How Good is Mark? - Darkest Dungeon Discussion

what's up y'all shuffle and today we are going to talk about mark teams this is not quite a guide this is more of a critique i mentioned this before people have been asking about it so i figured i may as well just sit down and do it and before we get started like comment subscribe follow twitch all that stupid garbage discord blah blah okay see only took two seconds we're done with it so this isn't quite a guide like i said but i do have a structure and it's going to seem kind of like the guides it's gonna be like a loose guide formats but i'm going to talk about pros and cons i'm going to talk about the heroes involved in mark teams some of their abilities and trinkets and then i'm going to give like an overall analysis just so we're all on the same page so we know what we're talking about and then we're going to break it down the pros for mark teams consist of mega damage a proactive strategy and i think they're actually quite fun to play because when everything gels correctly and you get your turns in the right order and stuff is getting crit for you know 55 70 damage and stuff and just starts dying it feels great so mark teams can be very fun the cons of mark teams are pretty strong it doesn't mean that you can't play them in their weak states it doesn't mean that they're just unplayable at all it's just a different way to play the game and like where heavy blight or bleed damage has a place mark does have a place so like i said we'll we'll try and cover these in depth for cons of mark teams there are about three prominent ones that i can think of the first is that they're weak against bosses that have multiple actions per turn so if you have never noticed when you look at the health bars of enemies down at the bottom of the screen i should say the middle of the screen there is a little gold yellowish bar next to the health bar and those little tick marks represent how many actions an enemy gets per turn so the player always gets one and you're probably pretty used to that but there are some bosses that get two actions and even three which means that since mark lasts for a duration of actions taken it's supposed to be rounds like ideally but as the game has gotten further into development uh the idea of bosses having multiple actions has become more and more common it wasn't too common in the base game there are a few that do have it but it seems like once more content has come out in the game that's kind of like the power creep on the boss side it's been multiple actions which means mark has gotten a bit weaker over time it's certainly still playable it can certainly still dumpster enemies so don't think that it can't but the fact that the marks fall off so quickly means that you lose the investment because mark as a playstyle is you invest the mark you take your turn you do nothing with your turn except say the next person to hit you with synergy is going to deal double damage or you know some other percentage of like 50 25 depending on who's doing it but you get what i'm saying so you trade one turn to do a bunch of extra damage for someone else and then the next turn they're still marked and then the other person that did the mark before if it's not a cultist can usually participate and do their own giant chunk of damage so mark is a investment strategy it is actually low tempo unless you're getting crits and then it has this clash where it is really good at killing bosses but then if the boss has multiple actions it gets worse so you're not getting that really good payoff of i mark you i get like two swings against you and then the rest of my team gets all their hits too and that's just a bunch of damage if a boss has two or three actions a turn you have to put up a mark every single turn and that is very inefficient with your turn you may as well just double tap them at that point the next con of marked teams is that they require heavy team investments all strategies in this game do require you to build comprehensive teams to like enact your strategies so that's no surprise there but mark itself really feels like it asks for a lot from your characters like you have to use the same pool of mark characters which you know if you do blight or if you do bleed damage and stuff like that you have to use the same pool of characters there but for mark specifically it it comes down to arbalest honestly i was gonna try and like go about this a different way but it really comes down to arboles we have to talk about her later so if you want to do mark like you're pretty much stuck with arbless bounty hunter and houndmaster for damage you can do stuff like vols tassel and leper which that works shield breaker has mark synergy grave robber two uh highwayman on pistol shots so there is mark synergy in the game but primarily you are trying to get the most out of it by using bounty hunter houndmaster and arbless and those are just your damage dealers if you want to set mark you still need those three and occultists because those are the people with marks in the game and if you try and run all four together in the like fabled team name mark for death then you really trade a lot in terms of effectiveness on your team and mark is weird because to get the most out of it you have to invest more and more people into it but if you're investing more and more people into a strategy that is just big single target damage in a game like darkest dungeon then you're not investing as much in control elements and that's not that those characters can't do control things like bounty hunter has two very good stunts a cultus has an amazing stun so you do have those options but with mark you have to like invest a lot of your opening turns which are the most lethal in or from the enemy's perspective because they get you know four attacks against you in most cases so you have to invest a lot of your opening turns into using marks or you have to go the other way which is kind of like i don't want to say