Darkest Dungeon II | 2023 Guide for Complete Beginners | Episode 1

hello everyone how's it going Dr incompetent here and I'd like to do a complete beginner's guide on darkest dungeon 2 shall we this is a fantastic game that carries some of the lineage from the first darkest dungeon but changes it to a much more roguelike experience than the first game ever was in some interesting ways and yet still preserves that Rogue Light Element the permanent sense of progression that you can gain in the background as they've changed the game for a full release it's a complicated game it's a punishing game it's brutal just like the first one but I think that you can enjoy this game even if you never played the first one for example or if you like the first one but this one is different there still is something here I have found that when I get into this game more I am enjoying it more than I did in Early Access and I think they've made good changes to the game so in this guide what I'm going to do here is start up a brand new game of darkest dungeon 2 and walk you through the basics of the game I'm going to explain the UI to the controls some basic tips and tricks the strategy so that you can really sink your teeth into this game I'm not going to tell you the absolute best party composition I'm not going to min max and take any of that decision making away from you but rather I'm just gonna walk through my thought process narrate what I'm doing and give you the fundamentals so you can enjoy this game at your own pace because once you start making Traction in darkest dungeon 2 it really comes alive so I've created a brand new account and I'm just going to start a new Journey right down here ruin oh no friend calculations were correct the ephemeral equation is unbalanced the Earth spins on a strange and terrifying new axis and everywhere unbridled consequence The World Is A Wasteland of failures past and yet you must ride out into it afraid this it is hope the very last of it it is yours now we were bold once bold once more free yourself from this suffocating Stillness fix your Gaze on the horizon space to fearsome truth of the darkest dungeon it's not good it's things seem to be going rather badly but we've got in our Command The Last Hope on our wagon let's turn this thing around it looks okay I mean it looks better than some of the places we might stay so here we go and we're going to begin our confession I mean yes this is indeed the darkest dungeon so I'm gonna go through this guide kind of talking to you in a way that is either if you played the previous game or you haven't it doesn't matter and I'm gonna re-explain things for you make connections between the games because honestly it's I want to say 10 years between the release of the two games so it's been a while if you played the first one at release now I have a complete let's play of darkest dungeon the original on the channel and it took me forever to beat that game it was a long long effort to get strong enough and to clear that darkest dungeon and it looks like our work is not done so we need to pick it up here and let's sign our confession by beginning with the prologue and let's sign our signature there all right so here we are with the stagecoach now I'm gonna explain some of what you see this light right here is our Beacon of Hope and when you Mouse over it it gives you a number of how strong the intensity of the light is and you want to keep that full that baby goes out it's over bright light 100 and you could see that very similar to the first game there is a Torchlight mechanic the brighter the light Your Heroes gain benefit but there's less reward the dimmer the life things are more dangerous but you have the potential to get more reward so you kind of balance that risk reward now I myself I'm a very cautious player so I like to keep this baby as bright as possible because look how terrifying things are in the game in my opinion is already hard enough so I try to make it as easy as I can and maybe I earn less progress at a slower rate you know it's like my progress is a little slower but you make progress you don't you don't die but your appetite for risk might be different and you might want to you know change things up that's just my Approach now in the upper right of the game anytime you get something new it's very helpful it bakes in these tutorial pop-ups where you can click on this and get the information about the stagecoach and it says here the stagecoach is your Carriage coffin and confessional the three C's really that I look for in any vehicle that I want to drive so you move this thing around using was and d and you're going to drive it okay so you you hold W to move it forward and you kind of just move around now it has a bit of a drift to it because you know it's a horse-drawn carriage so you'll get used to the momentum of it then there's also Stagecoach view which you can push Z to bring up and it shows you what items you currently have equipped on your Stagecoach at the beginning of the game you're not going to have anything it's going to take you a while to actually start outfitting your stagecoach with enhancement but it's a really cool feature of it which that you get to kind of upgrade this mobile base that you have but importantly and this is something that at least when I was playing in early access was not there you have armor and wheel points so there are Shields and wheels that you'll see on your Stagecoach and if you go over some rough terrain you will lose a wheel point and if you get smashed by something uh you will lose an armor point and if you lose any of those completely then you're going to have some drastic encounter happen where you're trying to repair the stagecoach so you can keep moving so you want to keep both your wheels and your armor as high as possible sometimes it happens by surprise like you know just there's something in the road that you you couldn't have predicted and it's unlucky but it becomes part of the decision making process you're gonna plan your route and as you're calculating which route do I want to take my Stagecoach along you might see well there is going to be some pitfalls in the road it's rough road up here I want to avoid that or no you know what I have plenty of will points I can do that um and you just make your calculations accordingly now you can repair them with the Wainwright at the end which is kind of like a resting point between different stages of the journey which we'll see whenever you're done with this awesome Archive of all the little bits in the game just click up here in the upper right and close this window now right here because we're in the prologue no time is passing we're good to go and I'm just going to pull W and start moving this Stagecoach so in the first darkest dungeon you had your Hamlet edges of your mind ouch and I trembled at its terrible reverberations fair enough so we get some great decisions here do we want to go towards guilt loathing failure regret disgrace these are just amazing options so as I was saying in the first game you had your Hamlet which is what you built up to give yourself your account a permanent sense of progress remember this is a rogue light lite game meaning that if we die and we wipe we have to start over and do a new run but we don't lose everything like you would in a rogue like l-i-k-e in that sense you just lose everything and you have to start from scratch in this one by gaining candles of hope we can boost our account and make ourselves incrementally stronger even through failure so it's brutal but there is some hope and that's what we're gonna cling to now in