I do not see what is so easy about the mid game.
Four Vet runs with Lvl 3 guys bought up with most of their stuff to Lvl 3, and I was straight wrecked half way through all four times and had to retreat. I haven't yet managed to beat one.
One time, it was a vet medium ruins explore mission. I bought 12 food, as I usually do for mediums. And because this medium explore generated 9 rooms in a grid with zero enemies, I got 3 fucking hunger checks before I'd even fought anything (Hunger checks seem to be "did you fight? No? Have a hunger check instead" sort of mechanic.) Then the combats start happening, ones that strip health from the whole party and start wracking up stress. I camp. More stress, more lost HP because the game decided walking was such hungry fucking work. I grit my teeth and try to bear through, then ANOTHER MOTHER FUCKING HUNGER CHECK. WHAT THE FUCK GAME. 4 Hunger checks and I've been through maybe 8 rooms at this point, and camped. More health stripped off, more stress, so everyone is going into the next fight at 30% health, 50+ stress. I abandon, pay ~4000 + ~2000 gold for stress, diseases (which as far as I can tell, do not fucking go away in any reasonable amount of time) and negative quirk removal.
Another run in the weald I get badly beat up by leveled up Slimes, who made a giant slime that dragged the fight out to 10 rounds. I was in such bad shape that the Fungal Giant/Witch/Dog combo that came after completely doomed the run's chances, and that was before my fourth goddamn obstacle. Christ almighty.
Third time I try a Warrens run, room battles, short, and get whittled down by group after group of leveled up pig trash despite having a Plague Doctor on call. With the Butcher pig constantly critting back row fighters, placing massive bleeds so my healer is barely keeping everyone at half. Enemies keep hitting in the 9s to 10s, which if fine for tanks but just like lower levels, the back rank/dodge fighters can't take those hits, only now it's worse because the crits are higher damage and more often, the bleeds and blights are nastier.
The fourth Warrens run, I just got fed miniboss after miniboss. Fucking Swinetaur with his "let me hit the entire party for 1/4 to 1/2 their life each time." That shit is a fucking miniboss? The bosses aren't even that nasty. Fuck you, game. How fucking overleveled do I have to be, before the thing at my level isn't tearing my face off. The extra HP? Fine. The extra damage? Fine. The extra crit? Well, fuck you but I guess that's fine. The extra resists? Be nice if MY leveled skills even began to keep up with how fast their resists grow. The stuns and shit that could save a fight are now practically worthless. Anything less than Vestal/Occultist healing feels like it comes up short in Veteran, because your non-tank guys can't even begin to dial the damage they can receive. You're fighting a losing battle from the first massive crit you take. So you need stupid amounts of healing and crit healing to compensate, which excludes basically all the back rank characters.
And then I decided to try an Apprentice boss with the few remaining lvl 2 guys that made a viable party....and the game throws fifteen fucking rooms in a straight line at me. Hunger checks abound. I camp mid way after clearing two rooms and a corridor fight in the pitch dark, because I know that fucking boss room is at the very end of the goddamn corridor and I don't have anywhere near the torches to compensate, especially not after Cultists just keep draining them in every fight. The room I camped in became a nasty fight that took most of my camping to recover from. And then I get ambushed right after camping. Crits are dealt out like candy in the first round of the fight, and basically my whole camp session is undone in about two rounds of combat. At this point I'm pretty much fucked. The boss is at least three rooms away, probably more, one of them is a room fight, I've got two torches and my party is half dead already, there is no chance I'm going to reach the boss, let alone beat them. Just to try and salvage something, I proceed down the hall to get one last bit of treasure...and the game throws another hunger check at me. Because, you know, there's no fucking reason there should be ANY KIND OF CONTROL ON THAT SHIT WHAT SO EVER.
I want to love this game, and sometimes I do when the balance is right. But when it goes off kilter, either in your favor or completely reaming you, everything good about it starts to break down.
The worst part is when you've got a full roster of heroes you've carefully worked up through ones and two's, and then you hit threes and suddenly it's like Lvl 0 all over again, only now you've got giant fuck off minibosses with 25+ damage crits at full brightness thrown in for good measure, and all your debuffs and dots and bleeds don't land as often. The AI is so vicious now it's like an 80/20% split whether they'll go for the worst possible thing they can, vs. a random attack. So as soon as someone hits half life or stress, they just start piling on.
So you end up bailing on runs, not covering your costs, throwing together parties that can't win just so you can abandon again and eat more losses due to immediate stress for fleeing, diseases for fleeing and negative quirks for fleeing. Forget trying to do shit like fight bosses at specific levels, when you have to make sure you have tanks and healers in the appropriate level range. Notice there's no level 2 missions? Gee, I wonder why that is? Maybe because they realized you might actually be able to get some shit DONE with the ability to use your level 3s alongside your rag tag level 2s? Suddenly the best option looks like dismissing heroes you've worked to level up so you can recruit, abandon and discard heroes just to pass the week. Why bother loading up guys you care about with stress and diseases, after all?
One thing this game has not lived up to is any sense of subtlety in its gameplay. Maybe the combination of trinkets and stats and specializing and blah blah blah might have meant something, were it not drowned in a mass of RNG. And Quirks? Spam. There is no relationship between what happens and what you get. Diseases? Spam. The game will hand them out as randomly as anything else at the end of a mission, on TOP of the whole host of diseases you can now get from enemy attacks. Heroes? Spam. There is nothing unique about them, and the only reason you even like them or care about them is they represent your progress toward actually beating the game. Mechanics? Spam. There is the barest of controls on what happens in game, from the hunger checks to traps ALWAYS hitting your healers to crappy level layouts to curios that, once you do the math make exactly zero sense to use. Trinkets? Almost constantly useless spammed mechanical ideas that just get vendored. Even the Very Rare and Ancestral trinkets play to such specific roles, and some of them are suicidal. +3 crit in the front row and +10% damage a Crusader, at the cost of -8 Dodge and -30% healing received? The mind boggles. I found one for the Arbalest that made sense. 20% extra damage and debuff chance for -30% healing dealt and received. That at least makes sense for the class and the row and job. I can't say that for half the garbage trinkets I get though. 99% of them vendored to make up for crappy runs. "Number fiddling" is what I'd call the bulk of DD.
I don't get how people say they just breeze through all the way to level 6, without some super cheese dick build. I can see it playing the way the game says it should be played, with hours and hours of grinding, failing, losing heroes, rebuilding heroes. But a cake walk, it has not been.
*sigh* Goddamn this game. I get into it for a day or two, think I've finally broken through to some sort of playable balance and then it goes to shit when I try to keep playing.
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Topic: Darkest Dungeon II. Emotionally traumatize some adventurers. Wagon Life. (Read 210819 times)