also gonna share part of my DD run with yall because maybe someone will see it and get obsessed with this game so I can talk to people about it xp
I was going to spoiler tag because it's long but no. If you're in my den, you signed up to be subjected to my random rants and annotated let's plays. You chose this fate. I will not protect you from the consequences of your own choices /j /hj really
so the first part of this game is doing the base building upgrades and stuff. That's one of the bigger "roguelike" aspects of the game: you bring home relics (seen at the bottom left) and use them to upgrade the buildings. This is the clinic, where you can change the character's Quirks (variable combat or exploration buffs/nerfs) and get rid of any illnesses you pick up in the dungeons (which range from annoying to debilitating debuffs)
My bounty hunter is being treated for Bad Humors, which gives him -20% max HP and -10% to ALL RESISTS
anyways, here is the character tab with all the important info!
Each character spawns as either Religious, faithless or Pagan, each that have their own buffs and synergies. a lot of skills have extra bonuses lik: +10%dmg if religious, +5% otherwise or -30%stress if Pagan that encourage you to teambuild around them. A lot of character classes can only ever spawn as 2/3 of the faiths (like vestal cannot be pagan, and occultist cannot be religious)
Then you got the Quirks. The yellow ones tend to be good, and the red bad, but there are a few negative quirks that are good on certain characters, and many positive quirks that are useless on certain characters (for example, having a +10acc to melee attacks on my musketeer is very useless). You can only have five in each slot, so the idea is to find negative quirks that are not debilitating and keep them, and then find the best five positive quirks for those slots. You can get rid of quirks in the clinic (or by interacting with curios in dungeons) and you can pick up random quicks (positive and negative) at the end of missions randomly. You can also get them by interacting with things in dungeons, or in Black reliquary, fighting a lot of the same enemy type or hitting the same kind of attack.
Trinkets are also a roguelike progression mechanic! You can buy them in the shop that rolls new ones after each mission, you get one as a reward for each mission you take, and you can find them in dungeons. Trinkets can be class-specific or general and there are a lot of rarity tiers and such. Some of them change a character's moves or playstyle entirely! There are trinkets that make your healers good frontline bruisers or buff a support skill into a sniper shot that can one-shot a squishy backline enemy. This is why each run feels different, because you really need to play around what good trinkets you roll into. There are some trinkets that are just GOOD on certain characters, but every niche has its applications.
And here's the combat side of the chart. Each character class has the same seven skills. You can only have four of them equipped in battle, but you can switch them on and off in between battles in the same dungeon. Each skill has five ranks that you can upgrade, which doesn't change it in any way, just makes it better (increased damage and accuracy usually, or increased debuffs)
Here's the details of one skill. The dots at the top tell you what rank you have to be in to use it (so I can't be in the first slot) and which ranks it can hit (flashbang also can't hit the first enemy rank, but can hit the rest). If there was a line between the dots, it means it's AOE and hits ALL those ranks. It also tells you what damage type it is (ranged) which is important for buffs, quirks and trinkets (my bounty hunter has Lazy Eye which is -8acc on ranged skills). The skill doesn't deal dmg (-100%) but it does stun and shuffle, which means the enemy unit will randomly move places. It also has a debuff of -7acc.
not that all these effects will always happen. Each effect has a base accuracy, and 110 is good it means it will always happen if the enemy has 10 or less resist in that stat. But if an enemy has 20% move resist, the shuffle only has 90% chance to happen. You can use trinkets to boost the move chance or stun chance of skills, if you need those effects in battle. You can't swap trinkets in a dungeon, so you gotta plan for those circumstances ahead of time.
There's also camp skills, which either give buffs or healing during rests. You get a certain number of those depending on the length of the dungeon and can help shore up weaknesses in your team.
