Darkest Dungeon Tier List with In-Depth Analysis: Part 1/3

sup y'all shuffle and today I present to you opinions whoa darkest dungeon opinions after 500 hours and a completed blood moon run I feel confident enough that I can actually say which heroes might be a little better than the others so the criteria that we're using is going to be it's gonna be vertical obviously so we have s through D we're primed a can use D or just gonna start C I don't think there's that much differentiation but also keep mind that the game is about bringing the right tool to the job it's about understanding what heroes work best in what places and what strategy you want to use and how to accentuate that right someone near the bottom for instance like if I say the árboles you know that could be technically a low rated hero but you could build your team to be really good for the AR bolused and then just have her dumpster everything so it's more about overall strength and effectiveness such as how many places they're good in how many situations they're good in and then how much help they need in order to perform well and of course the top of the tier list would actually be knowledge that's what wins and darkest dungeon is knowledge and understanding of what you're getting into and how to circumvent it and beat it but knowledge doesn't have a hero icon so we're just going to assume it's at the top and all of its glory so we will be focusing on statistics such as hit points speed that kind of stuff their versatility how many things can they do how well can they do them from what space how much help do they need to do those things their camping skills their trinkets because those are also important and we're not considering doubles so is in more than one of the same hero and a team and we're not really considering color of madness because I feel that's a more specialized thing and I don't have that much experience with it so I don't feel that I would have an accurate opinion I think this will be more fun and suspenseful if we start from the bottom so where to start the seats here and where to start the worst character in the game IMO of course all of this was in my opinion so I don't have to keep saying that every two seconds it's the antiquarian boom yeah it's a surprise of probably a few people and then there's a thousand people angrily hitting their keyboards going she's the best character in the game here's XY and Z here Mia right so we're going with our framing our criteria she has very bad stat she is low damage low hitpoints okay speed and her gimmick is getting money right that's really helpful she's good for like if you went by time in-game for the first maybe 50 or 60 weeks she's definitely better than see probably be but over time depending on how long you're playing and especially Blood Moon not Blood Moon but yeah actually Blood Moon stage and stuff like that anything with the time limit her usefulness starts to fall off pretty quickly and so her only really redeeming strategy is spamming dodge lowering accuracy those kinds of things so with one it's pretty hard to keep up with all the d buffing and stuff you can just spam the dodge vapors the whole time but then you don't get to do other things like the supplemental healing or the blighting or the flash powder to lower their accuracy and things like that so usually to make use of the Dodge ability the spamming stuff like that usually need another antiquarian or someone else helping so like a man in arms with bolster things like that so her best strategy she can't really get off the ground too well by herself anyway and you're trading too much in the way of offense in exchange for something like it's the equivalent of like a critical hit kind of build if that makes sense where critical hit as a chance to do double damage dodge is like a chance to take no damage and it they kind of almost go up around the same rate you know so you're getting about around 30% extra dodge most attacks especially champions stuff like that have minimum like a hundred and three accuracy so you could probably knock them down to maybe 70 65 percent accuracy which is okay but it's still it's still too much RNG and I feel that's banking on RNG strategies especially in the harder difficulties and stuff like that aren't as strong is something more consistent such as damage over time builds and stuff like that and so because her only good strategy needs help from other people and then also the trade-off in offense and her bad defensive abilities or her bad defensive stats as well as her gold gimmick falling off at a certain point cuz at some point you just don't need to buy upgrades anymore it's why she's the worst her trinkets are okay she has a couple pretty good ones but they're not enough to make up for all of her other detriments and her camp skills like you can pull random trinkets supply items that is actually pretty helpful it's everything is just a way to save gold basically or get more gold and even though the trinkets crowns can sometimes high roll to something good it's not consistent but it's still something and by the time he gets a champion level you're usually not wanting to take her I feel like this is the class I struggle with the most to get to level six it's usually I get through veteran and then it's just like I can't justify taking this class anymore just there's too much at stake or I need this I need that and I don't need the money that badly like the extra five thousand that I polled just by bringing her so that's why I feel like she's the worst character the next one I'm gonna apologize to graphic in advance but it is in fact the abomination and it comes down largely to the stress inflicted on the party the solitary nature of the character but that makes sense thematically as well as the very odd ranks that he hits and occupies in battle so there's a lot of good though the base stats are pretty fantastic as one of the highest base HP totals for a DPS class character so he's under the likes of the leper and the Crusader but he's still pretty tanky pretty good defensively his speed is tied for second among a bunch of others only behind the grave-robber I believe at nine max of nine and he's one of those self-sufficient characters so that's why I was saying before he's solitary he can manage his own stress as I want HP and stuff like that but it's more he doesn't synergize too well with most teams outside of maybe a plague doctor with bunch of blatant stunts Pam but that's about it building and playing the abomination follows this back and forth kind of thing of take it slow with stunning and blight and self heal and stuff like that and then hulking out and going transform and then just beaten the hell out of stuff and so that's where teams can get tricky because you have to find something that can accommodate both play styles and then also you have to decide which one you're building for in terms of trinkets because he gets access to all the skills at all times which is pretty cool his camp skills mostly focus on himself which makes a little difficult but as I was saying with his Jekyll and Hyde kind of build in his trinket selection a lot of people are gonna say well the transformation is OK and more manageable if you have the the restraining padlock the legendary one that lowers stress for transforming and that's true but you also have to remember that for every turn that he's