Man-at-Arms and You: Darkest Dungeon Guide

what's up y'all shuffle welcome to the man at arms guide today we'll be talking about everyone's favorite grizzled old army sergeant dude militia thing with his cool eye patch and his mace and his just pissed off attitude of telling people to get off his lawn so if you want to learn about the strengths weaknesses teams skills all that nice awesome stuff and stay tuned i'm gonna try something different i'm gonna ask you to like comment subscribe all that stupid youtube crap do that at the start of the video and join discord if you haven't because when we were setting up for this guide i did some playing of this in stream and i've been talking to people over a few days and i even stream this on twitch so go check out my twitch as well now that the self plugs are out of the way so let's talk about man in arms himself he's a very interesting character so his strengths are he has access to guard there are only three characters if i remember correctly that have access to guard so that's pretty cool he has really good buffs especially his camp skills he has some of the best so if you can take him to something for camping or a boss mission which primarily always has camping he also has her post something he shares with our favorite highwayman dismiss so repost is not a common thing at all so we have the ability to guard which is already good and then we have the ability to repost which means he can funnel more damage to himself and get more counter attacks which is pretty awesome his last strength is actually his very versatile choices in positioning so you can put man in arms in the front of your party so rank one and two you can put them in three you can even put them in four which it's kind of meh but we'll talk about why when we get to that because we will cover a rank 14 but otherwise he can do a lot of stuff from a lot of positions and that's really nice so if you need to be flexible with your team or like certain people have to be in specific spots and you still want to take mana arms you can just drop him in rank 3 and he can do pretty much everything he wants to anyway so that's really nice weaknesses we're going to talk about bellow a bit later but bellow is a very underwhelming skill some people do try and sing its praises and it does have use you know i'll say it's a weakness in terms of his kit but i still put bellow on certain builds and i still press the button so it's not the end of the world but as a skill there's a couple reasons why it's lackluster and i'll explain that later man at arms himself has low damage that's another weakness of his his damage used to be 8 to 16 and they cut that to 8 to 14. i really don't understand why it's kind of like upsetting because that hurts everything on him so that makes crush weaker that makes for post weaker and then rampart shield already wasn't doing great damage so it's like even though he can repost and that's pretty cool he's gonna be like reposting for eight damage you know unless you have like trinket set or something so otherwise it would be nice if he had more damage but he doesn't the next weakness i probably should have led with but that is the stress factor so man in arms is a massive stress magnet because he's always guarding other people in most comps so that makes him get hit more often and then also since he has lower damage output and riposte is okay but not amazing compared to dismiss i should say highwayman just because people don't always use the cannon name but yeah so with man in arms the fights usually go a bit longer because he's a slower like he's a slower character in terms of how he plays so that means your fights instead of being over in like four turns or over in like five or six which means more crits come in more stress casts go off stuff like that so man at arms is oftentimes just getting hammered by stress over the course of a dungeon especially longer ones so if you plan to bring man at arms in your teams you should have some some plan for the stress so either some kind of trinket or maybe not have him guard as often have some kind of other plan for him in battle or just have a stress healer like those are some good options otherwise his last weakness is his pool of class trinkets he has a good one in rampart shield which i think got nerfed from where it used to be i think it didn't have the plus damage penalty before and it had higher stun chance so i got shafted a little bit but it was understandable and then his crimson quartz set is actually kind of good it has plus stress which i don't like but otherwise it's this only thing that gives him like damage none of his other stuff gives him damage everything else he has is like defense and just defense and more defense now let's take a look at the man and arm skills we're gonna start with crush this got a change in butcher circus that i liked i think where it ignores armor or like has some kind of armor pen crush does not have armor pen baseline the accuracy is pretty bad it has a nice crit modifier but the fact that his base crate is pretty low and his damage got nerfed crush is okay but it's pretty underwhelming rampart however this move is very good so this does a lot of awesome things you can obviously stun with it you can move enemies out of position especially like rank two to three is pretty cool but also the fact that it moves man in arms forward lets him fix his positioning and then also if you want to have like dance teams where you have two people moving around sometimes three this lets him do it it actually lets him participate in it which is you know different you don't expect tanks to be really good at dancing even though like crusader as holy lance for instance but rampart is a very good skill bellow is a skill with several issues the effects are actually pretty good it's just the fact that it no longer does damage like it used to i think he used to do like one or two damage which was fine because you could just snipe low health targets but it's got pretty average bass accuracy at 110 and then the reason i don't like it is because since it's a debuff that has to stick to the enemy the move has to do two things it has to hit first which means man in arms might need some accuracy help and then it has to debuff which means he probably needs some kind of debuff help so he needs a trinket for that you can't i mean you can't itemize for both but you're kind of sacrificing a bit and also it's just a worse battle ballad the reason battle ballad is just strictly better is because even though i think the speed increment is a bit lower on battle ballad but it's it's a buff it doesn't have to hit your party it just works on your party you know the only time they don't take it is that they're afflicted and they act out like that so ballot is usually better and bellow is kind of awkward to use especially the crits received while marked usually with mark teams it's it's a bit of a struggle to fill all the gaps you need to because you want like a lot of mark synergy in the team but then you still need healing which means you have some more limited options in terms of space which means you're kind of left with like mark setter and then mark hitter or like sometimes two bounty hunters or something like that and then you have like bellow which it lowers their speed so you can beat them up which is kind of cool but then like just five crit at max rank that's pretty weak and they have to be marked in order to get this so i am not a huge fan of this it's not a lot of value for everything it gets but like the best thing about it is the minus speed and i do have like circumstances for when it's good i mean it's good all the time but there are some times where it's better than not guard ally is probably one of the main reasons you take man at arms because there are some specific bosses that guarding just almost counters