit of dissonance from the introduction of the game, which implies that your ancestor’s only fault was delving do greedily and too deep. And that dissonance is intentional! And it leads to a suitably cosmic horror ending! But it does mean that his actions need a bit of time to be revealed properly, it’d be difficult to be like “here’s why the Siren is like this” when the Siren could easily be the first boss you see in the game.

I’m not going to rush through the DLC bosses. I mean, I might go back on what I said last week and try and fight The Miller, since that quest is offering a decent trinket, but I haven’t decided yet. I might just try to grind a little more first. We’ll see.

-r

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Week Thirty-Two -- The Miller

Slabs etched with certain celestial designs were erected around the perimeter of the farmstead. The miller, lamentably eager for some early sign of improvement, fixed his watery eyes intently upon the wilted fields and listless mill. My gaze, however, was cast skyward, and I marveled at the limitless profanity of the stars, wondering what harvest might come.

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Look at how enticing that is. That’s basically the only torchlight level I play at, and things like the Crimson Court’s Bloodlight and whatever the heck the Farmstead has going on (but we’ll get to that) automatically count as this light level also. All we have to do is fight a Veteran-difficulty boss after only one dungeon run at this level. Not only that, The Miller’s one of the more annoying ones to fight. Easy.

Let me put it like this. There are two (2) trinkets in the game that are specifically designed to help with boss fights. One of them is in the Darkest Dungeon, and that one has a whole other set of challenges built into it. The other is this fight. So we are going to break out the big guns here. It won’t perfectly fit my normal Endless Harvest team for lack of trinkets and skill levels, but we can at least show it off, especially since I doubt we’ll be doing many Farmstead tasks for the rest of the run.

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Amani and Dismas are going to dance around each other picking enemies off, the former specifically for some of the higher protection enemies and the latter because he just does a lot of damage, including ripostes on enemy turns if we’re lucky enough. Sethera is the primary buff. The Jester’s Battle Ballad boosts speed, accuracy, and crit chance, none of which goes unneeded. And Junia the Vestal is to keep people alive, obviously.

The fights leading up to the Miller go pretty well, all things considered. I mean, Junia did get an affliction after getting too much stress, becoming Abusive, while Dismas saw the same adversity and became Powerful with a capital P.

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I don’t remember if we covered virtues so here it is again: Just like in real life, people respond to stress differently. In game terms, this means that there’s a 25% chance when an adventurer reaches 100 Stress that they become Virtuous instead, getting a massive stress heal, and significant buffs besides. It’s one of the few times random chance actually helps the player, and it’s a cathartic release every time.

Anyway, Junia becoming afflicted means Sethera starts buffing every third turn instead of stacking Battle Ballad to its maximum, desperately trying to get Junia back down to zero stress eleven points at a time before she gets too disruptive. It’s only a slight change in strategy. There’s more to cover.

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The way the Farmstead keeps from overwhelming players with one long combat string is to break them up into shorter ones punctuated by small reward sections. Once you’ve reached a set number of kills, the game spawns a special crystal shard that immediately uses a move called “Beyond Time and Space”, warping the party to a safe zone with a curio attached. The curio can be healing, stress healing, loot/supplies, or, in a rare case, a campfire, which can be all three in the right circumstances. None of them are harmful, thankfully.

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The other way the Farmstead holds off monotony is by changing the torchlight. Every other wave takes place in an alternate version of one of the main game’s areas, which means instead of farmhands, you’ll see things like enemies from the Ruins. Unfortunately, I don’t have a great way to demonstrate this since the only enemies we fought in that wave were universal -- grubs, a couple of ghouls, and some munchers -- but the background does change to match the new environment. The effects of the torchlight also change, even if the “light level” remains the same. Here’s Gleaming’s, for example:

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This is about when Junia’s mind broke, though it was more from rolling like three ghouls in a row and all of them wanting to kill her specifically. The twisted geometry of the place didn't help, I'm sure.

So, after that and one more wave, we’ve reached the Miller.

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The Miller is a Poor Soul (as you can see from his enemy description) who can summon enemies like The Necromancer, heal himself like the Drowned Crew, and deliver devastating damage to the whole party like the Swine God. He can even do two at once since he gets two turns every round. Plus, and I forgot this somehow, his summons, unlike basically every other boss in the game, get to move immediately after they’re summoned. Oh, and he has a stress attack too, as if Amani wasn’t hurting from Sethera giving all the attention to Junia as well.

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We do have some benefits on our side, though. Namely, his Reaping attack is neatly countered by the Vestal and Highwayman sent on this mission, the former having a mass heal and the latter being able to always attack back when the Miller uses it. This is also the easier version of the fight, since every other time we see him will be in Endless Harvest runs which are inherently Champion-level experiences. So while it is a bit of a grind, it’s not more grinding than any of the bosses we’ve seen so far, and we have seen most of them.

I didn’t expect Sethera to get a critical hit on the boss, so I don’t have a screencap of that, unfortunately, but they do get the kill if people are keeping track.

That’s it for this week. Next time, I need to stop putting things off and begin the Level Three difficulty spike in earnest, starting with earning a whole bunch of gold to meet the challenge of the dungeons ahead. That means antiquarian runs, but her inability to participate in combat means that, in one of the most notorious parts of the game, I’m making things even harder for myself.

Good luck, future me.

-r

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Weeks Thirty-Three and Thirty-Four -- There's Money To Be Made

Hey just a heads-up one of the Marvin Seo additions to the game includes an encounter with a woman who has been kidnapped and tied up, and there’s a slight implication of sexual violence, so, uh, be aware of that.

Okay. So. I know I either said or implied that the stagecoach would be useless as soon as the initial recruitment phase ended, and that’s technically still true, but I would be remiss to not talk about the one feature the building has that didn’t get modded out, and that’s the gem hunters. These recruits are basically free. They don’t count toward the maximum limit, they don’t count toward the highlander mod, and all their equipment and skills are fully upgraded so there’s not even any maintenance involved. We unlocked this feature by defeating The Miller.

There are just two problems, though. The first is that they are Endless Harvest exclusive. To put it in the flavor of the game, unlike all the other adventurers who are here for glory, these are mercenaries, and they are after riches only the Farmstead can provide. That leads to the second problem: payment. The reason you would venture into the Farmstead beyond this point in the game is in search of crystal shards, which can be used to buy either special trinkets or an elixir that’s rather useful in the Endless Harvest mode (I suppose we’ll get to that when we get to that). Every time one of these mercenaries participates in a run, however, they siphon off a portion of the crystal shards earned. So it’s a nice option, but given that there’s no permadeath in that region anymore, it’s not something I personally am interested in when there are enough other things on my plate to worry about.

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One less thing to worry about, though, is this event, which I’m mostly noting for its convenience. I don’t think I was taking Skaia on a run this week anyway, so this is just an extra bonus. As I ended last week’s post with, we’re more concerned with our money situation, which means an Antiquarian run to get the numbers back up.

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As you can see in the corner, that number is looking pretty dire. I was worried about this team because it’s not great at healing back up to full, though it is good at keeping people not dead, and Cowcow has a stress heal that will also keep the light up in the Weald’s long corridors. At the same time, Audrey’s primed for a lunge or two, and her base attack, Pick to the Face, is going to be really helpful against many of the enemies here and especially the Thing From the Stars if we run into it. Yui as well. Some of these new enemies are things that just need killing.

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Oh, they actually show up in the first fight. Cool. Anyway, so that’s a Giant, and basically all of its abilities are annoying. The least annoying one will still inflict some serious blight on you, but it can also use the spores on its back to confuse the party, shuffling them around, and in the worst case, it also has a move called Treebranch Smackdown, which does exactly what it says it does and hurts even more than you think it hurts.

There’s also the Crone, who is basically a worse version of the stress-inducing priests we’ve seen in other areas, the most problematic element of which being they start stealthed, so they’re unable to be targeted for two whole turns -- plenty of time to disrupt the party on their own. Really, though, despite these things showing up right next to each other, the dungeon goes rather well.

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I mean, the Crone enemies can also inflict a variety of diseases, to the point that Josephine the Antiquarian gets hit with three of them, but the Graverobber has a camping skill that apparently just heals… all of them in addition to any on herself, so that was a nice surprise hidden in a poor description of the ability. Saves me some gold, anyway.

I also want to point out a fun bit of loot that popped up when fighting another Giant.

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forty-five hundred! that’s a lot of doubloons!

We're hitting a new loot table. So that's neat.

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The second run of this post was into the Warrens, and Josephine was in the shop this week, so I took it upon myself to get some more adventurers up to the level three threshold. Both ABC and Euryale were behind schedule, and while I could have excused that in Euryale the Lamia since good healing is in short supply, ABC the Arbalest is almost required for some key fights, so she definitely needs to get up in levels.

The party is pretty good, though. It has a stress heal to keep The Goliath from going out of control, and speaking of The Goliath, both he and Ren can work to keep the enemy formations bleeding and out of step.

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There are two big enemies to watch out for here. The Swine Centaur probably the weirdest (which is saying something given the other one). We’ve seen something like this already with the literal nightmares that inhabit the farmstead, and they operate similarly. When they use a turn to pull to the back of the formation, it means they’re about to lunge forward with a devastating charge.

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I mean, it would be devastating if it actually hit anything.

But it’s not helpless at the front of the enemy formation either. It also has a devastating backhand, so it’s in your best interest to kill it as quickly as you can.

The other enemy to think about is the Large Carrion Eater, which is a lot like those smaller worm-shaped Carrion Eaters we’ve been seeing, only, you know, bigger.

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But, I’ve honestly never found these things that scary? Just large. And I know saying that is just going to get someone killed, but also they’re another one of those “needs a mark to be scary” enemies, and while they can also mark an adventurer in advance, that also means they’re taking at least two turns to do anything threatening, and they’re not tough enough to be able to do that.

Lastly, I’ll bring up that addition Marvin Seo put in as part of his Talon faction, and given the content warning I put at the start, I’m just going to spoiler it here.

Spoiler

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I don’t have a lot to say about it because the mod has a lot less easily-findable documentation (nor do I have the ability to properly discuss the tropes at play here), but my understanding of the enemy is that it stresses your party out to see a damsel in distress, as indicated by her getting moves inspired by the Madman enemy, you’re incentivised not to attack her because of the permanent riposte effect and buff she’s got, though she can also get guarded by her kidnappers making it hard to avoid attacking her. If you do manage it, though, she thanks you with a very healthy stress heal, negating any stress you might have gotten from her wailing, so I guess it all works out.

More importantly, though, you’ll notice the Fuseliers are also stealthed now that we’ve reached veteran difficulty. That’s not going to be annoying at all in the future.