an emerging thought for mark uh like mark strategies but it's something that's not readily apparent like if you're a newer player you're probably like okay if i use mark i just have to fill my team with mark people mark all the time shoot all the time but the hard part about using a mark team is that you have to know when to not do it sometimes it's better to just open with heavy control and get some stuns or just not use mark in general and try and like focus fire and disrupt so that's where the hard part comes in but even if you are understanding that that's how it's played it's still a little scary i guess is the word because the teams can sometimes feel vulnerable what you're left with then is the choice of packing your team with marx energy all over the place which you can do you can still do very well doing that or you run these hybrid creations like when i did my herbalist guide i covered this team that had um arbless and i think it was hellion vessel and bounty hunter so you have like hellion who's really good at just picking off people at any rank she does really good damage then you have arbolest who has some support tools and some okay single target then you have bounty hunter who sets up our blessed and then also has some synergy with the hellion because she can lower protection then you have vessel just for consistency if you run a team like that then you're not investing as much into marx energy and sometimes random stuff happens like our last high rolls you on speed even if you're like plus four plus minus four speed r bliss can still go before bounty hunter and then things just get really awkward for instance or you're kind of doing two things at once you have helium who just does whatever the hell she wants because she's just a really good character in general and then you have like this small mark shell between two characters then you have vessel who's just like dropping stuns and heels and it can't or it can feel okay but it doesn't like feel amazing and usually when you run a team you want it to feel good you want like everything to be this well-oiled machine the last thing of note is that some of the best i shouldn't say best but like just some of the really awesome support characters in this game just don't have mark synergy at all and some of the ones that do their mark synergy is kind of honestly bad like man arms is a great support character and he has bellow and bellow is just bad in a lot of cases usually battle battle is just better in like almost every conceivable aspect then there are other supports like even jester like i said ballads better than bello but even jester has like no marx energy then you have vessel with no mark synergy she's just like healing and stuff like that or crusader has no marx energy and then even though you can use like i said some of the other characters like highwayman for mark synergy it's just not worth it because his benefit from it is so much lower than our bliss it's like why not just bring herbalists at that point so if you want to get a lot out of your mark teams or have good support units in them it's kind of hard to fit them in without sacrificing a lot in terms of your offensive efficiency let's talk about the heroes now that are involved in mark teams so the first one i'm just going in some random order there's no rhyme or reason to this order there's bounty hunter who is fantastic i do greatly like bounty hunter i think he's actually the the best mark synergy character but the thing that's weird about bounty hunter is like midnight came up with this idea and i like it quite a bit bounty hunter wants to be the payoff and the the setup he's a really good setup character but then he also wants to benefit from it so bounty hunter's best ally in a team is usually another bounty hunter which is kind of weird and if you're running two bounty hunters you're leaving the back line open so like the team gets really weird to build at that point houndmaster is another mark like exploiter he's a mark damage dealer and i think in many ways houndmaster is almost better than arboles in terms of just the damage output because he gets bleed his base damage is almost equal and his damage bonus is pretty nice he also gets a damage bonus against peace which is a very it's a pretty common subtype so there is some awesomeness there and then he has access to dog biscuits which give him even more damage houndmaster differs from arboles because he has some pretty good team help in terms of the cry havoc which is nice the guard can be pretty good sometimes and he has blackjack which is an amazing stun and then he has hounds harry for a cleave and it's kind of weird because hounds harry doesn't synergize too much with the mark play style like with mark you're going for heavy single target damage and then you have hounds harry which is just a group attack you know just a huge cleave with a bunch of blade damage and that doesn't really fit so if you don't use that move usually you are going into a bleed team not so much a mark team so that's just houndmaster being flexible in terms of his roles and then houndmaster also has the best mark in the game target whistle is nuts target whistle is overstated like by god knows how much and it's such a huge effect and usually if you're going to run a mark team it means that bounty hunter and houndmaster together are very good because how master can mark the front dudes which they usually have protection and he just shreds most of it with his minus 30 percent and bounty hunter just gets even more damage and then bounty hunter can still set up houndmaster's mark targets with a zone mark in the back so it's pretty cool a lot of synergy there forgot to talk about some of the other bounty hunter skills but bounty hunter has mark for death which is pretty good it lowers protection which is phenomenal and it has bonus speed on top of it so this is bounty hunter feeding into the idea that he is a setup and exploit character or like set up and pay off