Action Economy and You: Darkest Dungeon Guide

what's up y'all shuffle back again with another guide slash discussion type video and today we are going to be talking about the concept of action economy this is something i bring up pretty consistently on stream and in my videos so we're going to talk about that today we're going to talk about what strategies look like when they are proactive and reactive because those are two classes or specific ways to play darkest dungeon and once i explain it it'll probably make a lot more sense and then we'll explain how this all translates into battles and how you can use this to your advantage and hopefully get more out of your game maybe play better have better teams better outcomes stuff like that so i hope you enjoy it and i can't stop thinking about something that thick said when i mentioned i was going to be doing this video he said it's quantum theory on dd combat and i think that's pretty fitting so before we get started obviously if you have not already check out all the social media stuff down below like patreon i stream on twitch four days a week and join discord if you have not already because there are a lot of cool awesome people there we have over 500 people that's a lot of people now that's out of the way let's start with action economy so action economy is a concept that if you've played tabletop games before like pathfinder or dungeons and dragons or call cthulhu or all the other awesome systems out there you've probably heard this term before so action economy is talking about how many actions you get per round of combat or whatever the encounter is and how impactful each of those actions are in terms of darkest dungeon the player characters have up to five things they can do per turn of combat they have four skills unless your abomination who has all seven of the skills and then they have the ability to move which is your fifth thing i guess you could also consider pass as well that's something we just normally don't do in fact the button for it is much smaller than the other buttons so you don't accidentally press it and i forgot it existed until right now likewise the enemy only gets to do one thing per turn the difference for action economy shows up for bosses i'm not gonna spoil which bosses have multiple actions if you have not seen them but i have alluded to them several times those are where action economy gets a little more interesting because if you've ever played an rpg or a tabletop game for instance and you got or you say to yourself okay we're we have our four people like our group of player characters pcs there's four of us and we go into a battle and there's seven enemies you say to yourself wow this is a little intimidating or maybe this fight's kind of hard and you think oh it's because we're outnumbered and that is the right way to think about it but what i'm getting at with action economy is if you're outnumbered in that situation so like seven to four the enemy is getting three more actions each turn compared to you so that's more dice rolls that's more chances to cast spells or heal and stuff like that so that's where the idea of action economy comes in likewise in those same scenarios if you have your four player characters against one you know spell caster and they're casting one spell a turn even if the spells are pretty dangerous and high level as long as they're not just killing people outright in your team you're probably thinking yourself okay this is a bit easier the spells are dangerous but there's only one a turn that we have to watch out for and that's the same idea of action economy so often times in tactical games and rpgs the idea of action economy is what wins out usually in these types of games the way you can generate advantage or in this case tempo which is a card game term i use quite frequently which refers to momentum that's what tempo translates to so in these situations being able to generate more actions or get higher value from your actions are how you win games and leverage your advantage here are some examples in darkest dungeon of action economy and like positive action economy so one thing i hear constantly is when you use stuns especially from newer players is they say why do i want to stun enemies i'm just trading my turn for theirs and that's not entirely true there are instances like plague doctor who has blinding gas that stuns two enemies you're trading one turn for two that is generating huge advantage every time you do it and then every other stun in the game does something proactive with it you never like there's no move in the game that stuns and does nothing else it always does something else that can generate advantage even disorienting blast from plague doctor and flashbang from bounty hunter those stun one enemy they do no damage but they can move enemies and sometimes you can move enemies into really bad positions or disorienting blasts destroys corpses when you use it so those are examples that even if they don't do damage they're still doing other things and that's ignoring the fact that we have blinding gas for double stun yap for double stun uppercut does damage hands from the abyss crits all the time so it stress heals and does damage there are a lot of examples of stuns that just do extra stuff so even if you're trading your turn for the enemy's turn you're still doing something else on top of it which again is compounding this idea of generating tempo and advantage it doesn't just stop at stuns though there are quite a few other examples in the game as i've been talking about some turns are more important than others an aquarium for instance her turns or i should say her buttons are okay you know they're not hands from the abyss they're not blinding gas they're not iron swan those are all just incredible moves on their own right when you play sonic and aquarium her buttons aren't that strong so her action economy her turns are worth a bit less than other characters for instance man in arms can guard allies but man in arms also has this thing where he wants to be doing a bunch of stuff every turn he's pretty starved on action economy that's the hardest thing about playing him is