How Good Are Bosses? Boss Tier List: Darkest Dungeon

what's up y'all shuffle and today we're going to do a boss tier list video and before i get into the stipulations this has been a video that's been requested a few times in the comments over the last few months so i decided to sit down and do it i'm using tear maker obviously i'm gonna go through a couple of the well whatever's here right this is the stuff they gave me but i'm gonna use the base game bosses the dlc bosses and a couple of the roaming mini bosses so if you do not want to get spoiled on all of the bosses and me talking about them then i understand if you click out of this video i'll miss you otherwise we will begin shortly so i'm going to take the bar off the screen or the centering or whatever it is so that way we can see the lineup of bosses and for the criteria i'm going to do a combination of just bosses i enjoy playing against i'm going to try and talk about what i like about them and i'm going to talk about if they're well designed or like if they have lore that i enjoy then i'll talk about the lore and i'm going to not necessarily go like you know this boss is super hard so test here or this boss is super easy so test here those may be like conditions sometimes because there are some mosses where it's kind of nice if they're easier because they'd be like really annoying if they're harder or there's some bosses that are kind of too hard sometimes so like i i understand before you get started make sure to follow me on twitch join discord and twitter all that stupid stuff okay i'm done and now we will remove the center bar and i'm not going from like s to a d or whatever i'm not going that way i'm just going from the order of bosses how i have them arranged here and then i'll talk about them as i get to them the criteria like i said the ones in s are ones i just think are well designed or they have like really cool lore or like i enjoy fighting them and i like team building for them or they have like other stuff we'll talk about the ones as it goes further down you know obviously like they're missing some stuff or like their lore isn't as cool or their design isn't as awesome or like they have like bad rewards or something like that then obviously if you get to d tier those are just not fun in any iteration and they they need like a total redesign at that point we will talk about the d tier like as we see them obviously so i'm going to start off with the collector collector i'm going to put in b i think collector is a pretty cool fight all things considered i do like the idea of this weird creature that just gets bodies and then takes their heads but not just their heads like their spines attach their heads and the spines go into these like little tentacle things and for some reason he has a highwayman a vestal and a man in arms which means that maybe that's what the devs feels a good solid party that covers most bases and for you know most intents and purposes there right the collector is interesting i i also like the lore like the i don't think it was like official lore i know someone made that like uh comic or something like that for him on reddit which i thought was pretty cool if you haven't seen that go check it out wait that's right so the cool part about the the potential lore for collector is the fact that he has heads and you find three heads like associated with them you can also find them in secret rooms so there's junior's head which is the vessel there's barristan's head which is the man of arms and there's dismiss head which is the highwayman and it's weird because you start with dismiss and the game is based on a time loop plotline so you can kind of see how maybe something like that happens like the collector transcends time or the player is out of time like outside of the the time loop that's happening or the paradox whatever you want to call it so i'm interested to know like exactly why that is and the collector himself the reasons i don't put him higher is because i think that as a unit or like as a fight he's not really that threatening except for highwayman which is why he always has to summon one highwayman and sometimes he gets two and like that's really the emphasis of the fight is how many highwaymen he gets and that's like the fight's supposed to be about collector not the highwaymen and the highwaymen themselves are just overtuned compared to the other two they just hit like way too freaking hard and i would rather that if they were going to keep collector like as is they would rebalance it so he only summons like one of each and then each time he summons or like when he summons them like they at least are more effective like the mana arms and the vessel are a little more effective or maybe collector has some more interesting attacks than just like lifesteal and just being a complete nuisance really the fight just comes down to highwayman and i think that that steals away from collector's thunder i think it's also interesting that the collector shows up when you have too much stuff in your inventory and then he shows up like because you have that and then when he dies he gives you a gem that is very hard to fit into your stuff so maybe that's intended where he's supposed to put pressure on the player to make decisions with their stuff otherwise i think it's just weird that like a person or a unit that's like supposed to show up because you have too much stuff gives you an item that is hard to manage in your inventory so it gives you more stuff i don't quite understand that but i guess thinking that it's intentional to make it harder for the player to decide what to keep is probably the best reason to think about it so if it's not that then i don't know what the heck he's doing i already screwed up my first take so we're gonna do it again for shambler shambler is ester so the shambler is one of my favorite fights i think visually it's really fun i think that even though it summons ads the ads don't take away from the fight they just kind of enhance the fight they also just look weird and then they're just like coming out of the floor or something i have no idea what's happening with them the shambler is cool because for one i should let me let me start the first thing so the coolest part about shambler is shambler is completely 100 optional it is a boss that you do not have to encounter unless you choose to encounter it so if you decide to put a torch into the altar you're fighting shambler if you decide to walk around in darkness you're going to fight shambler but otherwise outside of those situations you cannot encounter shambler and if you even think about it if you're walking around in darkness unless you made a mistake in torches you're doing it by choice as well so that means that shambler is 100 optional good risk versus reward factor very cool fight design uh the background as much of a headache as it gives me i like the background it does look cool i wish it was a little bit slower moving just to make my senses not overloaded the shambler though i like that it's has a great sense of identity where in darkest dungeon the ancestor has summoned all the stuff that's you know appeared that the player encounters so like it's all the ancestors you know um like mistakes that you're dealing with or maybe his choices i should say the shambler is something the player summons and you can i guess argue that if you're in darkness like the ancestor technically summoned it so i just walk around but i really think it's the player that summons the shambler each time i think that's really cool it's also an iconic lovecraft type of creature the shambler is just an awesomely designed encounter i don't know how else to go about it even when they put a super version of it in darkest dungeon 1 so the first endgame mission it's not as cool as the normal fight it's actually just not as fun or flavorful for reasons i'll get to in a bit but otherwise i love the shambler