I get the feeling I am too cautious. I've killed two bosses so far, and have so far only put a single adventurer in the ground (due to a stupid mistake really early on). Normally this wouldn't worry me, since I tend to be patient and play games, especially "difficult" games, cautiously. But looking ahead I can see that about half my roster is level 3 and I'll run out of level 2 dudes long before I've gone through all the eight green bosses! Or even just half of them! I think by the time I've put the Wizened Hag in the ground, I'll have run out of level 2 dudes who will deign to go after mere green bosses! It'll be beneath them all!

There's something off about the progression in this game. It takes a lot of grinding out portraits and deeds to level up the smithy and the guild to keep your dudes equipped with their level-appropriate weapons and skills, which is fine, but by the time you've gotten the smithy and guild up, your dudes are already past that level.

I assume you're supposed to forge ahead with inferior skills and equipment and have it be a grand event when finally you get to unlock lvl 2 weapons and armour for your lvl 4 dudes, but that's not how I play games.

The progression structure in this game might not be for me. I might lose patience with it - but for now I'm still hooked. I guess I'll see how it goes.

(I almost did have a full party wipe against the Swine Prince. Like most I guess I took out Wilbur first and enraged the great pig. Managed to escape the combat with just a sliver of health left on all four dudes.)

Once you start doing the mid and upper tier dungeons I would guess that you're gonna start losing more guys. Maybe not, but the jump in difficulty can be severe for a lot of people. Once this happens you will need to level up more guys and you will play through the lower level dungeons and beat more of the bosses.

Don't try and kill all of the low level bosses before progressing on to the mid tier dungeons, you'll ruin the game for yourself.

The game does have pacing issues and the grind puts me off in a lot of ways (now that I've played it for 80 hours :) ). The end game is especially egregious.

"Once you start doing the mid and upper tier dungeons I would guess that you're gonna start losing more guys. Maybe not, but the jump in difficulty can be severe for a lot of people."

No shit! I got my lvl 3 dudes up to snuff on skills and (somewhat) equipment, went into a yellow medium length exploration mission, and the second thing I encounter is The Collector! Now all my guys are at 70-80 stress, and two of them are at death's door! Goddamn! I think I can eke it out completing the mission though, so I won't have to take the extra stress hit from jumping ship. But holy hell ...

@joques: Hahaha, I'm glad man :) The beginner dungeons are the pretty easy once you understand the game. The mid tier ones can be real fuckers, especially for stress damage. Let me know if your guys make it.

I hope the challenge is more to your tastes now, good luck in the dungeons!

@joques: fwiw, don't be afraid to retreat from battle/completely abort a mission, if your dude is on the brink of death. The stress from doing so is quite minor, and while you don't get the mission reward if you abort, you do still get to keep all of the money and heirlooms currently in your inventory slots. Better to do that than have a guy die whom you have sunk tens of thousands of gold into upgrading.

Can The Collector appear more than once per mission?

@joques: I've never seen it happen. You'll often go like 5-20 missions without ever seeing him.

Hey, another question: If party members die, do you still keep all the items and money in the invtentory? Or does a portion of the loot disappear as characters die off? I keep picturing a single half-mad, bleeding, diseased, grave robber weighed down by a pack of loot bigger than herself, staggering back into town ...

@joques: I think you keep everything unless you run out of room in your inventory for other party members trinkets.

Also I think it is technically possible to get more than one collector but the odds are extremely low. You'd probably be able to find out on the reddit page, they've mined most of the numbers from the game files.

@joques: If a guy dies, you keep the loot in your mission inventory. If ALL 4 of your guys die, you lose all of the items in your mission inventory and any trinkets they may have had equipped. Try to avoid this ever happening, because it is a pretty major loss. You always have the option to retreat.

If a guy dies and he had trinkets, those trinkets still exist, but are considered loot for the current fight (I guess you don't have time to scavenge their corpse in the middle of a fight). If you win the current fight, you will receive those trinkets within the loot reward of the fight. If you choose to retreat from the fight (perhaps a tough boss fight that you don't think you can handle with only 3 living party members) then you will not get those trinkets back. If a guy dies for some reason outside of battle (bleed damage, blight damage, trap damage, starvation damage if you're out of food, etc.), I believe you get his trinkets immediately.