the first game you had your Hamlet and in this one you have your Stagecoach your characters themselves and you've got the candles of Hope and the upgrades you can do with them as we'll say later it's gonna click on this and let's go okay so again here comes the archive telling us uh that we have the party four Heroes will join together on this Expedition your salvation rides with them and in party creation you can drag or double click to Hero portraits to assemble your party of Heroes the hero in the rightmost position of your roster will be first in the combat line and I cannot emphasize that enough you know I'm used to reading left to right but in this sense it's true darkest dungeon format these portraits and I'm gonna close the archive here on the bottom center of the heads up display or HUD these golden diamonds these represent the party order and the right side is the front and the far left side is the back so when you begin the game many of the characters are locked and you unlock them at the altar of Hope by using the candles which are the permanent progression currency that I was talking about we don't have any right now so you need to start with this party fortunately for us this party is actually pretty sweet now this uh if you played the first game you will recognize all of these classes so this is barriston he's a man at arms and you can always just change his name and it you know you can give him a random name or you can give them a completely unique name of your own choosing I'm going to give him his own name now below this it says Wanderer and we get one candle if we reached a second in with him as a Wanderer this is a new feature to darkest dungeon 2 from the first game where not only do you have characters to have a class like he's a man at Arms but you can specialize them with a kind of a path and Wanderer is the only path that we have right now and this helps you gain candles which we want anyway so this is fine and now the information displayed is this you'll see that there are it says Rank and then there are these four spheres right here and they're glowing with different levels of intensity and what these mean is barriston does best in the first second or third position and he's okay at the back but less strong there he's kind of a tank and his abilities do better and can Target more things if he's in the front also you'll see on the right side where it says Target you could see that he's best at targeting foes in the first and second ranks a little okay at the third and not so good at the fourth rank so he doesn't have good range but that's okay it also tells you right here he's a Resolute Defender tempered by the merciless blows of innumerable assault which means he wants to be in the front he guards he's durable and he has repost you can also go ahead and look at his skills by clicking the second tab from the top on the right portion of the character select screen and this shows you what abilities he has now at any given time your character is going to have I believe five abilities selected now at the beginning it doesn't matter because I haven't unlocked any of these other ones so there's really no choosing but later you get to make all kinds of awesome customization choices with your Loadout where you choose what skills you want you choose what path you want and that's all unlocked with candles as you go so then you can look down at his quirks now these are random totally um individualized based when you're rolling heroes so he has a stress killer which is his good perk which means um the knitting needles fly when stress is high so he does good I guess when stress is high and then he's greedy which means he's always focused on his share so we have to watch him he's going to be a greedy one then there's his different paths which we were just talking about a moment ago we only have Wanderer and you can read um his story as you visit shrines of reflection now shrines are reflection they're locations you can visit on the map when you're doing a run in the game and what these allow you to do is choose one of your Heroes and unlock their backstory which gives you access to more skills potentially more paths and more features of that hero so you get to choose who you want to unlock and fully develop first so right now again not many choices but you can see how much depth and cool Rich decision making is embedded in this game and why I'm liking it more and more as I go now I'm going to just double click more devastating than the horrors of a hundred campaigns you know I haven't seen 100 campaigns so I can't verify that little piece of wisdom there but I'm gonna put our eyepatch demanded arms in the front and I'm actually going to go with the exact order that they recommend we'll put dismiss who is our Highwayman second we're gonna put Audrey our grave robber third and we're gonna put paracelsus our plague doctor we'll put her forth now you can do whatever you want I like this order of just going with what we've got here and dismiss you can see he's an amazing DPS character and he has some Wily tactics up in the front that will unfold but you see right here he doesn't do great in the first position so you you'd rather have him in the second slot I mean he is a fugitive that's fine and here we go we've got Audrey now she has great ranged attacks uh and we're gonna just put her in the third position seen into the catacombs of the Mind you took that to a place I didn't expect there but that's fine and then paracelsus is our kind of debuffer also healer uh just a very very good support character and don't sleep on the plague doctor's ability to use blight as a powerful damage over time so I'm gonna put paracels I'm gonna put her way in the back so this lineup is called The Usual Suspects if you there are certain party configurations that the game has pre-made names for and you know it's a good indication that it's probably pretty powerful and that's what they give you to start so we're gonna go with it and again you're free to kind of like investigate everybody's skills but I'm going to start talking about these skills in the context of battle so that they make more sense but on your own you can just look at all of the other information and I'm gonna just go right here and start it up all right here we are in the valley onward and let us hope and have yet remains of the world okay so now it's telling us about the roster Arrangement and we can rearrange this at any time while driving to drag the the order around and this is absolutely vital at times party order determines what position he churros in when the battle starts the furthest hero to the right begins at the front and there are times when you might get jostled around in combat and you want to make sure you have your people in the right position as you go now before I start moving there's no time right now you can just chill this this thing ain't going down um you know right now until we start moving up in the upper left you'll see I've got two wheels and I've got two armor wheels are damaged when we're on rough routes and um when the wheels are at 100 strength each hero gets 50 travel healing this is a huge point in the game you heal as you're traveling so you know this was not something at all that was in the first game healing is done much differently in this one um through items and through just moving so having four wheels is amazing for healing up and here's our armor and this is effective if we're on hazardous roots and if you are at a hundred percent each hero starts to round with the defend status symbol and we'll take a look at what all of those mean in a moment