because he can do both with mark for death and then you have come hither which is kind of awkward come hither has like a two round mark duration and it pulls and it's like it's there for him to pull and hit the person but a lot of times when you pull back liners they have moves to get back so like you pull them they move back and then you're just kind of screwed so there are some weird interactions in the bounty hunter kit but if you can set him up it's still really effective and he puts up big numbers occultist is like the primary support character for a mark team and a cultist is actually one of my favorite characters i love occultists quite a bit and him in a mark team helps a lot he has an okay mark in vulnerability hacks it's a dodge debuff which isn't amazing but it can target anything from anywhere so that makes it you know good enough and occultist is pretty fast so he can help set up the other characters even hound master and bounty hunter occultists also comes with a fantastic stun in hands of the abyss some moderate damage output between his other attack moves and he has weakening curse which is an incredible move that lowers damage and protection and a team that may struggle for healing output like a mark team especially if it's not running vessel or something like that or if arboles is trying to do more damage then lowering incoming damage is the most helpful thing you can do and then lowering protection also helps everyone because protection screws over mark the hardest we also forgot to talk about occultist fantastic heal it's inconsistent but honestly the math ideally wins out and it's at least putting up you know like 11 like on average or you're hitting 18 when you need it and stuff like that but of course everyone at some point rolls zero and hits bleed and then you feel bad the problem with the cultists and mark teams is that occultist has like four very good buttons in pretty much every build that you can think of and he has to choose between one of his four very awesome buttons every single turn and there are times where he's gonna find himself in a situation where it's like wow i really need to heal to get this 10 hp up on you know my bounty hunter but this stun is looking freaking juicy and occultist does require quite a bit of finesse and a bit of gambling so if you're running him consistently mark teams then things get like consistent in terms of offense but then less consistent in terms of hp values if you're using him to heal and you're not like crutching on our bless man in arms is helpful for mark teams just because he has a lot of awesome buffs but then you have bellow which is awkward and you have to stress heal man at arms sometimes because he does attract quite a bit of stress and having mana arms in your mark teams is nice but bellow does kind of suck honestly so you're really bringing him just for the other buffs but you can find decent buffs and synergy in different ways with other characters the only other benefit of man in arms and mark teams usually is just the fact that man in arms can guard and if you are running occultist man arms is guarding people which means he is funneling damage to himself which means occultists can just focus on dumping heels into one person instead of having to spread them out across the entire team arbless is the character we have to talk about most i didn't have really an order going into this but i did know i wanted to talk about her last because arbless is the core issue for mark teams i feel like because arbless is supposed to be the mark character marking is supposed to be sniping like in all for all intents and purposes and arbless's kit is so just filled with issues or at least it has a couple prominent issues that are pretty tough to manage and she really bogs down the entire archetype the first being that when you run arbalest she is really good at killing backline enemies but even then she has issues with doing that and then when you kill backline enemies you start running out of targets with our blessed whereas if you're killing things with bounty hunter bounty hunter will never run out of targets because every time you kill something and then the corpse goes away they move up so even if you just chop through the front liners you still get to the back liners at some point whereas if arboles cleans up the back line in like two or three turns she has nothing to do besides healing at that point which is helpful but you would like it if she could just keep facilitating offense because instead of spending turns three four and five using bandage it would be nicer if she can just hit mark on rank one and then help bounty hunter just erase what's up there arbalest also runs into the issue that she is the only mark character in the game that cannot put her mark on a target she can't hit which is completely weird i feel like red hook actually missed that because occultist can hex anything so that's cool bounty hunter can drop mark for death on anyone from anywhere and same with houndmaster and target whistle but for some reason arboles cannot mark anyone from everywhere on the map or at least in your party and that is actually bad because if something happens and she ends up in the front of the party she can't mark them if you are out of targets and you don't need to heal anyone she can't mark them and help end the fight faster instead she has to use like blind fire or bola and arbless like i keep saying does cause a lot of problems in the the mark archetype and i would more times than not usually skip her unless i need to kill a boss that is exclusively in the back the other shortcoming of arbalest is that she has to go last in your team to make sure that she is set up because she only has like great damage if she marks whereas houndmaster his damage is okay it's actually very close to arbless i believe his is 7 to 13 at the top end and arboles is 7 to 14. so they're pretty similar in terms of damage output for like the raw hit however houndmaster