directly and man in arms has a better guard than houndmaster though hound masters is pretty cool it's just different because it's dodge but this is really easy to use you can use it from anywhere in any build so it's usually something that's good to just have on at all times in case something happens so you just press it you press the person that needs to be guarded they can't be hit by a single target move or even a cleave if manned arms is not involved but that is the thing too so let's let's say let's put our crusader here so if this man arms guards this crusader and both of these two get hit by the same attack at the same time they're both taking the damage it doesn't just skip crusader at that point so guard is pretty cool but it does have its weaknesses and if he gets stunned guard goes away retribution is the repost move for man at arms so he just counter attacks anything or almost anything that comes at him with this so like i was saying before if you guard someone and then retribution or retribution lingard you're just getting that many more counter attacks so it is pretty cool the reason it's not as good as highwayman's is just because man in arm's damage is lower so it just doesn't put out as much on the return hit so it's kind of lacking in that regard but there are certain enemies that this does very well against there are certain bosses i'm not going to name them obviously but they have multiple actions to turn so that means that like you know man in arms gets one thing he hits retribution that's the end of his turn and then the boss gets like two or three actions and anytime they get multiple actions uh riposte gets much better because the more free swings you get because of it just the more damage you're putting out so that's kind of what makes it so good is the fact that it cheats action economy command is a move i have been liking the more i use it it's just it's not even a weaker battle ballad i think the crit rate's a bit higher it's the same 10 accuracy and then the text is a little deceiving it says buff target and it shows these stats it actually buffs the whole party it's just the guarded target is the one that gets the damage increase so this can enable some really heavy hitters like bounty hunter in mark teams and that's kind of another point against bolster it's like why not bolster uh bellow it's like why hit bellow and give them five crit when i can just command and give them eight crit and then also i don't have to worry about the dodge debuff because i get the same mountain accuracy and then i give them 25 damage if i guard them on top of it so if i set up that combo they start hitting really hard like i was having bounty hunters crit like over 70 with command and guard it was pretty awesome bolster is a still good skill rest in peace old bolster which was absolutely broken because i had a plus speed and it lasted three turns so you just carry it around into other battles so that was awesome we don't have that anymore you get to use it once a battle you can re-up it if you use the shard dust from the provision store so if you buy that you can use bolster repeatedly although you do accrue some penalties we're using cool smarter language like accrue and then saying stupid stuff at the same time that's just what we do here but bolster is not as good as it was and i have stopped liking it as much in most builds just because i began noticing it's like kind of slow in a hallway battle usually commands better because it ends the fight faster and bolster keeps you safer but usually you want to end fights that aren't boss missions like as fast as possible you still want to end boss fights quickly but i feel like bolster is only good in boss fights now it's not as good in hallway battles i'd much rather hit command but bolster by itself is still a really good skill and if you run something like an aquarian or some other dodge tank type of team then you can stack this with like invigorating vapers and actually get some pretty good dodge numbers across your team so as you've seen so far we have guard we have command we have bolster we have some really cool buffs going on that can fit a variety of teams and that benefit for lack of a better word i can't think of a better one offhand but that benefit extends to his camp skills as well so starting with weapon practice we have 10 damage and a bunch of crit the crits a chance to land i wish it was like certain like i wish it was four percent crit for you know 100 chance or five percent or six or something like that but it's fine it usually hits that's all that matters the 10 damage is really good too so weapons practice is just a good camp skill if you have a couple of direct damage dealers and you're gonna go like fight a boss this is when you hit this and you want to blow them up and then we have instruction that was a weird awkward move of the mouse there but we have instructions so speed and accuracy on one person for three points that's a bit expensive but it is still pretty good you can make a hyper carry that way and if you have someone that is going to be getting command every turn or like one command and then guard to boost their damage then this gets a lot better because you have more speed to capitalize on it tactics this is a great move so this is what i was saying before right they give us ten percent damage and then eight percent but it's like a chance to to land and then tactics gives us five percent crit for like free you know it always hits so you get ten dodge which is surprisingly helpful and then you get five crit which helps everyone like like everyone in your team wants crit because crits help stuns stick even if you know they crit for like two damage crits help you kill things faster they help bleeds land stuff like that so this is just a very good skill this is one that if i have mana arms in the team i am hitting this in like 99 of my camping maintain equipment i don't know why this is four points after man in arms got nerfed on his damage this should be three just because the scaling potential on it is a bit lower and like i was saying before man and orange doesn't die to direct damage like even if he dies to direct damage it's bleed and blight it's not just getting hit in the face by tree branch smackdown which i have been crit for like 50 on man in arms so yes that's like the outlying case but otherwise man at arms doesn't just die to direct hits like almost ever so this is a pretty weak skill even though it is kind of thematic for him so this is one you almost never hit i think i forgot to talk about this in the arboles video so i apologize but just to go over his trinkets really quick his low level ones kind of suck the rampart shield is actually pretty good because of the bonus stun chance the guardian shield that's only for rank 4 which we will portray a build of so don't worry about that and then well i should say the guardian shield's pretty average as well i don't like it that much the healing receives the best part about it the toy soldier and unit standard from his crimson quartzet his set's actually pretty good the thing i hate about it though is the fact that it kind of pigeonholes you into bolster not bolster i keep saying bolster instead of bellow but a pigeon holes you into bellow and then you also need riposte and you need stun if you want to get the most out of it of course but otherwise the thing i don't like about this besides it like fostering bellow is the plus stress as i was saying before man at arms dies to stress more often than not like if something is going to kill him it's going to be stress so having more stress incoming even if it's just 10 is kind of hard to uh to accept but this set does still work and does very well you just have to set him up for it i do not own the mirror shield on this file but i do not like mirror shield the reason i don't is because it gives you