i think it's great even new players who have played just for a couple hours have probably ran into this thing because they see the altar and it says put in a torch or whatever it is and just invite misery and then they do it they're like what the hell is this and then they just die heck yeah we messed up another take but we're gonna talk about the shrieker so the shrieker is a tier i like the shrieker just visually i think it's a cool enemy i like its intended purpose i like that it brings you your stuff back i think that's great because normally i should say before streaker losing your stuff just sucked because it's gone and having something to funnel your trinkets back to you is very welcome the fight itself is awesome for a few reasons i like that it's a short fight i like that it is a very intense fight so it's got a lot of lethality over a short amount of time so the shrieker is only there for four turns but in those four turns it can easily kill someone i've had it happen other people have had it happen it can just get like two crit uh qrik crit pecks back to back and just you know start bleeding you pretty hard and that that's it you know it gets three actions and then the player also gets the choice of do i build to kill the streaker do i build to kill the nest or do i build to survive so you get three different ways to handle this fight and all three of them have their own merits on how you should do it plus if you are able to complete the encounter especially being down the streaker then you get cool quarks on top of it including corvid's eye which is one of the best quarks in the entire game i think the shrieker is super awesome and very deserving of an a tier i don't think it can go to s just because it doesn't like it's a really cool encounter but it doesn't just have the impact that something like shambler has all right as we get started here try and think of where i'm going to put thing from the stars and you're probably right it's obviously d tier this fight sucks so freaking much i hate this fight with a burning passion the only thing that's cool about it is the design i think the creature looks amazing and that could be enough to honestly put it into c alone it probably is but my hatred of this fight just can't let me get it like past d-tier so the reason this fight is terrible well the reasons there are quite a few the first is that it is a monster that feels like it's hostile dm type of creation so if you don't know your tabletop rpgs i'm going to try and go through this quickly but there's obviously dungeons and dragons is the biggest one or like pathfinder star finder and just like a zillion other ones called cthulhu there's so many out there that you should be playing because they're all you know pretty cool games in themselves but with the or with those games whoever runs them is usually called like the game master or the dungeon master or keeper or just whatever else other you know titles they have i'm using dungeon master so i say dm all right now that that is you know behind us the reason this is a hostile dm type of monster is the way it's designed makes it feel like whoever designed it said okay players like to stun it's gonna be really hard to stun players like to use bleed and blight on things that have you know multiple actions okay so it's going to be able to cleanse those every single turn so you can't burn it down okay so what if we just use direct damage sorry he gets a giant 80 percent prod bonus when he gets under half-life or i should say 40 or 45 whatever it is it's like okay that's cool plus he'll get speed on top of that which means you can't actually reliably stack bleed and blight anymore because he's gonna be really fast so unless you have plague doctor or flagellant good luck because he's probably going before you you only get one tick and every time he gets like through his actions or the end of the turn comes out you know he drops a crystal he takes damage okay that's cool like he starts killing himself which i understand because i shouldn't even say i understand like that's really bad in terms of design if you have to create a enemy that self-destructs because all of its other defenses are too much and you're worried that the player can't reliably get past them consistently you should probably reconsider how this boss is made because as it stands it has everything to counter like the majority of play styles except armor piercing and shield breaker is already good enough especially against like the majority of farmstead content so why do you have a monster that's tailor-made to die to shield breaker and then to a lesser extent grave robbery because she can armor pierce and it's just not a great fight it's not fun it's such a chore like you're guaranteed to take maybe 40 stress damage across like on each character across the fight because of just how it operates probably more than that i would reliably say you take about 60. and why the heck does this thing have everything under the sun short of a direct bleed attack it has one of the worst diseases in the game in sky taint it has a seven point bladed champion what the hell is that it has four round debuffs that last for days it has a stun it lowers your damage it lowers your speed it has vorpal strike which can crit for in the 20s like why does it need all of that why does it need all of that you can tell me yeah it's supposed to be hard shuffle but it's it's one of the last enemies they introduced to the game why does it need everything it shows that red hook understands how people play their game and what they do to win and then they just made something that just tries to hard counter everything which is why it feels like the hostile dm you know insert enemy because you know as a dm you start playing with your your team or your players i should say your campaign you play with them for a few months or weeks or you know a couple years sometimes and when you're doing that you understand what your players are doing you understand how they built their characters you understand their tactics and then when you start designing monsters to explicitly counter everything they do and they you just keep throwing it at them and stuff like that that starts to be less fun it's fun in a one one or two case scenario where you go wow that was wild that was really hard for us and it's memorable but when you can just run into this dude almost every week depending on how lucky you are then it just isn't fun anymore plus the rewards that it gives you it does not give you nearly enough shards for dealing with this complete garbage and so your choices in getting crystal trinkets are do i run farmstead for literally 24 hours broken up into multiple increments or do i farm thing from the stars literally a hundred and something times probably more than that probably like 200-ish wait no i did my math wrong okay probably close to like 20ish okay extra zero all right it's late at night i stream today i'm tired so there you go yeah this fight sucks i'm not a fan all right i tabbed out to make sure i was still recording and everything was working and it is so fanatic is a solid b tier i debated putting him lower but the reasons i'm gonna put fnatic in b are really just coming down to the fact i really like the i like a lot of the artistic uh design for fnatic i don't like the combat design because it's basically just super hag and i don't like that but what i do like is i think he looks awesome so you know shouts to barassa and whoever else helped on art very awesome design i like the theme i love the idea of just basically a completely nutty and berserk van helsing who for some reason is wandering around the estate instead of going to the courtyard where all his enemies are i don't quite understand that maybe there's a lore thing i miss so you know feel free to tell me and with the fanatic i like that like i said the artistic stuff so i like how he looks i like how the fight