Defenses and You: Darkest Dungeon Guide

what's up y'all shuffle and today we're going to talk about defenses in darkest dungeon so we're talking about the stats and how they interact and where they are good and where they are weak this is just because i've been hearing a lot of talk about the defensive stats recently so i do think that i should make a video about them at some point and i guess that point is now before we get started as always if you enjoy the video give it a thumbs up if you want to talk about some stuff leave a comment down below and then if you want to check out the description for all sorts of cool stuff like twitch where i stream four days a week discord where all the cool people hang out and patreon for people that want to support the channel further all of that is down below if you want to get started with that so go ahead after we talk about some defenses of course a couple of general points before we get into these specific points because we have four specific things we want to talk about today so we're talking about dodge protection hp and resistances before we get into those i do want to talk about stress damage it does matter there are situations where you should be considering it actually most the time you should be considering it and a couple of the defenses don't matter against stress which i find very interesting the stats for an aquarian skill protect me also need to be discussed at least just a tiny bit in a video talking about defenses because this move is a guard it also sets up a mark targeting and it gives the unit that has it bonus dodge and bonus protection this move covers so much ground the stats are absolutely insane and it is a fantastic defensive move that can be used for a variety of purposes you can use it to guard and protect an aquarium you can use it to set up or post you can use it to give someone just defensive stats in general if you think they're going to be taking hits regardless of the mark targeting there are a lot of cool things to do with this move and you should be using it if you have an aquarian on your team we're going to start the main points by talking about dodge dodge is very interesting for a variety of reasons dodge is a stat that you either take zero hp or stress damage or you take all of it that means it is pretty inconsistent because it is inherently reliant on rng either sometimes you dodge four times straight and you just take no damage which is amazing and then sometimes you can have 50 dodge and get hit in the face four times and that is not fun i have gotten comments in the past where people say dodge is absolutely worthless in torchless and that is not true at all it does take a little more work to get value out of dodge but there are a couple things even about that so in torchless the enemies get a bonus 12.5 accuracy so more chance to hit you which means all of your dodge stats are effectively about 13 percent less so you have to get just that much more dodge in order to make it more worthwhile and torchless there are things like moon cloak which are just straight 15 dodge in darkness and that's awesome there are also a lot of other dodge trinkets like ancestor coat and whatnot that give you more bonus dodge a lot of characters have access to dodge so even though you need a lot of dodge and torchless to make it seem worthwhile it is still worth using the other side of the torchless coin that's pretty interesting is the fact that the stats in torchless are so skewed in terms of the damage output of the enemies it means that having high dodge values actually gets better because why deal with getting hit for all that absurd amount of damage so instead of dealing with the enemy having 30 increased bonus damage or 50 increased stress damage and having to watch as pelagic groupers aka cove lepers hit you for like 25 an apprentice instead of dealing with that you can just dodge instead dodge as a defense also works against every single thing in the game if it is a bleed attack you can dodge it if it's a physical attack you can dodge it if it's a stress attack you can also dodge it there are some exceptions to what you can dodge because some things have so much accuracy that you can't do anything about it but besides all of that dodge is an absolute defense it answers every situation and is also a defense that every character can get a decent amount of every character in the game has dodged that comes with increasing their armor levels and not all characters get protection or high amounts of hp but everyone gets a decent amount of dodge which means you can lean into it and boost it there are also team abilities that give you more dodge mana arms has a couple and aquarium has a couple she has flash powder which is like kind of inverse dodge and then she has the dodge vapors invigorating vapors which buffs your entire team for dodge also of note are besides these group skills that give you dodge there are a lot of personal skills that give you dodge as well hound masters guard gives him a lot of dodge grave robber has shadow fade that gives her dodge and aquarium has get down that gives her dodge and then there are the trinkets that give you dodge there are just tons of them out there there are a lot of neutral trinkets that do it a lot of characters have personal trinkets they give them dodge as well so dodge is all over the place it is easy to get a large amount of it is easy to stack up and it can be effective even in torchless where you may not think it is a common misconception with dodge is that you need like a hundred percent dodge or over 100 in terms of the numerical value in order to make it worthwhile so the enemy only has a five percent chance to hit you at that point because it doesn't matter how much dodge you have the enemy does have a five percent chance to hit you at all times so having a large amount of dodge seems like you have to get just really absurdly high numbers before it's even worth using and that's not the case in regular play so high torch levels even if it's stitch in blood moon whatever if you can get a character to about 50 dodge at champion then that's good enough honestly if you can turn the enemy's attacks into just about a 50 chance or 60 chance to hit you meaning you're gonna be dodging the other 50 or 40 of the time that is good enough that is honestly good enough in just about every situation even for like the frontline bruisers if you can get them that high but having manned arms at like 47 50 dodge something like that that's that's fine that's honestly good enough another good part about dodge is it does the best out of the defenses with limited healing i talked to thick before i made this video and that was a point he brought up and i thought that was very smart because if you have limited healing you still don't want to get hit even if you have a large amount of prop because you're still taking damage if you have a large amount of hp it's still hard to heal that back up so you don't want to be getting hit which means dodge is the last thing you should be looking for not the last thing the first thing you should