now you're going to see some more stuff on the bottom center of the heads up display you're going to see our characters from uh right to left and the red bar is their health everybody starts at full health and the Bottom bar is their stress and it used trust used to be out of 100 it's just out of 10 in this each pip corresponds to one out of ten and then in the lower left you're gonna see that there's the map if I click on this uh you can bring this up at any time by just pushing M or clicking on the map in the lower left you can see here's where we are on the map we are the stagecoach here and we're going to be moving forward we're going to get into a fight at a barricade there is going to be an assistance encounter where we meet some uh kind of downed on their luck individuals that we can give help to on the side of the road and then we're gonna get to the old bridge now right now you can see we only have one option to move but as we get further beyond the kind of like prologue tutorial of the game these pathic choices will resemble something like slay the Spire where you have choices where I could go right I could go left and you look at the layout of the map and you make your decisions based on you know are there rough routes or hazardous Roots other enemies are are there locations I want to go to what am I trying to do and you drive your Stagecoach along the path that seems the best for you right now we have no choice so that's fine and then right here you can click to see goals and conditions we don't have any hero goals right now because we're just starting out but once you get further in the game each of your Heroes will get like a sub goal for the mission and if you complete it you get a small little reward uh that's kind of like a daily Quest or whatever it's just a small achievement that you can get and it gives you candles usually which is great and then over here you can push I to open up your inventory which shows you what you have or you can click this little bag on the bottom right of your HUD it sorts it by default by just all items so we have 40 relics which is kind of like one form of currency and you can see at the bottom of this panel the three different kinds of currency that we can spend there's relics Mastery points which are for leveling up our skills and there are bobbles which we can buy other types of items with like upgrades for the stagecoach Trinkets and things like that then you can sort by combat items items that you use at the end trinkets that you equip On Your Heroes and then items that you affix to your Stagecoach then you can push Z to actually look at your Stagecoach itself and you can see you could give it another name right now it's just called the last hope there's all sorts of different slots where you can affix things uh for the flame for the item slot for the trophy slot you unlock more as you go and I'm just going to close these up and you can hold alt to kind of highlight everything on the screen and you can push actually rather it's a toggle so you hold Ctrl to bring up this screen so the icon I call defend is just what I call it but it's actually called Block in the game you're going to be doing this a ton holding control to bring up this status screen because this screen explains every single buff debuff in the game for the most part and it's incredibly useful until you learn these things and look how great this game is when you Mouse over it it tells you straight up so if you have this block buff on yourself you just take 50 damage when you get hit so this is a because our armor is at full everybody's going to be taking 50 less damage from that first hit so it's Sensational and you can take a look at these later we'll look at these more within the context of an actual battle but I also want to say you can right click on your hero portrait to bring up their hero screen and this shows you all of your different skills that you have equipped it shows you their resistances it shows you their quirks what trinkets they have equipped it tells you what their initiative speed is how what their stress level is at what their health is at and then you can click through and you can see what their relationships are at and these start pretty neutral 9 out of 20 and they can go into the blue which is bad or into the gold which is amazing and I don't want to sleep on this relationships are incredibly important if you have good relations with the rest of your crew all sorts of awesome synergistic moments can happen where you do things and people trigger and combo with each other and it just like your life gets really easy if their relationships get really sour your life becomes a nightmare this used to be harder to manage in my opinion in the Early Access I think they've tempered it a bit which is good because it would be so brutal if people wouldn't agree try to keep your relationships High we've already looked at the combat skills and you can look here at conditions to just get a sense of like what's going on with my person if there's something going on now additionally notice right down here there's more icons that are not on this control screen so using the combination of the icons on the control screen and then these resistance icons here you can know what every icon in the game does so you just consult either one like if you see this green swirling you're like what's this oh it's blight or you know what's what are these four diamonds mean that are gold oh that means stun but if the four diamonds are blue that also means um stun but negative like I'm gonna lose my next action this is my actual resistance to being stun so you kind of have to consult both of those sheets to get what you want and then pets we don't have any pets yet but boy do we want some alright let's go I'm gonna move forward now I'm gonna actually hold s to stop this is important you can stop at any time just like in the original darkest dungeon you can just stop it's not real time I know you see the leaves blowing but just you can chill and just survey what you're doing before you move forward you see this pile of leaves on the upper right along the road these babies you want to smash into as many of these things as you can because there could be hidden goodies inside so it's kind of a fun little game that you're going to play with your wagon which is try to hit the leaf pile so I'm gonna kind of get my horse to the edge here and try to hit these I'm gonna go in the middle hit this one and then boom we just hit the barricade now that barricade's unavoidable it was the fight that we saw on the map barricades will be across the road will stop your Stagecoach and you get into a fight and here we are in combat now this is going to be very similar to what you might be familiar with if you played the original darkest dungeon but if it's been a while or you didn't let's talk about this this is a turn-based combat so like when you're driving the stagecoach that's kind of you know real time as long as it's moving this is totally turn based take your time we're going to go in order of the initiative and right now dismiss gets to act first which is this you see this kind of gold icon below him that's glowing up that indicates it's his turn in the upper right you can see next paracelsus will act and if I Mouse over this it will highlight paracelsus so you can see her down there then Audrey gets to go then bariston goes okay uh so we are going in this order wait wait this might be right to left let's see which way this goes I swear I always read left to right so I'm like wait a minute are we talking right to left let's find this out let's click on combat