has a very cool background where everything's like on fire so he just somehow got a bunch of people and took them into the ruins i don't know and started burning them i think it's a really cool artistic direction i like that the player gets a heads up when he's going to be there because if uh if fnatic is showing up talking too fast but if fnatic is showing up then you get a custom loading screen so the player knows he's showing up and there are ways to mitigate it you can take only one crimson cursed person or you could take a bunch of crimson cursed people to a boss mission because fnatic can't spawn that way so i like that it kind of rewards player knowledge on if he shows up and the reason fnatic doesn't go higher is for one like i said i don't enjoy the fact that he's just super hag i think that's kind of lame they could have done something else with it i also don't like that the rewards for this fight are just bad because who needs the cure like once you get rid of fnatic i don't remember the timeline on when he comes back like i don't think he comes back until like another infestation or something like that so why do you need the cures at that point he only gives you a couple too it's not like he gives you 10 so you can cure your roster like if he gave you a bunch of cures that would actually be good because the player can go you know what i'm running out of blood because i have you know 14 people that are cursed and if i can take down the fanatic by making him spawn by using blood people and also risk taking more blood with me so i have less in town stuff like that so there's that risk reward factor if i could do that and then spawn fanatic and then cure like half my roster for it i'm doing it i think that'd be really cool but instead he just gives you like what three four of those things maybe less like two that means that all things considered fnatic just isn't as cool as he could have been but he's still pretty awesome from the artistic direction and then the lore like i said the lore presentation art all that's just awesome all right necro we're getting to our first region boss right now so that's pretty cool necro is a b i thought about putting him in c but there are a few things i like about necro so he is pretty easy and i like that he's a great tutorial boss so he's someone that's when you fight him you know it's it's a pretty simple mechanic from the players per se uh perspective in darkest dungeon knowledge is like the most important thing because once you know what you're up against it's easier to deal with and that's kind of like a lovecraftian theme anyway so with necromancer the player can pretty reliably figure out what is going to happen in that fight just by seeing the name of the boss so when it says kill apprentice necromancer you're going okay this dude probably summons stuff it's a necromancer it's in the ruins it probably summons undead and you're right and that kind of rewards the player just for at least reading the name which is pretty cool when you fight the necromancer especially the first time you know the summons aren't too difficult to deal with the necromancer is pretty threatening with the stress attacks they can deal and then it can deal some moderate damage so if you don't have like a good consistent damage per turn game plan necromancer can kind of spiral out of control but still not really and there are a few ways to deal with him like you can just run a range team and just shoot him when he hits the back of the the party or the enemy formation and you can just do it that way i think his movers this is kind of low so you just pull them back up if you really want to and just beat him down that way you can also bully him a little bit with stuns and stuff because he only has one action per turn and he's pretty vulnerable to like really anything you want to throw at him so i think it's a really cool way to do a tutorial bus so it's just like it's just a threatening encounter like it's threatening enough the player gets to learn that bosses can be difficult if just like by virtue of their attacks and some of their tactics and it's it's good that it's not overly difficult like i don't know freaking dark souls 3 like gundyr as the tutorial boss that thing was like i knew someone that stopped playing dark souls 3 because they couldn't get past gundyr at the start of the the game and red hook didn't go that way so i greatly appreciate that and with necromancer the other thing i think is pretty cool is i like that it's actually so tall as an enemy it's kind of weird at first because you see necromancer it's like seven feet tall you know it's like freaking yao ming status and it's kind of weird but when you think about it if necromancer is the size of a bone noble where he's just you know like this regular looking dude just summoning other regular skeletons about you know necromancer height that wouldn't be as terrifying the fact that necromancer is like eight feet tall seven feet tall or whatever is kind of weird but also creepy it gives this um like sense of threat because of the sheer size of the enemy even though it's only one space on the field so i have a lot of positives about necromancer and i would put it higher if just the fight wasn't so i i respect that the fight is so easy i just wish it wasn't as cut and dry as just like it summons dudes it hits you for some stress damage it summons dudes it summons dudes for profit i didn't know how much i enjoyed this fight honestly until i started sitting down and i wrote my notes for this list i actually think profit's an amazing fight so i'm gonna put profit at s the reason i like profit at s is because it's a fight where it's kind of risky to take it slow you can obviously do things like stacking intimidating weakening curse and then you can kind of neuter the fight that way but what i like is that if you decide to take it slow and get rid of the pews then leper gets some value outside of intimidate or whoever else is like in the front line and you get money for it so there's a good risk and reward factor there i also like that the mechanic until volf was a really cool mechanic i think valve's just not as cool so obviously wolf's gonna be lower but with profit i like that the rubble really fits prophet's theme like prophet with the pews makes it feel like you're in the church and that's obviously where a divine i should say not divine like a religious being would be um so it's there it's able to predict where rubble's gonna go i think that's really cool i think his design is fantastic the lore is one of the best in the game where for some reason the ancestor couldn't kill it and when it saw the the heart of darkness it was just so like horrified by it that he ripped his eyes out of their sockets and he keeps the eyes and juggles them while you're fighting him all the little things that the ancestor talks about like putting the knives in his back he has knives in his back put him in the stockade he's in like some kind of restraint that he broke his arm out of which i'm not sure why he has the restraint but he was also able like go see the thing and then broke out i don't know what's happening there so the profit is just a really awesome encounter i like the design i like that you have the optionality as a player of do i just bring you know an arbalest and just nukem or do i try and be greedy and kill or take down some of the pews do i take down one pew do i take down two do i go for three like the third pew has a bunch of hp compared to the first two it's like what are you gonna do you have options and i think that's a really cool way to do a fight i like when there are options on how to reliably tackle encounters the last time i did profits i did it with a bounty hunter spamming caltrops so i think it's a fantastic fight all around and i really enjoy it plus the boss trophy is a very good one to get the hag i'm gonna put in b so i'm not a huge fan of the hag i