dodge when it's a trinket that wants you to get hit and then you reflect the damage you've taken so if you get hit for 10 and your protection chops it to seven you reflect 30 percent of the seven that's pretty bad because man at arms is always stacking prot somewhere especially if he's guarding so this trinket even though it's kinda cheap at 75 it's honestly not that good in my experience for quirks when building your man at arms i regret to inform you that the normal damaged ones don't do too well on him just because repost damage to my knowledge is not melee damage it is explicitly repost damage so that means that slugger precise striker stuff like that do not boost it so that kind of limits your options unless you want to go crush which i advise against so having that mind for quirks the ones i will prioritize for man in arms are anything that reduces stress so steady is just flat stress resist obviously very good photomania if you're playing high torch a bunch of stress down that's awesome so those are usually the best things to get him because like i said he dies to stress very frequently if he is dying next i will suggest speed and speed for him his speed is okay but the reason i suggest speed is because if man in arms can go early in the round to set up then he does a lot better so if you go early he can get command down on people he can get bellow if he's using it he can get that guard on someone before you know those front liners at six seven speed start swinging at them or something like that so anytime you can give him some speed he usually does pretty decent with it defensive quirks can be useful on man at arms like i said he doesn't die to direct damage or just damage in general that often but there are some that are nice to have like clotter so resisting bleed is pretty cool because bleed is a very common damage over time type then obviously tough and hard skin those kinds of things those really extend his longevity so he can stay alive if he is getting pummeled but also this is one of the cases where i will suggest hard noggin and that is uh stun resist and that's just because man at arms does not want to get stunned if he gets stunned then he drops guard and that sucks corvid's eye is a quirk i normally don't suggest just because it's just so universally good on almost everyone that it's kind of like do i need to talk about it i probably should bring it up just because there are new players that don't under or that don't know of it but corbin's eye is a great quirk it gives you eight accuracy and eight scouting and for man in arms who has pretty mediocre accuracy giving him a sizeable boost in terms of accuracy for his other moves like rampart and retribution but also his repose specifically that's really nice and then also you get the utility of bonus scouting so corbin's eye is pretty good on him if you can get it oh yeah there's one final thing i forgot so if you can get this disease grayrot is actually pretty cool on him if you run certain builds that aren't as reliant on doing direct damage so grayrod is just a massive hp increase and there are only a couple characters where i would suggest grey rod but man in arms is one of them this team is an idea for a riposte heavy team so there are sometimes this is pretty good and apparently it has a name it's called the collection i didn't realize that until i made it but this team is focused on having double riposte and double guards and then you have the consistent healing output of vessel with a couple stuns so it does do a lot and it protects an aquarian pretty well looking at our main man here mr sergeants we have rampart for stunning so general control some movement and you can do some repost setup dancing with dismiss if you want to keep you i should say hi man if you want to keep using dual survance so it is a pretty good skill to have next we have defender to guard vessel the reason we want an aquarium is to force damage onto highwayman so having defender is primarily for vestal and i guess if guard falls off at some point you have to like clutch guard someone else like either highwayman or antiquarian it's there so this is a pretty good skill retribution is the main money maker no pun intended with an aquarium but is the main source of damage for man and arms on this team be very careful with the fact that it marks man at arms so if you know you're in like the wheeled for instance the mushroom front liner people they have uh ren the mark or whatever it's called so they have like mark synergy cultist brawlers have more synergy there are a lot of things that have marx energy and man arms can kind of tank it so that's pretty good but just be aware because you're gonna be taking a little more damage than you're used to otherwise this should be up like as close to 100 of the time as possible even like your turn one is going to be this and that's just because it gives you the most consistent damage output so it is worth getting up as soon as you can bolster making an appearance i said it's not great for hallway fights but we don't really need command with a team like this because like if you have command and then you guard vessel and she's getting bonus damage like what who cares but bolster has some pretty good synergy with antiquarian who can both buff the dodge of your team and lower the accuracy of specific enemies and that's pretty cool and then also man in arms does die distress pretty frequently if he is going to go down to something so having an extra 20 stress reduction on top of everything at level 5 is pretty nice the trinket set is the best way we can support mana arms using riposte so we have the crimson cord set so no surprise there gives us some stun chance on rampart which is nice gives us debuff chance on bellow that we're not using so who cares and then the whole set gives us for post damage and accuracy which is very helpful so that's really nice this turns his damage penalty of minus 20 into a positive five so you're actually doing i think nine to 15 damage on her post and if you crit it's obviously much higher so that's pretty nice and you get also the 10 accuracy on top the only thing i don't like about this is the 10 stress because like i've been saying in this whole video man in arms does go down to stress if he is going to go down at all and that kind of sucks so be like cognizant of this if you are going to run this set like this oh yeah i forgot to talk about the toy soldier just some flat prod and crit which is actually pretty nice so getting all this extra crit on riposte it's all helpful all just you know more damage and i think if uh repost crits at 15 damage so you get an extra 50 on your max roll so i think it's 22 or 23 damage it comes out to so that's that's kind of nice if they don't have protection highwayman is responsible for most of our damage on this team man in arms can do some okay damage with their post but you know his buffs and guarding stuff like that is primarily why he's here the repost is just a fantastic bonus and it does do okay but for everything else in terms of damage it's gonna be highwayman and the first skill i'm actually gonna talk about is pistol shot this just gives him range so he can clean up rank four which is where this team will have the most troubles killing rank four enemies you have point blank shot on those turns where man in arms falls into rank 2 and he does something like guard so you have this to get back to rank 2 with uh highwayman and it's just a lot of front loaded damage which is really nice duelist advance is the most important skill here because this way we have double riposte going on our two damage dealers here so having this up at all times is pretty much mandatory and with this alongside the man-at-arms ramp or not rampart retribution ability you're just putting out a lot of counter attack damage and then counter attack the same person