here's where you can choose which dungeon to go into! Each region has their own enemy types and quirks, and certain classes are better for certain regions. green dungeons are low level for lvl 1-2 heroes, yellow for 3-4 heroes and red are champion dungeons for lvl 5-6 heroes. the lower level dungeons have easier enemies, the medium usually have the same enemies, but with buffs, and the champion dungeons have elite enemies that WILL kick your butt if you don't have a plan to deal with them specifically. A lot of them have either high protections or stealth and if you can't shred those protections, you will be losing a lot of hp
(or stress, which is a secondary hp bar and can be more difficult to manage; if you get to 100 stress your characters will afflict and will give all your other characters more stress every turn, but also have a chance to "act out" and either pass their turn, take a random action, hurt their own teammates or other bad stuff. At 200 stress your characters will have a heart attack and go to 0hp, or if they are already at 0hp, they will straight up die. Stress bad. You also have a small chance to virtue at 100 stress, which gives your heroes buffs and lowers all allied stress. There are trinkets and quirks to make it more likely to virtue, and increasing virtue chance is a viable stress-management option too, but riskier than simply managing stress and not taking that roll)
there are also lengths to dungeons, short medium and long. Long dungeons require more resources to get through, but have better rewards. I find the long dungeons to be more trouble than they're worth most the time, because if you gather all the treasure, you'll probably run out of bag space well before the end of the dungeon. You do get better trinkets, though, and more base rewards (all veteran level the short dungeon gives 7500 gold; 6 matakh and a uncommon trinket, medium gives 11,250 gold 8 matakh and a rare trinket; the long dungeon gives 18,000 gold 15 matakh and a very rare trinket)
Right now, I'm training to take on the Exposed Interior boss. Which is unfortunate, because there aren't any veteran dungeons there.
I think I'm going to do this long dungeon though, because this grave robber trinket is very, very good. She already has +dmg and +crit in stealth, so having kills give her more free stealth is great. the only problem is that I would LOVE to bring my plague doctor but she's not great in catacombs. She's alright there, but a lot of enemies have decent blight resists.
Okay! 15 minutes of desperate planning later and here I sit, ready to set off. My team is a little unorthodox, but I only had seven lvl 3 characters available right now so we make do. I have a little bit of DoT synergy (grave robber lowers bleed and blight resist for the plague doc and flag) and some mark synergy (grave robber + highwayman). Our defense is... alright (flag wants to get hit, grave robber and highwayman have decent dodge, grave robber has stealth and highwayman has reposte) and we have actually pretty decent healing (plague doc takes away DoTs and minor heals, flag heals a LOT at low hp and our camp skills are good for healing). we are completely lacking stress heals (I'm not running suffer) so uh. Hopefully our crit builds will keep us steady.
Also I am at CRITICALLY low gold after funding this trip. 30k sunk into upgrading gear and skills and buying the supplies for this long trip. And I'm still packing pretty light... I'm not hoping to be efficient in looting; because it's a long dungeon, I should get full bags just by finishing the dungeon normally and running back through for loot (which is why I took a few more torches than usual for this length of dungeon). Anyways. that's all I can do for planning, time to get to it and hope.
part of the game is knowing when to cut your losses and run with what you have instead of losing everything. Hopefully I can draw that line. But I REALLY need the money from a successful run too... I have barely enough to probably fund another small dungeon after this if it utterly fails. But losing too much money is a slippery slope: if you can't afford to upgrade units or buy supplies, the likelihood of success goes down, which means you can't afford anything for the next one either and the cost of recovery goes up... it's a snowball effect, and I don't want that to happen.
this... isn't bad for a long dungeon. Manageable. I have to do all room battles though, but I get three rests... should be okay.
Literally a fight on the FIRST TILE great.
unlike base game darkest dungeon, black reliquary has a "prep round" mechanic where attacks are less likely to hit and is meant for buffs/debuffs. Certain skills have a special "prep round" effect, that is different from the normal ability, others are attacks with lessened effects on the prep round. It's a great way to encourage buffs and stuff, because in the original game, it usually wasn't efficient to spend a turn on a buff when you could be one-shotting important foes. The motto of Darkest Dungeon literally was: it can't hurt you if it's dead. Offence was the single best strategy for negating damage. Healing was a last resort.