he has buffs he wants to put down he has a good stun he wants to use he has a solid moving crush he wants to use he has retribution he has guard he has bellow he has all these things he wants to be doing and spending one turn guarding someone is nice but it's not as effective as for instance an aquarian pressing protect me to spend that turn guarding four man at arms an aquarium can even guard four mana arms she can use protect me on him and then he just gets to use retribution which means he's doing other stuff and freeing up his own turns which are worth more than antiquarians i'm hoping that's not too confusing but i think that gets the point across where not all turns are equal in this game so if you can spend one turn doing something that's worth more than someone else's turn that's again generating small advantage but it's still worth it because being able to generate those advantages in darkest dungeon is key to winning and it helps you get through even the toughest fights another example is pretty simple it's the speed stat having higher speed stat or lowering the enemy's speed stat means you get more turns than they do perfect that generates advantage when you use something like point blank shot and you have shield breaker that's a pretty popular combo is having shield breaker who can use very strong rank one moves push yourself back and then hiring man has point blank shot which highwayman has other things he could be doing but if you really want those shield breaker moves like adders kiss and impale for instance you can circumvent shield breakers major weakness of having to spend an extra turn getting yourself back up to the front and just have someone else do it for her and you're still making this huge tempo game by doing so on the same idea of speed marching plan the arbless cam skill massive tempo gives your entire team two extra speed that's more turns battle ballad that is probably the highest tempo generating move in the entire game it gives you crit which kills enemies faster which takes their turns away gives you accuracy which helps you take enemy turns away by killing them and it gives you speed which we've been talking about gets you more turns outside of battle ballot the other action economy monarch is riposte only two characters have this in the base game so that's man at arms and highwayman and being able to get extra attacks every single turn is just straight up cheating the action economy system if you think about it like that instead of just getting to attack once in a turn like highwayman and man in arms normally get to do you set up her post and if you get hit you know two more times in that turn especially man at arms you can guard people you're attacking two or three times a turn that is massive gain in terms of damage output and these are all of the i shouldn't say all but these are just some of the examples of positive action economy in the game and now we'll talk about proactive stuff proactive strategies are ones that help you dictate what's happening in the game and in darkest dungeon we'll go through some examples here but you'll start to see that reactive plays are usually not as good in this game so normally when you play rpgs you think okay i take damage i heal but actually a huge thing in darkest dungeon for success is denying enemy turns so you generate action economy and this idea was the central idea of this video it spawned into action economy at some point but on wednesday or you know last week or whatever it is at this point whenever i release this video i was playing this weird team with an aquarian i just had a bunch of leftovers that i was trying to level up to level three and i had an aquarian i had helium abomination i think plague doctor and i was like this team doesn't have a dedicated healer it has you know a self-heal as a couple self-heals and then some off-healing stuff like that but i was thinking myself can this team beat a long ruins mission granted they were all level uh two with level three items that did help quite a bit but it was still torchless which is dangerous and that team actually did pretty fine in that dungeon even though it had no dedicated healer it had very limited stress healing outside of camp skills and the reason it was able to do so well is because i had a lot of speed on my units and i had stuns all over the place so because i had this i could leverage the opening round denying a bunch of turns and the goal was to get hit once on turn one and maybe once on turn two and then the fight was over and i won at that point just because i was able to do enough damage stall the enemy long enough by stunning the hell out of them and then killing the big threats and then leaving the weak threats at the end i tell you the story because this just goes to show how good denying actions is in this game and how strong being proactive is and again i still have math on my side to prove that reactive strategies aren't as good so when we talk about proactive strategies we have to consider tempo which is what i said very defined as momentum so anything that just gets you extra turns and these are things like stuns movement skills preventing damage speed i wrote movement skills twice in my my notes here then scouting scouting is actually a proactive thing so knowing where battles are not getting surprised is really nice and then obviously preventing surprises themselves preventing nighttime ambush these are just examples of proactive plays these are things that let you dictate how fights are gonna go when you're on expeditions proactive plays can be set up for battles but also things that you do in town such as giving yourself speed or picking scouting trinkets or picking fast heroes just fast heroes in general so you're able to go first and get extra turns and deny enemy turns these are all examples of proactive plays the other side of this idea is reactive strategies so no surprise reactive stuff are things like heals so hp heals stress heals town facilities are reactive it seems kind of weird to think of reactive play outside of battles but in town healing stress is reactive moving your units without movement skills so no holy lance no lunge