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Week Sixty-One -- We Are The Flame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the wiki is indispensible though

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-r

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Week Sixty-Two -- Light The Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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sometimes.

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

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

-r

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Week Sixty-Three -- The Belly of the Beast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ah.

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

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

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

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See you next week for that.

-r

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Week Sixty-Four -- The Shrieker Part Two

Ahhhh.

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

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

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

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

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

-r

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