to get more information combat is turn based and proceeds until one side is defeated once in battle there is no retreat so you could run presumably in the first darkest dungeon maybe I hardly ever did that unless it was Dire Straits but you can't run in this let's go to turn Order each hero or enemy rolls initiative at the beginning of each turn and this is modified by the speed the speed is that purple clock icon we look like on the character we looked at on the character screen the turn order is shown by the portraits in the top right only a partial turn order is shown you can plan ahead a little but not completely right so they don't show everything you know how like some games the return order runs all the way across the top of the hood and you can see for like 50 turns who's gonna go when that's not this game there's still some mystery and there's a role it's not strictly based on what value your speed is there is a role you want the higher the you know the greater your chance of going first but not a guarantee actions so on your turn you may first use a combat item if you have one equipped and it's a free action I still am having to get used to this if you have a combat item which we don't have any but if you have some you could use them for free so they're really really powerful in the sense that it doesn't take your turn to use them then you can use your skill normally either way a left click on the item in the skill is displayed on the hot bar so you can click it with left click or you can use the number Keys one through seven your skills can only be used if your hero is in the correct launch rank which means the correct position in your party and then it can only be used against an enemy that's in the appropriate Target rank that your skill is going to be targeting to see what ranks this uh a skill can Target look at the tool tip of the skill the circular Pips tell you this information a solid pip means it's valid an empty pip means it's not some skills could Target multiple enemies which is shown by Pips joined together and they'll have a line connecting them we'll see that in a moment with either paracelsus or our grave robber Audrey those are AOE skills in addition to doing damage skills can cause a variety of effects most of these are shown by tokens so those icons I keep explaining to you the game is calling those tokens and you can Mouse over any of those to get more information or use the status screens that I was showing you and then there is a glossary as we looked at by holding control to get more info so let's break this down dismiss our high woman it's his turn you can see right here it says dismissed he's highlighted here's his skills in the middle I can do any of these skills right here additionally I can move instead of attacking if I got out of position or if I want to change the party order for some reason you can also pass your turn if you don't want to do anything and this can't come up in your strategy like if you're trying to get off a heel or you want somebody else to do their thing or whatever your reasoning but there's a consequence if you pass you gain two stress which is not an insignificant amount all right so let's look at what just miss can do so if I Mouse over Wicked slice which is my first skill right here and this does correspond to number one so this does go left to right I can use his dagger you see right here you know in his right hand he's got a dagger just left hand he has a pistol it's a melee attack dismiss can do this if he's in the first second or third position which he is and he can Target the first or second position of the enemy he can't hit the third and fourth those Pips are empty or if I wanted I could shoot my gun dismiss can shoot his gun from any party position except the first because you know so it's a ranged weapon and he can hit anyone that on the enemy's side that's not in the first position I also have the option to do dualist Advance now for duelist advance I want you to kind of look over to the left under dismiss for all of these skills it's going to tell you what the range of damage is what the crit percentage is and what other effects happen when I do this ability so for example dualistadvance says self Repose times two and it moves you forward into party one now remember we're post I can just hold Ctrl and you can see right here what this does repost means I counter attack any damaging attack that's coming at me so somebody is trying to do damage to me I might still get hit by it but I'm going to counter-attack it um two times I get two stacks of the token repost then there's tracking shot which ignores if they have Dodge or stealth and uh it puts combo on the target and then also removes stealth or Dodge which is very very good if somebody's being super evasive and then I've got Take Aim which it gives me these things on self and it removes blind so if I've been blinded I can remove it with Take Aim and I also give myself crit which means my next skill has a hundred percent crit and it ignores 20 of resistance which is you know insane and then um I also give myself Dodge which gives me a 50 chance to dodge the next attack so what do I want to do well I'm not going to spoil anything for you but I'm going to tell you in my opinion I love duelist Advance with dismiss so when he I'll select it I'm going to left click on this and now you'll see on the enemies there are blue bars beneath them which meaning like which one you want to hit you want to hit this guy or do you want to hit this guy now will I Mouse over them look at the bottom center of the screen it tells you I have a 100 chance to hit it's going to do three to five damage I have a five percent chance to crit so you really want to calculate what's my chance to hit what's my range of damage and how much do I crit and then on the right in the bottom right of the hood you'll see this is a lost soul he's gone and he has 13 Health you can see all of his resists as well so this is not going to kill the guy but I want to start wearing them down so I'm going to do this now watch what happens with dismiss when I select this I'm going to left click now dismiss moves forward when dismiss moves forward because dualistic dance advances him one square or one position forward he displaces barriston who was there and they just swap places generally whenever you move you're just going to swap positions with whoever is in that square and just kind of reorder the party accordingly now let's look at bariston's abilities so bariston has Crush which is like I hit people with my mace but if that Target has combo that kind of uh skull that's like glowing blue flames means combo then he just heals 10 so you can do very nicely with this if bariston's been taking damage you can apply combo like with take aim for example and then have bariston hit and heal up do some damage bariston also has Rampart which will move him forward and then he'll go the party will be back in the original position and he will do damage and he will knock back who whichever Target he hits or has a chance to knock them back uh enemies have a resistance to movement altering effects and then we also have a chance to stun them that blue swirly oh that's uh alt just focusing on him um the blue swirly with control you could see is days so next turn will be delayed until the end of the round I'm sorry I always confuse this for stun it's a crowd control but it's not the same as stun stun is even worse they just lose their action days is like you have first strike on them uh or at least that's how it operated in darkest dungeon one they get to go but they go last so the idea