Why Torchless is Bad: Darkest Dungeon Discussion

what's up y'all shuffle and today we are going to talk about torchless and darkest dungeon and we're going to discuss why it is actually not hard before we get started make sure that you check out the box below for all the social media stuff like discord twitch and patreon and then like comment subscribe all that awesome stuff that every single youtuber probably tells you to do and now it is hardwired into your brain for those of you unaware torchless darkest dungeon is a self-imposed challenge it is one where you choose to not take torches with you into dungeons and then you snuff your light down to zero on the first possible chance and this gives every single battle increased damage crit stress and also more loot it makes everything more threatening and you might be thinking okay that is naturally harder and there are other caveats to it as well like increased surprise rates and the chance that shambler spawns as a regular hallway battle if i can be quite honest as well the only reason this is even remotely difficult as a mode is specifically because of shambler once she gets a veteran you have to be watching out for shambler and then when she gets a champion it gets pretty difficult because champion shambler scales up pretty hard in terms of difficulty which means every team that you take into that dungeon has to have him in mind but also the appearance rate gets up to 12 percent i believe which is pretty freaking high shambler itself is for a later time we're gonna talk about it later so for the other stuff in torchless as i was saying the reason it's actually not difficult is because after a certain point you're just playing regular darkest dungeon it feels like i know that once i got past week about 10 or so and i had a couple good trinkets it stopped feeling like the mode that it was supposed to be and i think it's just because it's so poorly designed and it reinforces a lot of what would be darkest dungeon's metagame if it had one to further explain this context when i was doing my attempts to beat torchless before i finally did it the first weeks were the most difficult because i had no access to the guild reynolds starts with horrible moves dismiss is okay and then you're kind of at the mercy of whatever the stagecoach gives you for the first couple weeks and your heroes are level zero which means once they enter the dungeon they are taking bonus stress just from entering because every dungeon is level one and if you don't know you take penalties for being lower level than the dungeon itself so i probably had a few dozen restarts in the first few weeks and you can go okay there's the challenge shuffle i'm still gonna disagree and again i'll explain in a minute but once i got past week 10 i only got past it three times and after the third time is when i beat the game getting past it the second time is actually when i would have beaten it but i threw the save file pretty much for content so once i got back to that point and i got past it again i had a couple decent trinkets i had a couple good heroes it was just the same game after that it just reinforced the darkest dungeon meta that i was discussing a second ago where instead of you thinking you have to change everything you're doing you really don't it just depends on what you've normally been playing in darkest dungeon like your regular team comps that you bring out for torchless it has all these different challenges like increased damage increased stress damage increased crit increased surprise three of those four things are countered by the same game plan that wins at like all times which is having faster characters so speed becomes more beneficial and stuns the reason stuns and speed become like the most important thing is because the scaling on the damage and the stress gets so out of control that jester has trouble keeping up with it vessel has trouble keeping up with it occultist has to roll really high consistently on heels to keep up with it which means instead of getting hit for 35 with a stress attack or a gunner bandit cleaving you with a stress attack the you know gunshot and you take 40 25 25 25 across your entire team in terms of stress instead of dealing with that garbage instead you just stun them and you prevent all that damage so that's why torchless doesn't so much change i shouldn't say change but it doesn't define challenge in darkest dungeon what it does is it forces you more into a very optimized strategy which is already very powerful in just regular play the other part of the four things i listed so like i said increase damages increase crit and then the increased surprise chance surprise is offset by scouting scouting is very powerful and no joke once you get your scouting up to about 45 50 that's only a couple trinkets maybe a scouting quirk once you get the ancestors map it's pretty much gg or if you have like a couple seer stones for instance like once you get your scouting past 40 the surprise thing is no longer as much of an issue because you're consistently scouting a hallway or two so you only get surprised every now and then if you don't know again the mechanic if you scout a fight on the map you will not be surprised by it you can surprise the monsters but you will not be surprised yourself so what that means is if you're stacking speed you have a couple stuns on your team and you have like 50 scouting you're going to get through