no get down none of that stuff just hitting the fifth button the blue one with the arrows and moving someone a couple spaces that is a reactive play because it has very low tempo you're not doing anything you're just moving your unit you're basically you're almost skipping your turn entirely you're not quite doing that but something like holy lance where you get to move and do damage that's fantastic moving and doing nothing else is pretty weak by comparison even if you favor a reactive game style you just want to bring jester and vessel to every dungeon and have all the super sustain there are times for it i'm not going to say that i haven't done it i still do it for certain missions and it's still very powerful but even if you're playing reactive play styles having proactive elements still makes your reactive stuff even better so there's this idea of stalling in darkest dungeon where you kill two or three enemies on the enemy team and then just bleed or blight the front one and stun it and just waste or it seems like you waste time but then you just spam your recovery moves because recovery as one to one against enemy skills is usually weaker than what the enemy can do so the way to make recovery worth it is you have to slow the game down and grind out the last few turns to get more hp and stress heals out because otherwise you can't just spend jester's turn to counter occult a switch it just the numbers don't match up for that this is probably the easiest mathematical example i can show to prove why being proactive is better than being reactive so if we look at the cult of switch at champion and we look at jester at level 5 or level 6 with level 5 skills we have stressful incantation on paper at champion it causes 20 stress and gesture can heal 12 stress with inspiring tune and give you a buff that prevents 20 percent of stress damage so you can already see just by the raw numbers you take 20 stress and heal 12. you're already eight points behind and if we say okay let's give inspiring tune all of its benefits let's say that culture switch uses incantation twice on the same person so she deals 40 total stress so you get hit for 20 you heal 12 she does it again you block 20 percent of that you took 36 stress across two turns because you couldn't stun her and you did nothing else you're just reacting to what cult of switch did to you now let's bring in someone like plague doctor plague doctor her best strength is being able to stun both enemies in the back of the party or the enemy party so if we stun cult of switch on turn one maybe we get lucky and we go first you stunner you take zero stress from colts to switch and hopefully you can kill her maybe you have units that are attacking her that same turn so you stun her you hit her once really hard plague doctor goes again like at the start of the round before cult of switch her stun wears off and then she hits her with like play grenade and then the blight damage over time effect just kills her you took zero stress in that scenario even if we use the gesture scenario where we have someone attacking the cult of switch maybe cults of switch you know she's pretty fast so she goes first you stress heal so you took 20 you healed 12 of it so you're back down to eight in terms of stress net gain and then you get a crit and you just kill cold to switch you still took eight stress and you spent jester's turn using battle ballad instead of stunning two people whereas with plague doctor even if plague doctor low rolls and goes second then you take the 20 and then you kill cold to switch by turn three because you know she hits you you stun her she's stunned on turn two she dies on turn three that's about as fast as she should go down so in that scenario you take 20 against eight but you still stun the back line so these preventative measures are still better and even in this case where plague doctor just gets unlucky and goes last you still have a very good chance of blocking 20 stress very consistently instead of having to heal 12 every time because if you're just using reactive plays over the entire dungeon you are going to accumulate stress and damage you just can't keep up with it without being able to disrupt the enemies with movement or stuns we don't even have to keep considering stuns though for this example let's look at something like pelagic shaman which i affectionately call the pink fish from the cove it's a stress caster it sits in the back it's pretty fast and it does things like stress wave which hits two people for i don't know what is like 14 stress at max level something like that and cold cis not cultists pelagic shaman is a unit that if you pull it up to the front so rank one it's stuck with this really weak dagger attack so you can get a lot of action economy advantage or tempo gain however you want to describe it at this point just by moving enemies where you can stun an enemy and leave them in place and you know that's good and it does amazing things movement is interesting because enemies that are vulnerable to movement you can just not only mess up one enemy you can actually mess up two enemies sometimes three and doing that is effectively stunning multiple enemies at the same time whereas instead of taking one of their really good attacks every other turn you can move them out of position and you take weak attacks every turn which means that the stress casters that start off as huge threats like bone courtier or pelagic shaman or a gunner bandit that can hit you with you know the cleave gunshots stuff like that moving them around actually let's think about that too the stock banded fight where you have big bandit sword bandit rank three and then gunner bandit in a rank four just using something like damon's pull or a good flashbang or come hither for instance pulling that gunner bandit out of the back up to the front of the enemy party means that not only does gunner bandit use rush shot which is much weaker the sword bandit in the back uses harmless poke so you've already disrupted two enemies at the same time and force them to use weak moves i know that later versions of gunner bandit have stealth but this is you know just the theoretical