not transformed you basically aren't using a trinket which feels kind of bad and you could be doing other stuff which is why I actually feel that his best trinket is the green one that gives him bonus stun and blight chance because you spend most the time in that mode and then you just give him one of those and if you really want to some kind of accuracy booster for when he transforms he's definitely playable from that point his crimson court set might simultaneously be bad but then also good at the same time because it covers both of his things it covers if you're going to be spamming stun chain and blight and stuff like that with the osmond chain giving you a boost to that but then also a - distress and a plus to dodge all that's really good and then the set bonus is if you transform you get bonus damage for being in the first rank so the whole play style is as I was saying before soften them up with some blight or some stun or whatever and then transform and then start shredding them I will say this is probably the best sham blur killing class like the default shamblers just because you can spam rake against all of the clapper claws and just whoop those and two turns every time unless he misses and he controls that by himself so usually if your sham blur hunting I think he's actually really good but other than that the like I said the stress damage he could bring a jester and all that stuff or now you can bring a crusader that he would have actually been the worst character if he didn't lose the restriction to religious teammates that actually made him a lot better but the stress he inflicts on your team it's not even himself because he can lower his own stress pretty easily it's the team stress that begins to actually suck and the reason is stress is arguably more lethal than hit point damage because stress can still kill you we know that hit point damage can kill you quickly obviously but stress damage to deal with it it takes time it takes time outside of the dungeons you have to place people and stress relieving activities it costs money it takes away from other stuff you could be doing with your money like upgrades and overall the drain of resources that stress puts on you over just raw hit point damage makes someone that constantly puts stress down on the rest of your team if you choose to use them that way less appealing and of course you could just play it the way I normally do which is you just put on the padlock or transference and he's just a stun but it's it's up in the front row but as useful as that can be it's not his strongest way to play and as I say before you're really gimping your overall effectiveness by not using every tool at your disposal so those two are at the bottom we're gonna move up to the next tier the B tier and the criteria for the beats here is there's still a little more niche in terms of placement than a a little less so than C and they require the team to set them up so they can perform their best or they have a skillset that does not allow them to go to certain areas so again this is not in some specific order this is just how it is in my notes but starting us off and the beats here is gonna be the shield breaker class that I actually like a lot but sadly I can't really justify putting her higher than this there's a lot to say about her I mean you could even argue that she could be in the seats here but I feel like once she gets higher level and gets some of the gear that she needs I feel that she actually becomes a better class so it's kind of tough she's kind of like in-between like she almost could be a tear when she has the right setup and then she could be CT or most the other time so I feel that Bea's pretty appropriate but she is really bad at low levels especially without certain class trinkets usually if you're doing a Blood Moon run she feels very vulnerable especially early on if you've ever watched Moon Moon stream this game shield breakers of the class I think he dies with the most of the point where I'm surprised he still uses them but the reason is as I was saying before she desperately needs some kind of hit point boosting trinket like her special armor but you cannot get that until champion and the only way to get them is by subjecting your party to a mini-boss battle with those stupid snakes and the snakes or even a random chance and they don't occur on boss battles so there's no guarantee that you're gonna get them and if you miss it at a lower level I think you can get at a higher level so that means you're doing more high-level snakes which is not good and due to the inherently fragile nature of the class even though she can defend herself with a serpents way but the inherently fragile nature and the necessity of a trinket to potentially function effectively as a majority of the reason why she's near the bottom of the list she's designed to be a frontline class because she has serpents way rat she has ways to defend herself she can move in and out of combat a lot of her best move she has to be at the front of the line for and then you tie that together with her inherent fragility so like I say in her low HP and it becomes dangerous it is a dangerous class to use as I was saying before characters in this tier usually need to have a team that can accommodate them and so you have to have a team that can handle her moving back and forth between certain places they can capitalize on blights and then also it should say her base speed is really good I think it's up there it's 9 at max which is up there with everyone not named grave-robber so she was pretty fast and because you need to use I feel that you almost need to use her special armor to do her best that armor reduces her speed by two at the cost of giving her 33% extra HP so you take away her best facet which is her speed to give her something she NEADS and it feels like a tax to play the class right it feels like if you're gonna play the shield breaker you need something like that you can't you could go in on damage and stuff like that but as I was saying it's dangerous especially higher levels when people start hitting for 1215 stuff like that and leaving bleeds and stuff so when she's only at 36 HP or whatever without any of her other stuff it's pretty easy for her to go down into turns and you don't want that on your front liners and the last two points are as I said before it takes too long to get a rolling you have to get her to champion you have to get some higher level trinkets that's when she's probably your best and some of other abilities do not get good until later on like impale impale is garbage when you start out but when impale can blight it gets okay at level 5 impale is actually really good because it hits pretty hard all things considered and it leaves behind blight on everyone which is never bad light itself as the damage type usually does 1 or 2 points more than bleeds but you can't use it as often so usually bleed is the better damage overtime effect in my opinion and then we have to consider endgame scenarios there's almost no worthwhile boss that I can think of that I want to take this character to I don't want to take her to the darkest dungeon I don't want to take her into the crimson court I'm not saying that she can't succeed but I don't want to take the blight skillset into those places usually and if you were to do that I would suggest focusing more on her other strengths