be looking for because it handles that situation the final point about dodge that i'm gonna make is dodge is a defensive stat that functions at death store so when you are at death store your protection matters a little bit doesn't matter a whole lot but it does matter just a bit your hp total value doesn't matter it mattered before you got to death store because it took you longer to get there but once you're a death store it doesn't matter if you have a thousand hit points because you are one hit from dying essentially and then resistances can matter at death's door not just death blow resist but like bleed and flight resist those do matter a little bit they also help you from getting to death store like it prevents you from getting there sooner but dodge is the one stat that completely has the potential to work at death store you have a chance to just not get hit at all and not have to roll deathbow resist and you might actually live because of that next up is prot aka protection or sometimes called armor prot is a percentage base value that shaves that much damage off an attack if you have 50 prod and you get hit for 10 damage it's gonna go down to five which is awesome there is the added benefit that pro rounds up on numbers when it's calculating the damage you're taking so even having something like the very noble small very common trinket protection stone that is i believe minus one speed for five prot that usually takes one damage off most attacks coming at you so those little chip damage attacks from like cult of switch who hit you with stressful incantation instead of that doing one it can do zero and if a move hits you for zero damage even if you're at death store it does not check death blow that is something i don't know if newer players understand but if you get hit at death store for any damage that's won or more it will check your death blow resist to see if you survive if you get hit for zero if the number that is displayed when you get hit by an attack is zero then it will not check death blow and you can survive that's awesome pront is a very consistent defensive stat because it always works when you get hit directly it always calculates the same number against any attack it's always you know minus 20 or minus 25 percent whatever it is so prod is pretty nice in that respect it's consistent it can do its job pretty well there are characters that can get a lot of prot like crusader and man in arms and leper but prot is sadly not widely available to most heroes if you do not have a trinket like barristan's head or heavy boots most characters cannot get prod it's also very hard to buff your allies prod with a character so the only things that you can really do about it are using things like protect me or pray with vestal that's a camp skill you can use that in camp and that gives everyone a bit of pride which is nice sometimes there are some strategies like running four vessels that can all spam prey on each other which is pretty funny but otherwise there's nothing like bolster that can give the entire team prod and then you can use shard dust to hit it a bunch of times prod also only works against one type of damage and that is a direct hit so if the enemy does one damage like ooka crab and then puts a 10 point bleed on you then your prod doesn't really matter at that point because you're worried about the bleed not the on hit damage prod is also something that is difficult to get a large amount of there are a couple skills like i said before bulwark of faith withstand those can get you a chunk of prot for a one button press but only man in arms can really get a sizable amount of it on demand and quickly and stack it and then keep it prod also has a cap it caps at 80 whereas something like dodge you can get well past 100 if you have enough trinkets and quirks and buffs on the people my final point about prod is that it functions at death store which is very nice as i said before hp does not function at death store it functions before death store but it does not function once you're at death store so prod does have that going for it it is kind of nice sometimes when you do have a good twenty percent maybe forty percent of prod made with man arms or something like that and you hit death store for whatever reason and then they hit you and you just see a zero because then you know you at least survived that attack our third defensive stats to talk about are hit points aka hp hp is pretty nice because it is like dodge and the fact that it is a universal stat every character has their own hp total some have more than others you can get some things that do get you more hp like stacking it there are a couple trinkets that can stack it for you or camp skills like snakeskin is one that gives you hp which is pretty cool and hp does matter a lot in general like the whole game deals a lot of hp damage to you alongside the stress damage so you do need some hp if you don't have other defenses to help you survive hp works against all types of physical damage or i should say non-stress damage i guess you can survive damage over time if you have enough hp and then you don't have to worry about healing it right away or using a provision you can handle getting hit in the face with a big crit and what's nice is the beef east units in the game usually don't have to worry about going down to hp damage man and arms still can go down to hp damage because he's guarding people but crusader and leper are rarely in danger if played properly to hp damage because they have their own cell fuels and stuff like that but the hp totals that they reach are usually enough to really not be threatened by anything except certain bosses that can put out high damage very quickly as i spoke of before with the other defensive stats hp is something that does not function once you reach death store so you can have all the hp in the world you can bring healers that keep you above death store and help you keep that massive hp total filled up but once you hit death store or heart attack from stress it doesn't matter how much hp you had because it's all gone now hp sadly does not have a lot of ways to boost your max total you have healing which is very effective there are a lot of ways to heal hp there are characters that can heal it there are curio that can heal it there are skills that can heal it which i guess is characters but then there's food too so a lot of ways to heal hp but there are not a lot of ways to stack large amounts of it and one could argue also that if you can stack large amounts of hp you're probably better off stacking prot at some point i haven't crunched the numbers on this but there's definitely the idea of like diminishing returns and stuff and there's probably a break point where if you have a certain amount of hp you're better off getting prot instead which is something to keep in mind our final thing to talk about in this video are resistances this could be stress resist this could be bleeding blade resist whatever you're thinking of but resistances are pretty cool because everyone usually either has a strong resist somewhere plague