is like you dazed them and then you try to kill them before they get to act and you effectively negate their action which you would do anyway if you kill them but if you push them to the end of the turn order you have a much higher chance of being able to kill them before they get to act I can also defend which allows me to select one of my own party members and defend them and it will put two stacks of uh guarded on them which means like barriston will step in the way and take the damage twice for that unit and put two stacks of block on baristan which means he'll take 50 less damage so very good for you know kind of tanking or taunting and I've got bolster bolster is amazing because what this bad boy lets you do is reduce stress so um if bariston has five or more stress he will reduce stressed by one and gained guard and then if the target you use this on has five or more stress then they lose a stress and they also remove the vulnerable token if they have this on them this debuff is nasty so it's great and then we've got hold the line which uh is really really good because it if whatever reason barriston has been moved way back to the back of the party this lets him move forward three so he like gets to jump way in the back from the back up to the front and do his job defending everyone he puts defense on himself and um he becomes immobilized which means he can't be pushed back again so very good now for me what I like to do is I love Rampart I'm always huge on this ability because I like dazing I like knocking them back and uh if I put it on this I have 100 chance to hit and I can use this and I also want to be in the front even though dismiss has this awesome repost I still want dismiss to be in the second position so that uh we can do list Advance again and uh you know we can allow him to survive a little bit longer he'll still get targeted in the second spot but I'm a big fan of this ability let's see how it goes and oh before that happened okay so a lot of things just happen there let's talk through it I just did my ability but bariston decided to crit so we just insta killed that enemy I'm gonna look at crits when a crit is struck it does several things normal attacks do 150 damage and then if it's an ability that is doing damage over time like bleed blight or burn it's duration two plus rounds it ignores twenty percent of resistance um and heals to 150 more healing so that's all amazing now you'll notice that it was a death blow there are several times when they have to pause and just tell you this is really important because this is a big change from the first game in the first game your characters would go on death's door and they wouldn't be killed instantly when taken um to zero or below Health the first time kind of like Dunson dragons and you had a chance to like stabilize them the enemies never got that ability but in this game they have it so sometimes you will do lethal damage to an enemy but they will go on death door but not die and it's the most frustrating thing about the game in my opinion it's so brutal so if you can kill something um right away like you just hit him and then they go to death blow then you don't have to worry and you're fine but they can survive that so you really really have to pay attention to that but luckily we got it and because we pushed this guy back he's in the second position here and he's gone he's not blocking us so now it's time for us to go now it's confirmed by the way from my own incompetence let's verify this is moving right to left so the round order is going right to left all right so what do we want to do with Audrey Audrey has uh some melee attacks which she's actually able to do from the third position which is so awesome and then she has some good ranged attacks as well as a little bit of self-care so pick to the face is fantastic if the enemy is really defensive it ignores the defense token or the block token if they have it if they're comboed you do you have 50 more crit chance so it's really really good and you can only use it on Targets in the first or second spot Throne dagger is a ranged attack it ignores um if an enemy is being guarded by someone else and if she is stealth it ignores Dodge on the enemy Target and it has a boost if they're comboed flashing daggers notice that in it hits both position two and three you'll see that the blue Pips under the words flashing daggers in the middle center of the bottom portion of the screen are connected it's an AOE attack it's awesome then there's poison dart which applies two stacks of blight which is a damage over time and then we've got her absinthe which she can chug if she's hurt and if she's below 25 Health she heals 33 and puts on three stacks of Dodge and gives herself um haste basically uh which is she just acts faster next round she gets the speed buff so very good if you can trigger that all right but of all of the abilities that we have I love poison dart but look if you could see that these enemies actually have really strong blight resistance they have 40 plight resistance that's a lot so it's not going to be very effective plus that's for a longer fight this fight's going to be over pretty soon so let's act faster and I'm just going to go ahead and pick to the face bam six damage all right and by the way another tip you'll see the enemies there's their health bar if there is this gold bar below the health bar that means that enemy has not yet acted in the round and still gets to go so even if you can't see the full round order you can still kind of see like which enemies get to go so that you don't Focus fire some enemy that's already acted and instead use your energy trying to kill something that hasn't gone now paracelsus is great at hitting the back ranks but there's nothing there so you'll see that paracelsus is the second third and fourth abilities all can't be used now Battlefield medicine can't be used just because nobody's hurt enough to heal in this game unlike the first game you cannot heal unless people are at certain Health thresholds and most of the heels have a cool down so healing is very different than the first game and you need to kind of start changing your mental Paradigm of how healing operates in this if you're used to the first one ounce of prevention is great for giving us a boost but let's just go ahead and do noxious blast it's the only thing I can even do that targets the first position with damage so we're gonna try to throw this and put some blight over here they did not they resisted the blight but they took the damage initially okay and what did they do they attacked barriston who got stressed out about it for an odd reason but he took half damage and now it's back to Audrey remember he took half damage because he had the block token from our full armor on our Stagecoach these tokens do not expire unless the triggering event occurs so they are there forever and the block will just sit here until someone attacks and it goes off repost will sit here until someone attacks or it goes off now other debuffs have um will operate in different Fashions but these are all sitting there so you don't lose it it's very strong just go ahead and pick to the face and we kill and got the death blow so it's over indeed one less obstacle so what do we get we get a candle of hope this is Alter currency and this is the permanent progression that we're looking for these are great to get and we also got a vague trinket a minor heart Seeker so this gives you three percent more crit chance at the expense of 10 healing received from skills so very similar to what you might be used to in the first darkest dungeon this