because I have spent a couple minutes really tearing her down but her strengths do exist she does have ways to help boost party damage like crit chance and stuff distel thing very helpful her ability to maneuver the enemy all over the place with her pulls and stuff like that are really good and finally she has inherent armor pen which is actually really good because some of those protection values get up to like the 40s 50s depending off their buffing or not and having someone they can go straight through it is really good but in a lot of those cases you could also just blight and there are other characters that can do that so shield breaker finds herself decidedly in the beats here right before we go into the next one I do need to add one last point the shield breaker camping skills nothing to write home about pretty underwhelming dedicated to herself mostly don't add too much I'd rather spend the rest points on other stuff so there's such a forgettable part of her that I forgot to even put it in her little review there I only remembered after I was looking at another character that characters actually the Our Blessed blam poor are blessed I really like this class but the two biggest things with her well start there her prose write very tanky for a back liner I think one I think the highest HP total for a backline character has some pretty solid support skills like being able to lower enemy accuracy crit chance stuff like that she can mark to set herself up or other people that's actually a pretty solid heel if you can use it more than one turn in a row because it boosts healing receive which is actually really nice her camp skills are fantastic her restring crossbow really boosts her damage her ability to increase party speed is very helpful and then she has emergency healing if you find yourself camping with someone you know like 10% is really good so her weaknesses really fall into her actual job which is to snipe it's supposed to be too high roll some crits do some really good damage pick off squishy targets in the back which can be helpful and it's tough for her to do this because she gets really screwed by positioning she's kind of like a backline leper everything about it she has a lot of damage she's pretty slow which means all the quick back liners that you'd want to snipe anyway are gonna go before you so usually you want to stack surprise chance with her and to get the most out of her abilities you need to mark mark is sadly not an amazing game plan it's of course viable I don't think there's anything that's not viable in this game unless it's outright stupid like using your Crusader 2 solo heal but all you have is inspiring cry or whatever which is more of a stress heal than anything else but the reason she's supposed to go slow is so someone else on the front like your bounty hunter or your hound master can mark the target and then she can take them down and in those situations you're spending two turns to kill one enemy usually so let's look at this scenario turn one bounty hunter goes first marks squishy target in the back or in the third rank or something then árboles Snipes it usually can one-shot from there even without a crit and he spent two turns to kill one thing usually unless the characters in rank four you could just hit it twice with each of those characters and also killed it and then for instance if you're trying to fight a boss a lot of bosses have multiple actions per turn and mark becomes way worse on any enemy that can act more than once in a turn because it takes away from the mark duration and then finally her damage is actually ass she's supposed to be this heavy hitting sniper or whatever but she only does seven to fourteen damage at max rank and for comparison a lot of the other ones like the grave robber and stuff like that they do seven to thirteen so her biggest job of picking off stuff is inherently shafted by most boss mechanics and the fact that her choice targets can usually be double tapped by a second person on the team anyway you're more than welcome to all-in and shine high role with her get someone get one or two people that can mark give her a bunch of crit and damage and then just try and chunk people you can definitely do it it works but that game plan is not the most effective right now so if you're bringing an ARB list I would suggest it on a mission that requires camping to make good use for camp skills but then also then give her some of her support skills so she has some other effectiveness you're just not really banking on her to just sniper shot everything down her heal like I said is actually pretty good so if you have another healer or if you have two like another kind of weak healer that's not a main healer you're gonna have someone else there helping out and that's where she's actually pretty good and she has some really good support skills not just the healing but the rallying Flair the ability to clear stun and mark specifically she actually makes wine prints or swine god or whatever swine King boss she makes it the easiest fight possible she can just sit back there and hit rallying flare return and just completely screw Wilbur and the swine king out of decimating your party she gets dumped stirred by positioning pretty hard so she's like the leper where if he knock her out of the back to rank she just becomes really bad and thankfully she doesn't need a trinket to function well it's not like the shield breaker where you need armored otherwise she's gonna be kind of kind of in she has a lot of good trinkets she has a really good early trinket that boosts her crit by three percent I think it used to be one percent they buffed it but she has some good shrink it's that really helped her out on whatever you're trying to fill with her as a role her keening bolts from color of madness are really good and then her crimson quartzite trinket is also fantastic so she's really good on the equipment and the stats and outside of her damage it's really just the fact that she's supposed to snipe things and kill them that way and she's not incredibly effective at it and the game also doesn't really accommodate that considering the biggest threats have multiple turns which destroy mark that's why she's still near the bottom sadly still one of my favorite classes though even if it's not the most optimal strategy I do like bringing her places I do like the satisfaction of marking stuff and then having her shoot them so there's definitely one of those cases where fun kind of supersedes overall effectiveness coming up next I will reiterate these are not in a specific order outside of the bottom ones again there's just how they're written in my notes but we're gonna do the bounty hunter all right so the bounty hunter very cool class very uh almost edge lordy in a way gray just this masked man collecting bounties man a few words slice and stuff you may have already noticed the fact that he's next to the árboles there's this a theme that they both share with mark and critic and high-rolling and stuff there are times where the bounty hunter will just chain three crits together and it just seems like the best class and you're going why don't I take this everywhere but outside of some good rng you have to dig a little deeper into the specifics to see why he occupies his own space and the noble b-tier the actual biggest reason that he's not higher is that the highwayman