Overall, I’d mark these two weeks as a success. There weren’t any moments where things went horribly wrong, anyway. Even the moments where things went a little wrong (Cowcow almost became a vampire and Euryale got put on Death’s Door on the final fight of the run) weren’t worth recording because, well, it wasn’t worth relaying that information (outside of right now). It’s already been fixed. Next week, there’s a new event that I want to show you, which may or may not just stop the run dead in its tracks, and I know I’ve said that every time something vaguely threatening has happened, but this time, I mean it. The game is giving us the opportunity to face The Shrieker a few levels early, and I’m not going to let the opportunity go to waste.

Until then,

-r

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Week Thirty-Five -- The Shrieker

The Shrieker is one of those high-risk high-reward fights that populate the game, on par with a Shambler fight in difficulty. That being said, the only punishment for not fighting it here is, to put it bluntly, not getting to do it. The Shrieker would just fly away and move on. But I want to do it because of those high rewards. The trinket it’s offering has a pretty hefty Accuracy buff, and more and more of the team is becoming rabid, so accuracy is in short supply.

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While we’re here, I suppose I should talk about the other ways The Shrieker quest can spawn. This one is always a Champion-level fight -- the highest there is -- but there are two other ways with other difficulty curves. The first is a bit more associated with a crow, it filches eight of your trinkets and the game asks you to get them back, the difficulty of the fight there involving just how rare those trinkets were in the first place. It doesn’t have a set time limit for completion, though, thankfully. If you want to wait a few weeks to get all your ducks in a row first, it’s patient enough for that.

The other opportunity for this fight actually comes as a catch-up mechanic. If you lose eight trinkets (you can lose them for a variety of reasons, but eight is the number because that’s how many you lose in when a fully-equipped party TPKs), the Shrieker collects them all and you can get them back by confronting it. Again, the difficulty of the fight is contingent on exactly what it has collected for you, but these trinkets aren’t going away any time soon. Without this fight, a lot of one-of-a-kind trinkets (Heads, music boxes, Crimson Court trinkets, Shieldbreaker trinkets… the list goes on) would be lost forever. 

But again, at this moment in time, we’re just fighting for greed.

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Unlike other boss fights, this quest is literally just this fight, without even a boss corridor leading up to it, so we’re thankfully super light. Even more importantly, the gimmick of The Shrieker is that it flies away after three turns, which will inflict a large amount of stress but still result in a victorious fight, so survivability is key here. Both ABC and Margaret have healing, Doggo can both heal himself and keep his stress down, and Damian is not only inherently hardier than most adventurers at Death’s Door, he also has a suite of heals once he gets too low. We’re also breaking out the Aegis Scales because this is the sort of fight to break out Aegis Scales for. They’re rare, but prevent one instance of damage (though not the effects associated with that damage -- an attack that inflicts bleed will still deal that bleed, for example), which could be all we need.

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If you want to kill this boss, you’re going to have to contend with a bird that has some obnoxiously high dodge, constantly shuffles around its nest so you can’t just focus the front or back lines, and has three attacks per round. Oh and almost every attack sucks to deal with. The marquee one, Peck, has an increased crit chance, and given we’re already under leveled, those crits are especially devastating. A crit also means an increased chance of the attack’s secondary effect, which in this case means a pretty hefty bleed gets added on top of all that.

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Two of its other attacks, Caw and Call the Murder (oh I get it) are stress attacks. I forgot that Doggo currently has a Fear of Hellbeasts, which means that the Shrieker with its dual Eldritch/Beast typing gets to do even worse things to our poor Abomination’s mind with these attacks.

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The last move to address is Regurgitate, and only now am I realizing how vomit-heavy this game is. If we were actually trying to kill the boss here, this move would simultaneously be the most annoying and least worrisome. It’s the most annoying because of the debuff the comes with being covered in bird goop -- a loss of accuracy making an already difficult-to-hit boss even more difficult and a chance for disease -- and it’s the least worrisome because, well, the disease chance is pretty low and the debuff can be cured with some medicinal herbs. Still, when an adventurer is on Death’s Door, any damage is bad.

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ABC actually received two deathblow checks on this fight, thankfully surviving both, but it was pretty close on the second one thanks to some bleed. This is the danger of dealing with a boss with multiple moves. Sometimes they just get to move twice in a row. The action economy swings both ways.

Anyway, that was the big worrisome moment. The “keep everyone alive using heals and bandages and just tank the stress damage” plan worked fine enough otherwise. The only problem is that now we suddenly have to pay up to get everyone’s afflictions back under control. Damian the Flagellant was guaranteed to be rapturous, and everyone else was pretty likely to hit an affliction thanks to being two levels below the quest's expectation. But we're all still alive, that's the important thing. Now we’re back to the money grind, along with hopefully getting our two remaining stragglers over the Level 3 wall. Until then,

-r

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Weeks Thirty-Six and Thirty-Seven -- The Power Spike

Just a preview of things to come, nothing to worry about.

I mentioned last week that there were two goals for this particular run: level up Quinn and Alhazred to match everyone else at level three, and get back the money we’ve been spending on adventurers. The first goal takes one run that involves those two characters and the second one means as many runs as possible with Josephine before she levels up and out of veteran-level dungeons. So we’re going to be doing just that. There are consequences to doing this, of course. Josephine continues to be a liability in combat and two of the other adventurers will be stressed out and not as effective as they should be, but it’s not an impossible task.

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The only new addition to the provisioning here is the blood. Alhazred still has the Crimson Curse and we need a way to keep that in check. Both Quinn and Alhazred can also play support to Joan here as they can mark more targets for Joan to strike down quickly, and we’re going into the Ruins so Josephine’s blight attack can actually be helpful.

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This is the first time we’ve actually brought a vampire with us in the party instead of having the condition thrust upon us by bloodsuckers, so let’s actually go through the mechanics of the Crimson Curse. The last time I mentioned it, I mentioned the speed boost and its ability to beat out all the other diseases an adventurer might have, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. There are four states an adventurer with the Curse can be in. “Passive,” “Craving,” “Wasting,” and “Bloodlust.” “Passive” is the least threatening, only inflicting a handful of slight debuffs in exchange for that speed buff. “Craving” doubles both the buffs and the debuffs, but the game also starts treating it like an Affliction, so they can start causing trouble with the rest of the party. For example, they can refuse to eat even when hungry, which makes them take the penalties for missing that meal.

“Wasting” amplifies the debuffs even further and turns the speed buff into a debuff as well. At this point, the character needs to receive a vial of blood in the next few turns, or they die from hunger. If they do receive one, their condition returns to “Passive” and the cycle starts all over again. The timer is a little random with this; each status will last at least 31 rounds but can go up to 75 before moving on to the next one. This leaves the special condition “Bloodlust”. If you give a Craving adventurer a vial of blood, they will go into this state, whereupon many of their debuffs are converted to buffs, they get an additional damage buff, and the speed buff doubles to +4. It’s still an affliction, though, and a more dangerous one than Craving’s. They’re liable to attack party members outright.

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This run goes well enough, though. This is the introduction of the Ruins’ big upgrade, both for the enemies that we’ve already seen and the enemy that’s going to keep us on our toes while we’re here. As you can see, the middle skeleton now starts each fight Stealthed, which makes up for its previously exploitable fragility. More obvious about this fight, though, is the new Bone Commander standing at the front.

This is probably the least threatening of the additions that Veteran dungeons introduce, if only because it doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen before. It’s basically just an undead version of the Bandit leader enemy, and we’ve already seen a more threatening version of that with the Falconer version Marvin Seo added.

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I mean, it’s still threatening. But we make do.

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There were a couple of mistakes with this run. I assumed that the combination of two small healers in Paracelsus and Josephine would keep people alive in place of one general healer, for example, especially when one of them can cure the intense bleeding I know is coming. I didn’t check the party’s camping skills, so I almost guaranteed there would be an ambush. Honestly, though, the biggest mistake I made was underestimating The Cove again, a place where every permutation of enemies is a threat.

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This isn’t even some Cove enemy, either! This is just some bandit that decided to show up!

Josephine got Crimson Curse’d early in the run and though I didn’t have any blood I did feel I could keep going. I outlined this earlier, the cycle the Curse goes through is pretty long, and we have plenty of blood at home. But the hits just kept coming.

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The shaman in the back is stealthed, so that didn’t help, then the Thrall is in position three, which means Yui can’t hit it easily. The Grouper in Rank Two is a problem also since that’s the position where it can use its Seaward Slash attack, and the octopus in front can guard the more problematic creatures behind it without being one-shot by Yui.

This all culminates in a quad-Grouper fight (as a reminder, one of the more deceptively annoying fights in the game), where everything goes wrong. Three people are put on Death’s Door, with Josephine even taking a Deathblow check before the fight ends, and she refuses to heal back up when I camp.

26.5k gold is still a decent amount, though, and technically, because you don’t gain experience from a failed run, Josephine can still be deployed one extra time before she hits level 5. It might take a bit to come back, because the stress of failure sure runs high, but we haven’t taken an irreparable loss yet.

Next time, our adventure in the Ruins has unlocked the next boss, so we’re off to fight the Necromancer.

-r

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Week Thirty-Eight -- The Necromancer

I entertained a delegation of experts from overseas, eager to plumb the depths of their knowledge and share with them certain techniques and alchemical processes I had found to yield wondrous and terrifying results. Having learned all I could from my visiting guests, I murdered them as they slept.

The changes made for the Veteran-level Necromancer fight aren’t worth talking about if only because they’re so expected. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any new developments on this run, though. Let’s just get right into all that.

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CowCow gets the damage trinkets because The Goliath is already pretty damage-focused and just needs some accuracy. The Goliath isn’t the best class given how most of the enemies resist the bleed status effect of his main attack, but he’s still rather strong, and his random stun won’t have any other targets if he does it fast enough.

Jumping ahead a little bit, I wish I managed to get a screenshot of CowCow’s damage numbers because he was hitting for like 45 on a crit.

Anyway, it’s a pretty standard party, I think. Audrey lunges forward to put Cow in the optimal position to use his own lunge on turn one, Euryale is the healer, and The Goliath is the tank at the front. Both Cowcow and Euryale can also manage the Thrall’s “stress on every little hit” mechanic as well, so we shouldn’t have any trouble at all.

(they write, having already played through the mission knowing exactly what trouble there is to find)

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Oh, look at that, two more infections. This is getting to the point where I should probably take some blood with me just for peace of mind. This is a medium dungeon, at least, which means less time for these vampires to waste away, and being a boss dungeon makes it even shorter since we know exactly where we’re going and the shortest path to get there, but these infections are adding up. Dare I try and cure them for a bit or do I just keep pushing onwards a little further?