is a brutal game as the game says when you boot it up it's about making the best of a bad situation very often there are pros and cons to the loot sometimes it's just all upside but often the loot has a little bit of a downside now this is probably fine like three percent crit is reasonable for that trade because we're not going to need to be healing so much at this point maybe but it's up to you if you want to use this now I'm going to take all the items we're going to hop back in our stage coach there is so much worse in store thank you that's very encouraging now notice how in the bottom of the HUD you'll see all of our characters have this little exclamation point Red Badge uh by their portraits and that means there is something in our inventory that they can equip so right here it says inventory your Stagecoach is limited to how many items it can carry press I to view what you can have and this was something in the first game it's like inventory Tetris where you could only carry a little bit uh it's managed somewhat by the fact that everything generally takes up just one square but it Stacks to different sizes inventory stacking your shared inventory is split between all item types some stack well where others take an entire slot you can filter them as we looked at before uh here's the treasures tab trinkets combat items in items and Stagecoach items will all help you in your quest You'll Find relics Baubles and Mastery tokens which can be used to purchase some Plies from vendors or upgrade your hero skills and then trinkets we can equip in the lower right of our hero right here you can only have two at a time they can be removed or swapped when outside of combat like right now and we can equip trinkets by opening the inventory and selecting the trinket filter and then dragging it to an empty hero slot or double left click on the trinket when we have that screen open so for example who do I want to crit and not get healed probably dismiss so I'm going to right click on dismiss for now and then I'm going to push I to open up my inventory you could see how both of these panels to character screen and the inventory can fit on the screen at the same time and now you'll see that right here these trinket slots both have The Red Badge meaning like hey you have something you could put here if you want and I'm just going to double click on this and give it to dismiss and see how he does with a little bit of boost to crit okay and oh we can go forward but let's just push M to show the map see where we are we just got through this battle and we're heading up to the assistance encounter okay and let's keep going you could see our um light is going down as we make progress and here's the desperate few huddled by their little wagon here and now we're an encounter during encounters you must pick one of the choices by holding the left Mouse button on one of your Heroes by the way you gotta hold it you can't just click it and the results will be previewed at the bottom of the screen Affinity changes Heroes often have different opinions about how a given encounter should be resolved when you choose a hero's response any Heroes the degree will have their Mutual Affinity increased gold glow so what this means is when you make choices here your relationships between party members are being affected if they have the gold glow they're like I like that choice and R Bond the person making the choice and the person or persons glowing will increase if it's blue that means they don't like it and the relationship will decrease assistance encounters bring the heroes face to face with the downtrodden local populace these forlorn creatures are in need of help and often have valuable supplies to offer to the heroes in return and if you help them it's the best way to restore the flame which is right here we could see it's our our hope it's at 76 so you'll see it right at the top of the screen and right now here's them and we can only choose between either baristan or dismiss and they both like it so either way these two are going to get along with the decision now it says right here Barrister says let us unite them beneath our banner and dismisses from high women to passenger pay is likely worse and here's what you need to pay attention to which is on the bottom of the screen it's basically saying um if we do this you can hold alt right here as it says to get more information on these icons if we take barriston's choice we're going to get supplies and a hundred flame if we take dismiss's choice we get a trinket and a hundred flame I actually want supplies so I'm going to select bariston and you'll notice how now what here's what happened dismisses relationship toward barriston went up but it didn't look like barriston's relationship toward dismiss went up reciprocally it was just his relationship that went up so if you have one that you're looking to carry or one relationship you want to improve make sure to have the person whose relationship you want to go up not make the choice now what do we get we got a candle of hope we got a hundred plus flame and we get four laudanum actually we get eight LOD them so we'll take it all and a hundred is the max that our torch can be so we're back to a hundred percent right there I'm actually going to push I and I'm going to right click paracelsus and see we got this lobdum which is a combat item and it removes one stress and it also removes horror which adds stress at the end of each round so if anybody gets the horror token on them which is a stress over time we can use this now all heroes can equip one combat item and it goes in the upper left of your skills and all you need to do is double click or just drag it over so I'm going to give it to paracelsus and I'm actually also going to give it to Audrey so I'm just going to click this to switch over to Audrey and I'll drag it over here and there we go so now we've got everything equipped uh combat items and we this explains how to equip them but their free actions and you use them before you use your skill of course because once you use your skill the turn is just over for you so anytime before you do that you can use the item all right and we're going to keep going and I'm gonna try to hit this leaf pile over here bam I got it and I'm gonna go over here and smack that bam and let's just ride out of control oh no I'm Gonna Miss This one no I just got it what do you mean a change in the air so we've reached a bridge on the map and we're about to get to the end it says here Heroes the hero sheet holds critical information open it with see or right click on the portrait we did this and we've looked at this we've pretty much seen all of this I don't think I need to read it to you because we talked about it um this relationships these are quirks negative quirks can be treated at the field Hospital which are locations on the map and positive quirks can be reinforced at the hospital as well here's our combat skills we can equip five and the sixth is for combat items now you can toggle these on and off anytime you're not in combat all it tells you right here and right now we only have five and we need to visit the shrines and Reflections to unlock more and here's our hero conditions um from Buffs or in item use in the upper right you can see and I'm just going to keep going forward and push M to close the map and I'm just going to use the scroll to kind of move around and hit this looks like a barricade we got another fight right here okay so they got this guy got blinded by our flame which is great it's so bright it has a 10 chance per round to Blind enemies blind means they have a 50 chance