exists the highwayman is just better I feel in almost every way possible than the bounty hunter the bounty hunter has a couple more hit points but he has lower speed has less versatility in his attacks he's only melee outside of a couple supporting type skills and his damage is lower than the highwayman so he's always putting out a little less and you're really just banking on crits and the fact that Mark is okay as a strategy like again no strategy is outright terrible unless that's actually stupid or something but mark is probably not the best dps strategy so that leaves our lonely bounty hunter down here I will say though his personal mark lowering protection is very good it's probably the best I would say between being able to lower dodge and lower prot I'd rather lower prot in most cases because I can always slap on a trinket to get some extra accuracy I can't slap on a trinket see at armor piercing I don't think I don't think there's no piercing tricky out in the game his higher base speed makes marking a problem also he can't do like with the árboles you can have the Bounty Hunter mark and then the árboles finishes him off with the Bounty Hunter he's still pretty quick so he's got like one term where he's kind of doing something else waiting for the mark personalist it's like the hound master and you manipulates speed with the bracer or something like that or quick-draw but otherwise bounty hunter is just kind of doing his own thing the first turn he's not usually set up by then some of his bus that came through actually were pretty good come-hither being able to mark was really good caltrops is actually fantastic now I I would actually I would probably move him up to the a tier by itself if caltrops could hit the second rank but it can't it can only go to three and four but his different ways to stun he can hit from the first three ranks pretty reliably is different ways to mark those are all worth something right they're still pretty good but overall most the rating comes down to the fact that his marking and crit killing is less consistent than something like the highwayman which is just doulas advanced point-blank spam that kind of thing like other DPS classes are usually more consistent than the bounty hunter the bounty hunter is really good if you're high rolling so naturally he's gonna get a little better near the end of the game when you get some trinkets his trinkets are decent some of his earlier trinkets are actually surprisingly good like his comment rank at the boots of speed and his dodge is pretty good the hunter Salim which boosts critten accuracy is pretty good even if you have to eat extra food he has a bad trinket like that camping helmet kind of May its crimson quartz that's a little frustrating because when they were designing you just get this feel where it's like it's almost too good because it has to be able to cover all of his options right he has to have his caltrops buff is come Hitler buff or is his uppercut if you actually use that and then I'll show you so we get a marking and so we're gonna give them all this damage boost if they're marked and it's like it's all kind of - it might be too good so let's just put the - Dodge on there because we don't want to put - stress I should say added stress and I think actually I will say this it's smart to give it - dodge over added stress because he's usually the one killing things so he's gonna lower stress automatically by critic and killing stuff so actually the - Dodge is way more painful than that it feels like plus 10% stress I would not care but the - 10 Dodge is like Oh kinda hurts a little bit his crystal mask is pretty good it's never bad to have speed and dodge and then like 5% stress is kind of an afterthought it's just it's good but it doesn't really help him too much in terms of what he's trying to accomplish unless you're trying to have him mark first otherwise usually want him to be the one to kill stuff so you want damage instead of speed even though speed does help you kill so crystal mass still good just doesn't fit him too well outside of giving him some protection because he's on the frontline but as I saying before I would usually rather take a highwayman every time instead of a bounty hunter just because the highwayman is more consistent and that actually kind of that hurts to say this camping skills are also pretty underwhelming like the scouting and surprise chance are actually nice but planned takedown usually a lot of the bigger bosses it feels really bad putting for camping points into a single person buff for a specific enemy alright this is something like if you wanted to boost your boss killing and they occupy two spaces you take plan takedown but usually protection is kind of the Achilles heel to that because because anything with some extra protections gonna cut into this pretty hard and so as I was saying before if I'm spent for points I'd rather be a party buff or something just straight-up incredible that I can justify it on I don't think that a little bit of bonus accuracy and some extra damage is the thing like I would rather spend two points on his this is how we do it skill and just get the extra crit instead of something that works for everyone I should say against everyone instead of the spore pointer that only works on big bosses next up is one of my personal favorites and something that I definitely could have made a case for being maybe the best character or definitely in the top three previously but that's the flatulent poor little guy used to be easily s tier has fallen it's probably like high beats here I know I'm saying that it's not more of a left to right thing but the more I'm thinking about it as I'm doing this I'm definitely thinking the current three are gonna be lower than the next people in the B tier if that makes sense his stats are honestly mediocre all things considered he's got kind of low HP but that's because he has easy ways to heal himself his dodge is kind of low for a frontliner his speeds actually really good at nine his base crits kind of low and his base damage is pretty low but they're definitely reasons for that so back in the day punish used to be able hit the third-ranked which made it just absolutely nuts because you could hit you know near the back with something that's pretty strong and put a five six point bleed on him and it may drain of Sorrows actually decidedly worthless for the most part because this way it was easier to just chunk down someone's squishy in the back I don't have to worry about it instead of having to deal with them for a couple turns as rain of Sorrows bleeds him out his low HP skills like exsanguinate and redeem used to be able to be used just all the time there is no per battle limit which made them just again insane it'd be pretty easy for him to get low HP because he has low HP and then you could just hit one of those and you just heal up really easily he claims actually okay I thought it wasn't that good at first but then I actually tried to use it a little more and then it felt like it's it's actually a solid supplemental heal and it kind of goes in with what he's trying to do where he's okay getting low HP and all that the heal is okay and each individual tick can crit I think so I makes it decidedly a little better he has some solid synergy with the Jester cuz you can use endure to lower someone else's stress and buff his