has bleeds attached to his attack moves and bleeds are good so bleeds increase houndmaster's effective damage by anywhere from like two to six points every time he sticks one or in the case of hounds harry it's uh three points for like each bleed tick so if you think about it if the enemy is living for three turns like you hit him once over three turns and houndmaster six to bleed he's doing 13 to 19 damage whereas arbelis is only doing 7 to 14. so her damage compared to houndmaster can fall behind very quickly if houndmaster can keep sticking bleeds which means that arbless is desperately reliant on mark whereas houndmaster is not this also makes houndmaster much better at bosses that have multiple actions because he can still do kinda close to the same damage as arbless but arbless gets better damage scaling trinkets so she can actually ramp her damage much higher than hound masters but if the enemy has multiple actions per turn this mean town master can still do like maybe like on a crit 15 or 10 less on hit damage but then he sticks a 10 point bleed on them if he's quitting and that's fantastic and the fact that the bosses can have multiple actions means that houndmaster's bleeds are ramping up very quickly and doing their damage faster so it's actually easier for him to like i said put up almost comparable numbers to arboles and houndmaster is easier to use in parties because you can put them in quite a few different spots and he still performs very well so at that point you're really just picking arblast if you want her bandage and her type of support skills instead of hound masters and then if you want someone that's a very tanky backliner so we can't really write off arbor less massive hit point pool compared to especially houndmaster who's like under 40 and arboles gets close to 50. so that is kind of a nice trade-off but back lines don't usually take the most damage i think i got a bit tangential there but the other thing i wanted to comment with arbless is that since she wants to go at the end of the party order she has to be slow she has to be like five speed or less to consistently be going last and that means that the enemy back line is going before you like every single time because you spend your first turn marking and you're not killing the back line with you know the rest of your heroes you're just waiting for our bliss to shoot them so if you're doing that that means that the backline stress casters which are very quick and they're supportive types in most cases they are getting two or like at least one sometimes two maybe even three if you low roll uh stress casts off so that's like anywhere between 20 to 60 stress or they're dropping awesome buffs like plus damage or whatever happens you know with these these buffs i can't remember all of them and that honestly sucks if you let support units do their support stuff on the enemy team or you let stress casters constantly nuke you with stress bombs then you are going to be falling behind and taking a lot of damage that isn't you know it's not hp damage you're taking stress damage and that's much harder to get rid of and it costs you money in a lot of cases so to sum that up the issue with arblast having to go last is that the most important turn in uh darkest dungeon fight is turn one because every single fight sees turn one and most of the time if you aren't fighting you know a boss or if they just happen to not roll four enemies you're fighting four enemies if the enemy is getting four attacks without you interrupting it because you're trying to set up offense then you're taking a lot of damage that you don't need to be taking and if you ran a different team you could slow it down it's easier to mitigate and you can still kill them just as effectively you just don't get you know a crit for 60 instead you just get like a play grenade and a blinding gas you just rotate those and you kill a back line like four turns for the characters in the mark synergy pool so the same you know four or five we've been talking about with their trinkets there are some good ones and there's some that kind of miss the the mark i'm not trying to be funny i swear bounty hunter for instance he has some pretty good trinkets but they're not like mark trinkets they're just actually no he has uh what is it the bag of crime lord moller so the bag of teeth that's like his mark's energy trinket but otherwise the hunter's talon that's not a mark trinket that's just you know good damage trinket wounding helmet that's not a mark trinket that's just a good damage trinket although it does it's kind of a trap because of the shortcomings but you know wait for the bounty hunter guide which means that the crown lord or crime i can't even say crime lords molars are the ones that give bounty hunter his mark damage you know besides the skills and this is kind of a common issue with the the mark stuff you're just looking for like raw damage scaling because they don't have as much mark scaling houndmaster's got a weird collection of trinkets because he has a lot of support trinkets across his entire pool and he actually doesn't see a damaged trinket like a dedicated class damage trinket until orange so the very rare tier and that is kind of odd because houndmaster has mark synergy which he has a lot of it in terms of the damage potential on hounds rush so that's the game telling you he's a like pseudo sniper mark damage character but he doesn't see damage until like i said orange and then his orange trinket has bleed damage or like bleed chance and then flat damage so the flat damage does kind of help with mark damage but the bleed chance is also there so it's not like dedicated mark it's just dedicated like damage overall and then you have this crimson cord set which has a lot of utility and it's got damage against bleeding so that means you want a bleed team not a mark team and then finally he has his color of madness trinket which is a guard slash stress healing trinket so houndmaster has a lot