think she's i think she's cool enough as a boss i don't like the pop mechanic too much just because i feel like the damage ramps up a little too fast and with how fast the damage ramps up but also how the boss is designed if you're not playing on blood moon it is way too easy to burn her down she's not super fast in terms of her like raw speed she gets two actions a turn she sits in the back she's pretty squishy so you can just bleed her out really hard really quick so like iron swan caltrops finish him those combos can do a lot of work uh flagellate can just obviously rain down a bunch of damage and still be okay if he goes in the pot and stuff so like i just don't enjoy that the boss can be like the boss mechanic can be ignored for the most part and just burn her down you can make that case for a lot of bosses honestly but i think with the hag specifically though i think that just ignoring the mechanic at all is almost encouraged and i don't like that you know there's one thing to make the mechanic bait and then there's another thing to make the mechanic not uh worth the time and i think if the first reaction to this boss or like the first piece of advice people give is just burn her down and ignore the pot i think the boss needs to be changed so that the pod actually becomes the focus of the fight instead of just like let me ignore this mechanic and just try and win in terms of design the hag looks cool you know i can get down with that but the the lore isn't that great as a enemy it's just like some weird woman the ancestor met and she liked to eat every mushroom she found like okay that's cool and that's about it next up is the brig and pounder this is a d tier fight this fight is ass so the reason this fight is bad is because it's a complete slog it lasts way too long it's not even remotely threatening if you have any solid plan of downing the matchman in time then this fight's just nothing because the cannon basically does nothing the match man does nothing so you're going 2v4 for the entire encounter and you're just relying or the boss is relying on like sword bandits and gunner bandits and the occasional cutthroat or whatever it is on uh higher difficulties or what what's the the big bandit i can't remember anyway on higher difficulties it's relying on the big bandit two and none of those enemies by themselves or even in groups are that threatening so like is one giant bandit by itself threatening because that's what happens when it summons the giant bandit you just have the cannon in the match guy that's not threatening same with like one sword bandit one gunner bandit not threatening so this fight just takes way too long it's not a threatening fight unless you just miss or have something you know egregiously go wrong i guess that's the theme where it's just yeah it's an easy fight to control and if something goes wrong you're probably hitting death's door on two or three people at the same time so i guess i understand from that point but i think it just goes way too long as an encounter and it's got prod on top of damage resist because they have to like nerf shield breaker indirectly or guess directly in this case and it's just not fun the only cool part about it is the fact that the lore is interesting that the ancestor was depraved enough to turn a freaking cannon against his own citizens and the matchstick is a pretty cool boss trophy otherwise this fight is just garbage sirens next in the b tier as well sirens an interesting fight i like her mechanic i think it's very thematic i understand why she summons enemies but i don't like that she summons enemies for bosses that do summon like necromancer it makes sense that necromancer summons collector makes sense to necroman or necromancer that collector summons shambler i have no idea what the hell the lore is with shambler and lovecraft but it's summons and the summons are gnarly so that's cool but the siren like i said it makes sense that she summons but it's just not as satisfying when she summons it's kind of like in other games like destiny and stuff like that where it feels like they just summon things to fill the room and they think that that's like the threat or like part of the threat just like here's another thing to deal with like i have to deal with you know 30 hp and 17 damage coming out of this cove leper okay and that's just not it it misses with the siren that's what i'm trying to get at and it obviously it's a fight about action economy because siren can summon people which helps her and then she can take one of your units away and all of a sudden if she has a summon plus one of your units on her side then that means the action economy goes from three to four in her favor and that's interesting so she's kind of like the shuffling horror in the fact that she wins through action economy but it's easy to choose her mechanic so the charm mechanic has a 70 chance to land you like that's it it's just a flat 70. it doesn't matter about your debuff resist anymore even though her trophy still has the debuff resist which i think is interesting and the targeting priority usually does focus on someone with lower debuffers this that's just kind of a way to get around it and it makes an aquarian actually really good in this fight because antiquarian can just be fed to the siren and do nothing besides like protect me which is kind of threatening but still not threatening because sirens taking damage even though she's got more defenses and it marks her so you can just shoot you can shoot siren or something if you have a synergy but since it's also an attack like that you can make it miss so you can just with an aquarian dodge spam and if it fails then you just feed her an aquarium in most cases it's just not a not a great fight in terms of how it ends up playing out because if she charms someone each turn or like each time it's up then it's it feels like the way it's intended but if it misses then it just feels like this really awkward fight where she's spending one of her two actions a turn trying to charm someone and it just doesn't go her way so she just sits there and gets beat to death and it's not a good time and then the other moves outside of summoning or like taking your people aren't that threatening so it's it's a cool enough fight the lore is nice the design's really nice i like how she looks she's definitely horrifying so very thematic of a siren next up is the crew i'm putting the crew in a tier so i like the crew as a fight i like the pirate theme i think that's a really good one i like the lore behind the crew it's one of my favorite sets of boss lore in the entire game and i like that the crew has even though it has a summon mechanic it's not as boring as like siren or necromancer like it summons a unique enemy that's threatening and it's part of the entire boss design so it makes sense in how you're dealing with it and i didn't think about this until i reviewed a viewer's run for fighting the crew the crew is cool because it makes the player have to understand their team pretty well like better than most times they have to really think about their team because the important thing in the crew fight is if you're going to juggle damage you have to know exactly how much damage your team can put down in one full turn to decide if it's better to just try and burst down the anchorman or wait and get some more damage in on the crew and then go back to the anchorman after it loses its buff so the player has to make some really like dynamic choices in this fight and it's very easy to get lost because this happened to me i've seen this happen to other people when they fight this boss it's very easy to get lost and trying to focus fire too much on the anchorman and giving the anchorman too much attention and then you're just wasting like one or two hundred damage literally over the entire fight by focusing too hard on the anchorman i think that's pretty cool with the crew also the