speed and then the Jester can heal him when he needs it then suffer is solid depending on where you're going to but usually if I'm looking for a force skill there I would rather use anything else before suffer so it's kind of tough to it like it's not bad but it's never oh I need this right here this thing specifically this cam skills are all okay you can cure some disease which is really good lowering your suspect 50 he's never bad I know that he gets stronger the more torn up he gets a low HP high stress stuff like that but the fact is his affliction rapturous it's still an affliction right it's he gets some really good buffs and all that but still an affliction and if you can it's usually ideal to not be afflicted unless you're really trying to ride the orangey Train of having him not die at a heart attacks or just raw damage by giving them death blow resist and stuff like that we're knocking a stress up by 40 is still ideal but the thing that gets me about all of these is the subtle again tax as I was saying before like where the shield breaker needs to wear an HP booster for the most part the flatulent can only lower his stress in the penance haul so anytime you need to knock stress off him it's gonna be you know about 2,000 gold depending and that starts adding up so if you can usually don't want to get them stress out especially early on when you first get him and because his kid is so bleed centric you don't usually want to take him into the ruins or the cove where bleed resist is a bigger issue but he does fantastic in the Warren's he's definitely my first warms character that I like to grab he's incredible in the crimson court I mean that whole DLC was tailored for him basically but overall the high-risk high-reward kind of play style of having to stress him out or get him low HP and stuff like that is scary and that's why I don't want to put him higher than me especially because the nerf said I'm pretty hard but at some point you're gonna lose the 13% chance or whatever on death blow and he's gonna die or the afflictions gonna screw you in one turn and it might get someone else killed and this is more of a personal preference I don't like to play with too much variance I like to control as much as I can so throwing it all to RNG with those various different play styles and percentages and stuff like that is kind of alarming there's an awkward cut point because we're going to trinkets you don't want to end on an upward inflection killing that's good no you sure timeout something else but here we go trinkets this trinkets are meh I think they're okay and they definitely help him achieve his objectives but for the most part I feel like I have the most trouble doing trinkets with this character it's always like martyr seal or one of his class trinkets and then something else you know it's just kind of a toss up so it's actually a good idea if anyone has any flatulent trinket advice please throw down there I'll gladly appreciate it otherwise I think like the bleed charm or the bleed amulet or whatever the the green one that gives you bleed chance and bleed resist is pretty good you know you can't go wrong with his main source of damage this crimson quartz that's a little confusing you get a lot of death blow which is good and then you lower his bleed resist which kind of sucks cuz using things like reclaim you'd rather have it up and then move resist isn't a huge deal for him movers this is in my opinion the worst resist to have if you have to pick one to be worse it's definitely movers this and also with his ridiculous speed he can move forward three spaces he can get back up to the front no problem rate his movement is not an issue so having movers this on a shrink it feels like kind of a wasted stat and then I'm not a huge fan of his crimson core trinket but that isn't to say that it's bad it's just not my personal preference he's also religious which he used to be kind of a mixed bag because of certain things with camp skills and stuff like that but being religious is largely helpful now especially if you bring Vestal and Crusader to places otherwise flatulent very fun character one of my personal favorites to sum it up nerfs hit pretty hard and now he's really good against anything that is part of crimson court so the fanatic any of the crimson court missions but outside of there maybe like the Warrens kind of tough to justify bringing him over someone else next up another s to your character or previously s to your character they got hit pretty hard with a nerf hammer the zone hammer the man in Arms we're starting to get into that territory where you can make a case for like low a tier but I don't want to have the ACE here to be completely just loaded up with things so I'm making the hard split right here but the man in Arms used to be easily top three characters in the game and so before I was saying the flatulent was one right then the man-at-arms the other would actually well well when we get there right when we get there we'll talk about who that other used to be third character was on the top in my opinion of course but man-at-arms got some pretty big nerfs the first couple were definitely fair and that is his big battle buffs like bolster and command and all that they became just one use things once a battle which arguably could be a sideways buff rate you only have to hit it one time and then you get to use whatever else the rest of time which is okay but bolsters specifically bolster was ridiculous before so I definitely understand the nerf bolster used to be buffing your speed and your Dodge and that's like buffing your offense and your defense at the same time which made it incredible and it also wasn't a per battle thing and it just lasted three rounds so you could actually bolster in those situations where you had a fight in a hallway right outside of a door or vice versa like a room battle outside of a hallway battle and you could bolster on the last turn with the man in arms and just carry that buff into into the next battle which was really good and so that got nerfed to high hell which is again fine but now bolster is still solid not as good as he used to be but it's still nice and then command is actually I would say it's better command is actually pretty cool with the damage buff or guarding so you can just guard your DPS monster you know and protect them and then watch them just crush everything so that's actually pretty cool I do need to use command more like I abused it I understand how it works but I just feel like defense wins out in darkest dungeon more than offense so being able to control what the enemies are doing and stuff like that is usually better than just buffing yourself with damage in most cases so I usually like to take bolster if I have to take a buff defenders still pretty good guarding an ally never bad taking hits it's really good on things like the Prophet and I feel like it's almost 100 percent required for the second darkest dungeon mission because you only get three talismans to block revelation so having a defender not defender of man-at-arms with the talisman guarding the person that doesn't I feel you almost have to do that ramparts still pretty good it doesn't hit the 3rd rank any more which really hurts that's one of the nerfs he got so you only get to slap the first-tier which again it's fair it's just you notice it's like you'll have something that's