doctor and grave robber i believe have above average blade resist same with abomination flagellant has high bleed resist so there are characters that have either one or two really good resists or they might have a solid amount across the board like just strong averages for resistances the flip side of that is some characters can have very low resistances on certain things i know that shield breaker has lower than average blight resist and leper has lower than average bleed resist the thing that i like a lot about resistances is that they are a proactive strategy so i talked about this in other videos but i'm a fan of proactive approaches resistances are very proactive you don't have to worry about using a provision or a skill to help you deal with the stress or the bleed that you just got hit with instead you can just resist it and minimize it or disregard it altogether in the case of damage over time or stun and things like that resisting stress overall is really good because stress is long-term damage it's residual you get it in hallways you get it from curio you get in fights you get stress all over the place in the game and being able to keep your stress down through resisting it is nice because you don't have to worry about healing it with character abilities or sending them to facilities after your missions which do cost money if you have really good bleed or blight resist you just resist a ton of damage even at apprentice level resisting a bleeder blight is resisting three damage just straight up that's really nice and then later on in the game a lot of champion enemies hit you for i believe four damage for three rounds so that's 12 damage over time with bleed and blight and if you can tell me that you have a stat that heals you for 12 instead of taking 12 damage you know that's that's pretty good right you'd use that the only other thing with that potential in the game is dodge but dodge has a chance to fail and resistances they have a chance to fail too but the percentage isn't as wide as dodge so let's say a bunch of dodge your dodge fails you get hit in the face but then you resist the bleed you resist some extra damage which is nice to do as i just said dodge is something that is more random than resistances just because of the wide range of possibility there in terms of variance resistances can get pretty high and pretty safe and it's really easy to do there are characters that can buff their own resistances or buff the resistances of others there's holy water that can boost your resistances for 33 for like three or four rounds which is nice but then there are trinkets it is very easy to just slap one trinket on someone if you're going somewhere like you're going to an area that has a lot of light you just put on a blade resist trinket and then blight isn't really much of an issue it can still stick and get through of course but most of the time you can whittle it down to a good you know 40 30 chance to hit and that's good enough kind of like the same thing we were talking about dodge earlier where you just need 40 to 50 chance to dodge something and that's good enough if you can get a resistance high enough to where the effect only takes place like 30 of the time that's honestly good that's worth doing that's worth a trinket slot or a skill or whatever being able to resist things like stress as i said before it saves you money in the long run because you don't have to worry about healing people outside of battle but also inside of missions it gets nice too you don't have to worry about bringing provisions like bandages to heal people's bleeds because they just resist it so a lot of the times when i would go somewhere like the cove i put bleed resist trinkets on my front liners the benefit of that is you save a lot of money on bandages and you don't have to buy as many when you go to something like the cove because you're resisting all the stupid stuff like arterial pinch which means you can turn around and use that money for provisions that help you loot things or corals stuff like that or just not take the provisions in general and save that money in that way to wrap up this video i want to make sure that everyone understands that all defenses are pretty good overall and they all have their place there are some fights in the game like boss battles where having a large amount of protection is really good there are some fights in the game where you can just get a little bit of dodge on everyone like 40 dodge 50 dodge and you can just break the entire encounter which is nice as well there are some bosses that do heavy status effects like damage over time or stress damage and being able to resist that and mitigate it to even like 40 or 50 effectiveness usually makes those fights a lot easier as well and then at the end of the day everyone usually gets hit at some point with damage and hp helps in that regard so i want to make sure that you understand that all defenses have their place that once you understand a bit more about the game like you understand the fights and the bosses and stuff you go okay i can stack protection on like this one person like man in arms and that will trivialize this fight none of this is even getting into the deeper aspect of defenses which is the other half of the defensive stuff which is what you do to the enemy so things like stuns prevent all the stuff coming at you being able to lower their accuracy with flash powder or suppressing fire does wonders you can spam weakening curse and intimidate from occultists and leopard respectively and lower their damage further there's so many things you can do to mitigate damage in this game and that's really awesome honestly so as long as you are creative enough with your heroes and their abilities you can find a lot of interesting solutions to big problems you don't have to beat every single boss the same way there's one boss that i'm not going to spoil but the go-to strategy like in the past was guarding because it did a lot of high damage at the end of the turn and then people started thinking like well what if we use a cultist and leopard and stuff like that to just spam damage debuffs on it or like minus damage debuffs on it to just take its damage down to 20 or even zero percent and that's great so there's just a lot of stuff out there and i encourage you to keep looking at it all right that's gonna do it for this one thanks for watching if you enjoyed the video like i said before give it a thumbs up let me know what you're thinking down below check out the social media stuff in the box if you have interest in anything like that the next video i'm not sure exactly what's coming up next but i am working on things like the crimson court guide i have another idea for unconventional builds that i could show off like funk vestal or support flagellate and stuff so there's a lot of cool stuff that we can still talk about as always thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: ShuffleFM

Views: 32,806

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

Id: XQWEtO50EgE

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 13 2021