do upwards of 30 damage if one of them crits it's pretty crazy and against certain bosses that have multiple actions per turn so if they have like two or three attacks in a turn to your one this is what i'm saying when you cheat action economy so like if they hit you two times each turn and you ever post that's just two more attacks that um you're countering with either highwayman or man at arms so you get a lot more damage out of this especially against those types of targets wicked slice could be open main this just depends on the dungeon you're going to so if you're going to the ruins where you can't bleed enemies reliably then it's wicked slice same with the cove probably if you're going to you know courtyard or wheeled or warns where things can be bled more reliably then you're gonna use open vein there's actually a consideration for tracking shot on this team but again that's like if you know you're going into a boss fight and you know how the boss works and you can afford to get rid of probably pistol shot in this case because it may be the the least useful against bosses where you'd want tracking shot so being able to understand that means tracking shot gets a lot better and it also boosts your counter attack damage on her post again to a positive i guess integer in this case right that's probably the right word to use so you get again plus five percent instead of minus 15 and that brings dismiss up to i should say hi man i keep doing that but it brings them up to i believe 10 to 17 damage on counter attacks so that gets you a lot of you know good easy damage if you can find time to use tracking shot for trinkets if you can afford i shouldn't say ford if you can find the crimson cord set this is what you want just because it's flat crit flat accuracy virtue chance you don't have a stress healer so that's you know somewhat helpful and then you have the neckerchief which just helps you dodge if things are swinging at you which you don't want to get hit with highway man if you can help it like you don't get hit directly even though you can repost so having this just covers all bases otherwise if you can't find that then having something like the crystalline gunpowder jump out real quick and look at the shard merchants so yeah the gunpowder from here is also fantastic again just flat damage increases repost damage which is awesome and having the three speed is very helpful so that's an option otherwise you know you can get that or just any source of flat damage and like accuracy crit is awesome here and then maybe like if you need to run a defensive thing like bleed resist that's also an option but usually not needed vestal no surprise it's the loadout we're used to this is just the best support vessel loadout so you have a stun you have two good heels then you have a pretty high tempo move in judgment and then for trinkets we have chair origins this is just a low level set and then we have dazzling charm to help our stun stick but this could be everything else i always offer up in these videos in case you have not seen my other ones but salacious diary is the best like raw healing trinket for her uh sacred scroll is kind of a trap i need to make a video about this at some point i know like it's got really good upsides and the downsides are pretty punishing so i'm just less of a fan of it the more i play um but otherwise for trinkets you can do like a healing trinket ancestors map for supports and then maybe like survival guide if you're low level so any supportive thing that you can think of goes pretty well in vessel because really she just needs one dedicated trinket slot for healing in most cases an aquarian making an appearance here so she is pretty low effective in terms of combat capabilities but the tools she does have if you can figure out good ways to use them or like what teams to put her in certain trinkets to give her and stuff like that then she actually feels like a contributing member of the team and i think this is a build that actually lets her do that so for your main attack i like festering vapers just because repost is like raw just flat physical damage uh you know instead of like bleed blight stuff like that so having this to get around protection because we have no way past protection is pretty nice so like skeletons or the octa-cestus fish in the cove that like to guard people this helps you get through those pretty reliably we have the heel because why not having access to a heel that can get people off death's door is better than not having it the vapors this could be flash powder if you really wanted to or maybe you can switch the heel for flash powder because both of these are pretty good moves depending on the situation vapors gets better later game than it does early game because of the scaling but you can run one potentially both i don't know like there are some instances where you might do that otherwise i do like vapors overall just because combined with bolster this is plus 20 dodge to your entire team on like turn one and that's actually quite a lot that's very significant so you see here antiquarian's already at uh she has daredevil so she's already at 30 baseline so between these two with bolster like i was talking about she gets up to 50 dodge out the gate and that's pretty high even at champion things have only about 57 55 to 60 chance to hit her on average and that's really nice and even man in arms appreciates having an extra 20 dodge so it is worth using and you can stack it so it just gets better protect me is pretty crucial to this team you only get to use it three times in a fight that kind of sucks but just make sure that you know you're using it at the best spots so it has like good uptime especially against boss enemies but having protect me is what enables highwayman to pump out way more damage so when he has riposte up you use protect me then after that's up you know any hit that's going at an aquarium is going to highwayman and he's counter-attacking it in like 99 of cases there are some things he can't counter attack but the majority of attacks he can and it gives them some dodge and prod on top of it so we're stacking a lot of dodge across this whole team and then protecting our front line which is pretty nice oh yeah i forgot this also marks the target so again just be careful if you know there's mark's energy among enemies then just be sparing with this like maybe if you know someone's got mark's energy stun that target while you kill everything else that kind of thing otherwise uh it's still it's still really good just because you have a couple stuns and access to vessels consistent healing the marx synergy is a little scary especially against spiders so i wouldn't recommend that but any other time it's usually okay to still do for trinkets i would recommend the crimson quartz set but i'm just showing off things that you can use in case you don't have that the fleet florin is really good for her just because four speed on an aquarium lets her set up early and the earlier and aquarium can go in the round the better and this also kind of incentivizes flash powder if you want to use that instead because you get the debuff chance i messed up a take that's why the trinket box is open and i'm too lazy to close it but the candle life is just one recommendation this just gives an aquarium a little bit of extra healing it puts her from three to five at max level which is nice and then it gives her some hp in case there's like a cleave attack or something else that comes into the party otherwise the candle can be really anything it can be the ancestors map or survival guide that you didn't want to put on your uh your vestal it can be just any number of things there's so many flexible choices that antiquarian gets but i would still recommend using the crimson quartz set just because it covers everything but like i said if you can't get it