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There’s also the matter of a new enemy type flying around the dungeons, the gargoyle. They are mostly annoying thanks to their high prot, but their low health means a good pick to the face courtesy of Audrey the Graverobber takes care of them easily through that. They’re also unholy, which means CowCow has little trouble as well. That isn’t to say they aren’t annoying. They either rend the front two rows and can shuffle them back or they can tail swipe the back two rows to stun them. They’re not great to keep around, but they also could easily be worse.

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The biggest change to the Necromancer is the enemies it summons. Sure, it has appropriately buffed health and damage numbers, but the strategy of “hold the fort and pick off the summons to keep the fight manageable” is a lot harder when the first thing it summons is a skeleton with stealth, or a tanky skeleton that takes at least two rounds to kill. Of course, that’s where the stuns come in, making the Necromancer much easier to race by virtue of simply limiting its turns. And when the stun comes with a hefty 20 Crusader damage attached, it’s pretty easy to see where things are going.

That being said, it’s technically Audrey that gets the kill by virtue of getting the last hit and having her blight being part of the DOT that ends this particular necromancer’s career.

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There are getting to be a few too many infected adventurers waiting around with little to do, and this is our one chance before champion-level dungeons to try and alleviate that. The actual breach of the courtyard grounds won’t be next week, but we do have to get our potential party ready. See you then,

-r

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Weeks Thirty-Nine and Forty -- The Calm Before The Storm

I decided to prep just to make sure all the adventurers going into this run were all set at level four, and then there was an extra week in there to rest and recuperate. We’re getting to a point where the game is throwing more and more Champion-level dungeons at us, probably because level fours can wield Champion-level weapons, which is making the picking and choosing of these quests a little difficult. I don’t want to do long dungeons for reasons we’ve already seen, but there are a whole lot of Veteran-level long dungeons on offer as well.

The “Blood and Guts” party title is certainly memorable. I don’t think Sethera will be coming to the Crimson Court with us on this run, but this bleed party will help out a lot in future Weald and Warrens runs, I think. Provided none of them die, anyway.

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I’m a little conflicted because neither of these two weeks’ runs is particularly interesting to talk about. We’ve already met the big new additions to each dungeon and we’ve already talked about the changes to the enemies that were already there. Making a post about preparations, it turns out, just means we’re seeing what most of the party is going to look like.

There is one mechanic, though, that I believe came up for the first time here, and that’s the Pass command. 

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Passing is disadvantageous for obvious reasons -- in a game about action economy, you don’t want to give that up -- but Red Hook Studios have decided to give it that extra oomf of adding a bit of stress to the option as well. It only came up during this fight because we killed all the other enemies besides a stealthed one and there wasn’t even a corpse to whack on. This, I suppose, is a downside to running a Hellion, she’s so bloodthirsty she doesn’t even have an option to move backwards, but that’s hardly something to worry about. It’s unlikely to come up too often.

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The second run was even harder to put together because the only medium-length options were this grain-gathering one, which is annoying since the grain bags take up three precious spots of inventory, and the second Hag fight, which I wasn’t about to do in the back half of an already awkward post. But there is a bright side to all this. The Crimson Court was going to be an expensive amount of provisioning because it’s so long, and the Bumper Crop event from this run is going to make it all free, so there’s that going for us.

This party itself is a little awkward? Amani dancing around the party is fine since Ren doesn’t care whether he’s in slot two or slot three and Joan is flexible enough to hit from slot two if she needs to, so that’s not the problem. The real problem is that Margaret the Musketeer is the only one with a mark skill, and she’s not very speedy, so her synergy with Joan is a little lacking. There was an option somewhere for Ren to get a mark skill also, but he’s more useful using Chain Gang or Guillotine to contain enemies or close out fights respectively, so that’s out of the question.

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There’s also the problem that diseases are prevalent here and the two classes that can cure those on the fly -- Gravedigger and Plague Doctor -- aren’t currently in the party, which is an expensive bother. Thankfully, that curio in the background of this fight is a significant buff that lasts until the next camp, so as long as we spend our one camp beforehand, things should be alright.

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Yeah, something like that.

Overall, a successful run, it’s just that, again, successes like these are boring to talk about. But there are a string of threatening fights coming up, from this Baron fight from the DLC to the two bosses we’ve now unlocked. We will see where things go from here.

-r

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Week Forty-One -- The Baron (Part One)

They would arrive in teeming hordes, adorned in powdered wigs and pretension - seeking to slake their thirst on wine and indecency. As intoxication invariably took hold, innocuous frivolities would escalate to ever more disturbing diversions. Orchestrating the hideous affair was a hunchbacked fiend who seemed to delight in proportion to the suffering he caused. I could have stopped him, I suppose, but I was a slave to my own appetites, and restraint would have rendered me a hypocrite.

I admit this is another broken promise, but know that I did try my hardest to get all the way to the Baron and defeat him in one run. It’s just that, well, look at this map:

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No, I don’t know why the only map the wiki has is in Korean, especially when the maps for all the other Crimson Court quests are not, but that’s besides the point anyway. You get the general gist of how big this thing is, right? And even if you think it’s not (which, fair, we haven’t talked about all the new surprises the Courtyard throws at you now that it’s not pulling its punches), you can see that there are two mandatory Crocodilian fights, right?

There’s one other reason I felt disincentivized to complete the dungeon this week. It doesn’t physically come up, but it did change the way I played to the point where it might as well have.

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Yeah, I forgot to take any blood. To the dungeon I know is filled to the brim with bloodsuckers. It’s not my smartest choice, I admit, but okay. The plan once I realized was to heavily prioritize enemies with The Thirst above anything else, because getting cursed is a run-ender. Of course, we could find some blood along the way, but that’s leaving things up to chance a bit more than I’d be comfortable doing.

The party, though, is about what you’d expect. Boudica does a lot of damage and inflicts bleed when she doesn’t. Damian inflicts a significant amount of bleed. Hakima bleeds and also heals stress very well, and Junia is the crowd control/healer. Would run again, just without all the misery that follows.

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The second fight in the whole dungeon introduces us to the enemy that’s going to be our biggest problem: the Chevalier. It’s not that it likes to sit in the back rows, we’ve got a pretty strong party to be able to deal with that, the problem with the Chevalier is that it has an attack that will stun two of your four party members while also hitting like a truck, and when it’s not doing that, it’s inflicting a pretty serious dodge debuff. It also has a bleed attack, because it wouldn’t be the Courtyard without bleeding you dry. But the Chevalier won’t give you the Curse.

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Also added to the Courtyard are these secret rooms (which are a bit confusing to find since “Scouting” is the mechanic used to see through the Courtyard’s Fog of War, concealing that you have to actually roll high on another scout check to reveal them) containing chained up characters who you can now add to your party through the Stagecoach. Another Vestal would be useful if we weren’t doing a Highlander run, but we are, so that’s no good.

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We’ve seen the Large Corpse Eater before (and it’s still surprising that the mere sight of it doesn’t cause any stress damage, but maybe that’s just game balance reasons), though it’s obviously new here. Its smaller cousins are also here but less remarkable. The new enemy, though, the Courtesan, is an interesting one. She’s got a party-wide shuffle and a stress attack, though what makes her the most threatening is, of course, The Thirst. We’d probably be killing this one first in a normal run, at least.

You’ll notice on that map posted above that the Red Key item isn’t actually required to beat the dungeon. In fact, it’s easier to, instead of going down and then backtracking around to the key door, just head upwards to face the first miniboss. This is one of those times that a familiarity with the game ruins some of its tricks, because you’re definitely not supposed to know about that going in. At the same time, it’s one of the meaner tricks the game pulls (not to mention the already labyrinthine nature of the first third of the map), so if the game isn’t interested in fighting fair, neither am I. The Crocodilian can punish me for my sins if it so chooses.

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The last time we faced this boss, we had a set strategy to keep it off balance. That was what Alhazred was for, pulling it forward so it couldn’t set up its most devastating attack at us. This party is not built for the same shenanigans, though, this was a party built for an endurance run, so the nature of the fight has changed. This also ignores, you know, the fact that it’s a Veteran-level Croc instead of an Apprentice one. It’s tougher just because of that too.

Honestly, I think this fight falls right in the middle of “could be better, could be worse.” The way it could have gone better is if it didn’t resist the first three or so attempts to stun or bleed it, and the way it could have gone worse is… well, Apex Predator is a hell of an attack.

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There’s a reason we tried to avoid this one.

Yeah, both Junia and Boudica got put on Death’s Door, and with the Croc’s Teeth Rake also shuffling the party around, it got pretty important for Hakima to guard his allies where he could to make sure everyone got healed back up. This is where most of our bandages got spent, too, just keeping people from dropping back down. Damian, thankfully, manages to kill the thing before things get out of hand, at least.

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I was still willing to continue on at this point. Like, we can rebuild from this. None of the other fights have been so bad, which means both our AoE heal and stress heals can get things back to manageable. One of the more common curios here will grant a pretty significant stress heal too, so that’s definitely not an issue. But then again, I forgot exactly what fight was next.

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Do you see the problem? From everything you’ve seen, do you see where I messed up?

That’s right, I’m obligated to kill the Manservant in front because that’s the one that will definitely end a run if I get it, but that means the three Chevaliers get free reign to knock my teeth in. If some of the adventurers weren’t close to death already, they definitely do so here. The only one that doesn’t is Hakima, and he’s the one I wanted to get hit near the end just thanks to him guarding the party’s squishier members.

The real nail in the coffin here is that constantly getting put on Death’s Door is a good way to get a load of Stress dropped on you. Junia was already taking a disproportionate amount of stress from navigating the Courtyard, not to mention the 50 or so she accumulated from the Crocodilian fight, but she snaps.

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If this were a normal Darkest Dungeon run, if these adventurers were disposable, I probably would have kept going. Remember, you can fix these afflictions by getting their Stress back down to zero. But we’ve accumulated three invitations to the Courtyard to get this quest finished, and this is the one time our progress is saved, so I’m not going to take any chances. There’s a chess saying -- and I haven’t played chess seriously in a while so I’m probably going to butcher it -- when you make a blunder make extra sure that you don’t make a second. The run is most salvageable if we just retreat and lick our wounds.

Next week, then, is the Swine King fight.

-r

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Week Forty-Two -- The Swine King

My first attempts at summoning were crude, and the results disappointing. I soon found, however, that the type and condition of the host's meat was a critical factor. The best results came from pigs, whose flesh is most like that of man.