discussion that we're having right now we can compound this idea of emphasizing our reactive play so heals and stuff like that get much better not only on stalling targets that are stuck in front like weak front liners but being able to pull a stress caster up to the front where they're just locked up there for the rest of battle that is like the ideal stun or stall target because instead of getting hit for stress wave for you know 28 a turn across two targets you just lock them up front and they just hit you with the dagger for five damage and that's much better than getting hit by whatever else is in the cove which is interesting because it turns these super huge threats into like the most harmless enemies out there and they're the best stall targets which is pretty nice sadly not enough enemies are vulnerable to this type of thing so i hope that's something that changes in the sequel i think the best way i can drive home the idea of something that's proactive versus something that's reactive is with the idea of something as simple as bleed resist so in a dungeon let's say the cove because bleed is pretty common there if i have plague doctor i spend one of her turns something like an uka crab hits me with arterial pinch i'm bleeding it hurts quite a lot and i spend plague doctors turn using battlefield medicine to cure it i'm using plague doctor's turn against an enemy like a crab which really wants to be stunned or hit with blight if you don't have armor piercing or mark or some way to reduce armor again mark then plague doctor matches up very well against this enemy even with battlefield medicine she pretty much hard counters everything this thing can throw at you but if you have plague doctor would you rather be stunning or using blights or would you rather spend her very precious turn healing their bleed it's kind of nice in the way that it does save money because you don't have to use a bandage but let's bring in the idea of bleed resist bleed resist is proactive it's not reactive you're not taking the bleed when or ideally you're not taking the bleed when you have bleed resist and this frees up plague doctor's turn so the same scenario your person with bleed resist gets hit with arterial pinch they resist that means plague doctor can throw noxious blasts to do 21 damage or she can stun it to deny a turn and those are much more valuable than using battlefield medicine for as good as battlefield medicine is it's a button that we don't want to have to press we'd rather press all of plague doctors really good buttons and before we talk about how this can apply to your gameplay even though we've sprinkled these tips in so far the last thing i'll talk about here for this section is camp skills so we have things like marching plan that i talked about before tactics those are proactive you're preventing damage either through getting extra turns preventing enemy turns making the enemy lose turns by missing you that's why dodge is so cool with tactics whereas if you use things like zealous speech for as much as i love cell speech it is a very reactionary type of thing it does have proactive elements with the stress resist but anything that reduces stress in camp or gives you healing for instance those are all reactive things and if we can we like to hit the proactive ones more just because they feel like they have more value it's not bad to hit the reactive ones but honestly do you feel do you feel good hitting encourage or one of jester's three-point camp skills to reduce stress or would you rather hit sharp and spear and get 10 crit with helium i'd rather hit sharpen spear honestly although that is not to knock the idea of recovery strats they are nice to have and they are very necessary unless of course your name is candle and you make a video on beating darkest dungeon without getting hit a couple tips to wrap up this video how does that apply to you as a player to start there is this common wisdom in the community of killing backliners first if you play the game for i don't know even an hour you'll probably understand that the backline enemies are usually squishier so they go down easier but they also have the nastier moves like stress or they buff their teammates or they can hit your squishy backliners like with crossbows and stuff like that you understand that the backline enemies are generally more threatening not every time but they're generally more threatening the reason they are more threatening it's not just because of their reach for instance it's because of their speed the backline enemies tend to have higher speed they get more turns so if you get rid of them faster they get less turns well they get no turns because they're dead but the frontline enemies they're generally just a couple points slower they're easier to corral they're easier to stun they do hp damage and set a stress damage in a lot of cases and hit point damage is much easier to heal than stress damage stress damage is kind of a pain to get rid of so this means that backline enemies are usually the bigger threats which is why characters with reach like hellion or crusader or characters with massive speed like a bomb or i should say abomination and plague doctor are really good at handling backline enemies the goal in those cases is usually to stun them and let them get one turn maximum like i said since frontline enemies are slower they're easier to stun they're easier to stall against they're easier to recover against which is all fantastic since they're also slower than you this idea of action economy returns once again and frontline enemies on average get one less turn than you do this was something i wish i remembered who said this but someone in my tearless video i believe said that the reason they don't like crusader is because of the bad speed that he has i was like yeah that's you know i hear i hear that all the time who cares but then the person said that crusader on average gets one less turn per fight than every character and once they said it like that i went oh my goodness that's right that is so smart that's exactly what happens even though crusader has all these great recovery moves he gets one less turn per battle