most dungeons pretty safely besides shambler the other thing that does not change to offset the quote meta for darkest dungeon is that all the monsters have increased damage and stuff like that but they don't have increased resistances they don't get plus 20 percent all resist or something like that which means these stuns are just even more powerful than they were before the monsters also sadly don't get more fun things to interact with like they don't get torchless specific attacks i think that would have been a nice addition would have been pretty hard to implement all that i will admit from a game design standpoint but it would have been pretty fun to have something like that maybe thinking to yourself as well that because there's more stress and more damage that means that the facilities outside of battle become more important and honestly they don't like you still need to use them to stress heal especially in the early weeks but honestly once i got to veteran i wasn't using that much in terms of stress healing just because i had so much access to extra scouting and speed and stuns that my heroes like yeah they would come out with maybe 60 stress sometimes or 40 but it was pretty manageable to keep them out of affliction range and that's where the facilities get a lot better so what this means is that the higher the player power gets in the play through the penalty of having to spend more money which is already offset by the torchless treasure drop rate which gives you more chances for loot so more gold more heirloom stuff like that so having the increased treasure already offsets the penalty for having to use the facilities more often and then once you get to a point where you're not having to use the facilities as often as you were you can just stack money like i actually was able to get the bank get over a hundred thousand gold by the end of the game even though i was spending it constantly like i had people in my twitch chat saying i can't believe that you're down to you know ten thousand gold fifteen thousand it's like because you know i'm spending the money but i'm also making it back very quickly i spoke earlier in this video about how the meta became prevalent in torchless so having fast stunners became really good so characters like plague doctor run a lot of my teams occultist was on a lot of my teams and abomination actually did pretty well even though i didn't have broken keys so shout outs to a bomb although you can't transform in torchless like the stress gain is just too much where transforming is usually not worth so having stunbot a-bomb is fine one of the criticisms i hear when people talk about torchless like i've gotten this in a couple of the videos i posted where i show snippets of my torchless run and people say oh you have arbless and leper you know against shambler like why are you running these types of characters that you can't run them in torchless and that's simply not true at all as i was saying before if you get your scouting high enough you can run these characters suddenly leper doesn't have to worry about getting thrown into rank 4 at the start of every fight which makes them a lot easier to bring along and leper really pays for his spot in the team with the massive damage he's putting out and surprisingly with leper arbalest those two specifically i would argue those are my two highest performing characters over the entire playthrough so when i start uploading the file in i don't know a couple weeks or something like that you're gonna see what it was looking like the arbless did really well the leper i think i had one leper but he was just incredible the entire way through and the other character that really surprised me was hellion like i know hellion's already pretty good but hell's hairpin is such a strong trinket that being able to get it early and have a couple hellions on your team is really nice my point though is i want to reject this myth that you can't bring certain characters to torchless because they may get surprised and thrown to the back there are characters like as i'm saying with lepre and arbless they may get screwed by getting surprised but they are so durable as units especially leper with solemnity that it's one of the few things that can stand up to the constant punishing of damage or punishment of damage that comes out from the enemies in torchless arbalest also has the benefits of things like pretty good healing camp skills and marching plan marching plan is another massive speed boost to your entire team which again helps you prevent enemies from doing damage to you if you've not seen my action economy video you should probably do so because in that one i specifically talk about how prevention is the best form of healing because preventing more damage is usually better than reacting to it in this game shambler is the only thing that really throws a wrench into the regular dd play style with torchless and that's just because the spawn rate of shambler is frankly too high and it was actually balanced around a previous thing that they patched out so think found this out and he told me about it and he showed me some video evidence where before i don't know exactly how long ago this was this might have been before color of madness because i think that was like a massive patch to everything so shambler can spawn in hallways in torchless it can replace a room battle the chance of getting shambler is one percent on