almost you could argue that it's broken in terms of how good it is and then they nerf it a little bit and then these characters kind of come back to reality into the mid tears and the man-at-arms is definitely following that suit just like the flatulent then he has retribution which is still good riposte is never bad especially with a certain group attacks that trigger it so it's always cool to have something like that but marking yourself does kind of suck because there are a lot of enemies that gets energy off it's they have to be really careful where you're doing it if you want to be super super cheesy about it not cheesy but optimal you could have the are bolused with the man-at-arms for instance and anytime you're using something like retribution to mark yourself you can just rallying flare it off the next turn especially because she's so slow she's usually gonna go last but then do you really need to write the man-at-arms is pretty tanky in terms of stats he's definitely up there and his lower HP compared to people like the Crusader and all that is supplemented by things like defender boosting his prot let me come down to his last couple things crush is the sad one because the other thing that got nerfed and one of the patches was his damage he sued eight to sixteen I believe and now he does eight to fourteen so he was kind of like Loki really good at also being a frontliner cuz he's pretty tanky he has all the support stuff and then he could crush things for respectable damage right eight to sixteen his bounty hunter damage so he was able to do that kind of stuff upfront which was really good then they nerfed it down to fourteen it kind of hurts a little bit it hurts a little bit by not hurting as much that makes sense where he's not hurting them as much and then there's Bello I don't like Bello and the reason is Bello has to make two checks to succeed it has to make an accuracy right it has to hit the target to actually go off and then it has to beat their D buffers us to also stick so that's why I don't like Bello too much I'd rather use something like bolster or command because when you have those your buffing yourself right those don't miss you can't miss your party with your own buffs but having to go through Bello and having to go through those double checks and stuff like that especially when you get to champion missions and things have more evasion than normal right you start having like a baseline seventy-five eighty percent chance to hit Bello gets a lot worse and then having to beat their debuff resist also makes it not as ideal so it's like if your trinkets do you bring more detection abilities right or quick-draw people have done that before I've seen it used pretty well right you can quick draw your command and stuff like that get some really early strong buffs going on because you don't really need the speed afterwards especially if you buff your speed but then yeah are you bringing debuff charm Plus tank charm accuracy charm plus tank charm two tank charms right it's it doesn't mesh too well you really have to plan out what your man-at-arms is doing before you even leave the hamlet it's am I just buffing and cleaning up you know my buffing and protecting and my D buffing and damaging and stuff like that you have to make that choice before you leave you have to tranq it accordingly you can't have it so you change up what you're doing when you get to the boss or something like that it's just not as effective sadly best part of the man-at-arms though in my opinion are the camp skills like they're all pretty freaking fantastic tactics is in the running for one of the best camp skills in the game it's like old bolster right dodge and crit so you're getting offense and defense together and it hits the whole party there's no 75% chance or whatever so that's really good weapons practice chance to land the crit even though the 10% damage is okay and I would actually say his worst camp skills maintained equipment so I know he got nerfed in the past I would like to see that one go two maybe three I think three costs for the camping skill requirement would be nice instead of four two would make it pretty insane I probably put it on every time but at three it feels pretty fair for a single person buff right same 15% prot 15% damage on a character with damaged now he's down to 8 to 14 and said 8 to 16 so you're kind of like I don't know if I want to buff this guy who's here for I don't want to buff this guy's damage when he's here for buffing the team and protecting allies and stuff like that his trinkets actually suck because you remember we were saying the criteria section of things we're looking at class trinkets for our analysis his class trinkets are just bad the rampart shield was probably his best one and that got nerfed with 15 percent damage decrease so they're just bad The Guardian shield is okay surprisingly I do like it it's kind of tough to use but the thing that sucks is you're putting your mane and arms in back so he doesn't get to use some of his other skills so he has to like be in the act the whole time and because you don't have to spam your bus the whole battle really just hit your buffs at the start and just put guard on everyone which is okay but you're basically trading something he's always doing which is buffing for him being super tanky in the back which doesn't take a lot of damage the backline takes stress it doesn't usually take direct damage and you're trading a very precious rank for slot that's your Archer that's your sniper that's your plague doctor right that's your control the backline clean it up kind of thing you're trading that for something he's normally doing already all the time which is buffing and tanking so even then none of his class trinkets are good I don't usually find myself putting them on when I have any choice of anything else so maybe you know the start of the game if I get one early of course I'm gonna put onyx have nothing else but otherwise mid game late-game I'm putting on boss trophies ancestor trinkets those kinds of things I'm not touching the man in arm trinkets usually as cruising court sets actually okay but the thing is it's really pitching holds you in to a specific loadout it's gonna be retribution it's gonna be rampart and it's gonna be bellow and then you have like your choice of something else and when you have to decide between is really good group buffs like command and bolster or guard I don't like having to make that choice so again I'd rather just use neutral trinkets in most cases mirror shield is very cool thematically anything much like your Zelda's and other stuff having a reflective shields Dark Souls 2 LOL very cool type of item and at first I was looking at it I went why I really want this and then the more I looked at it and thought about it this item actually feels like bait I don't like to use the term new bait kind of thing because again Moon Moon famously called the gesture new bait and then went oh wait this class is actually pretty good but the mere shield the reason it feels like it's bait is it does it does things right you see that damage reflection that dodge and stuff and like right that seems pretty cool but it's in conflict with itself and then it has an almost wasted stat stun resist is pretty good because you only get knocked out of your guard but man and arms has some pretty solid baseline stammers this