This is probably the boss with the biggest difficulty spike between its Apprentice version and its Veteran version. Most bosses just get bigger numbers or, where they spawn more minions, the minions get better. Not so here. The Swine King’s numbers get bigger, yes, but a whole extra dimension is added to the fight that wasn’t there before.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the lineup:

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Dismas got a cool trinket from the croc fight last week that I’m itching to use, and Yui is going to be particularly helpful for the strategy. Doggo is a tough bring because he’ll mostly be confined to stunning enemies with Manacles in an area where the most threatening things are either out of range, hard to stun, or both, but he’s level three and can dance in the middle of the party with Dismas in a pinch if he transforms. It does make ABC stretch a little thin between healing, flares, and possibly damage, but it’ll probably be fine. Both Doggo and Yui have a decent self-heal if it comes down to that.

You’ll also notice that I remembered to pack blood just in case this time.

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The map we get for this run is interesting. Normally once you know the rules of bosses, it’s easy to intuit exactly which way to go. Here, though? I was convinced it was bottom left for a good portion of the run. It took a well-timed scout to reveal that it was actually in the middle. This makes sense, of course. The middle left slot is furthest from the entrance. It’s just tricky. The game is being tricky even when I think I know everything.

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The other thing to note is that we kept running into these same three enemies. There were three room battles on the way to the Swine King, and all of them had this organization of enemies. In fairness, it’s a tricky party. The centaur is obviously the biggest threat, but the Swine Reaver and the Swine Spawn are both bothersome as well. Yui even gets ennui from one of them. I don’t know why ennui counts as a disease one can get from pig vomit, but so it goes, I suppose.

But the fights go alright. The only worry is that this turned out to be a difficult party to recover from a shuffle, but we have a camping log to recover from all that as the door to the boss looms ahead, and party shuffling won’t be a problem there.

No, the problem, as always, is Wilbur.

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Remember last time we fought this boss, where Wilbur’s point was to mark the adventurers so the Swine Prince could hit them for massive damage? For the Veteran and Champion versions, Wilbur gets an extra action, meaning he gets to stun a party member too.

Thankfully, flares clear Wilbur’s stuns as well as they clear his marks, but it’s a constant worry. If he does manage to stun ABC, it changes the entire tone of the fight.

Also thankfully, a properly buffed Yui the Leper can do like 60 damage.

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The Swine King has almost 200 hp, but he’s also weak to both blight and bleed, so between Yui and the DOTs of both Dismas and Doggo, it doesn’t take that long, actually. It’s ABC who manages to kill the King, in the end.

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That just leaves Wilbur and his two speedy, stunning attacks to deal with. This would be a problem, like, he’s fast enough and can hit multiple targets. If he was smart, he could probably keep everyone locked down for a couple of turns before we manage to kill him. Of course, if we do get a turn in, well, like I said, Yui does like 60 damage.

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So that’s the Swine King down. There are only four people left to reach level four, though that would mean taking slightly underprepared people into a Hag fight, so I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s a definite consideration to just do a runback for the Crimson Court, especially since we can probably get an upgrade in before the next croc fight. Something to think about for next week. Until then,

-r

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Week Forty-Three -- The Baron (Part Two)

I decided to go back to the Crimson Courtyard basically on a whim. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. Should we actually manage to defeat the Baron, the Courtyard’s corruption meter resets, making the rest of the dungeons that much easier now that we won’t have to deal with them. There’s also the matter of the Crimson Curse. That’ll be gone for the moment too. The biggest disadvantage, meanwhile, is none of the adventurers I’d like to send on this mission have been fully healed. Damian still has a disease I’d rather cure and the stress levels of the party are still rather high overall, especially for an extra-long dungeon that is guaranteed to inflict one stress per tile. But Hakima and Elmer are there for that, I suppose, even if it is random, and this rerun gives me a chance to run back one important feature:

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Blood. Because we’re absolutely about to turn into a squad of vampires if we push on and play properly.

Anyway, let’s take another look at that map just to catch up on where we are.

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As I’ve said before, we thankfully don’t have to do all that over again. We’re starting in the room to the left of that Yellow lock, which we need a yellow key to open, which we need the blue key to get to. As you can see, it’s one long line down and up to do all this, which is a bit more convenient than what we were doing before, winding around, going all this way around a red door. I imagine it’s easier for people going in blind as well, though I wouldn’t know much about that.

Still, on one of our very first fights in this line…

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Wait, does that mean Elmer Fudd is also a vampire? Because that dog is the one doing most of the attacking, so…

Really glad I remembered blood this time, otherwise this would be a pretty big retreat spot and I’d have to bore you with an absolutely poor post. We can continue onwards here, even if Damian’s stress is getting pretty high.

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Oh, okay. I mean, that was always going to happen if he got targeted enough times. It wasn’t like we were going to high-roll our way out of this one. At the same time, Rapturous is one of the milder afflictions. Its biggest flaw is that it causes Flagellants to attack their allies occasionally, and the affliction buffs his damage output, so it really hurts when he does that. At the same time, though, the affliction buffs his damage output, and Junia’s around to help heal. It’s not hopeless just yet.

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Okay okay. I have to admit the only reason I had to keep going here was pure stubbornness. The game can’t tell me what to do, right? Also, we’d already fought off the croc guarding the yellow key, so there were a scant few fights left. The Baron himself isn’t that big a deal once you know what you’re doing with him, right?

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There’s one final enemy to introduce, though, as we approach the Baron’s lair: the Bloodsucker Esquire. These guys are basically the Highwaymen of the bloodsucker world, either using a move called “Ribcracker” to do exactly what it sounds like or setting up a series of ripostes, and it only gets worse when they use The Thirst. I prioritized these ones pretty highly; thankfully all three of the damage dealers hit the back row pretty well. That’s about to become really useful in a moment, too.

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Okay, so this fight is a gimmick fight. By himself, the Baron has three actions, and most of what he does can easily be countered by a Vestal. His party-wide attack doesn’t do enough damage to overcome her party heal, his single target attack isn’t nearly impactful enough either, and he also has The Thirst, which, like, killing him cures the Crimson Curse, so it’s only annoying if he gets a crit heal. The gimmick, then, is this. See those eggs behind him? At the beginning of the fight and after he loses about a third of his health after that, the Baron hides among these various eggs, and it’s the adventurer’s job to break them open and fight what’s inside. The catch is that as long as these eggs are in play, there’s a special debuff that prevents the use of healing moves. Even Judgement, which is Junia’s primary damage move, is useless here, leaving her with just a stun.

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This is secretly a good thing, though, if you’re adequately prepared to deal with what’s inside those eggs. They don’t spawn with an initiative roll for the round, which means as soon as you break an egg, you’re free to wail on them as you like. There’s a small element of time pressure here; if the Baron gets too bored he’ll just break all the eggs himself and attack you, but that’s really only a problem if you make it a problem. The bigger problem is if you hatch the Baron early in this cycle and he gets a few turns to wail on you in the meantime.

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Thankfully, that doesn’t happen, and Junia, despite her new Hopeless demeanor is able to keep everyone alive with not even a death’s door check. He manages to get a Curse on Boudica, but Boudica just returns the favor with the curse of being dead.

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There’s more to the dungeon if you go looking for it. There’s a spare red key that gives access to a set of pretty powerful trinkets, but Junia got hit pretty hard with the stress attacks this run, and it was all Hak could do to keep her from having a heart attack, so I’m going to pass on that. There will be other opportunities for those at a later date. For now, everyone gets to rest on their laurels and thank goodness for one of those long-lost quiet nights in the Hamlet.

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See you next week,

-r

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Week Forty-Four -- The Hag

Her knowledge of horticulturalism and its role in various arcane practices impressed me greatly. My licentious impulse gave way to a genuine professional respect, and together, we began to plant, harvest, and brew.

I don’t know why they decided to give The Hag this particular progression of names. I don’t know why “The Hag” gets to be more powerful than “The Wizened Hag” and yet less powerful than “The Hag Witch.” But that’s a semantics problem, and there are bigger problems with The Hag, as we’ll soon see. Well, you’ll soon see. I already saw two weeks ago, but here we are after some delay. Here’s the lineup.

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There are two ideas for this party. The first is that The Hag is the boss that you race, so each member of this party can deal a decent amount of damage. The second is most of them are still level three and I would really rather they not be, especially when some of the more-used members are reaching level five. There’s a small contradiction there -- we’re not exactly putting our best foot forward to race, though we do have level four weapons so the numbers should even out.

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Another good reason to bring Amani the Shieldbreaker is the large number of high-PROT enemies for her to do her namesake action on. This is the only other notable fight of the run, and really only notable as a showcase for Amani. The gargoyles only have 10 health, after all, and she’s only getting stronger. The Ghoul, too, has a 40% damage reduction to ignore. And yeah, these are both location-neutral enemies, but maybe that just means Amani’s value is going to keep going up. A problem, though, lies in her nightmares. She’s getting up there in levels and still refusing to have any. I wouldn’t be complaining as much but it’s a progression track we’re behind on.

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One thing I learned about this fight since the last time we were here is that the Hag’s cauldron actually does a percentile of the adventurer’s in the pot’s health of damage every action. I thought it was just 3 at a time, but no, it’s intended to put them on Death’s Door after twelve actions, or three full rounds, of combat. Of course, when the Hag is healing herself on three of her six turns, then it gets hard to actually whittle her down in time, even after she puts the party member with the lowest output, Alhazred, into the pot.

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But, then again, that’s what The Hag wants to do. She wants to be around just long enough to cause trouble. The Cauldron is the main damage dealer of the fight, but The Cauldron can’t actually kill people (unless you retreat with someone in the pot, in which case it absolutely will). That’s why The Hag has an otherwise nonthreatening party-wide attack. It’s to kill people, and basically nothing else.

And that’s exactly what happens.

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Amani gets revenge a few moments later, but that’s a few moments too late.

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That’s the first death we’ve gotten. It’s ironic. I didn’t want to use him while he was a vampire, and as soon as he wasn’t one anymore, he died. Honestly, at least it happened to a boss. It would have been really embarrassing if it just happened to some random enemy in the middle of a random run. It’s also not the worst loss. It is a healer, yes, but not a premium one. Wyrd Reconstruction could occasionally be powerful, but he was always more of a utility than a healer you could trust to keep people alive. We can still complete the game with him dead. Still, it would be good to at least visit his grave in the given spot.

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Anyway, on to the next one.

-r

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Weeks Forty-Five and Forty-Six -- The Best Revenge Is Living Well

I’m a little tired of how the game’s been populating missions, even if I understand what’s happening. In a strange twisted benevolence, it never wants to give you more than it thinks you can handle. That’s why there’s always at least one green mission in the pool, it’s so you can always pull new recruits off the stagecoach and try again. It also won’t introduce harder missions until you have characters that are ready for them, which is why we didn’t see orange or red missions until characters started crossing those thresholds. At the same time, though, I’ve only got three adventurers who can comfortably go on one of these champion-level missions without cowering in fear and taking a boatload of stress, so, like, what is it expecting me to do with all these red options then, hm? I feel like I’m being dared. I won’t fall for it, though. I just lost my occultist and am immediately turning around and going to the Cove, you think I’m going to be cocksure now?