interesting part is if you choose to focus fire the crew it melts this boss for some reason melts harder than most bosses in the game i don't know what it is like the it's got an okay hp pool like 200-ish on champion it has two actions a turn so it's very susceptible to damage over time but it has no protection unless the anchorman gives it to it for instance and that means this boss is adding into that idea that do i just try and burn down the boss but then it heals a bunch oh crap i have to hit the anchor man well the boss heals a little bit more and then you put in some damage to the anchorman and you have to keep juggling back and forth and it's easy to get lost in what you're doing but even then it's still interesting because with all of that in mind this boss can still melt like you can use an adder's kiss like if you get a crit adders kiss that's like i don't know like 40 damage or something nutty if you get some good damage over time going you can stun to slow down stuff like that so it's it's cool because the boss if you decide to put damage into it can just melt right away and then you're like oh i should just do this from the start but it's still threatening enough that you can't reliably do that in most cases like you can the hag next up is swine prince so the swine prince i'm gonna put today and the reason is it should be wilbur sprite up here because i didn't think about this until someone mentioned it they said that wilbur's the real boss of this fight and everyone's kinda like ah yeah sure you know like wilbur's there and he's threatening yes sure but then someone said that because you get wilbur's flag and not like the swine prince crown or cleaver or something like that wilbur really is the boss of this fight and it makes sense so i think swine is pretty cool as an encounter i think that it's weird that swine prince has this really beefy arm i guess porky arm and it chooses to swing at you with the bony the bony arm with the rusted cleaver and with wilbur it's funny because obviously you have this ginormous just hulking pig mass with its guts spilling out with a giant axe and a crown you go okay i'm supposed to beat this thing or no i'm supposed to deal with this oh my goodness and then you see wilbur in the back with his like little air marshaling flags and the headband looking like a little rambo pig and you go oh maybe i'm supposed to kill this very tiny annoying creature that's stunning me and marking me i'm probably supposed to do that and so you decide to do that and then you just get freaking molly want by the swine prince because you're doing that so i think that's kind of it's very underhanded from red hook because in most fights it's better to kill adds there's only like two fights in the game where it's not better to kill adds the shuffling [ __ ] is the other one so with the swine prince king god prince of persia dude it's better to just try and survive the onslaught of attacks than kill the boss i think that's pretty cool because once you understand that the boss is like it's threatening sometimes it can stun your healer and you have like two people marked and it gets like this fat crit and that's just like terrifying but it's actually fun to play against it's also very fun to team build against because you can run guards and deal with the mark mechanic that way by trying to guard people if you have two guards then you're usually pretty safe against the mechanics themselves or you can run our blessed and rallying flare just completely trivializes this fight and that's really fun to see because arbolis just gets this time to be mvp in a boss fight and that's really nice to see or you could play it straight up you just play it with a normal team and just try and out heal the damage there's obviously a lot of potential there and i like any boss that rewards different ways to team build you don't have to brute force it you can use some finesse you can use guards and play defensive you can use rallying player you just play it straight up you could use bleed you can use direct damage all of it works in this fight and i think that's really good i think it's a very well designed boss and i think the trophy is good and i think the lore is the lore is cool the design is cool i if it was like a little bit better i don't know how i would say it would be better you know it's just like this weird creature he summoned like does that explain wilbur i don't know like how does what is wilbur's tie into this thing i have no idea but i i think it's a solid apex so i'm gonna move on it's probably no surprise where my favorite boss in the game is going enjoy your butt serpents i really love the flesh as a boss the reasons i love the flesh is i think that the variance is for as much as i hate variants in games which is weird that i like darkest dungeons so much but i hate variants but with how crazy the variants can be in this fight i like that it all kind of makes sense and from the thematic aspect of the fight it makes a ton of sense because the way this boss is portrayed is it is just a room filled of random pig parts it's not like one creature that's like sliding around and stuff like that it's just a mass of literal flesh and i think that the variance in it how it keeps shape changing and stuff i think it's so cool because that is like one of the smartest things i have ever seen in game design and how you realize an idea to game mechanics and i i cannot praise it enough with how much i love it like yeah the moves are pretty cut and dry right there's a bleed attack a blight attack a stun and a heel and they all hit like certain ranks some of them have protection like they can spawn in different spots like i understand that but just the way it all comes together and the fact that it changes every single turn it gives it this really chaotic nature when you're fighting it and i just love dealing with this fight i love like every turn that pops up it's like how many hearts did i get oh crap there's two butts i'm i'm probably losing my vessel here if i get like some you know nutty crit that's about to happen which i think the last time i fought it it opened yeah when i fought the champion flesh on stream it opened with a butt that got like a double crit for 27 or something like that and i was like oh that's cool and this fight is just really fun to do also it comes with one of the best boss trophies in the game the flesh's heart is really good and it's a good capstone to the warrens which most people think are either the hardest area or one of the hardest areas in terms of like the four base regions i'm not including courtyard because courtyard's you know its own bag and i cannot say enough positive stuff about the flesh i love this boss it also rewards a diverse amount of strategies like yeah cleaves or damage over time are just completely strong against it like no joke and it's interesting that cleaves are considered not that good in this game you know they have their uses they can be built around to succeed and stuff like that but for the most part cleaves just aren't strong attacks inherently this is the one fight where cleaves become mvp so anything that can target multiple enemies or multiple spots at the same time does very well in this fight if you or it's weak to bleed and blight for the most part or at least you can stick them reliably so if you want to run plague doctor and flagellate together you can do that if you're on a run houndmaster and like use two hound masters for double hounds harry you can do that if you want to run shield breaker and just impale spam you can do that especially because that's protection so shield breaker has other stuff to do then finally i like that the heart randomly shows up in each part and the last or one of the times no when i fought this on apprentice last time i got four hearts at the same time i didn't know that was a thing and it's kind of funny because obviously it's gonna heal for a bunch but