apprentice four percent on veteran and no eight percent on better and sorry and then twelve percent on champion before with the spawn rates you were able to retreat from shambler and despawn it which is fine i think that's actually okay some people may argue that it's not and i completely understand that line of thinking but the appearance rates of shambler were balanced around the fact that you could retreat and despawn it like you weren't meant to fight it every time so it would be like you walk into a room or not a room a hallway and shambler pops up it gets one or two attacks off because i can't remember if you can retreat on the first round i don't think you can in some cases i digress so shambler might hit you once or twice before you're able to get out of there and then once you retreat back to the room that you went into since you're playing torchless your whole team is going to get like 40 stress minimum so they're probably close to afflicting at that point you might have to camp afterwards which is another good reason to save your camping but they changed it so instead of being able to retreat from shambler and despawn it you just can't do that so if you retreat from shambler and come back to the fight shambler is still there but they did not change the appearance rates of shambler instead it still has the same 1 8 and 12 chance of appearing which means that the appearance rate of shambler is still balanced around an old mechanic or i should say feature that you were able to run from it and despawn it and they took that away so instead now shambler is always there but it kept the same spawn rates which means red hook probably just missed this it's a big game i can understand that they missed that little caveat but it should instead have shambler spawning at something like one percent four percent and eight percent for champion at the top end i would also accept something like five percent across the board so just one and twenty i think that would be okay too because shambler at the start of the game is a bit easier actually a lot easier than shambler at the end of the game so i'd rather just kind of keep it as a consistent thing where i always have to consider it i do like the idea of shambler spawning in torchless just because shambler like i said it's the one thing that really changes how you approach torchless because once you want to do champion missions in darkness you have to consider shambler when you build your team so you always have to build a team that can fight shambler and if you don't and it shows up you are in big trouble in most cases shambler itself does not actually get tougher in torchless because when you fight the dang thing normally it is already in zero light so shambler as a fight does not change at all it's just the fact that it can pop up at any time what this really comes down to is that torchless impacts two areas of the game the hardest it impacts the first 10 weeks of the game because you get surprised all the time and you can't pick your own moves because you don't have the guild and reynold has like the most abysmal starting loadout possible i didn't realize how bad it was until i started doing torchless and the other part that gets impacted is the champion dungeons because shambler's spawn rate is just too freaking high if you own dlc for the game that gives you extra regions those aren't impacted by torchless at all crimson court is always considered to be high torch it has its own special lighting called bloodlight and if you go to farmstead that has its own special light as well which depends on whatever the heck the torch rolls you get these different effects so the torchless stuff only applies to regular dungeons in the base regions and a few of the end game dungeons so we're about to head into some spoiler territory the in-game missions didn't feel that dangerous considering the torchless benefits it still felt pretty close to what they normally were there were just a couple extra crits it felt like but for the most part the stress was manageable because in the first couple end game missions there are ample opportunities to stall heavily so even with a kind of garbage team i still got through the first one without losing anyone i only think i had a death store check i think i had one or two afflictions i healed one of them off the second mission i was chilling pretty freaking easily for like the majority of it the only time i was even close to being remotely in danger was the same thing that can kill anyone at any time in darkest dungeon and that's just like a random crit with a follow-up of a very strong move afterwards so i had a man in arms he got crit for like 35 and then right after he got hit for 17 and he was on death story because i think he had crimson curse so outside of that one instance of a crit and a follow-up hit i was pretty safe for the majority of the dungeon considering how short the third mission is for the end game it got a little closer than i was hoping for but we still pulled it out and obviously i'm gonna stop there in terms of the spoiler content even though we're still being kind of vague and i really expected more from the torchlist experience i was expecting it to make me a better player and it kind of it did in some ways but it really didn't in a lot of ways it was just more i had to focus on having extra speeds and stuns even though i usually play that way anyway so control styles are usually