then the florin and something else are usually good substitutes this team is really straightforward in terms of operation so the first turn you're getting repost up on both of your front liners so highwayman and mana arms they just get repost up on turn one so you can counter attack everything for a couple turns vestal on turn one if you don't have a lot of damage from a previous fight she's usually stunning probably rank three because that's a stress caster so being able to do that is nice otherwise she's just healing after that and aquarian is likely using protect me on the opener or dodge vapors and then protect me right afterwards and then for the rest of the fight if she doesn't need to stack protect me or something like that she's just throwing festering vapors on units that have protection to just try and wear them down and then hopefully by the time your counter attacks and stuff get through the rest of the team then you can clean them up because they've already been weakened by the blight there is a notable mention to use crush potentially on this team if you don't want to use either rampart or maybe bolster and the reason you might want to use crush is because it can hit rank 3 and this team doesn't kill backliners that well and backliners do a lot of stress damage usually like that's their primary uh role in the enemy teams so they do a lot of stress damage you have no way to really kill them effectively besides pistol shot which you can use duelist advance on turn one and then rampart with man in arms so you're back into position two and then you can use pistol shot after that so there's stuff like that but otherwise if you can do the optimal stuff then you're just rotating repost and guard and stuns amongst everyone and then you're just stacking up to like 40 50 maybe 60 dodge so like i said this is a pretty safe antiquarian team to play to do some gold farming if you want to and it's not that difficult to play and even though there are some high level trinkets in the example that i'm showing here you can easily run this at lower levels with lower level trinkets you don't have to have cc sets and stuff like that it's just got a lot of good synergy across like the four characters and the moves that they have this is a team using rank four mana arms so that's the back line man at arms with the guardian shield and honestly this build feels like kind of a meme just because it doesn't feel super effective but i am covering it just in case maybe you discover your own really cool team with this from this suggestion so i'm just being thorough with a interesting idea for a trinket but this team has mana arms as like pure support and he's in the back line which means it's a little tougher to get someone like vestal in here though you can use her but instead we're going for fl uh flagellant i've been corrected by mr brassa himself at this point so flagellance is our healer he's pretty good as a front line healer so i like him and you can run crusader instead but i think one of those two is best but this team as we take a look here the issue with rank 4 man at arms is that he doesn't get enough abilities that are worth pressing in rank 4 because if he could use retribution from that spot this build would be fine like there would be no mean dreams about it it would be effective it would do stuff and it would be good right maybe not like great but you know it would be playable it would be solid and there are some fights that it would do very well in so unfortunately we don't have that instead we have this rank 4 dude who can shout at people with bellow he can guard he can command and he can bolster those are like the only four moves he gets back here we did some experimenting with using like grave robber and dancer types that move up to past him so he starts in like this spot where this bounty hunter is hits retribution then you move up past him then he can do all this stuff and get this effectiveness but it's pretty clunky in how it works and if you get like turns out of order or someone gets stunned something like that it just sucks so instead we're just going with a very consistent rank 4 build here and obviously we need the guardian shield that's just the way this runs and the 10 parts pretty cool the healing received is really nice and that helps keep him alive back there and since he gets so much healing received we don't have to worry as much about resisting stuff but this is also why i gave him an arya box this could be you know any other thing that lowers stress but the reason it i feel that stress is most beneficial is just because like i said he goes down to stress more than direct damage but this could be something like a cleansing crystal if you're not going to hit bellow this could be fortifying garlic this could be blood charm for some bleed resist because that's very common so you do have options here but i think guardian shield is like non-negotiable because that's kind of what the entire thing is built on also this is one i forgot to mention this is a build where you can actually use gray rot to great effect since you're never hitting stuff you're not worried about accuracy too much except for bellow which kind of sucks and then if you're not using rampart riposte or crush then who cares about minus damage the bounty hunters are actually like really cool in this team and they play pretty similarly so they're gonna have very similar builds and you can kind of copy the trinkets on each one if you want to i'm just showing two different things you can do here but this bounty hunter is like a damage-centric bounty hunter so we have focus ring because this dodge is kind of okay baseline but then you get accuracy and crit we have ancestors pen for just the highest output damage possible with crit 2 and i realized i just did trinkets instead of skills so let's just do this backwards we have finish him because obviously there's mark synergy hits really hard pretty good crit rate we have mark for death because when you have mark teams you want multiple people being able to set up mark and then hit it so if we have one bounty hunter go before the other that's fine we have a mark it doesn't matter we're never stalled because someone like high rolled on speed so that's pretty cool and it also lowers protection which is what bounty hunter struggles against the most and being able to get through those beefy front liners is very nice flashbang can go on both bounty hunters but i think one should i think the rank three one should have flashbang and the rank two bounty hunters should have uppercut and i'll explain in a sec but obviously flashbang has some really good uses if you like mark the turn before so bounty hunter's super fast the next turn he can flashbang a backliner and get him up to the front sometimes so that's pretty nice even if it gets like rank three from rank four you can use finish him with the other bounty hunter and clean it up which is really nice so flashbang is just there to help us control stuff like just very annoying stress casters in the back which will hurt man at arms and then we have finished him just for the reach this could be come hither if you really wanted but i think having reach on bounty hunter is really nice because this team kind of struggles with backline kills just a little bit so any help it can have in hitting rank 3 specifically is welcome so otherwise if we don't run something like this it's up to flagellate to clean up those back kills so our second bounty hunter here same idea as the first for these three skills but then we have uppercut so the reason we have uppercut is just so we have a way to stun the front line and then we have flashbang as a way to stun the backline so that's really the only difference between them you could run a stun trigger on this one just because uppercut is like 10 under flashbang and that would help you but i don't