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You’ll notice this is a Short mission, which is ideal for this team given that it’s running three veteran (level three) adventurers. The one holdout, Doggo the Abomination, is ideal here as he’s got a solid blight attack, a stun in Manacles, and his beastly side can help dance Paracelsus back to where she belongs.

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We encounter a lot of bandits, which makes it really nice that Thar’s riposte has only gotten stronger, but they’re also not interesting to recap in the same way as introducing The Cove’s new enemy is. This giant enemy crab has two attacks and they both suck, but then, what else is new? The first one, Arterial Pinch, is the real reason you bring a Plague Doctor to high-level Cove missions, because it inflicts a whopping 8/turn bleed, the most in the game, and something only Battlefield Bandages can cure without spending actual resources. It also debuffs healing, just for the extra rub-ins. The other move it has is called Tidal Slam, which deals some pretty significant damage and will stun and knock you back if it gets the chance.

Did I mention this thing has 50% PROT also, meaning if you’re not prepared to pierce through that it has effectively 120 health? I mean, we are prepared for it, but still.

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Thar gets put on Death’s Door, but there are two party members with healing abilities so he’s not in any particular danger. It’s just the Cove being the Cove, really. I also packed a slight surplus of food, which helps a bit as well.

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I forgot to take a pregame lineup screenshot like I normally do, oops. This is a pretty standard mark party with a bit of Sethera to taste. The biggest problem is no heals, but this is another Short dungeon and I packed extra food again, so it’s not a big deal. It also helps that everyone on this team seemed to dodge like a god.

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Seriously, this was the attack with the highest likelihood to screw things up. 

I wish I managed to screenshot the time the team dodged the Swine Marcher’s Drum of Doom AoE stress attack. Like, how do you manage to dodge being drummed at? There wasn’t much else to report back about, though. The Warrens offer plenty of damage buffs, and both Skaia and Joan do a decent amount of damage already, so all the fights got resolved pretty quickly. There was a small moment of panic when three attacks went Skaia’s way in a row, but again, extra food. You know what they say about an apple a day, right?

We’ve unlocked the second Siren fight, so that’s where we’re probably going next. As long as we’re being extra cautious, I’ll be sure to learn from last time’s mistakes, right? We’re not going to lose another character to a boss, right? Guess we’ll all find out together.

-r

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Week Forty-Seven -- The Alluring Siren

In financial desperation, I struck a bargain with the ancient things that surfaced in search of sacrifice when the moon was right. Their price was the delivery of an obscure idol and one other item of more troubling portent. The pact struck, my new-found accomplices slipped silently beneath the brackish water. A fearful stirring at the edge of the torchlight betrayed a familiar witness and gifted me with malign inspiration.

I was taking a look at the current levelling situation, and with several adventurers hitting Level Five, we’re pretty close to being able to take on the Darkest Dungeon proper. Which is a scary thought! I mean, I knew that going in, how limiting our access to more heroes, practically forbidding me from dismissing them, means we were getting more useful experience per run, but still. It also means we’re unlikely to actually hit all the versions of all the bosses, but we did thankfully see the first versions, so you can get the gist of what the next ones might be like. I’m still trepidatious because of our trinket situation, but that will get rectified in time. For now, we’re just staying the path with the Siren fight, as promised.

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A small mistake you don’t see here is that I forgot to give Audrey, our Grave Robber, a second trinket -- she’s only got one that boosts her speed. This is largely fine in this case since she’s mostly there to support the one-two punch of Skaia and LordCowCow, but a utility trinket to help with scouting wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

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On a related note, a frustrating quirk of the map design is that the game likes to have the party in the center at all times, but in this case, that obfuscates which way we need to go. I was pretty sure the Siren was in the bottom-right square since that’s what the game defaults to in situations like this, but I needed to count the left path just to make sure it wasn’t longer, which the game seemingly enjoyed preventing by zooming in on the party. I eventually managed, but it was a small quality of life thing I hadn’t noticed in previous runs.

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We face this lineup a few times in the runup to The Siren fight proper. It would probably be a backbreaker necessitating some pretty heavy item usage if it weren’t for a few key points. The first and most obvious is that Margaret directly counters the two Shamans in the back with her Skeet Shoot ability, which serves to de-stealth them. The second is that Skaia’s ability to mark enemies also comes with PROT reduction, meaning the Giant Enemy Crab is a little less threatening. Lastly, it turns out the team’s Dodge stat was pretty high since everyone got at least one key dodge in when it mattered.

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One fun interaction we get after one of these fights is how the game will let you camp before taking loot or interacting with the curio in the middle of the room. It’s something I’ve done a few times without comment, but it’s especially exciting when I’ve given LordCowCow all the damage trinkets and we come across an idol that will buff damage even more when purified. That buff lasts until we camp, so we camp first, take the loot from the fight now that the camping log slot is empty, and then interact with the curio. Now all that can go wrong is if The Siren enchants LordCowCow first.

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Aw son of a -

I mean, it’s fine. Does it still suck when CowCow deals twenty damage to Audrey cutting her HP to a fifth of what it once was? Yeah, sure, but she never gets put on Death’s Door and Cow only gets to do that once anyway. Like all the other summoner bosses, the real difficulty spike is in exactly what it can summon, and we’re prepared for that for the same reasons we could fight through those room battles. If the enemy has a high PROT, Skaia reduces it or Audrey’s pickaxe pierces right through it. If a healer gets charmed, we brought along a spare. It’s still a grind, but it’s always a grind in our favor.

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I alluded to solving our trinket situation in the next few weeks. I said that because hopefully, we’ll be able to do that soon. We might be running into a miniboss we haven’t seen yet to do so, so that’s exciting as well. Until then,

-r

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Weeks Forty-Eight and Forty-Nine -- We Fight A Miniboss, But Not The One I Was Talking About

We have two goals this week: progress towards another boss and getting more upper-tier trinkets ready for the Champion-level fights. That feather crystal featured above is one such example, an upgrade to our existing speed cloaks given its additional dodge chance. The stun resist debuff is absolutely manageable given not even every monster will stun you (even if the worst ones absolutely will). A smaller goal is to show off this Thing From The Stars miniboss, though, as you can probably infer from the subtitle there, that doesn’t get to happen. Here’s the loadout we do have, though:

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A synergy I didn’t actually realize while planning is the three adventurers behind The Goliath all have a small bit of Mark synergy. That was helpful to find out as I was navigating my way through the various rooms. Honestly, when I was putting the team together, I was just designating The Sisters as the healer to level her up and the rest as whatever Bleed synergy I could cobble together that wouldn’t level out of being able to fight the one remaining Veteran-level boss The Warrens has to offer.

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Another bit of synergy is having the tools to deal with this nonsense that the game decided to throw at us. I didn’t even realize an enemy lineup where everyone started off stealthed was possible, though I suppose it makes sense. Thankfully, both Quinn and Junjeong have abilities that destealth enemies, and they’re both slower than Ren and The Goliath also, so it’s not a huge problem, but it was a bit of a shock, especially for the first fight of the run.

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An anti-synergy is that I keep running Quinn and a Goliath who is Marked by the Flock in the same party, which means I also keep running into this nonsense. Thankfully, it’s a stress heal if you leave their hostage unharmed, and this party is pretty big on not wanting to deal with stress what with The Goliath who gets stressed every other time he suffers a hit and The Sisters whose every move will either stress them out or the rest of the party.

But those are the two notable fights of this Warrens run. Between that stress heal, the campfire, and both Nammo and Ren having move that guaranteed a critical hit, even the stress wasn’t a big factor, so much so that I ended up bringing Ren along for a second run immediately afterwards.

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I probably don’t need to take Josephine on any more runs given we’re more concerned with heirloom acquisition than money, but if she’s going to slot into any party, its one with a buffed up heavy hitter like Yui on the front lines to make up for the lack of damage. And it’s not like she’s completely useless. Her kukri stab is getting to the point where it can reliably help clean up already injured foes, her blight is similarly meaningful, she can work as a secondary healer to keep people from Death’s Door, a trait she manages during this run, so she’s not a completely useless pick here.

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Was really scared she was going to get knocked by a tree branch though.

That Blighted Giant isn’t actually that scary when Yui’s hunk of metal that can barely be called a sword can take it out in two swings. The real “Oh for fuck’s sake” moment comes later.

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We didn’t fight this guy last time, but then again, we weren’t as well-equipped as we are now. We outlevel him, for one, with all our adventurers at Level 4 in a Level 3 dungeon, and while our capacity to stun him and keep him from retreating to the backlines is limited, we have a second way of working around that part. Ren’s core feature is his ability to disrupt enemy lines, which in this case means pulling enemies forward into Yui’s chopping range. In a surprising bit of utility, Euryale can do this as well, so she’s not entirely useless to me once her stun attempt on The Collector fails.

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i showed you my collection please respond

I touched on this when we retreated from this guy the first time, but this is another flunky-summoning sort of boss. He has three “heads” he can pull from his collection, corresponding to each of the three head trinkets: Dismas the Highwayman, Barristan the Man-at-Arms, and Junia the Vestal. Each of them does basically the same thing their alive counterparts do, which means you have to slog through a lot of damage, protection, and healing to get at a miniboss who’s adding an extra smattering of stress on top of that, just for him to summon more as soon as he gets the opportunity. Other options of dealing with this boss besides pulling him back to the front are outspeeding him from the outset and taking advantage of his lower-than-average stun resist to get two free turns of damage on him, or being able to hit the backline with, say, a Hellion.

So yeah, a much easier time this go-around. I’ll call that revenge for week 4. Next time, we’ve unlocked another boss fight, so we’re going to go fight the Unstable Flesh and probably lose access to half our bleed teams until we start doing Champion-level dungeons in earnest. See you then,

-r

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Week Fifty -- The Unstable Flesh

I could not store such a prodigious amount of offal, nor could I rid myself of it easily, possessed as it was by unnameable things from outer spheres. When excavations beneath the manor broke through into an ancient network of aqueducts and tunnels, I knew I had found a solution to the problem of disposal.

Unfortunately, this is not a particularly exciting fight. Between the way the game generates its boss fights for The Warrens and the fact that the Flesh doesn’t actually scale as well as some of the other bosses in the game, this is an exceedingly quick run with about three fights total. I incur some risk by not taking a primary healer, instead relying on a Plague Doctor (whose healing is just good enough to keep people alive) and a Flagellant (whose healing only works some of the time), but I was saving half of this party from levelling too hard for this exact fight specifically, so it’s hard not to have a little cheese.