just winners and honestly outside of the first few weeks and the last few weeks of the playthrough the game felt like nothing had really changed when i got hit sometimes it was a bit harder than i was expecting but for the most part everything just felt fine the stat changes hyper inflate stress specifically and it makes really not fun interactions like gunner bandits cleaving you for an absolute boatload of stress or drummer pigs cleaving you for a boatload of stress and you can say sure that's the challenge because you have to make sure that you're preventing the damage and all that but like i said it really just reinforces the darkest dungeon meta of having heavy turn denial game plans or hyper aggression where you can just wipe stuff out in like two turns the core reason that i'm making this video is because i've seen too many people on the social medias and i've had people like express this to me personally when i've talked about the game and they say things like oh you haven't beaten it on this so therefore you can't talk about it i had one person accuse me that i had not beaten the game even on blood moon when i was talking about it and i thought that was pretty hilarious and i showed them some video proof and they like double down on it still but whatever and the thing with torchlist is it's not hard it's just poorly balanced and i think that people conflates or misunderstand what difficulty is when they think they're dying so it's very easy to die in the early weeks of torchless because you just get people afflicted and you have to take people at like 60 stress out on missions until you have enough people from the stagecoach to make it easier to deal with and so people are getting hit for a bunch of stress they're getting hit for more damage the crits are you know off the charts in a lot of cases and people think oh this is challenge and it's really not it's just bad design which means my goal is i want to inject this idea into discussion for darkest dungeon where we're not basing what people have accomplished or whatever or saying like your opinion is invalid because you haven't done this when you bring up torchless and blood moon and stuff as reasons for why someone doesn't know what they're talking about you're just doing a disservice to everyone at that point so torchless it's not difficult like i said it's poorly balanced and honestly i think if you can beat the game on blood moon or stigen if you want bragging rights i think you can get them there just because in darkest and radiant you can eventually win just by grinding out the game you will eventually get enough trinkets and enough good heroes built up to conquer what you're doing so blood moon stitching have actual game over modes which is why they're more challenging but even blood moon isn't that much harder than darkest so i really don't want to see more talk where people are saying yeah i beat it on torchless which means you don't know what you're talking about try beating it on torchless blood moon before you step up to me nerd it just needs to stop so take it from someone that has beaten it that it's not it's not anything major it's pretty much the same game after a certain point it has too much imbalance in terms of the stress and shambler spawn rates and outside of that stuff it's honestly like i said it's the same game this is even going into a bigger topic that i'm gonna make a video on later but just you can always crank up the difficulty on yourself there are always more self-imposed challenges that you can do so people can sit here and go oh you haven't beaten the game on blood moon you're bad then you go well yeah i'm beating on torchless blood moon so you're bad yeah well you didn't beat on torchless blood moon deathless all bosses you're bad yeah you didn't beat on torchless blood moon deathless all bosses with no stress healing you're bad right you can always just crank the dial further and at some point it needs to stop torchless itself does not teach you how to be a better player in most cases like it doesn't teach you things that any experienced dd player doesn't already know most of us know that stuns are good speed is good accuracy is good you have all those things you can do pretty well in the game and if you have all those in torchless it's going to feel a lot easier than if you don't so that's why other challenges like when spartan beat the game with no gold that was pretty crazy or you can beat the game with no stuns like thick did which is absolutely just nuts and crazy i would never do that those kinds of things will make you a better player than just playing with torchless like being able to beat the game even on darkest with for instance no gold that's a bigger accomplishment than beating torchless i would argue all right that's gonna do it for this one thanks for watching next step i'm gonna start working on the leopard guide at some point i'm behind on that go figure shuffles behind on something i stream on twitch four days a week come watch that stuff join discord if you have not and if you like what you're seeing slash hearing consider supporting on patreon so thank you very much and i'll see you next time

Channel: ShuffleFM

Views: 110,547

Rating: 4.7967763 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, marvin seo, indeimaus, splattercatgaming, northernlion, react

Id: YAthsZ7mtZc

Length: 20min 22sec (1222 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021