of interesting choices in his trinket pool but he doesn't really have that much access to damage occultist kind of follows that same idea where he has some utility trinkets he has access to the damage but he's primarily there to facilitate offense so a lot of his trinkets help all of his utility moves so they help his pull his stun he does like i said get some damage and his debuffs that's like what his trinket pool focuses around he doesn't even get a dedicated healing trinket which means you're taking a cultist it's really just him being there to hit stun and pull and debuffs so again no mark synergy on occultists in terms of his damage potential it's just the fact that he's kind of quick and he can set marks for other people and then he has stuns and a decent heel the only mark synergy trinket that man in arms sees is his crimson cord set so the old unit standard has debuff chance on it and that's the only thing he finds in his class pool to help him synergize with mark people because duff chance helps the mark debuff stick not uh mark dbf the bellow debuff stick and bellow gives the thing where they get chris received with their mark but that's not even that good because you can just use command you can just use command and get more crit and not have to risk the debuff chance and the miss from bella's accuracy and then we come back to arbless who has the same type of issue in her trinket pool where her class trinkets aren't that good for the mark synergy she has a lot of other stuff she can be doing with it and just to go over these kind of quickly she only has access to damage in two trinkets so she has when i say damage i mean flat damage so like just percentage increased damage or percentage increase range damage and that is keying bolts keying bolts are incredible they're way better than the musketeer one the musketeer one sucks i don't know why it's designed that way i mean it's kind of thematic for the class but it's honestly not that good then you have the wrathful bandana which is another source of damage but then you have to trade off uh arbless healing output which once she's out of targets she's healing she's healing for the rest of the fight once she can't shoot anything so the fact that you take that away from her or at least make it way worse honestly sucks a lot so her trinkets aren't that good outside of keening bolts unless of course you run some kind of support setup with medic screams then they get a little bit better same with the childhood treasure or the i think second place trophy for musketeer because all those boost healing those are pretty good but that again you're not running arbor less strictly as damage you're running her as like a pseudo support hybrid at that point the other weird part is that arbless best thing in terms of her damage output is the fact that sniper shot has base 115 accuracy at uh level five that means she doesn't need too much help with accuracy yet for some reason she gets bedtime story which is 15 accuracy if they're marked and then she gets the bullseye bandana which is eight accuracy just across the board she doesn't need these she doesn't need those that much and if you are looking to get big damage you have to go elsewhere but she doesn't have that much strong access to it unless you're running neutral trinkets which are still good but usually if you want to run neutral trinkets it's because you need some kind of weird niche combo of effects because you need to tackle that specific dungeon and with characters or the hero classes themselves it's more fun often times to run clash trinkets because that's like the hero's identity you know like yeah i can put on a chair urgence charm with the vestal and that's kind of cool but i'd rather just grab her salacious diary you know that's like from her origin comic or like that's part of it and it's something for her it's hard to get and that's fun it's more fun to put on salacious diary than chirogens and same goes for our blessed it's more fun to put on her crimson cord set or keening bolts than it is to put on ancestors musket ball so for these mark characters the trinkets oftentimes leave a bit to be desired i'm not even going to get into the other characters that are mark synergy like highwayman because he just has like you know range damage all over the place from a couple sources or just flat damage and then you have what is its shield breaker who has the fang spear tip which is just 25 then she has like captivate then you have grave robber with throne dagger so there's just weird mark synergy that's not as good across a bunch of other characters to the point where it's almost not even worth using so we keep coming back to the central idea that if you want to get the most out of mark you have to run some combination of having at least one of these classes like hound master bounty hunter or arboles then we get all these other issues that we've been talking about that kind of start to compound at this point where we have odd trinket choices that we have to consider and then we have skills that don't make sense like arbless kit for the most part or we can only hit a couple ranks unless our names town master like if we're bounty hunter we can only hit the frontier with mark damage and if we are arbless we can only hit like the back three with mark damage which is admittedly okay it's just our blessed damage range is so garbage like i don't know why it's not 8-16 it really should be buffed up then if you want to run like i said the mark teams you have to like pick this odd assortment of characters sometimes and then like you can run good teams like um occultists bounty hunter jester and arblas that's one that thick and midnight have been using and that is a very good team i've been testing it a bit for my bounty hunter video and i like it quite a bit but it's it's definitely fragile so like if things go wrong you know people start getting hurt that's kind of a common issue with mark teams is that they can feel a little