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And it’s not like the Plague Doctor is a bad pick here anyway. Plague Grenade is perfectly reasonable given that it’s twelve blight damage a turn when it connects. Thar the Man-at-Arms is an extra bit of insurance here. His mace is getting pretty hefty, and he can guard anyone that gets close to Death’s Door, tanking further hits if need be. One thing I didn’t pay attention to is that Hakima was still Gluttonous, which means he’s eating for two (Elmer Fudd should get a share, I suppose), so maybe I should have packed more food, but I wasn’t expecting to be here too long. Twenty food is enough for two hunger checks and a full campfire, which turned out to be enough.

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The one other fight we ran into before the Flesh itself wasn’t even an exciting one with a centaur or a wraith. It was these insects that all died in one hit. It honestly felt like this entire dungeon was one big anticlimax. I told myself that I’d go back and collect loot from a bunch of other curios, but there weren’t even many worth taking. The one treasure chest in the whole dungeon turned out to be trapped.

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We talked about how we’re taking on this fight last time we did it -- several AoE attacks that all inflict damage over time means the 150 or so health the flesh has gets churned through quickly. I made this fight easier for myself, too, by getting Hakima the ability Hound’s Harry, an attack I normally don’t like but it hits all four of the Flesh’s slots and inflicts a significant amount of bleed, so it was worth the purchase now that we’re rolling in money. It’s not like we can’t go back to his normal skillset later.

There aren’t even any more screencaps of this fight. There was no danger. The Flesh just died because it was taking, like, fifty bleed and blight damage a turn and could only heal twelve of it. If I must attribute the kill to someone, Paracelsus was the one who hit it last, so I guess I’d give it to her.

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Like I said, I wandered around afterwards and took one more fight, but that was just to fill up our bag with loot and wasn’t particularly exciting either. Honestly, I’m fine with all this, even if it makes for a frustratingly short recap, because the alternative is there’s too much to talk about, which means either the game has surprised me or things are going horribly wrong. Either way, someone’s probably not coming back alive.

Next week is going to be a tough one, though. I’ll explain more then.

-r

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Vveek Fifty-One -- Vvolves At The Door

Flames on the horizon, sulfur in the air -- the vvolves are at the door!

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Okay, so, like, The Ancestor doesn’t say “vvolves,” he says “wolves” like a normal person. At the same time, I have a mild obsession vvith replacing the letter vv vvith tvvo vs in old-timey text and the boss of this random encounter is, in fact, called “Brigand Vvulf” so can you really blame me if I ham it up a little bit? Anyvvay, do you remember that Shrieker fight vve took sixteen vveeks ago? This is kind of like that except you actually have to complete a level six (6) dungeon to get any revvards and if you don’t, the vvolves destroy part of your hamlet, forcing you to have to upgrade it back up again.

Oh, and like all of the base game’s level six quests, if you go into it, realize you’re overvvhelmed, and then retreat, the game kills off a random member of your party, vvith the flavor being that they’re “giving the others more time to escape.” So that’s nice.

Vvolves At The Door vvon’t spavvn right avvay, hovvever. It’s not going to vvreck any beginning player’s experience until the game thinks you’re ready for it. It has to be at least vveek forty and you have to have a party vvho can feasibly take on that daunting Darkest-level dungeon; you have to have four Champion level five adventurers chomping at the bit to fight. That being said, it is an inevitable part of the game. Every vveek past vveek forty increases the chances of the event firing. If you don’t vvant to have to keep rebuilding your hamlet, you’re going to have to kill Brigand Vvulf.

So, uh, let’s do that.

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Thar is only level four, sure, but he’s kind of important for mitigating some of Vvulf’s damage, so he has to come vvith. The rest of the party follovvs from that. I’m expecting a lot of bandits, vvhich means a lot of AoE damage, so Junia is our healer, Skaia’s main attack, Collect Bounty, deals bonus damage to humans, vvhich there vvill be a lot of, and he can use it from the third rovv, not to mention his ability to disrupt the enemy backline. vve’re technically under-leveled so stress is going to be a bit of an issue, so LordCovvCovv vvill be managing that vvhile also being a tanky front-liner and secondary healer.

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The level six dungeons like to play a trick on you vvhere the first fight is significantly easier than all the rest of the fights to lull you into a false sense of security. These are all Novice and Veteran-level enemies, though it does reveal the gimmick of the dungeon -- the fact that they’re together at all is significant. These fights are all going to be against bandits vvith the occasional rabid dog and madman throvvn in for good measure.

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See, look! It’s our first glimpse at Champion-level enemies. Not that these are too different from vvhat vve’ve seen before, though the Brigand Hunter in the back there inflicts stress damage in addition to the expected buff to his damage vvhich is annoying. At the same time, the plan of Junia keeping the party alive and CovvCovv keeping them of sound mind helps a lot. vve even get a chance to stall a fevv of these fights to keep stress dovvn to manageable levels.

Novv, like the Crimson Court and our upcoming runs into the Darkest Dungeon proper, this is a scripted dungeon. Brigand Vvulf is directly north of the starting zone vvith tvvo paths to get there, clockvvise around the circle or counter-clockvvise. I recommend the clockvvise path since there’s a secret door in one of the northvvest tiles that can get you some extra loot if you pack a key.

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Brigand Vvulf is a mix betvveen the summoning-type bosses (The Siren, The Necromancer, and, fittingly, the Brigand Pounder) and the forecasted threat-type bosses (the Svvine King and the Prophet). At the beginning of every round, he vvill throvv a bomb at the feet of one of your adventurers, and at the end of the round, it explodes for hefty damage. This is vvhy Thar is so important here. Hakima’s guard vvouldn’t buff his dodge enough to reliably get out of the vvay, so instead Thar can buff himself up to three times to take, say, six damage instead of tvventy. Six is much more manageable to our healer. The alternative to all this is to attack the barrel of bombs behind him. If the barrel is destroyed, the active bombs are rendered inert somehovv. That being said, the bombs do fight back -- that “riposte” icon indicates that the bombs vvill literally blovv up in your face if you attack them. In addition, Vvulf’s most common attack not only stuns a random party member and summons a Champion-level brigand, it also respavvns his bomb barrel, so you can see vvhy the Man-at-Arms strategy is so preferred here.

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The other moves Vvulf has are yelling at the party in a vvay that stresses them out and guarding the enemies he summons. This guard is both annoying to deal vvith -- these are dangerous enemies he’s protecting -- and his biggest failing. Unlike every other guard in the game, this does not buff Vvulf at all, vvhich means not only vvill attacks that could only hit the frontline alvvays have a chance of hitting him vvhen he’s in rank three, vvhere he vvill be for most of the fight, they’ll continue to be at full povver.

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Anyvvay, the fight progresses for a bit and betvveen the stress of literal actual bombs being throvvn at us and being yelled at by a bandit king, three of our four adventurers cross the 100 Stress threshold. Thar gets masochistic, vvhich, vvhile very funny given the context of his role in the fight, also means that he stresses the rest of the party out vvhenever someone takes damage, vvhich is vvhat puts CovvCovv over the edge, except CovvCovv becomes, vvell

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I don’t think this lucky roll turned the tide or anything; vve vveren’t about to lose anyone unless Thar started to refuse to be healed, but it certainly helped keep any further problems in check until Thar vvas able to get the killing blovv.

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Our revvard for all this is the next room dovvn, a trinket vvith the “Ancestral” rarity, something normally reserved only for either killing the Shambler or completing a long Champion-level quest. I don’t think vve’re going to do anything exciting vvith this particular trinket, but vvho knovvs? That’s for future me to decide.

Speaking of future me, this fight leveled up the entire party to the maximum level of six, vvhich means the game is populating a vvhole bunch of Champion level dungeons for me even vvith so many level fours left to grind up. vve’ll see hovv vve manage these next time. Hopefully, it vvon’t be anything too grim.

Until then,

-r

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Weeks Fifty-Two And Fifty-Three -- The First Champion-Level Dungeon

I was going to make a crack at how the title technically isn’t true thanks to last week’s shenanigans, but it actually is true because Wolves At The Door (I got over myself thanks for asking) was a Darkest-Level quest, not a Champion-Level, a distinction that doesn’t actually matter that much outside of experience gained but means you get this rambling sentence instead. Many of these adventurers are still woefully underprepared for this step-up in difficulty, but, like I said last week, the game isn’t giving us much of a choice anymore.

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I chose The Cove because it was the easiest of these quests on offer in that it was short and of the Scouting type, which meant we’d have to see fewer rooms and, therefore, take fewer fights. I mean, hallway fights in the Cove are spooky, but its Champion enemy is also the least annoying of the four, so it’s a give-and-take there. The party is pretty solid too. Both Paracelsus and Amani are stellar in the Cove, Euryale can both manage The Goliath’s stress problem and stem the bleeding we’re going to experience, and The Goliath, well, he hits things really hard.

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Because things have to go wrong immediately, we encounter the Champion-level enemy in our very first fight. Meet the Squiffy Ghast, a fiddler who is going to stress out the party to no end. The biggest gimmick when encountering it is its movement. It has two moves, one that shunts it to the enemy’s front line, and one that has it make a full retreat to the back, not only changing what moves can even hit it, but what moves the enemies can do. You’ll notice in this screenshot that it’s also pretty hardy at 53 health.

That being said, this fight is fine. I know I was doomsaying things for a second there, but the snails are manageable through a combination of Amani’s ability to pierce their armor and Paracelsus’ ability to inflict a DOT that’s over half of their health. The real annoyance comes in the second fight.

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Guess who’s back? That’s right, after retreating to the Courtyard for so long you might have forgotten, the Crimson Court is slowly creeping its way back into the main game, and they insist on stressing out The Goliath if it’s the last thing they do. Two instances of Maddening Whine cause his stress to skyrocket, and some ill-timed misses let them get The Thirst off. I didn’t pack any blood, because of course I didn’t, but that’s not a concern in a short dungeon. What’s more a concern is what happens next:

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Like the Flagellant (and The Sisters, but that’s another Marvin Seo original and not part of an unmodded game), The Thrall only has one outcome when he reaches 100 stress. In some ways, it’s even a positive, in that his damage nearly doubles and he yells things like “NONE ARE SAFE FROM ME!” But he also has one of the most debilitating status effects in the game now: he’s literally berserk. Frequently -- like, fifty percent of the time -- The Goliath is going to smack a random party member for a good chunk of damage. The only blessing here is this doesn’t take up his attack for the round. If I were in a riskier sort of mood, I’d consider sending a berserk Thrall into a dungeon by his lonesome, but that’s for a different save where we could get more than one.