First fight went well! I didn't feel like I struggled to reach key units or had any turns that were lacking efficiency. which is a good sign that future fights will go well. This comp is what we call a dance comp: my units are constantly swapping positions. And by the end, that's exactly how they should look! my flag is my frontline tank for the first half of the fight, but he swaps to a backline healer after the first few hits, while highwayman gets reposte up and moves to the front for his hard-hitting frontline-smashing moves and grave robber can lunge to take out priority targets and then shadow fade back to drop aggro. Nice to see that the strategy is working as intended! Not all strategies survive first contact with the enemy.
my flag got hit by a couple of traps on top of the poke dmg he took in that fight. three of his skills require him to be at <33%hp to use. Usually I have the "heals himself and another unit for huge amounts" on, but since all my units are full I swapped him to the "heal himself and deal a lot of dmg" one! Gotta adapt on the fly. Now only to remember to switch it back after this fight heh
that's a room fight that I have to do for the quest, but I want to avoid the optional hallway fight that I scouted to preserve my resources. I'll take it later if I'm healthy for extra loot. I only have a 15% scout chance which is pretty low, but I don't have any good trinkets to increase it yet sooooo Scouting is super powerful, it lets you have perfect information of future fights and you cannot be surprised walking into fights (which is a condition that lets all the enemies go first and scrambles all your unit's positions, usually really bad but in this comp is fine because I'm expecting to dance my units)
Second fight, highwayman took a bit of a beating to some brawler's chest cavers. And a random hallway food check actually put my flag above his threshold for the big moves and no one hit him so... kinda ruined that plan a little. It's alright, he can heal the highwayman on the prep round next fight. My grave robber being somewhat stressed is actually the bigger threat here. I have PLENTY of ways to get rid of that stress during the three camps I have tho, no big deal.
one of the biggest threats in long dungeons is running out of food or shovels. Each hallway blank tile has a small chance to force a hunger check, and if you don't have enough food for your units, they take dmg and a lot of stress. You need food to be able to camp too, if you don't have enough you'll take damage and stress while resting and that's supposed to be the time to RECOVER damage and stress so... same with shovels: if you don't have enough for the blockages, you have to spend health and stress to clear them and that's Not Good for long term adventuring.
torches are also somewhat important, because at low light levels, enemies deal more stress, have a higher chance to crit and a high chance to surprise you in fights. You do get more dodge and loot, however, and certain characters and trinkets get buffs from low light levels. But that's something you REALLY have to build and plan around, otherwise you WILL get screwed over by stress. It's much safer to have torches.
another fight, and the first one with a terpsichorian. this enemy takes like five turns healing and buffing allies, then just NUKES one of your characters if you can't kill her before it goes off. You'd probably know to prioritize her anyways because she's a support unit (and if you hover her buffs and see that she's charging a +150%dmg 50%crt on a skill called "death") but you really need to know what units are dangerous and which to prioritize in fights if you want to stay healthy during long dungeons.
Wow three 40+ dmg crits that fight, two on flag, one on highwayman. gonna have to camp here to make sure he doesn't overstress, that was... a little close. Flag actually has a unique affliction that gives him +20%dmg and +6speed, but -20dodge and often bleeds your allies between turns. Which can be deadly.
First camp. We have enough food to feast, which gives -stress as well as healing... but I don't think I need it. Flag has a camp skill that is -50stress on self, that should be good enough.
Much better.
AND I get a scout when waking, nice. Some characters have an ability that takes away the chance of being ambushed at night by enemies (which is automatically a surprise fight on no torch, they can be awful). Highwayman has that. They do take 4/12 of your camp points to use, though, so some people just swap their backline with their frontline before camp so when the shuffle happens, it's more likely your units are in a decent position lmao I didn't need to risk it, so I didn't do that.
Ooops forgot to swap him to the dmg at low hp skill. Would have been nice, since there are two high priority targets here (2, the heal and assassin, and on 4, who has a heal, a dot heal, and several dot attacks)
You can actually see all the attacks from a unit in the bottom right. It will only show moves that have been used against you at least once, but once you've been hit with an attack, you'll always have the information available. It shows what ranks she has to be in to use them, what ranks it will hit, if it moves her or you, if it's a dmg or buff, and over there with the icons it tells you exactly what kind of buff it will be (like caustic impact has a blight, a debuff and a chance at a disease). there's a glossary of icons and meanings in the menu of the game, but you'll learn them quickly and naturally when you're being hit with them all the time!!
