Darkest Dungeon

Games
41

Well I am very much enjoying it. There is a narrator as you play, sort of like in Bastion. Skills and character design / uniqueness is off the charts awesome.

So far I am getting my ass handed to me, damn blight! Also everyone starved to death on my first game. If a character becomes to stressed, they can be tested and will either mentally prevail, which helps the team. Or they will go crazy of sorts and the whole team will suffer. You can actually lose control of a stressed character and they pick their own skills to use in battle. Overall I am super happy I backed this on Kickstarter.

My heros graveyard is filling up fast in the hub town. :(

42

Seems like an interesting game, but i’m still figuring it out.

The first dungeon seems near impossible. I’m not sure how to heal at all. Food heals one health but if you chip a nail you take 4 damage at least. This means i generally get worn out.

My gunner in the second row was doing pretty well until someone critical hit him for 18 damage (about 2/3 of his health). Then i fought some bandits with two gunners that had this MASSIVE damage attack that hits my entire party. During these two guys’ turn they finished off my gunner and got two of my remaining guys to just a sliver of health. I’m not sure how to counter this.

I get the feeling i am supposed to do a few fights, return to town and then repeat a bunch of times.

43

Watched a couple of let’s play videos (Northernlion and Jim Sterling) and have to say this looks awesome. I may break my self-imposed rule against purchasing early access titles.

44

You really should.

45

I’ll bite on the EA for this - it looks terrific. Anyone have any inkling what the Steam price will be?

46

Played for quite a while yesterday, and my experience was that damage is less of an issue (in a direct sense) than stress and party placement.

As noted above, stress adds up, and when it gets high the character becomes worse than useless. Some characters have the ability to heal stress during battle, and during camping many of them can do so. But at least at low levels, healing in this game is pretty weak, especially stress healing. So in my experience, it’s not long before all the characters are dangerously stressed… And unlike physical damage, it does not heal automatically when you get back to town. Instead, you have to pay for a gambling binge or a hooker or prayer time to relieve stress, and even that only partly diminishes it.

Characters each have four active skills, and each skill can only be used from certain positions in the four man party. So if your battle knocks the order of your party around – and this has been happening constantly to me – it’s not just that the softer characters are placed in harm’s way, it’s that you can’t use your best skills. And if you pass because no skills are available for use, it raises the stress.

One other thing is the level of light, mostly provided by torches. The lower the light, the faster stress piles up (just walking along, no battle needed) and the more likely your party is to be surprised and knocked out of order. So you want to bring lots of torches and remember to use them often, you can’t wait for a notification that your torch is out. Of course, food is important too – run out of food and among the penalties is higher stress. Naturally.

As far as I can see, there’s no way to bring enough food for major healing. But the death mechanic makes it helpful anyway. If a character takes damage to below zero, the character is not dead, he is on death’s door, basically at zero hit points. Any further damage and he’s dead. So if he then eats food, this raises his hit points minimally, such that further damage takes him back to death’s door rather than killing him.

Not sure about this, but as far as I can see at this point, direct damage never really defeats you because no matter how many characters die, you end up back in town, able to recruit more characters for free from the stagecoach. But stress can defeat you because you can end up with a full roster of characters with maxed out stress and no further money to pay for stress reduction. (Maybe there is a way to dismiss such characters and start over with new ones from the stagecoach, but I have not seen a mechanism for that.)

There’s still a lot to figure out, hopefully a manual or wiki will show up. But this is really enjoyable, and wonderful twist on the old dungeon crawl.

I’m liking the procedurally generated dungeons. It means that as I figure things out and start over, I don’t get that terrible “playing the exact same thing over and over” feeling I remember from so many of my favorite classic RPGs.

And although I know it’s a bizarre thing to say, this game feels more realistic and therefore immersive. Much as I loved Wizardry and such games, the idea of a group of characters killing thousands of creatures with no casualties on my side, no battle fatigue, so reaction to the horrors, always just one rest away from physical and mental freshness…

As I restart today, my tentative strategies:

  • Pick characters more with an eye to stress resistance
  • When possible, have active skills that are usable from all four positions in the party
  • Take more torches and pay more attention to keeping the light up near 100%
47

One thing I saw in a playthrough was that while lower light increases stress, the message that popped up said the rewards were greater in lower light, so it seems like it’s a tradeoff. I wonder how much better the rewards are, though. Seems like it’d be difficult to figure out if it’s worth it, depending on how much the difficulty ramps up.

48

If you right-click on a character in town, that will bring up their character sheet. In the top-left corner, right below the “rename character” button, there’s a red X button, that’s the dismiss character button.

While I don’t disagree with you on the importance of stress damage (it sure is expensive and time consuming getting stress down in town), I think physical health is just as critical. Ultimately dead-is-dead. You can keep a character on death’s door for quite a while if you’ve got a healer in the party, but a couple unlikely strikes in a row from the bad guys and that character’s gone. I’ve found my health slowly attrites away the deeper I delve into a dungeon and if I’m not careful it’s close to zero on all my characters before I manage to complete the dungeon objectives.

I’m carrying around a lot more torches than when I originally started playing and that does seem to have helped.

49

AHHH checkpoint save stupidity strikes again.