to miss which is phenomenal and because our wagon Stagecoach is doing so well we're all have defend now this big boy right here has 42 insane hit points and has a huge ax so we want to try to get rid of this individual if at all possible so I'm gonna go ahead and put a poison dart on this dude he has bad blight resist so we're gonna put light on him I'm going to noxious blast this dude now notice right now he has two blight for three turns these tokens do wear off over time unlike these Buffs right here that only wear off when they're triggered now I'm going to throw the noxious blast here with you three damage and now yep look at that we've got it on there and there's a tool tip for Dots some attacks inflicted dot damage and bleed blight and burn are all Dots Dots cause damage the beginning of the combatants turn until they expire many combat items or skills can cure them now they also stack so Audrey put on two paracelsus put on four so that means right before this guy's about to act he's gonna take six damage from Blight so this is phenomenal I'm gonna duelist Advance this dude just do some damage to him get the repost going he's acting and he's carving the toy he actually hit bariston which is surprising and he put a bleed on him and here we go they're attacking barriston finally bam there we go by accumulation so you could see everything that happened right there um all of our defenses got used bariston reposted and counter-attacked put a combo right here and combat uh the combo token or special compared to other tokens many hero and monster skills have effects that only happen if the target has the combat token on them in all cases combo is bad for its recipient having it means that the actor is vulnerable to some damage and disruptive skills they're best used as one-two punches use one hero to place it and then another hero to take advantage of it because they will disappear so I can if I want just crush this guy and then what will happen is you could see as I Mouse over with Crush selected barriston has plus four written on his health bar below his character there meaning he's gonna heal for four Health by doing a crush right here so it's phenomenal but I'm actually not going to use it I want to bring this guy forward a bit so what I'm going to do is um knock this guy back so that The Woodsman moves forward academic view during combat hold down all uh while mousing over a hero or an enemy to see the academic view which Zooms in and gives you more information so this is super helpful like my mouse with this guy and I hold all it zooms in and you can just read everything really cleanly right here it also tells you what skills this enemy has filthy Marshall and Chomp so you can plan better if you want to take this target down faster than the others for example all right now what do I want to do right here well guess what I'm spreading out my damage which I'm not fond of but I still want to take this guy down so I'm gonna poison dart this guy and we put more blight on and now he's taking eight for three turns and he won't survive that with his current hit points I am going to what do I want to do here I'm still going to do list Advance on this guy I just focusing him as hard as I can and then from this spot we have piercing um we have a more chance to get the blight because uh well the combo is gone never mind I'm still gonna do this right there let's see what we get all right so this guy here we go The Woodsman is almost dead he's going to die on his action if I have barriston do his thing which I'm going to do well yeah I was maybe gonna kill this but no no you could see The Woodsman is acting next so let me go ahead and do that Now The Woodsman has been days so he's actually not going to act now look at that he did not die he used his garlic very annoying and let's read the screen right here some monsters have death blow resistance just like Heroes do it's not all okay so actually that's good for me I thought it was everything so not everything does when the monster is on death's door each further blow has a chance to slay it some skills can increase the chance of executing repeated blows while it's on death's door will also reduce its death blow resistance so he's not long for this world is what we're saying here I'm gonna go ahead and finish this guy off and death blow now check this out if I um you could see that he has no death blow resistance this lost soul so it's a it's a kill every time and the Affinity system is triggering which says to survive your Expedition you'll need to pay attention to how your Heroes this is relationships a harmonious team is an effective team but if they're fighting like this demonstrates then all sorts of bad things can happen they can block each other from acting or healing it's so bad each your pair has an affinity value which describes how friendly or unfriendly they feel towards one another this directly determines the chances of that pair forming a relationship at the next Inn to a few affinities open any Heroes character sheet and look at their relationships Tab and this says that affinities come from a variety of sources like we just saw the event or combat like if you heal someone sometimes they'll like it or if you crit something they might be like that was awesome and then they respond favorably to that also at the end you can do activities together to boost relationship okay now at this point what do I want to do this guy is being guarded by The Woodsman but I can just throw a dagger at this guy oh no I can't because he's in the first slot fine The Woodsman dies okay now I'm actually gonna use uh I can't battle through medicine just yet sadly but I can just put light on that guy oh okay and now barriston's like really hurt so he could actually be healed but I think we're pretty good here to just win messy but effective is right so we win and we get some bandages which we're definitely going to equip these are better but by the way than they used to be because they just heal 10 and we'll take the candle now check out our group I'm gonna equip this after combat because I shifted myself around uh we are back to normal order so we don't have to switch the order after that combat we're good now watch barriston's Health you see how we just healed right there at the same pulse when the bright light starts to expire once you've traveled a certain distance you're passively getting a heal by just kind of recovering in the coach so watch his health and it's already up to 31 dismiss is fully healed and we get to the end so not too shabby and there's that horrifying mountain peak that looks like a two Roman numeral Style even more perhaps while the rest of the Soul so this um proprietor of the in here is a fantastic individual this is Coveted precaution and you really like to see the full mask being worn to not transmit anything to the guests and we reached the torch and Crown which you can see the name of the end up here and we get two candles just for reaching it so we say continue and we completed the prologue you found your fortitude at last collect what hope you can and end your Expedition here so we could say continue to end the Expedition it says right here the prologue Quest is complete for this Venture through the valley there's nothing left to do so end the Expedition at the lower left of the end screen normally the Expedition can end in three ways Victory yay defeat oh my God they're abandoning it didn't go well and candles of Hope right here it says when the journey ends you're awarded candles with hope based on how well you did candles are used to unlock and upgrade Heroes items and more at