know it's i think itemizing these two bounty hunters is the most difficult because you have to depend on them for damage but then they have some utility so you have to make sure that they can fulfill that utility if needed so if you feel a little i don't know frazzled trying to trinket these two dudes out don't feel you know bad because it is kind of hard to itemize them especially earlier on in the game and like i was saying before since we need guardian shield this is more commonly better as a later game team when you can get guardian shield because it's pretty hard to get this early and i don't know if i want to waste a boss drop on guardian shield for this team i'd rather get blasphemous vial so i just digressed a little bit there but this bounty hunter i'm giving him some accuracy and hunter's talon and even though we have command to cover a lot of our accuracy knees just having a little bit more accuracy in crit is pretty helpful i just think this is a great trinket overall so i like having it and then if you don't want to go full damage and you want to go like some kind of utility then camper's helmet if you're lower level this is pretty nice so having more scouting means less surprises because this team obviously if he gets surprised and flagellant hits rank four and mana arms hits rank two for instance or if one bounty hunter hits rank four like this team just stalls out and dies or doesn't you know straight up die but it's in trouble so being able to scout those fights and not get surprised is ideal if you're higher level this could be ancestors map obviously or survival guide if you're lower level there are a lot of options just make sure you have something like that in mind or just hope you don't get surprised when you run into stuff all right now we come to flagellance so i've ran this team with this guy i've ran it with crusader i've ran it with vestal and rank three and the two bounty hunters up front and i actually think this is my favorite way to do it and the reason i liked crusader is because i had a stress heal but i found that crusader really struggled on what to do with this turn so just be like do i stress heal do i stun and if i stun like the back line is just constantly bombing you with stress attacks because you have no way to hit them and that really sucks so i think flagellum is actually pretty good for this and even because of that if we look up here you can switch punish for endure if you really wanted to especially if you're camping because if you're gonna go camp you can have endure to siphon stress off the other people and then you can camp and then use lashes solace that's actually really nice and so flagellin is our backline killer with reign of sorrows this helps you just wear down those back lines if you stun people with flashbang then it you know just gets that much more effective and this is our only answer to rank four so you can kind of see where there are problems with this team so you have to like use this on turn one try and wear them down maybe hit it a second time hopefully they bleed out after like three turns or you stun them or something like that or a bounty hunter crits someone else so they move up and then you can hit them with the other bounty hunter but that's kind of what you're looking for then we have exsanguinate this is why you could dump punish if you really didn't want it because exsanguinate is such a just great frontline killing skill and it keeps uh flagellum alive so i do like having it here and then we have reclaim this is what we sacrifice redeem for because you don't really need both of the low health flagella skills unless you're like on a boss fight where you get to use all five shots of them and reclaim is honestly really good i like reclaim because of the ability to heal people preemptively like if you know a cleave attack from a swine guitar is coming in or if you're bleeding on a bounty hunter you can use reclaim and even it out so this has a lot of really cool applications and you can also use it from rank 4 just in case flagellate gets knocked to the back i'm showing off a lower level trinket set to highlight this build here i would if i was higher level i should say i would run flesh heart you know like a thousand percent of the time over a blood charm and then your second trinket is pretty optional but actually real quick the reason we have blood resist is obviously reclaim bleeds flagellant and it has a very high chance to do that i think it's close to uh like 160 or 165. so being able to not bleed yourself for five points is pretty nice because you are the primary healer mr flagellands all right sorry about that so yeah bleed amulet this helps us stick bleeds which is what we need to do to kill backliners and command covers our accuracy knees because flagellum actually has some pretty good base accuracy at 115 so this helps you out a little bit blight isn't that common and if it does hit them maybe you can get low enough to use examinate that's pretty nice with this team the first turn is pretty important so hopefully you get like some kind of surprise on the enemy or at least scouted the fight and you didn't get surprised but the man at arms usually opens with command just to help boost all of the the bounty hunters and stuff like that but also you could open with bellow and the times i would open with bellow over command is when i get a surprise because if you get a surprise on the enemy and you don't kill one of them with a team that's like got like average speed across the board between the bounty hunters and the man at arms they're going to get like maybe six or seven turns straight against you if you don't kill anything so being able to use bellow in the opener on a surprise to slow them down for next turn really helps you clean up a bunch of kills and it's actually a great way to open a fight i almost never open with guard and if i'm not doing a boss fight i will not open with bolster the flagellance spends the first probably two turns hitting reign of sorrows just to make sure he bleeds out all the backliners obviously this team struggles in the cove a little bit and it probably is not ruins viable unless you go full support fledgling so i guess that's an option otherwise you need to hit these two opening renaissance to make sure you can bleed out the backline and then you spend the rest of the fight just hitting reclaim on whoever needs it and then hopefully get like one exsanguinate to close it out the two bounty hunters are probably the hardest things to play in this team just because like your first impulse is gonna be just mark and hit big damage and that is good but sometimes there may be like a a spitting vomit pig that can give you disease and you want to like stun that with flashbang so you kind of open with that instead and then mark with the other bounty hunter i think one bounty hunter should always be marking at the start of the fight just to help kill stuff especially because if you mark you get the speed boost and then you have command next turn and then you just have all this you know awesome crit rate and accuracy and then the following turn that same bounty hunter is going to have a speed boost still and then he gets guarded potentially and has even more damage which is you know just great so opening with mark on one bounty hunter is good and then stunning potentially if you need to or if you think you can get that early kill then mark and just chop him with finish him using the not finish him collect bounty using the other bounty hunter the good part is too since you have two stuns that are actually pretty good this team has some stalling potential and any turn you can get like one stall to get like one more reclaim out is honestly really nice so with reclaim it has a 12 chance to crit as a heel and you roll it three times over the course of like applying it so you get more bonus