already and stun is not too common usually the AI isn't as tactical as the player at that level where they I with a stun attack is never gonna be like I'm gonna stun the man in arms so the party can dumpster the person who's guarding right it's it's very rare for that situation to come up and usually the player is already aware of that and they go oh that person can stun and so they're trying to get rid of that monster the other two are the damage reflection with the reflected damage coming from what they actually take so for instance if it normally does ten but you have some Pradhan and it goes down to seven you're bouncing 30% of seven which is a little bit right any extra damage helps but it's not that much it's counterintuitive you're bouncing damage when you're trying to minimize the damage you're taking so it helps out a little bit but again it's not that great and then you're also buffing your dodge which means you're not taking damage so the main gimmick of the shield is to reflect damage but you're also buffing your dodge so you don't take damage right this item is in conflict with itself that's why I don't like it that much even though again very cool thematically but again for the third time I would rather use neutral trinkets and just about any capacity with the man-at-arms instead of any of this class stuff so overall pretty supportive class the nerf bat hit it pretty hard so now it's really just good for buffing it doesn't have like that supplemental damage and cleanup that he used to have the buffs aren't as overpowered as they used to be in so in most cases you're gonna find yourself hitting your buffs and then guarding if you need to then like we're posting I feel like that might be the best but still not bad right you know where our tier list is short in terms of how many tiers we have but the even if something again just because it's be tier doesn't mean it's unplayable and viable there are plenty of times I'm like I need a man at arms and that's going in this team so don't think just because it's in the bottom half or whatever it's like oh I shouldn't play this it's not that good that's not the case next up is the one that I feel like is easily the most controversial pick on this entire thing it was the most difficult to place this character is gone from top to bottom you know in the same hour of thought that I've had when I was making this this whole list and video and even now I'm still going but this is where we're landing with it on the very edge of the be tier it's the king so the leper mr. self-sufficient mr. I don't need anyone elses help to do anything to me is decidedly beat here and there are a few reasons right let's go back to our criteria in terms of stats and stuff the stats are pretty good he's got ridiculous hit points as dodge is actually okay his speed is garbage but he doesn't need it his baseline crit surprisingly five and everyone that thinks of the leper thinks of these just high role you know forty damaged Hughes that take away the first two people for free every single time but that crit chance needs some help and it's almost like the devs knew you're gonna be stacking it highest base damage in the game thirteen to twenty six at max the only thing that sucks about it is the extreme variance but the percentage is for that variance are fair right you see a lot of eight to sixteen seven to fourteen right it's always minimum and then double what that is so thirteen to twenty six is in line with how they're balancing it but having a thirteen damage range means you can get some really good hits and some really garbage hits also his bleed resists being ten is so bad bleed is the most common dot it's in almost every zone in some form or another and being able to be hit by literally every bleed that ever comes your way is really garbage and then also it makes helium with the occultus an actual risk because you can sometimes low roll the heal and then you're almost guaranteed to get the bleed in most cases the other parts of our criteria were what ranks can they function in he's only good and wanted to he is no back row game plan he gets screwed by movement the hardest and even though his base movers this is pretty high the fact that movers this does not protect him from the party being moved makes it really easy to screw up his game plan so even if he doesn't get screwed up by Miranda move or whatever they gets thrown his way or the party shuffle the other party could just be thrown in such a way around him that he just gets put to third or fourth and then he only moves one space at a time so it's pretty tough for him to fix it which means the whole team has to be ready for that scenario right before we're saying how effective and versatile they are he's not versatile he's very effective where he's at but also the team has to accommodate him anytime you bring a leper you have to be thinking to yourself is there a way I can get him back up to the front with like one or two other characters or in at most like one turn because the most feels bad possible thing with the leper is when he accidentally just by some circumstance gets thrown to the fourth-ranked and you have no way of fixing it he has to move up two times right he has to go forward for both of his turns and it's just a waste it feels like such a waste all things considered as well for as much damage as he does all of the high prot enemies usually chill in the front so he's got this massive damage and he's swinging into things that commonly have like 30 40 percent pride no same with the Bounty Hunter AME árboles for the most part also this is another Hyrule character actually the flatulent to a lesser extent Ray because of the death blow and the rapturous and stuff like that the affliction these lower end characters if a high roll they seem god-tier but if they say low roll they just don't seem that strong and you're gonna notice that as we get higher up in the list that can its consistency that wins out it's gonna be the characters that seem that they don't have to rely too much on variants it's always like each turn this is reliably happening first combat skills you're always having chopped there's that's that's the reason he's there is to hit the chop button on anything that comes his way there was a player I played with him Pathfinder his paladin could do some pretty good damage and he called his sword the choppy's and that's what I think about the leper in this move it's always you got to give him the choppy's got a high roll those 60 damage crits got a chunk those front liners no I'm saying Hugh is one of the few double target moves that's actually pretty good just because of the lepers insane base damage and there's nothing more satisfying in darkest dungeon than hitting a double Hugh on like turn one that crit kills both of the the two people on the front it's just like oh yes I want this character every time purge is surprisingly good it buffs his accuracy does okay damage at the minus 40 it's got some solid baseline accuracy for a character that doesn't have good baseline accuracy and clearing corpses is really good there are only a couple moves that do this the plague doctor I believe has the other one I can't think of another one off the top but we'll probably see that there is one but purge just adds to self-sustainability you know those situations where I don't want this character up here I'm gonna just