the altar of Hope even when an expedition is surely lost it's worth pressing on to get more candles so that we can make the next run better also I want to explain I had this happen recently I had a hero die in the middle of a run and I thought oh they're gonna make me just go with three people but no once I reached the Inn there was we were hired another random person to fill the spot so as long as you make it to the end you get another person to kind of fill the vacancy so keep going now right here all we can do is end the expedition fortified by trials so what did we get we are going to get five candles ending early at any point you can end by collecting your candles during normal Expeditions making it to the end is worth the effort because it'll award extra candles by making it to the end now what they want us to do is quit and there's no option we we can't do anything else so we just have to collect the hope and say yes deepen your understanding and victory will come so they're saying we're lost in darkness but that's just what has to happen at the prologue so don't worry about it just we could fix this Stagecoach no problem continue we got five candles and it's fixed look at that it's fine it's not a problem and we're just gonna ride on and what's this what we found it's the altar of Hope look at all these candles so you select it and at the altar of Hope you earn these candles and um you get to spend them however you want but right now they're only going to let us visit the working Fields so we'll do that so we can only go to the working fields which is this one right here but there's other options later let's select this is to make it okay and the working Fields this is where you unlock more trinkets combat items in items and Stagecoach upgrades for for future Expeditions it's vital to continue unlocking items to spend some candles here whenever you can each item unlocked at the altar is also immediately granted into your inventory for the current Expedition so this is cool like when you unlock something you're just gonna get it next time so we haven't unlocked any trinkets combat items in items or Stagecoach items so I'm going to unlock one of each but you can do whatever ratio you'd like so I'm gonna give myself a Trinket bam I want to give and we got the fishmongers gloves so if a serrated item is equipped um we bleed and uh there are some bonuses for having serrated stuff which we'll look at and then combat items let's do one of these what do we get great and overcome it so this is like helping you if you're on death store and then to overcome death door if that happens I'm gonna do a stagecoach item all right this is actually really good so you equip this and then each location you have a chance to produce whiskey items which you can use at the end Stagecoach items it says right here you can equip them at the Wainwright which is at the end now whiskey is something that's an in item that people can use to like make better relationships or um affiliations and then I'm gonna get one in item here and we got the book of creative insults disposal that's awesome all right great so now we've unlocked this and we just click Embark sanctuary I mean but you know Stars take a while to die so let's not get too intense about our astrological metaphors oh and we're back not at all but we completed the prologue and now we're ready to go into denial that's the first step nothing's wrong you have coward in your crumbling denial long enough come on give me a little more time in my crumbling denial we're gonna ride on your insightful questions during my lectures gave me pause I recognized in you something of a kindred spirit despite our differences in age and position we shared a keen Fascination for an archeology folklore and of course occultism the crossroads wait by the Lantern's light and welcome what help may come but who doesn't love occultism all right so now it's time to pick the party again and well guess what we're going to pick the same party of course but look at what we've got we now have hero goals so if we get to the tangle we get two candles and if we visit the hoarder two times we get an extra candle and if we land um they're actually they're both two candles if we land a killing blow on two pillagers uh she gets two candles and then if we use the glimmer of hope two times with paracelsus we get two candles so that's wonderful so now we have a way to earn a bunch more candles which will make our account stronger and stronger as we go and we're going to click this so what are you seeing you are seeing the loop of the game now they've been gating us of course because we had to do the prologue but now this is it once again though all the world's Horrors are the way oh pish posh I'm gonna push I look we've got all these items to equip and now I can't throw this on the stagecoach right now because the Wainwright has to put this on at the end but I do have this in item this combat item which is eh now serrated let me see what uh paracelsus this is serrated right you know what I mean it's a serrated blade but I don't believe it it counts yet as being serrated but I'll try it just to see if it works and then we'll put this right here this is the game Loop you're gonna go and you're gonna fight you're either gonna die or maybe you're gonna win that run you're gonna use candles to make yourself stronger so you could keep making it further in the game and potentially reach the ending we're going to unlock more characters if I push the map you're gonna see we've got all sorts of new things to encounter again here in the valley and then we're gonna get to make some more choices about where we go we're going to try to fulfill these hero Awards to get more candles we're going to try to visit the shrines of recollection to strengthen our heroes by unlocking more skills and we're going to learn about more features of the game that we haven't yet seen but we're going to have to get into that next time because I really think this is a good place to end the first episode I don't want this first episode of the guide to be like 50 hours long it's a long guide to be sure but there's so much to talk about this is a complicated game but I'm telling you it's worth it once you get into it I have a ton of fun with this it feels really satisfying when you can make progress and get your More Heroes in your party get to make more choices get more Trinkets and things unlocked so you you build really uh comfortable loadouts that you feel good about and you chip away at this game I hope you found this to be helpful uh if you're just starting out or you're thinking about playing darkest dungeon too if you have any questions post those in the comments below and let me know do you want to see me take this series further do you want me to explain more of the game as we go through show you more content walk you through bosses more decisions things like that please let me know that in the comments below as well everybody thank you so much for watching take care hello thank you

Channel: Dr. Incompetent

Views: 785

Keywords: Darkest Dungeon 2, Darkest Dungeon 2 lp, Darkest Dungeon 2 playthrough, Darkest Dungeon 2 first time, Darkest dungeon 2, Darkest dungeon 2 lp, Darkest dungeon 2 2023, Darkest dungeon 2 lets play, Darkest dungeon 2 gameplay, Darkest dungeon 2 ep 1, Darkest dungeon 2 playthrough, Darkest dungeon 2 first time, Darkest dungeon 2 lets play 2023, Darkest dungeon 2 guide, Darkest dungeon 2 tutorial, Darkest dungeon 2 beginner guide, Darkest dungeon 2 guide 2023

Id: 0dr1J4HxcPs

Length: 72min 59sec (4379 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023