I started a new game and the game froze right after i clicked to embark. Which means i lost about 1000 gold worth of supplies :(

50

You can’t save anywhere? Interest level dropping.

51

There is just auto saving in the background.

It seems like a roguelike game, so i understand why they did it (so I don’t reload a save game when one of my guys nearly dies in an unlucky hit or trap), but it does lead to the potential for certain problems.

What i don’t understand is why if one of my characters has a no cooldown heal ability in combat, i can’t just use that out of combat. Also, if one of my characters can cure the blight in combat, why can’t they do it out of combat? It makes no sense.

52

Yeah, I`m really intrigued by what you said so far, but I can’t say checkpoint saving makes me comfortable.

53

Has anyone completed the first dungeon?

I think i’m doing something wrong. In my last game, i got two rooms in before my healer got hit with a single attack that brought her to death’s door, also making her bleed so i need to feed her constantly. Now i can’t heal her up (because i can’t heal out of combat and in combat heals are very bad) and i’m forced to return to town because even if i don’t care if she lives, i won’t be powerful enough to complete the dungeon without her.

Now every one of my heroes is at max stress.

I don’t see how beating this game is possible. The damage is simply too high compared to available healing to complete the dungeon in one go.

I love the game’s theme and style though. Bastion can eat its heart out because THIS is what a narrator is supposed to be.

54

I have completed 3 dungeon excursion so far, all “short”. I had a total party wipe on the one that I was offered with the campfire logs.

Hero stress needs some tuning , the one excursion I took my entire party was maxed out by the 3rd room. Out of 8 rooms.

There is no saving when on a excursion, your only choice is to abandon the trip and return to town. Which causes even more stress, lol. Its not supposed to work that way, leaving the evil dungeon should be a good thing.

55

I don’t mind autosave or perma-death. I just don’t want to have to restart a dungeon from the beginning because I didn’t have time to complete it the last time I played.

56

As character level and improve their skills, weapons and armor, the stress becomes less. I have completed a dungeon or two without any afflictions. I carry a ton of torches and try to maintain a light level that doesn’t create stress. High light also improves your odds of surprising your opponents, which can lead to a much easier combat and less stress. That isn’t to say I don’t have many failures, but those runs are possible.

What I hit last night was that I no longer had Easy quests and was getting bumped up to higher level quests that my rookies off the coach couldn’t handle, even with the help of an experienced character or two. The game design is still cool however, because you can abandon quests with a relatively minor stress hit and return with your bounty. It is pretty grindy, so I decided to restart and see if I can come up with a better progression. I wasted a lot of money early in my game that could have been much better spent. Also, does anybody know why we lose all our food, torches, shovels, etc. between missions? Shovels are expensive, but I think that may be designed, just so you don’t exploit the above strategy.

It is going to be critical to develop some robust characters in your town design and party composition is critical. Okay, just about everything is critical. Don’t forget this entire game is pretty much a roguelike. You’re going to need to really figure everything out, don’t make mistakes and get lucky to prevail.

Spoilers below on the first two bosses I came across, albeit not very effective spoilers.

I’ve fought and lost to both the Hag and Apprentice Wizard and they really illustrate how critical party composition is. The hag can only really be taken down by range, unless I level up my melee enough to take out her defensive cauldron and her in a single round. The wizard is just a grind as he spawns undead to take the front ranks. Again, they could get chewed up by melee as range goes after the wiz, or you could develop melee to chew up the chaff and then wallop the wiz.

57

Does anyone know how to use camping skills?

I’m also not sure how viable abandoning is. Maybe if you go in to battles with minimal supplies, planning on it, but otherwise the hit from buying supplies is going to wipe you out, not even counting the cost of stress relief. They really NEED to make supplies not go poof after a mission.

I could get maybe 1,500 gold from doing a few rooms, but it probably costs 600-800 golds to get the tutorial recommended 8 food and 4 torches. I think i might try just 3 food and 3 torches later.

58

The camping skills menu is just there when you enter camp. You click on the skill you want to use and then on the hero you want to use it on. Are you instead asking how you get to a camp. To do that, you need to be on an non-short mission and they’ll automatically give you firewood. Then, in any room, but not the hallway, you right-click the firewood to set up camp.

Abandoning should be done with minimal supplies, or to save important heroes. It is a little gamey, but also fits the theme of this game to throw some new recruits into a dungeon minimally armed, pull them out after they gain some loot. Use loot on your important characters and dismiss the riffraff.

59

Hmmmm. Checks game description on Steam

Darkest Dungeon is a challenging gothic roguelike turn-based RPG about the psychological stresses of adventuring.

Seems accurate. :-)

-Todd

60

Good gravy is this game hard. I’ve defeated the first three bosses and each has taken two heroes (who have been upgraded with better weapons and skills) with them.

You must grind to succeed. You need a full roster of leveled heroes before moving to the next difficulty tier. Always retreat rather than wipe, and always be putting your people in the asylum to try to manage the flaws. Right now that’s my biggest enemy - the fact that you always get either a trait or flaw (or both) after winning in a dungeon can be devastating. Suddenly one of my best characters has a huge speed disadvantage or is now useless in certain dungeons.

Yeah. Really hard game but I can’t put it down. Thumbs up up up.