brittle at times so not only do you have these issues if you want to run characters like grave robber or highwayman or shield breaker and try and use their marx energy they have better strategies to be doing than marx energy like shield breaker has impale pierce puncture all these utility things adders kisses high damage there are a thousand things she can be doing and captivate is just fine without um fang's spear tip so she doesn't need that same with grave robber you'd rather be lunging you don't want to be hitting throne dagger like throne dagger is just okay to clean up kills or if you're on like not blood moon so they have lower hp you can sometimes snipe someone on the opener and that's pretty good otherwise if you're running grave robber it's lunge it's lunge and sometimes pick or poison darts it's not thrown dagger with mark synergy because if you're just gonna throw dagger with grave robber from mark damage you know unless you have some early game in like week eight where you can't build a proper team but you have like this mark thing going on that's okay otherwise you're better off running out master or arboles then there's highway man his best strategy is to duelist advance and then point blank or duels advance into wicked slice or open vein it's not sit there and wait for someone to mark and then pistol shot them four times i realize i've complained about mark quite a bit but i feel like i have to highlight all of its issues so there are some like i said some design philosophies that feel like they need to be changed obviously they're not going to get changed anytime soon because red hook's full steam ahead on dd2 so that's completely cool i'm just hoping that if mark makes a return in the sequel then it has some reworks i'm pretty sure if they're going to put it back in they will have figured out something because uh some of the common solutions that the community myself and other people have put up that we thought of you know if if we can think of these things then obviously red hook knows about them and red hook is pretty in tune with their community so they probably if they didn't know them they probably saw the ideas and they're probably like taking them in and doing what they want with them and figuring something out that works and if we talk about these solutions there are a couple ones that jump out at me so the first is that arbless with her kit her kit needs to change she should be able to mark any target from anywhere because that would help dramatically and if you could do something like run bandage from the front line then arbless could you know just be a tanky frontliner with a good heel and then she can just be dropping marks the whole time that's not bad if she had like blind fire that's actually a usable kit like would i sit up in the front and use battlefield bandage and sniper's mark and maybe flare would be nice to have and then blind fire that's a usable set for arbless if she's gonna sit up front and just soak damage with her massive hp i think that's one other issue i forgot to talk about with mark teams is that if you want the range damage from marked teams you have to put these characters in the back line like arbless and sometimes houndmaster or even bounty hunter and rank 3 which means you're kind of struggling for solid healing because occultist is a bit shaky so you're left with crusader healing which is okay and then flagellate healing which is actually really good and i think fletch ellen was kind of a boon to mark teams because he's a frontline support and that means you can just stack the rest of the party with backline snipers and not snipers but like mark damage and that clash overall just doesn't feel great like if i want to run hound master rank 3 and r lesser rank 4 and bounty hunter rank 2 i can't fit vessel on my team i can't fit like reliable good backline support units if i do i have to trade something and then risk you know taking more hp damage or not having reliable healing and then if i'm doing that then i'm very reliant on the mark team to go quickly and go first and kill stuff but if you have arbalest the same issue keeps coming back she's slow she doesn't get to go often and she doesn't get to take out both backliners before they get to do stuff she has to wait until they get two turns the final issue of mark teams is that if i want to run you know this backline decimation with rblest or houndmaster or something like that why don't i just run hellion or crusader or shield breaker or any number of units that can get a lot of reach and do a lot of damage to backline enemies so with rbls the issue i keep coming back to her right but the issue with arboles is that she has 7 to 14 damage that's backline damage it's balanced against her shooting backline targets compare that to hellion and crusader whose damage range at max level is 10 to 19. so that's quite a few points over our bliss as a whole like the average damage goes from 10 to about 15 which is really powerful and then with crusader and helion specifically since they have that bruiser damage it's designed for them to fight other frontline enemies that have protection so that's why it's got that you know huge damage range however crusader and hellion both have ways to hit the back line so hellion has iron swan and if it bleeds crusader s holy lance and that really diminishes arbalest as a sniper because like her thing is hitting the back line for big damage but then you have these other two characters who can hit the back line for big damage and they're easier to build around the reason that crusader and helion are very good at killing backline enemies is because they basically cheat like they like not in the sense that they're breaking any game rules actually they kind are but you know they're not breaking game code or something like that they have kits that are focused for them to hit front liners but they can cheat and put their damage into the back and that makes them much more powerful so if it were