the heart is the one part that takes like the most damage in this fight so it's kind of cool that the heart is also like whack-a-mole so if you want to run a direct damage team you can just wait for hearts to pop up and hit them i wouldn't recommend that but you can do it so i like that this fight has interest the lore is kind of honestly the lord's kind of meh it's just like the ancestor had too many pig parts what's he gonna do with them i don't know i just threw them down the drain and then they became this thing so the lore is kind of eh but for the most part outside of that i think that the way it's described in that lore and the way it translates to game mechanics i think it's flawless i think it's just absolute genius how this fight plays out oh yeah there's one more part so the boss doesn't have the normal little turn action bar thing to let you know that it has a turn turnip which means that it becomes more important to keep track of this enemy when you're fighting it because you don't know when it's turned or if it has turns up unless you're really paying attention so it's very easy to lose track of what's happening which just adds to the chaotic nature of the fight uh yes the crocodile which i am pretty confident is a running joke about randy orton because this thing submerges and then uses apex predator which if you know your wwe apparently randy orton's called the apex predator and the meme is rko out of nowhere so you submerge and then use apex predator out of nowhere and that's it good job good memes but this fights the crocodile i really just don't like it the design like the the visual design of the croc is cool i like that it has this like weird beehive thing coming out of its back and it's got weird little insect legs i think that's pretty funny but the fight is annoying and just not fun the reason it's not fun is because this fight can be pretty easy or incredibly difficult depending on rng and you can argue that rng is like a huge factor in every fight but i feel like rng matters so much in this fight specifically and it comes down to did the croc decide to cleave you or not if it decides to crit you and not create you if it decides to cleave you you know a few times straight it's a much harder fight than it would be if it didn't so if it's cleaving you or not is really the biggest dictator of the difficulty here and i don't think that that's a strong way to do the boss like it it moves it doesn't really have a unique mechanic you know it's got the the reeds so i guess that's kind of unique in a way but ancestor already had that or i should say heart of darkness so it's really not that special here and to an extent the prophet has that you know like ways to block the player from hitting it so with this fight it's just not it's not special so it's not that fun and then the fact that all the challenge comes from did it decide to hit more than one person or not is kind of telling of course sometimes you can be like me where the croc decides to hit your vessel like six times straight and then she goes virtuous that's a thing but if that's not happening to you and it's just spreading out a single attack everywhere it's going then this fight's really not that hard and between its ability to heal and dodge and stuff and it's like little amount of protection all that it turns into kind of a slog so you just have this slow fight where you're just waiting to see if it cleaves you or not and that's just not fun to deal with up next is garlic butt aka the baron so the baron is estier to me and i like other things i don't like about the baron i don't like the three actions and the cleave spam i think that's kind of whack but everything else i really enjoy about the baron i like that the arena you fight the baron in has witnesses like there's an audience there which shows off that the baron is like literally just trying to put on a show you know it uses a move called crowd pleaser it has a three act structure it has an audience it's really cool in that regard i like the three acts themselves i think it's a very interesting way to do a fight because it's obviously just a percentage chance to open the baron and then it just goes up every time you take down eggs i like that damage over time transfers through the eggs so if you want to plan out what you're doing then you can just drop bleed and then open them up and hope you got something that's not the baron or maybe you did want the baron but i do like the pacing of the fight i like how the three acts play out i like that you can run either riposte spam to take them down really quickly or i like that you can run heavy bleed to take them down i like that you can still succeed with a control strategy which is i failed at that but i beat it with that before too so i like that you can take down the eggs one at a time if you want to and deal with it that way i think it's just a really cool fight in general it can also be really challenging some of these bosses once you know the mechanics are kind of a pushover and even if you bring riposte to nuke the baron in a short time frame baron can still put down a lot of damage so between the cleave and like the other direct hit attacks and sometimes you pop a chevalier open or something like that the baron is threatening just across the board and i think it's a really fun fight vine count this fight sucks so the vi count is it's interesting i i like that the bodies are fun mechanic but like that's all it has going for it so the viking himself i don't like it for the same reason i don't like the hag where you're encouraged to burn down the vi count i tried this recently and i lost by trying to take down the bodies first which actually i tried to burst him down first and i failed and i tried to kill the bodies and then i failed still lost but i've also won it by taking down the bodies before but for the most part you're just encouraged to burn him and i didn't really think about that too much until like i said i started doing notes for this video and i was looking at the buffs he got for eating bodies and stuff so between how long it can take to get rid of all three bodies coupled with the stackings that vikel gets from eating on the bodies alongside the vikon's very shallow hp pool even on blood moon he does not have a lot of life which means that this fight is encouraged to burn him down the same reason i'm not a fan of the hag is the same reason i'm not a fan of i count you are encouraged to ignore the mechanic you are encouraged to burn down the boss next up is countess and the three talibutti i think countess is a a tier fight she's pretty cool i like that you get a animated scene when you fight her i like that she has a hallway of just basically horny simps sitting out there begging for i think that's pretty funny i like that the fight has the feel of a dance because obviously in the animated video she is dancing with the ancestor so i like that between the three phases and how consistently she goes into them it feels like a uh a dance in that way stumble is a dance and it's a challenging fight too i think it's the hardest fight in the game i was kind of waffling on that earlier today and then thick said no it is the hardest fight so i felt redemption for struggling with this fight sometimes and i think it is a very challenging fight and between that and the lore it makes it very special so i have a lot of respect for countess my complaints are how long the fight can be and the complete garbage piece that her trophy is the countess fan that thing is so terrible for those two reasons i cannot justify putting her higher but there's something to be said the fact that she gets a very cool set of cut scenes some interesting story and kind of an open-ended question like the ancestor learned about the heart of darkness by drinking her blood obviously so how did the countess get her powers i actually don't know the answer to that the statue is d tier this