Found a slight flaw in my team: if flag gets put in rank 3, he can only heal (which is fine) but if grave robber is faster than highwayman (and she usually is) then he will always have to click point blank shot, which only hits rank 1. And if there's a corpse there, he doesn't get valuable damage in. and if he does THAT, then grave robber's only move in shovel slam, which is a stun and valuable, but also her lowest value move in most cases. To break the loop you have to skip one of their turns entirely. So that's a bit inefficient. A fix would simply be to give highwayman one of his two melee attacks, but that requires giving up pistol shot, which means I won't have consistent access to rank 4 anymore, or give up grave robber's thrown dagger for shadow fade, which is good but then she only has two options in backline: nuke with lunge, putting her back in the front with no defenses, or flashing daggers which is... not ideal past prep round.
I think I'll choose to give up highwayman's reach... usually the backliners aren't causing too much trouble, what with plague doc able to stun them, and I never move grave robber forward until the backline is dealt with, so she'll have the reach. I can always use plague doc's stun to guard break if there are two levantine foot soldiers (I already have her set up with +15 stun chance just for that reason)
LMAO the next fight had that EXACT CASE. these grunts LOVE guarding the backline, which means any attacks will be redirected to them. Very annoying if there's a unit back there that needs to die quickly. but stuns break guard, so it's an easy way of getting rid of it. That's also why I have shovel attack instead of pick to the face on grave robber; pick deals more dmg, but in catacombs, having a unit spam guarding is very likely and having a free break on her is turn efficient. also if I use her fast stun on guard breaking, then plague doc's stun can hit one backliner and break one stun, which is SO much more efficient because stunning backliners is more valuable than stunning the grunts.
Because I killed two units with dots (which doesn't leave corpses; small enemies, enemies killed with dots and enemies killed with crits leave no corpse) this backline enemy is stuck using a very low damage, low accuracy move. I can use this to stall a little and heal my units. But I can't stall TOO long, because if I use too many healing moves in a row, the game says "stop stalling!" and hits all my units with 12 stress.
I really like this enemy's design. The archer, that is. They only hit every other turn, and on their prep turn they draw an arrow and you can see what the next attack will be! either a high damage shot, a hookshot that pulls a backline unit two places forward, or an explosive round that deals low damage to all four of my heroes. Kinda neat to have that in their animations!
Time for the second camp. We're a bit tuckered out here, everyone a bit low and stressed. Only three more rooms to check for fights, once we finished all the room battles and our objective, then I can settle in and go around looting. For now, I don't want to get rid of too many supplies, but once the objective is complete and we can leave whenever, I can start dropping supplies on the ground to fit more loot in our bag.
Here's one of the other enemy factions that can spawn here: the lost legion. They use expiate at their main mechanic, which my units can also use! They are really annoying though and are typically tanky and heal a lot. even the basic unit's basic attack is annoying because it bleeds.
Good! I did the last fight and finished the dungeon. Now I can backtrack and pick up as much loot as I can hold. I only have 4 food, which is just enough for one hallway check, which means I can't go very far and camping again to get rid of my last firewood to replace with loot is a little risky. I don't need to take too many risks, though, because the reward for simply finishing the dungeon is so high.
yeah, there's the hunger check. I'm going to risk three more tiles to go to the vendor, just because I want to check if they'll give me a lot of loot for giving them my firewood. I've never tried that before (because I've always wanted to USE the camp) but now that I can't camp even if I wanted to (no food) I might as well see. AY they gave me 2200 gold! That's epic! usually you give them a shovel or key and they give you like 400. very worth it.
Loot! My backpack wasn't very full, but it's better than nothing!
and I got a few quirks. my grave robber can no longer visit the fighting pit for stress healing (not very bad tbh) and gets buffs from being crit healed (which is alright, but she rarely will be healed because she will rarely be hit through stealth and her dodge stat, so I'll probably remove it and reroll for something better)
the real win is the xp tho, my plague doc is lvl 4 and ready to take on the exposed interior boss now! Levels don't inherently give any stats, but you can only upgrade their equipment to the character's level, so it ups that cap.
my experienced recruits 3 that i just got before this mission pays off too! free high level units will show up each week. The higher the unit level, the more innate quirks they come with. This can be good, but you might get a unit with four trash quirks and they aren't even worth taking. The dredge is... alright. but the bounty hunter has fated (chance to turn any miss into a hit) which is very good!
Anyways, there's my one episode of Darkest Dungeon black reliquary ^^ xp
hope someone can find joy in my commentary heh