heal three chances to crit to remove stress and reclaim is a really good skill i think people sleep on it still the other benefit of reclaim is the fact that healing received is what boosts its effectiveness it's not healing just flat healing output so man at arms greatly appreciates the reclaims so anytime you hit man in arms with one reclaim it's got the 50 boost at level five so it's healing for a total of six per tick and it ticks three times so you're healing for 18 every single time you drop her claim on manned arms and that's pretty freaking nice like that's about a third of his hp at that point and that's what i was saying before he doesn't really need the resists because if he gets hit with like a blight or a bleed or something like that and you hit him with like one reclaim it's gonna out heal it in like every case except arterial pinch oh yeah there's also a certain roaming boss that likes to hit you with a seven damage play but you know what he can just piss right off the last team we're going to talk about is the wall which is the subject of don't panic's famous video on a thing it's called four man wall but this is a team that has all three front liners that have played armor so you have the most like effective raw hp across your entire team in the game you also have a vessel of course this isn't counting like you know four crusaders or something like that but this team is interesting it is really hard to kill in terms of like raw damage output and i guess we'll talk about the nuances later so let's just talk about the characters themselves so we have starting with the leper we'll start with chop obviously those just hit stuff get big damage good value solid crit mod need some accuracy to help it out which is why we have trinkets then we have hue because sometimes you need a cleave or i should say just completely flat zero crit modifier which sucks but when hue does crit it's pretty nice so it's there to help clean up like one kill and then weaken someone else we have purge to get rid of bodies because the leper always needs targets to hit and it'll be a lot nicer to purge something either to the back or just purge to get rid of bodies and that way you can just focus on repeated attacks you don't have to worry about slowing down and waiting for other people otherwise this could be something else if you really wanted to solemnity is our fourth move again this could be rotated for something else if you feel the need to or if you know what you're going up against i think solemnity is still good just because with how slow this team is in terms of its like raw overall speed having access to more stress healing is more beneficial than not otherwise like i said this could be something else for trinkets as a low level example here i have the fortunate armlet which is actually one of my favorites for leopard like i've still put this on like i've tested this at even level six with like ancestors pen and stuff like that just to see how relevant the extra crit or i should say the extra accuracy is compared to like surgical gloves it's only three but you know every little bit helps with lepre and then following up with our idea of green trinkets we do have surgical gloves which in my opinion is like one of the probably top five trinkets in the game it is definitely busted in terms of stat allocation especially in the green pool so if you can find these very helpful like i said you can take this to level six like this it's that good like surgical gloves are just that freaking broken that you can even use them at level six crusader is an interesting one because at first glance you may be saying to yourself like okay i might need smite or bulwark of faith or maybe i want to go zealous accusations so i can cleave spam with leper hue like those are all pretty interesting options but the more i've tested this team the more i actually think holy lance is the key to victory and i'll explain why in a sec so we're gonna start though and bury the lead with stunning blow stunning blow is just a solid stun it's got a pretty good damage modifier considering how hard crusader hits baseline so combined with the pretty good 110 accuracy this is a solid move to help you stall at the end of games to get more healing and if you need to battle heal is a flex pick this could be whatever else you're thinking of or like that you want in the crusader kit but i do kind of like it the more i test this team and that's because offloading vestal's healing burden to other people means that vessel can spend more time stunning and she can stun rank three that's like the most important thing here is the other two cannot stun rank 3 which is primarily a stress caster in most enemy mashups so having someone else that can heal if needed to let vestal be able to use stun more efficiently is always welcome and the other benefit of this too is that the crusader can use this from any spot in the team whereas vestal cannot heal from every spot in the team especially like in rank 2 she loses her single target heal if she gets pulled to rank 1 she loses all healing and that kind of sucks big time so having a very flexible healer and crusader is a nice way to deal with like the unforeseen circumstances okay so i said i was burying the lead holy lance is actually the most important thing probably on this entire team and the reason is this team kind of has some good front loaded damage in leper so he can chew through front liners pretty quick but since the team is so slow it has a hard time dealing with fast backliners and stress casters and stuff like that so having holy lance to deal that damage to rank three and four like every fight is really helpful and being able to kill them and not take a bunch of stress damage you know over like five turns or whatever it is is very nice to have inspiring cry is fantastic you get the minus stress you get the flat little hp heal which can get people off death's door if they don't have like a bleed on top of them so that's always welcome and this team does take a lot of stress damage so having some way to kind of stall and then heal it is almost necessary for trinkets i think the glittering spalders are going to make an appearance here the reason is primarily the minus speed of all things so this could actually be heavy boots for the same reason but having the minus speed and then the minus stress is probably the second best thing about it that helps crusader not get stressed out it helps crusader ensure he goes second because if you haven't guessed by now we have a dance core in the middle with rampart so we need these uh spaulders in order to make sure that crusader consistently goes as low in the turn order as possible so he always gets holy lance when he needs to ancestor signet ring this can actually be a focus ring if you need more damage or if you're gonna go like super mega minus speed this could be bracer but then you're kind of struggling on accuracy so i think you do need one of these two or potentially like a warrior cap or something like that for uh accuracy at lower levels but i wanted to play around with the idea of signet ring just to give crusader crusader crusader a ton more prot and i'm not quite sure if it's the best thing i think the spaulders alone are already pretty good but having a little bit extra is kind of nice otherwise this like i said could be focus ring which is just you know a good chunk more damage man at arms is here to provide all his buffs and utility that he normally does so to start off we're going to talk about rampart rampart is here primarily to ensure that we can use holy lance every single turn so we get to rampart first and then holy lance and then rampart and then holy lance and this way we rotate stuns on the front liners sometimes we potentially knock rank two to rank three so they use a bad attack otherwise it's really there just for the control