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What happened next was probably inevitable. Between The Goliath, these new and improved enemies, and Euryale focused more on calming The Goliath back down than actually doing her job healing the rest of the team, both she and Paracelsus get put on Death’s Door, and that’s where I had to call it. If you look at the map, we weren’t scouting very much and still had to clear at least two more rooms. It wasn’t going turn out well no matter how you looked at it, so retreat was the best option left. I didn’t even wait to clear those remaining groupers, I just up and left. Another Cove expedition failed, then. That place truly is cursed.

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To drown my sorrows I went back to the Veteran-level quests. Thankfully, the game had populated one in the Weald, so completing this one sets up a fight with the Brigand 12-Pounder for next week. This party is pretty synergistic. Yui can get through a Giant’s HP bar ridiculously fast and benefits from Joan’s camping skills, while the rest of the party is a perfectly serviceable mark makeup.

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See, why can’t the Cove have fights like this? Where everything just dies in one hit and nothing hits for that much damage? I mean, I know the reason, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be wistful about what we’re about to leave behind.

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Even this isn’t an issue. it’s the most threatening fight the game can throw at this level, but between Joan and ABC doing increased damage to anything Junjeong marks and Yui doing massive damage already, it’s not a problem at all. With a camping log, we can even ignore all the stress damage that crone would otherwise do to us. I’m going to miss this.

But! We can only move forwards. The Brigand Pounder will likely level up most of our remaining level fours, and after that, we’re probably going to either start preparing for the Darkest Dungeon or take care of this Curse problem by preparing for the Viscount. Both prospects are equally intimidating.

-r

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Week Fifty-Four -- The Brigand 12-Pounder

The wild whispers of heresy roused the rabble to violent action. Such was the general air of rebellion that even my generous offer of gold to the local constabulary was rebuffed. To reassert my rule, I sought out unscrupulous men skilled in the application of force. Tight-lipped and terrifying, these mercenaries brought with them a war machine of terrible implication.

I’m starting to think this Ancestor guy isn’t a good dude.

Really, the hardest part of this week is just finding four adventurers who haven’t leveled out of Veteran-level dungeons and can also reliably deal with the Fuseman. One of those is an obvious choice, maybe a second at a push, but the rest? Well, here’s what I ended up with:

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I would not say that this is a reasonable party. Doggo is priced into transforming if he wins the speed roll, which is probably fine with Sethera and Margaret there to help lower stress, but on the other hand, that’s still not a great look going into one of the game’s longer boss fights. Margaret is also the primary healer here, which we’ve managed before, and should be fine as long as we take some extra food, bandages, and antivenom. Dismas is the key holding everything together. The bandits the 12-Pounder summons might be tougher than the 8-Pounder’s but they’re still bandits, which the Highwayman is really good at dealing with.

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This is the only fight worth talking about in the lead-up. Sure, there was some other stuff involving a ghoul and some dogs that might have been threatening, but the party is secretly all damage dealers, so it wasn’t much of a threat. This one, though, exposes a slight problem with the build, which is if Dismas does go first and shuffle to the front, the party only has Margaret to deal with the back lines. I wouldn’t call that the reason we suffered five critical hits here, especially since the Batteries seemed more interested in blighting our team, but that meant Margaret had to focus on healing a little more than she should have for such a routine fight. We weren’t ruined or anything -- our equipment is too good for that -- but things did get weird for a second there.

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As mentioned before, the bandits this thing summons are tougher. You’ll notice, for example, the Fusilier is stealthed like all the other Veteran-level Fusiliers. It also adds the Bloodletter to its pool of possible summons, which can definitely add some problems. But that only works when the 12-Pounder summons more than just its Fuseman, and I regret to say that the reason this fight isn’t more interesting is that, for three turns in a row, it did just that.

The Outlaw Fuseman is not a tough enemy. It’s not designed to be. It’s supposed to always go last and fire the cannon, soaking up damage for the real threat of the boss fight. But when the party is being buffed by Sethera playing music, the proper trinkets, and rabies(?), the party had no trouble managing it turn after turn. The Abomination isn’t technically recommended for this fight because of how grindy it can get, and the stress of being a beast does add up, but by the time Dismas landed the finishing blow on the cannon, Doggo had only gotten up to, like, 50 Stress -- well within acceptable parameters. 

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There’s one final surprise the game threw at me this week. I was debating whether to save this for next week’s post or just throw it up now, but it’s too interesting not to share now.

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Yes, sometimes the game will be extra nice to you and let you bring one adventurer back from the dead. Normally this is an opportunity to get back a hero with some really nice quirks you lost to a fatal misplay, but here it’s even more valuable. Here, we get back our one (1) Occultist we lost earlier. Now, coming back from the dead is a bit traumatic, so Alhazred’s equipment and skills are all reduced to level one, and he does come back at the level he died at, so he’s severely under-leveled compared to everyone else now, but he is worth grinding for. Everyone is.

See you next week for grinding,

-r

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Weeks Fifty-Five and Fifty-Six -- Grinding Up

I mean, I promised this. By the end of these two weeks -- spoiler alert -- all but one of these restored-to-twenty-four adventurers is going to be Resolve Level Five or better, and the one that we have left lagging behind will still be more than serviceable in the upcoming fights when we get back to those. That does mean, however, that I’ve got a doozy of a team lined up for the first of these two weeks.

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Oh my god, of all the teams I have had to not recommend on this show, this is the not-recommendiest. Josephine is a lot of useful things, but the Antiquarian is not a front-line class. The closest thing this team has to a damage dealer is Nammo, the Warrior half of The Sisters, which means the whole party is going to be dancing around as the pair tries and figure out what they’re doing. This isn’t entirely a bad thing, like, of all the parties to be constantly shuffled around, this party does have Euryale who can slither around the battlefield when she loses her human disguise, and both Alhazred and Josephine are placement-agnostic. There’s also plenty of healing to go around, both the mental and physical kind, so we’re not dying quickly even if we can’t kill anything quickly either.

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This is still a Veteran level dungeon. We’ve seen these for the past several weeks. It’s what we’re used to, so all this isn’t too difficult. I discounted in that lead-up just how good blight was in the Ruins and we’ve got two sources in the party: Junjeong and Josephine. The two of them combined frequently burned down one threat while Alhazred worked on another. We also got a pretty high-dodge team composition. At one point, the entire team dodged getting yelled at by a ghoul, and how do you even dodge getting yelled at?

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And then sometimes the ghoul did that

Another stroke of luck with scouting ahead was finding a secret room, which, since this was an exploration mission, counted to our number of rooms found and let us dodge a prospective room battle. We got out of this fight so unscathed that I immediately turned around and put Alhazred in the next run.

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Now, a pattern you might pick up from these runs is that whenever I act particularly excited about a team, something goes wrong and whenever I point out all the problems with a team, all those problems seem to disappear. This is a little worrisome since you can’t level out of these dungeons and I’m going to inevitably fall into bad habits, but also, this is a really good team to just clear out big enemy parties. Everyone focuses on the back rows and then suddenly the front rows are significantly less threatening. Nothing more to be said about that. There are even two -- technically three -- secondary healers to keep people alive.

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Of course, when you run into a miniboss and you don’t have his natural stun counter, then maybe there are some issues. Not a huge number of issues because again, everyone can hit the back rows where The Collector will be, but at the same time, the three actions from level five enemies are, uh, they’re bad! They hurt! And when they’re not hurting, they’re healing the Collector’s health back. So this happens:

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And then this:

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I could have quit right then and there, but I think there was a part of me that had still accepted Alhazred as a bonus, as a gimme that we could lose since we had lost once before. This is not an optimal way to play Darkest Dungeon, especially not with the stipulations I’m using, but it is how I played. I should say, Fearful on an Occultist isn’t the worst thing in the world. The worst thing it will trigger besides compounding stress damage is the afflicted party member will run towards the backline, which is negligible with this party setup. It still sucks, but once Alhazred’s health is topped back up, he’s mostly functional.

More annoying, though, is the other big status effect an adventurer gets here.

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Congrats, ABC, you’re a vampire now. I don’t have any blood but the run was basically over at this point, I was just taking a rest to free up some inventory space and got greedy with my camping skills. We got ambushed and I was immediately punished for it.

Still, these are only small difficulties, and, more importantly, they’re fixable. Next week, I suppose we’ll give that Viscount a visit, and maybe see if we can’t crawl our way all the way to the boss in one go. We’d better. We’ve only got one invitation, after all.

-r

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Week Fifty-Seven -- The Road to the Viscount (Part One)

The feasting and revelry would last for weeks at a time. Great stone tables were set with such an abundance of rare delicacies that we would stuff ourselves until the exotic became mundane. When the lavish spread began to spoil, a ravenous gourmand gleefully proposed that we sample from the fetid pile of composting refuse! The notion was dismissed as decidedly unhealthy. But days later, he was found cackling madly atop a heap of rancid comestibles, licking his fingers in delight.

This post has been so tough to write because this is another one of those marathon dungeons, where you’re expected to take a break to return to it later, but I was impatient and did more than I did should have. I’ll try to condense it down, but this’ll still be more of a ramble skipping over a bunch of stuff.

Three major things happened. The first is a result of what happened at the end of the last run two weeks ago. We gathered all the doctor’s bags in the Weald, which means there’s an event related to doctors ready to show up.

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This is really convenient since getting most of the adventurers up to Resolve Level 5 has been a bit expensive. We’ve gotten the blacksmith and guild as cheap as they can be and it’s still tens of thousands of gold to get a single person to maximum equipment and skills. We haven’t spent a lot of time managing quirks or diseases. This is a free opportunity to do some of that, and we’re going to take it.

The second major thing is, of course, the Viscount fight itself. Here’s the lineup.

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It’s a pretty standard Crimson Court lineup, I think. The biggest worry our stress healing slot is taken up by CowCow who would much rather be doing damage, and with the unique stress mechanics of the Crimson Court and these adventurers having a slightly elevated stress level, that’s what Cow ends up doing. Is that going to have a knock-on effect where we don’t have enough burst damage to kill the Champion-level enemies of the Crimson Court? Well, yeah. That’s kind of the third major thing that happens this week. It turns out, one of the hardest dungeons in the game… is hard! First, I’m going to post the map for this thing because it’s huge and then I’m going to post some consequences.

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The further up the difficulty curve you are, the more likely it is that even a random attack will deal stress damage. Anything that does deal stress damage only deals more. Even LordCowCow can’t keep up.