than everyone unless he's the one doing the killing which is a waste of his recovery moves so just hearing that alone is kind of a big knock against crusader the way a normal hallway or room battle plays out is there are two phases this like you can kind of get this intuitively from playing but if you want to hear it in an actual explanation it comes down to two phases there is the rush phase or the first phase rush down phase or opening whatever you want to call it it has several names but the first two maybe three turns in a fight that isn't a boss are when you want to kill or stun as many enemies as possible or move them you just want to disrupt the enemy take away as many of their turns as possible because that way you're not taking the burst damage from the enemy team if you were able to consistently disrupt the enemies so they get maybe two turns back to back instead of four you're gonna notice your characters live a lot longer which is actually why surprising the enemy is kind of dangerous sometimes because if you surprise the enemy they all go last guaranteed after all of your heroes and if you're not stunning or killing any of the enemies at the start during your surprise round they get four turns back to back and if any of them out speed you they get up to six turns back-to-back that is terrifying so this is why we again need to bring disruption so movement or big damage or stuns and take turns off the enemy's side of the field as quickly as possible anyway that was kind of tangential so you start by spending the first two or three turns disrupting the enemy taking out the big threats and then you spend the next two or three turns recovering a normal fight is decided around turn three or four on average i would say turn three because on turn three usually the two biggest threats on the enemy side should be down if your team is performing optimally and then you're down to two enemies sometimes one on the enemy side which means at that point you can enter the stalling phase or recovery phase i don't think i've heard it called anything else just those two so you spend first couple turns neutralized threats last couple turns stalling a little bit just to squeeze out a couple extra heals i know it's not the most exciting gameplay to be a part of but it is the most effective and sadly if there was anything that was close to a meta in this game this is about as close to it as you're gonna get just because it is the most optimal way to do things the too long didn't read to this video action economy is fantastic being proactive gets you more turns more turns or how you win fights there are certain bosses in the game that not only do they get multiple actions a turn there's some bosses the way that they work like how they fight against the player is they try to win through action economy there are a couple bosses or enemies that like to move your entire party or move a couple people and when they move your entire party you have to spend extra turns sub optimally if you don't have dance moves like lunge for instance repositioning your party to get them back into their best spots to do what you want them to do which means that while you're doing that the enemy is winning through action economy which is why we have to be on the lookout for it the next point if you're not seeing good results in your expeditions in darkest dungeon try to bring faster characters that have stuns like play doctor occultists in the front line with hands of the abyss is good abomination with manacles is pretty solid so try and start bringing those things to your party and see if just having a couple extra stuns to disrupt the enemy and prevent you from getting hit in the face every turn gives you better results again the reason that we like speedy characters especially ones that can stun like plague doctor is the fact that they prevent so much damage from coming into you so if you think about it like yeah plague doctor you know at worst 20 stress gets through from cult of switch sometimes there are two stress casters and get hit twice and that's just unfortunate but if you think about it over a long period of time over a lot of battles this is before we add in quarks and trinkets like feather crystal or on guard for instance which gives plague doctor a huge speed advantage if we have like six fights in a dungeon and we repeat this scenario six times eight times ten times for instance then you're denying a ton of stress all you have to do is like deny this opening from cole to switch four times you've denied 40 or not 40 80 stress so it adds up very quickly in a game that is focused on incremental advantage and inches all right that's gonna do it for this one thanks for watching obviously go check out the social media stuff in the box below like comment subscribe all that garbage if you enjoyed what you saw let me know what you're thinking down below let me know if there's something i missed because there's just a lot to this topic it is a fun one to talk about let me know if you've had better experiences with recovery you know there are probably crazy stories out there that i obviously don't know and yeah that's it so next time i i'm trying to work on one of the guides i'm a little bogged out the antiquarian guide right now but i'm trying and as far as the twitch stuff goes like i said four days a week wednesdays are variety days for twitch and youtube otherwise i'm looking to do more discussion videos couple tier lists got guides and stuff like that out there so i'm gonna shut up thanks for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: ShuffleFM

Views: 11,788

Rating: 4.9471698 out of 5

Keywords: Let's Play, Darkest Dungeon 2, guide, tips, help, playthrough, walkthrough, gameplay, ending, last boss, moonmoon, filthyrobot, speedrun, cohhcarnage, wayne june, ancestor, lore, optimized, best, challenge, hard mode, stygian, blood moon, baertaffy, dlc, crimson court, color of madness, ost, tier list, analysis, big daddy berkut, hidden squidz, bloodmoon, mods, christopherodd, marvin seo, indeimaus, splattercatgaming, northernlion

Id: 1pxtrlJdxn0

Length: 29min 59sec (1799 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021