fight sucks complete booty i really don't understand the thinking behind this it's it's an interesting fight for the one time but this is the fight that red hook chose to make the player do repeatedly to get uh crimson court trinkets why make the fight that you have to grind to get trinkets a fight that is not mechanically challenging like once you understand you can't kill the shield or whatever and just leave the the guardian open like once you understand you can't do that the fight is very easy it's just about not dying to the shield which is easy enough to do so like when you're doing that why do they have a boss that has a ton of protection so you get like the stone makers tools or whatever and or sculptor's tools and those still don't do enough damage alongside the protection unless you give it to shield breaker so again shield breaker just doing absolute work in this fight especially with puncture puncture does so well here overall i just don't like it it's such a slog of a fight it's a fight you have to do repeatedly to get all the trinkets and it's a fight that takes forever because the entire encounter has so much hp it has protection so you can only do a lot of damage with shield breaker if you take her or grave robber you can't use any bleeder blight and you can only hit the boss every other turn if you're not puncturing and stuff like that it's just it's horrible it's such a horrible fight and the fact you have to do it a good maybe eight or ten times in a play through to get all the the rest of the trinkets is ass this fight is ass and you have to do it way too many times to get all the stuff i had vulvan b but i'm honestly putting him in c i do not like this fight so the reason i don't like this fight is it just kind of feels like it's plagiarizing other bosses it has the profit mechanic of dropping bombs then it has the pounder slash necromancer slash siren slash shambler slash collector slash crew oh we got the point across mechanic of summoning dudes it's like do you need more things that summon dudes i really don't think so especially another breaking boss i guess it makes sense in the fact that the brigands are supposed to just be a bunch of a people so you keep summoning or like they have you know numbers and keep summoning them so i guess it makes sense in that way otherwise i really just don't like this fight i think the thing i hate most is the bomb barrel it's a thing that you're supposed to destroy like each turn or every other turn because obviously it's gonna be a bunch of big damage but like the hag and other fights it's like vulva's a fight where you need to ignore that mechanic the best way to deal with this fight is to just use mana arms and tank the bombs there is some interesting overlap because in man in arms origin comic he's dealing with a war and explosions and stuff so having him do something like block against bombs i don't know if that's like ptsd inducing but there's that otherwise this fight it just summons dudes it drops bombs it's not that fun and if you want to get rid of the bombs you have to blow up the barrel but there's no reward for blowing up the barrel besides getting rid of the bomb for like that turn because he just resummons the barrel the barrel for some reason has riposte i guess that's because you're hitting an explosive bat or box of stuff or barrel of stuff so they either have to make the barrel weaker if it's gonna repost or just not come back and give it like more hp because that would be more interesting what if the barrel had like 50 or 60 hp and once you got rid of it it didn't come back that'd be kind of interesting because the fight would change the player could decide to do 200 damage to wolf or do 60 damage to the barrel and then do 200 damage to both while he's summoning level 6 bandits as i look at the countess i think that swine prince is trying to touch her booty but i'm going to put the miller in a as well i like the lore with the miller because it just seems like the ancestor was having a bad day or something and decided to screw with the miller and blow up his his windmill and stuff like that i like that mildred is in the farmstead and she gives you an item to deal with the miller i think that's pretty cool i think that the interaction between the locket and the reaping and stuff i like that quite a bit and i think also he gets a different move right like something beloved because you have the the locket so i think that's actually really awesome the fight itself isn't too challenging the only time it's like actually kind of hard is when he decides to just spam the reaping four times straight that's more of an issue with farm set in general because both of the unique farmstead bosses are just cleave machines and i hate that so because of that i can't put the miller in s but i think the miller is tuned pretty well enough overall it's challenging enough but it's not like oppressively difficult it has some cool lore i like his design i like his move sets i like that the locket does stuff and because of these things i will put the miller in a but i don't think i can put them higher than that the sleeper i made this a game sin this thing is one of the worst bosses so the reason the sleeper sucks is because just like the miller it is a cleave machine but the sleeper is worse so the sleeper is just designed as a boss with endless in mind which you could argue is good design you could argue that but i don't think it's satisfying design the sleeper is just there to cleave stress and cleave damage over and over with its protection so it's harder to take down and it's just going to spam those cleaves until it dies the reason it spams those cleaves is because they want you to take enough damage and endless to die to stress or die to damage phase one is way more entertaining than phase two of the sleeper it's honestly just a terrible terrible boss it has a very cool graphical design but the gameplay is pretty freaking weak the shuffling horror i was going to put in b originally but i'm going to put it in a i can't put it higher than that because it's basically just super shambler what i do like about the shuffling horror is that it's in a way familiar to the player because most likely the player has fought a shambler by the time they get to the end of the game so they've seen it they know what it is and then they see this and they go wow that's different it looks different it acts a little bit different because it has two actions a turn it focuses on just doing a bleed cleave against you and then it doesn't summon clapper claws that's different you don't fight it in torchless which is different so it has enough differences to make it nice even though it's pretty close to the same as a visual design what i do like if you notice between these two sprites the eyes in this one are not glowing anymore but in this one they are so that's probably because the little parasitic infection has taken over and it's just using the shambler's body so it makes sense that it doesn't have all the same powers the fight also has the same thing as swine prince where there's a trap in killing the helper so if you kill wilbur you take way more damage than if you don't kill wilbur if you kill the cults's priests it summons that weird structure parasite thing i forget what it's called it summons that and that thing just spams like guard and defense on the shuffling horror and that's way harder to deal with than surviving the cultist priest for four turns i think it's pretty evil to put a trap like that in an end game mission but otherwise the player should be able to deal with this because unlike a shambler like when you look at the endgame mission it says defeat shuffling horror so the player can go i'm probably gonna get moved in this fight so they have to plan appropriately i think that's cool and if you have taken out a shambler it's fun to see the changes to shambler if you have not taken down a shambler like