not as easy to get massive backline damage from multiple sources like you can even run you know damage over time and stuns so like flagellan and plague doctor go well together you can run characters that can reach from you know the front to the back stuff like that with helium crusader you have highwayman who can repost and put out you know a bunch of damage through action economy and then still shoot rank four for instance you just have a lot of options which means that arbless doesn't really get the mileage she rightfully deserves i started talking about solutions and i got sidetracked so i apologize so we're talking about solutions here with red hook hopefully we just assume that they are aware or they've you know heard the stuff we've talked about in the past with mark i would like to see like i said bonuses on arbless i'd like her kit fix that would make make things a lot better i would like to see i said her damage up i would like to see marks like how they expire i would like to see that uh modified because right now they just wear off like a debuff and marks at least have the benefit of not having any resistance so they can't like fail they can just miss which still sucks i don't know why marks aren't like 200 accuracy that would be another nice change with marks then since they fall off quickly you have to spend all this time reapplying them which sucks i would like to see them last either for a total duration of rounds like it says rounds on the enemy when it's applied but it's really just their actions so if they have two or three actions to turn they're just wearing off and you have to put them up every turn which sucks ass and having marks expire or like tick down at the end of a round so it doesn't matter if they have three actions or seven or two like it's still just the same duration that would be a very helpful change and then another change i kind of liked was that it would be nice if marks ticked down every time they got hit so like you use mark for death with bounty hunter for instance and then you sniper shot with arbless that's minus one charge like it has a bank of like three charges so that way you always get the effective value that you're looking for so the investment is worth it so then you can do some other cool stuff which would be a lot of fun like having bounty hunter mark the first four turns because you can put marks down on everyone and they don't expire until they start getting hit and that'd be really nice the next change i would propose would be to have other characters that can set marks it would be nice if there was just more access to them across characters like i can't think of a decent example offhand but you know maybe like vestal for illumination marks the target that'd be interesting i'm sure there are plenty of ways to work marks into character kits with the existing heroes if you really wanted to expose that could be another good mark you know like it drops them out of stealth it marks them that'd be pretty fun so there are a lot of chances to just put marks on moves and then that opens up who gets to participate in our teams and that'd be a little more fun the final change i would propose to improve mark as a strategy would be to add more effects to the mark abilities like i really think that our blessed mark reducing dodge is kind of bad and it would be nice if it hit you know all ranks from anywhere on the map but i think arbless would be like the prime candidate to have crits received as a mark debuff actually vulnerability hacks also makes sense because you know it's vulnerability so either one of those having crits received would actually be quite the boon because mark characters get a lot stronger if they're quitting and it's not just the fact that you know crits do massive damage but oftentimes the mark characters have crit buff so if they get a crit they get increased damage against marked targets so it feeds into itself so like if you get a crit you just get 33 more damage the next turn and then that's an even bigger shot or bigger crit if it happens and you just start snowballing stuff and that makes mark also kind of rely on crit which is hit miss it's it's weird because like you take mark to do consistent high damage and then you have to stack crit so you get like a chance for more damage to snowball more damage i actually don't like that design at all and i just wish they would make some improvements so mark is a little easier to build and a little less easier to or like a little more difficult to throw off track because right now it does feel like it's kind of easy for the enemy to disrupt because like the enemy gets one stun on your occultist like you're not getting marks or whatever if you don't have enough synergy on your team and that sucks or if like the pig the butcher pig and the warrens stuns your rblist you're not getting damage that turn that sucks and then finally the fact that marks are at their best when they're killing bosses and there are a lot of bosses in the game that since they have multiple actions they just drop marks instantly and it completely negates the bonus or i should say the benefit all right all that's gonna do for this one thanks for watching let me know what you're thinking about mark teams and stuff down below let me know about the stuff i missed the stuff you agreed with stuff you didn't agree with love to hear from you join discord if you have not already follow me on twitch all that complete and absolute nonsense but i think you're beautiful and i appreciate you spending this time with me and we get to talk about mark so that's pretty fun and i hope you enjoyed it and next time i'm not quite sure what i'm going to put up next i'm working on a few different projects so thanks for watching and i'll see you later

Channel: ShuffleFM

Views: 24,590

Rating: 4.9371729 out of 5

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

Id: weZqKYllho8

Length: 39min 28sec (2368 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021