Now, the reason I kept going is that this map also introduces a curio that allows you to camp in this dungeon. My rationale was: if I can just get to the first campfire log of the game, I can mop up most if not all of this stress damage, and the team will be functioning again. I’m already hitting every other stress relief curio on the map, and I still have a bunch of Blood to keep these Crimson Curses at bay. This was a fatal mistake, though. An adventurer can only take so much stress after all, and so, after countless rounds of chewing out her teammates, Junia gets a series of heart attacks that kill both her and the week.

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Recovering from this will be difficult, but not impossible. We still have 60,000 gold in the bank, which isn’t a lot but will be enough here, and though Junia was the primary-est of the primary healers, we do have a number of backup options. At the same time, the process of grinding back involves multiple Champion-level dungeon runs. I feel like the whole run is on a knife’s edge after this week, and these next few weeks are going to determine whether or not we’re actually going to be able to complete the Darkest Dungeon.

-r

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Weeks Fifty-Eight and Fifty-Nine -- Treading Water

With the loss of Junia and a good portion of everyone else having been turned into vampires, with our money supplies dwindling, and yet the game only offering the hardest dungeons it can possibly throw at us, I’m at this point where I’m skeptical of any sort of major goals, so I have to turn back to smaller ones. Money can be less of an issue depending on how we prioritize loot -- especially since that’s the one benefit increasing difficulty gets us, more money -- and our levels are just about set outside of Paracelsus, which isn’t pressing. Our biggest manageable goal, then, is getting another invitation to the Courtyard so we can proceed further into that particular questline and cleansing the Crimson Curse until hopefully the rest of the game, with a smattering of “earn some money and get more people’s equipment fully upgraded” along the way. You’ll notice that those two side goals are at odds with each other and, uh, yeah, they are! Don’t worry about it too hard.

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I chose the Weald here because it’s got a Focus Ring as a reward, a powerful accuracy trinket that also buffs crit chance (which, you know, increases the amount of stress healing). We already have one, but more is always welcome. Yui plus accuracy trinkets should be able to cleave through most anything, and the rest of the party runs good support, so let’s see how this goes.

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Oh for fuck’s sake. Literally the first fight, too. I mean, we’ve got a couple of stuns in the party, and Ren can pull the Collector forward into Yui, but it’s still not a great start. It means for the next few fights, Euryale is working overtime to get people back to tip-top shape.

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Another reason I wanted to go to the Weald is to introduce its Champion-level enemy, the Hateful Virago. The Virago is annoying for a couple of reasons, the most obvious from the screenshot here is its capacity to do a whole bunch of damage to multiple adventurers at a time, something only Junia is easily able to deal with, and we know how that turned out. The Virago is a strict counter to healers like the Vestal, though, because it will turn any leftover corpses into Necrotic Fungi, which aren’t dangerous on their own but negate any and all healing for as long as they’re out. The Virago does if possible at the end of every round, so she doesn’t even have to take a turn off to turn those skills off.

Thankfully, she spawned in with three grubs, who notably never leave behind any corpses for her to take advantage of. I suppose that cancels out any bad omens we got from running into The Collector immediately, but we’ll see how that translates into the second run of this post.

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…You know, in a way, this is a good thing. The Collector drops a hefty gem when killed, and we do need money still, but at the same time, like, come on. Thankfully this is a party with both Boudica and Margaret to hit the back line where the Collector will be, and Sethera to make sure they’re going to hit for a lot. Skaia is also there to pull the Collector forwards and mark him for even more damage, which leads to screenshots like this one.

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I skipped the provisioning screen for that joke, but I think that adequately describes why I assembled this team. It’s not the best at healing back up, but the run had a campfire and Margaret to keep people alive if things got dangerous, and also you can’t take damage if all the enemies are dead.

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It’s especially good we took Boudica with us because that enemy in the back there is the Warrens’ Champion enemy: the Swine Skiver. There aren’t really gimmicks with this one. It will just kill you. I don’t have a better way to put it. If you leave this one alive to deal with, say, that Swine Heaver in front of it (normally a high-priority target, right?), it will stun one party member and debuff the other three so that they’ll never recover in time. So I say it again: it’s good that we’ve got a party that can hit the back rank with consistency.

So yes, these two weeks could have gone a lot worse. In fact, we did run into some egg sacs in the Warrens, so we even managed our main goal. I’ll have to go back and double-check prospective teams, but I think we might be headed back to the Court to get further into the Viscount quest. Until then,

-r

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Week Sixty -- The Road to the Viscount (Part Two)

This is the first time I’ve been actually salty at this game. On previous catastrophes, there were ways I could rationalize it away. “Oh, there was no way we were beating that Collector, but we’ve got time to get our revenge later.” “That’s just what the Hag does. It sucks, but it happens.” “I really got too greedy there, huh?” This one barely even gave me the time to see it coming. I only just managed to get a screencap of it before the relevant text disappeared. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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The biggest hurdle is Damian is still afflicted with the Crimson Curse, which is why we packed a stack of extra blood. There are some other, smaller hurdles like Hakima needing extra food (presumably for his dog) and a trinket Euryale is carrying gives her a debuff to her maximum health, which is relevant given her already fragile constitution. It’s entirely possible that was the big failure point and I should have known better. Oh, and that blue key is not droppable, which means by bypassing the gate last time we were here it’s just stuck in our inventory for our remaining attempts at the Viscount. Backtracking two weeks ago might have been the smarter play.

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Speaking of maximum health debuffs, Euryale joins Damian in the Crimson Curse club pretty early on in the run, putting her at a paltry 25 health. She does have benefits, of course. Her healing cures bleed and blight, which is rather prevalent in the Courtyard, and she can work with Hakima to keep stress down.

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And one of the fights we run into is quadruple grubs, and we’re still not hunting for the “die to a grub” achievement, so things were looking up for a hot minute there. If you’re following along on the map from two posts ago, we get all the way to the yellow gate without much issue at all, and even have a pair of campfire logs to keep everyone even more healthy.

So in Magic: the Gathering, there’s a witticism when it comes to the more midrange, grindy decks. These decks are really good at grinding their opponents down to zero cards in hand and winning because their cards are just better in that sort of parity situation. It’s something to the effect of “You can’t beat the top card of their deck.” The opponent knows your strategy, and sometimes they’ll just draw the right card at the right time and there’s nothing you can do about it.

In Darkest Dungeon terms, you can be playing out of your mind managing the various resources, but sometimes the Chevalier crits your healer for 21 and gives her a bleed…

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and sometimes your healer just bleeds out before you even get a chance to do anything about it.

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So we’re down two healers now. I don’t remember this quest being that bad on my casual playthrough, I promise, but we do need to switch tacks here. I think at this point, we need to rush the Darkest Dungeon and I’ll just figure out which missions we can do without a main healer. That’s going to take a bit of research, but that’s next week’s radio’s problem. Until then,

-r

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Intermission -- What To Do About The Darkest Dungeon?

I’m going to level with you, I woke up this morning and really was not in the mood to play Darkest Dungeon. But I don’t want to use that as an excuse not to make some sort of update here, so I’m going to spend a couple hundred words talking about the final challenges of the game and the preparations I’m going to do to meet those challenges, and we’ll see how things inevitably collapse next week.

I mentioned this a while ago, probably near the start of the run when everything was nice and bright and nothing could ever go wrong ever, but the goal of the game is to traverse through the four levels of the Darkest Dungeon, each of which is going to test a different facet of the game’s mechanics. For example, the first mission, “We Are The Flame,” has the stated goal of “Kill the Shuffling Horror” and when it says “Shuffling Horror,” it means a Shambler. The first goal of the gauntlet is to kill a modified version of the miniboss that is so hard that even a game as mean as this one won’t spring it on you without warning. So we’re going to have to come up with a party that does that.

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Now, the special reason Highlander is a challenging mode of play for Darkest Dungeon involves the Dungeon’s unique mechanic that any hero who has completed one of these Darkest Dungeon quests refuses to go back into the dungeon. They have seen too much. The mod we’re using actually disables this element, but I’m not a coward. It’s mathematically possible to do the dungeon runs normally -- we still have more than sixteen adventurers remaining -- so I’m going to do my best. Whoever beats this Shuffling Horror will be regarded as heroes, but I will basically be done with them.

Which is a problem since the second Darkest Dungeon quest, Lighting The Way is traditionally regarded as the hardest one in the game. The biggest reason for it is this: you have to deal with three bosses, and each of those bosses has a devastating attack only negated if an adventurer is holding one of the trinkets We Are The Flame gives you. Now, you may notice a problem here. We Are The Flame only gives you three trinkets, so this high-stress, high-damage attack is still a problem for one of the adventurers. The obvious solution here is to guard whoever isn’t holding the trinket, and fair enough, that’s probably the strategy we’re going to go for here, but the other problem having required trinket slots introduces is trinkets are really powerful, and it’d be rather nice to have more than one useful one on the majority of the party.

The third Darkest Dungeon quest is the endurance quest. Previously, we’ve had to deal with quests that are Short, Medium, or Long, which come with zero, one, or two campfire logs respectively. Belly Of The Beast comes with four. It’s called “exhausting” for a reason, it’s deliberately designed to drain your resources. This is the quest I’d like Hakima on, for what it’s worth, because if the name didn’t give it away, this is where all the Beast enemies are kept.

Lastly is Hell Is In The Heart, which is one long boss fight that, without wishing to spoil, is almost guaranteed to kill someone. Multiple someones, even. It’s just that kind of quest.

So that’s what we’re up against these next few weeks. For next week, I’m thinking of some sort of Dancing party to combat the Shuffling Horror, so adventurers like CowCow and Amani should be a decent offensive base, with maybe someone like Sethera or Ren in the third slot to help support those two. Now, the biggest problem we’re going to run into is that two of our healers are dead, and the remaining ones are suboptimal for various reasons. As the shortest quest, this might be the one we just try to blitz through, maybe with ABC or Margaret just in case.

After that, Thar and Joan are our premier guards given their high HP pool, and we’ll probably need someone like Dismas to do some decent damage. I’d probably take the other Arbalest clone here for the same reason. The key bosses here are two slots big, so it’s not like they won’t get hit.

The party for the third quest is pretty set. Boudica, Hakima, and Paracelsus are basically locks. Though Paracelsus is underleveled, that doesn’t matter as much for the role she’s going to be playing, and if we’re lucky with some specific aspects of the quest, it won’t even matter that much. I might be tempted to put Thar in this quest too just for his camping buffs, but I’m not sure about that yet. It probably would be better just to put Alhazred here as the last decent healer.

I don’t really want to think about the last quest yet.

Anyway, that’s my plan. Sorry I wasn’t feeling up to the challenge this week, but now that I’ve thought about it and laid it all out, there isn’t much left to do but do it. Until next week,

-r

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