elements and that lets vessel stun rank three if she has to while crusader is throwing holy lance into rank four bellow making an appearance i originally had defender slotted but then the more i thought about it you have the three beefiest front liners in the entire game and then you have healing on three different people one of them is a self-heal obviously and then you have like stress healing and stuff so it's like do you really need defender at that point it still has a use don't get me wrong there are things you can use defender on and it's still never bad to have but i think that with how slow this team is being able to use bellow for the speed debuff actually makes it a little bit better especially if you're trying to stall at the end of battles otherwise bellow could be anything else that you're fancying i just think that for the nature of this team it makes a little bit more sense retribution is here because why not we like counter attacks and any chance to squeeze out more damage and cheat action economy is never a bad thing command rounding out our skill load out here this could be swapped for something else if you really feel the need to but otherwise i think command does have some nice upsides like the fat crit bonus and the accuracy chance which does help pretty much everyone on this team and then it's also a case to run defender if you really wanted to so if you're gonna run defender probably consider command because giving leper an extra 25 damage is pretty tasty or giving crusader an extra 25 damage when he spears rank 4 is also pretty nice but like i said otherwise this can be anything else that you feel like you need for trinkets we're going to rock the rampart shield for that massive 30 stun chance that is pretty hot so being able to stun reliably even on front liners is really nice and sometimes you may even get lucky on someone that has like maybe 65 based on resist you can probably double stun them if you can hit this twice so there's that potential but otherwise i think rampart shield is pretty mandatory here because rampart is the core skill debuff amulet can be whatever else depending on what build you're running especially if you opt out of bellow you obviously don't need this but because of the way bellow works i feel that it's best to help bellow as much as possible because if it doesn't stick bellow is actually pretty freaking terrible because it's basically just skipping your turn no surprise in the vessel loadout so we have again best healing loadout stun high tempo judgment then we have supporting ancestors map to help scout because that's actually very important and the steam also has no rogues so being able to disarm traps somewhat reliably with someone is actually kind of important and then we have salacious diary which is just the best raw healing trinket output because it has no downsides and the upside like sacred scroll of plus eight percent is kind of minimal considering all the other penalties it comes with so i do like to run salacious diary if i get it the most important thing to remember when you play this team is that it is probably the slowest feeling team you will ever play everyone's base speed except for vestals is five or less without quarks and trinkets i think vessel's base speed is only six so vestal has become the fastest person on your team so think about that for one second this means that every fight that you don't get a surprise in the enemies are going to go before you even like they're somewhat average speed frontliners so that means that every time you go into a fight you're routinely taking all four of their attacks and then you do your stuff and then you take all four of their attacks again if you don't kill anyone the next turn i should say the first turn so that means the team takes a lot of like front loaded damage and stress which also means if you want to play a team like this you have to even if it's not your favorite way to play you have to look for turns to stall the enemy to squeeze out heels because anytime you can spend one extra turn or one more solemnity all of that helps dramatically and when you think about it if you are able to do that in every fight like let's say you have six fights in the dungeon and you squeeze out six inspiring cries because you stall at the end of combat and stuff like that you're healing an extra 48 stress and if you think about it in like those kinds of terms then you can kind of start to see how important it is so make sure you're always trying to slow down the end of the game even though you have i should say the end of the fight even though you have a lot of damage potential in leper because at that point people are in rank one so make sure you're always trying to milk a stun or two and then use your your heels and stuff like that and just slow it down to squeeze out as much value as you can the sequence of this team is probably no surprise turn one leper is probably chopping the squishier of the two frontliners unless you get two of the same thing crusader is holy lancing rank four and man in arms is stunning the person that leper's probably not trying to kill and maybe you can rotate someone into rank two or something like that which would be pretty nice but otherwise you have to rampart until you really don't need a holy lance anymore and at that point you can just leave crusader in rank 2 to stun and heal and stuff like that then vessel's opening with every stun that she can find and then healing you know near the end as needed but you have to remember you have so much life on all of these characters you have like over 50 on three of them so if you can just let them go down to you know 30 hp stuff like that as long as you're not in the wheel for instance but i would not take the seam to the wheel not not ever if you're aware of like how durable this team is and you're favoring like stress healing over raw healing then vessel can do quite a bit of good by being able to stun rank 3 to slow down stresses and then she can zap rank 4 with judgment to help out crusader and close out kills the last point i need to make about this team is it actually does pretty well if you get to camp the reason is that 3 out of 4 of these heroes are actually religious so that means vestal's camp skills like prey and chance which get bonuses if they are religious characters they just get that much stronger so being able to use those two and then maybe tactics if you're not worried about getting surprised in the middle of the night or using zell's speech to lower everyone's stress or some of the other really good leper camp skills means that this team does pretty well if it gets to camp so it has a lot of recovery potential it's just you have to like i said find those turns to stall for a couple you know like one or two turns squeeze out another stress heal and then go on to the next stuff all right y'all that's gonna do it for this one thanks for watching next i think we're talking about bounty hunter and then an aquarium after that i have not started the bounty hunter thing yet but you know i have some notes whatever and i want to do a new player guy that's probably gonna be my next thing i'm gonna see if i can make it like 30 minutes i'm usually really bad with time so that's just like my hope and i want to you know keep it condensed for those new players among us and otherwise if you have not make sure you follow me on twitch join discord all that garbage let me know what you're thinking down below and post your mana arms teams maybe your rank four man in arms team that's really good that i didn't think of or didn't notice and i think that's it so again thanks for watching and i'll see you later

Channel: ShuffleFM

Views: 25,750

Rating: 4.9270835 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: h45UBLR3tDE

Length: 58min 58sec (3538 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021