if you just haven't fought one in your entire playthrough for some reason and then you see this thing it's freaking weird and creepy i think both of those instances are really fun and good for the player templars i'm actually going to put in c i had them in b but the more i thought about it i like their designs in terms of like how they visually look i think it's really fun i don't understand why the cult of sprawlers i'm assuming they're cult of sprawlers who have the wolverine claws like their slashy claws and then they turn into pincher claws i don't quite understand that transition both the templars i think it's cool that they have a revelation attack which the the tough part about dd2 besides the length of it and the enemies are kind of threatening the toughest part about it is the fact that you have to take five trinkets instead of eight so when you have to put on the torches to deal with revelation and then you have to take a guard to make sure that you just don't get dumpstered on the fourth person that means that this fight or these fights get a little bit harder because you can't put on your strongest stuff i guess that's pretty cool otherwise outside of revelation like their moves aren't that crazy and off the wall they have like cleave and stuff like that but i mean even the templar like blight cleave is not as threatening as [ __ ] them it's probably close to it like it is pretty strong but i'm way more afraid of [ __ ] them than i am of doomsday or whatever it's called so that just leaves them with revelation and if you're blocking revelation correctly then these fights are easy so with no lore and a pretty easy mechanic to disable i don't like much about these fights besides the fact that they look pretty cool as enemies next is the sys which i'm gonna put in c i like the design of it i think it looks really cool but i don't like how the fight plays out it has the equivalent of a matchman mechanic which we've already dealt with pounder three times at this point most likely so that's not as fun and then it teleports you which makes the dungeon harder but like that doesn't say as much about the boss it just says like the actual dungeon design is more threatening but i guess you could say that's a point for the boss you know i wouldn't hold that against you the cyst itself though the cyst itself has only like a couple attacks and all it does is some pretty heavy direct damage and some blades that's all it has going for it otherwise you're just trying to survive its onslaught of attacks that can cleave while you try and take down the teleporting sell stock which is the actual boss of this encounter so as long as you can consistently take that thing down then you're not worried about the cyst really and characters you don't think would be good in d3 are actually really good like plague doctor she's fantastic in this dungeon i just think they kind of missed the mark with this fight the other thing i don't like about this fight is the fact that you can do it multiple times and i don't mean getting teleported and running back to it you can find a cyst in like every hallway or like most hallways as you head towards the center which it makes sense from the design standpoint because like the closer you get to the exit the more you have to deal with this mini boss you can't escape this mini boss except for i think one path you can only fight one of them but you have to either get teleported there or walk the super crazy route to get there and like walk past it so the cyst is or loses its charm because you can fight you know four of these in a dungeon you should only be fighting two if you know the way but sometimes you can fight four and that's just not as fun as it could be because that takes away from the uniqueness of the boss like if you had to fight the broken templars and then you get to the locus beacon and then you get teleported that's crazy but since you get to experience the teleport several times over the dungeon especially the first time around it loses its like effect it loses its threat over the mission and it becomes more of a nuisance than something that's just terrifying and i don't know crazy unknown other dimensional stuff like it's supposed to be heart of darkness easiest here this fight is super cool it's not the hardest fight in the game which i'm appreciative of it's a really fun fight you get to fight the ancestor so the person that's been yapping in your ear for 60 hours at this point is the one you get to fight then you get to see what he found under the manor you get to see that it's probably the heart of darkness that's making you hear the ancestor the ancestor's probably just never been there so you have to listen to the heart of darkness try and tell the air to come back to the state and take people down to it and feed it it's a really cool fight my only complaint is the spiral background it has it's like the shambler background but they just gave it a different texture i don't like that at all it gives me a headache the craziest part and i'm actually not gonna spoil this just in case someone has not beaten the game and they're just watching this video i'm not going to spoil what the mechanic is at the end but it is a very crazy thing the first time you deal with it because i remember in my first playthrough because i recorded it and it's on youtube obviously so when i got to it the first time and that part happened i went what and i was so confused and then it happened and i started like freaking out because like i didn't expect it to do that and it feels so bad because you see what are like how the the characters react and i think it's a really well done encounter plus you get to hear that final boss or the final fight music again which you've been hearing in the other dd missions but the final boss music is so good it's like it's probably the best soundtrack outside of uh maybe like dlc stuff but the final boss music is like the best combat music on the game i would say so top to bottom this fight is awesome the theme is awesome the storytelling's awesome the design is cool i like the the phases it has i like the mechanics of it and it's not overly hard it's just kind of like uh the game is giving you a handshake saying you made it this far check out this really cool thing you know get this narrative dump also and we'll see you next time speaking of that's gonna wrap up this video thanks so much for watching i know it's probably a long one it took me about two hours to do audio so there's that hopefully i can chop it into something shorter and in terms of projects coming up i'm going to do a new player's guide and some other stuff i've been working on i can't remember off the top because i guess the spotlight's on me right now otherwise in the meantime join discord if you haven't very cool people in discord we have like 400 people 400 that's a lot of people in discord you know not all of them talk but that's cool we have like 400 people come say hi and then also when i stream on twitch come say hi because the stream is steadily growing it's been a complete blast i've met so many cool people already some people come from youtube and they say hey i saw your videos and it's cool to see you live some people say my first time in the stream you're really cool and then they check out the videos or jump into discord and it's really just been super fun getting to meet everyone so it's been an absolute pleasure and i guess i'm going to shut the heck up so next time probably the stuff you've been saying so like blood moon vods random ideas that i come up with like spur of the moment those are fun videos to make some viewer runs a couple guides new player guide and aquarium guide soon tm and thanks for watching and i'll see you later

Channel: ShuffleFM

Views: 224,867

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

Id: sUtFcDXdb4A

Length: 61min 8sec (3668 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021