slap him all the way to the back row or these corpses were in my way I want these squishies in the back purged it's all good right so he does have a way to get around those tanky front liners so if you have like for instance here and like the ruins and you have that big skeleton that takes two spaces he has high pride you just slap them to the back row and then you just those archers and the the tempting Goblet dude in the back his self buffs are actually not that detrimental it may seem like it I would still slap revenge on him every time especially in the big battles even if he has 25% extra damage taken and - dodging all that his inherent tankyness is still pretty good I don't mind making that trade because you get that damage bonus that crit bonus that accuracy bonus he's gonna start wrecking the turn after withstand is okay the extra prod is really helpful the various resistances are pretty good but the only resist he has to be afraid of really is bleed and his is so low that buffing it without an extra train to help it out is still okay but doesn't seem like it would help that much and then marking yourself again is never too good of a thing solemnity is fantastic I don't that's solemnity or solemnity I'm going with that one but it's the same thing that the abomination gets where you heal yourself drop stress really good adds to his reputation for being self sustained and then intimidate I think went through a change I don't remember it doing exactly this especially the stealth casteless a new mechanic but you get to drop stealth which is helpful but mostly with the leper you're not using your turn to debuff if that makes sense you're not using your turn to set someone else up using your turn to kill something so in most cases if you're not using your emergency self heal or buffing or hitting you or hitting chop your leper turn is usually wasted this camp skills are actually pretty good even though he's in the bottom half of the tier list I would definitely say the leper is in the top half of camp skills they're all focused on himself for the most part but they're pretty cheap for how strong they're in terms of the points they cost for instance laying the mast down only one point but you get minus twenty five stress is pretty high and then five stress on everyone not too big of a deal it's not back-breaking or anything like that so you're basically you're lowering 25 to put in 15 so it's a 1-point for a net gain of 10 which is alright and buffing his resistances is pretty good but usually you don't need all four so you just get away with using a trinket to buff something specific if you need it but again it's two points it's actually pretty good but usually you're gonna be using reflection for one - ting stress is usually pretty good so taking off 20 by itself is nice getting 10 accuracy something he desperately needs in most cases and then getting eight crit top of that for three points we've seen some other abilities let's compare right let's think about the bounty hunter with his plus 15 accuracy I'm plus 25% damage conditionally not unconditionally just conditionally cost four points and we look at reflection unconditional accuracy unconditional crit unconditional stress lowering three points it's a really good skill usually when I bring a leper it's this is the first button I hit depending on who else is there then quarantine pretty good if you need to lower some of the companion stress because he's so tanky losing 20% HP isn't a big deal he can sell feel that back in the next battle like it's not even a big deal and again only three points very handy very efficient skills for the leper all of his class traits are actually pretty solid I don't have that thing with the man in arms where it's like I'd rather just bring a neutral trinket 100% of the time there are cases you can make especially with some of his earlier ones like the fortunate armlet is pretty good and the redemption armlet is pretty good even at high levels if you don't have another really good shrinkage just having an extra 15% damage for basically nothing then minus three virtues whatever so you can't really go wrong with any of his personal trinkets this crimson quartzite isn't that good I feel the minus that flow kind of hurts the bonus accuracy the condition kind of sucks even though it has its own way to protect it with the extra prot in the HP the minus stress is okay so it's not it's a good set but I feel like if you want to do something else like a focus ring you can get more out of it if you use a focus ring and something else and then the petrified amulet is weird bonus accuracy if you have a bandage - bleed resist he's not blocking anything anyway and then bonus HP is still pretty good and it's only one thing it's not assets that's okay but normally with the leper and spoilers I'm gonna work on a class guide in a bit probably sometime next week but you can usually just get away with the focus ring and like the ancestors pan or crescendo box or bracer or something like that and that's really all he needs but again if you're gonna slide in some of his regular trinkets those are all pretty good - in summation though leper needs some kind of help from a trinket or from the team in most cases as self-sufficient as he is he still needs other people to help him out to get targets where he needs them or to compensate for his shortcomings like his dreadful accuracy really likes having the Jester I feel like any leper party I always find myself bringing a gesture just to hit him with a battle buff for him specifically just gives them critten accuracy it's all I really wants ironically enough the best way to circumvent the lepers biggest weakness which is as positioning it's not bring a full party you can't get thrown into the third or fourth slide if there's no third or fourth person in the party so having a party of double lepers or like one leper and one healer can work I wouldn't advise it on high level stuff but if you really want to have some fun and challenge yourself and grind out every battle by having to spend like six turns chopping in hewing then you can definitely do it regardless that's gonna do it for the beats here and the video thanks for watching let me know what y'all are thinking in the comments I'm sure we have some agreements and disagreements I've already seen some other people's tearless and the midst of editing this one make sure you sub and all that garbage and even hit the bell because I'm kind of sporadic with uploads and feel free to come harass me in discord which I have a link in the description and next time we're going into the higher tiers and I'm thinking this is gonna be a three-part series just because as we get higher there's inevitably more to talk about so therefore longer videos longer explanations that's why it's gonna be three parts instead to two and again thanks for watching and I'll see you later

Channel: ShuffleFM

Views: 518,052

Rating: 4.8258958 out of 5

Keywords: Let's Play, Darkest Dungeon 2, guide, tips, help, playthrough, walkthrough, gameplay, ending, last boss, moonmoon, filthyrobot, speedrun, cohh, wayne june, ancestor, lore, optimized, best, challenge, hard mode, stygian, blood moon, dlc, crimson court, color of madness, ost, tier list, analysis, big daddy berkut, 2019, 2018

Id: Nx1QY8J2DZg

Length: 54min 18sec (3258 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2019