Just wanted to say I was having a real similar experience to the OP.

If you can live with grinding constantly, it's easy to keep playing low level missions and levelling up guys and upgrading your keep. But the mid-tier game is really, really crushing in my experience. I can't do a dungeon without someone dying at this point. There have been quite a few retreats recently also...

@arabes: "Let me know if your guys make it."

Super un-exciting resolution to this tale. I gambled that I would catch a break and get a couple of slightly easier battles where I could heal up and push on. Instead I met a group of burly-ass fish dudes with scimitars that straight up murdered my highwayman before I managed to put them in the ground. I realized there was no way I could survive with just three dudes, so I fled back to town.

Would I take that gamble again? Yes. If I could have gone a couple more battles, then camped, there's a decent chance I could have completed the mission. It was worth the risk.

@bisonhero: Thanks for the clarification!

The game was a joy to play. Small tip avoid the Tavern if you don't wanna run the risk of losing trinkets.

@joques:Taking the risk was the right move man, the gamble might have paid off. And there are always more willing souls coming in on the coach ;)

@walach: I think that you can sometimes win trinkets too!

@joques: Yeah, if a mission is going rough and a guy dies, at the very least, I would say immediately use your campfire to get your remaining party members into tiptop shape. At best, try to struggle through a couple more fights without anyone dying, but I wouldn't expect to finish the entire mission when you only have 3 guys to fight with.

Hehe i never once won a trinket but had lost a few rare ones and started to dislike the trend ^^

Also the Collector fight is not quite worth it unless you're really confident in your team. You can easily just flee the fight and when you go back hes not waiting for you :)

I am disliking the progress structure of this game more and more, but it still has its hooks in me.

Exactly half my roster (9/18) now consists of lvl 3 dudes, yet I have barely, after an intensive campaign of grinding specifically for deeds, managed to upgrade my blacksmith to furnish my lvl 2 dudes. Getting to the next blacksmith level (to get up to my characters' current level, remember) requires so many heirlooms at this point I have to look away from the numbers in order to bear it - else I'd ragequit the game right now. There is a real incongruity between the progress rate of your characters and the progress rate of your village/equipment that is grating hard on me.

I'm going to make another attempt at a mid-lvl dungeon now, with lvl 3 dudes using equipment one level below their tier - if nothing else then to make room in my roster for fresh arrivals :p

I can see a slight problem after a patch they had that makes leveling up from 3-6 faster, when your gear is not up to snuff..Mostly I avoided The Cove as it seems to hit the hardest.

I spent most of my time going to the weald and then the warrens. I prefered the short dungeons as they were like 15-20 mins each which made it feel like I was getting those hierlooms rapidly.

Fresh meat is good if you wanna grind the easy short dungeons and then throw them away if they get to much stress.

Good luck with the medium dungeons!

I realize I am at odds with my subject line here, but FINALLY GODDAMNED SURVIVED A MED-LVL DUNGEON! Just a short one, but still. My houndmaster rapidly went up to 200 stress and barely survived a heart attack. I couldn't understand why he was so stressed out, until I saw he had this disease that gave him 30 % extra stress :-p He turned irrational, which in turn stressed out the rest of the party who for their part were performing admirably.

I think if I'd had to abandon yet another quest and miss out on the quest rewards and being flat out broke from equipping them, I'd have rage-uninstalled.

@joques what's your party setup ?

@joques: I always thought it was because I played so much in Early Access, but no, the "early" dungeons in this are PRETTY easy if you're being cautious.

Trust me, once those icons turn orange and you have to start using lvl 3+, things get REAL tough REAL fast. Enemies' immunitie % goes way up, their DoTs start doing a LOT more damage, and you REALLY have to start paying attention to things like what @joques mentions like stress %.

@walach: I apologize, I had to step away from the game for a little while - hope I'll be back :)

Undeadpool, yep, you decribed my experience exactly ;)

So I am on the fence about this game. I love the look and sound from what I have seen, but lately i've been struggling to get into games that are deemed "tough". Does this have an ok learning curve where things will fall into place or is it pretty much hardcore from the get go?

@daveydave Hard to say for everyone, but I found it quite fair in difficulty. I thought it started out quite Easy(lv1), Medium(lv3) proved a interesting challenge, and Hard(lv5) dungeons can be scary. If you like a challenge it's a really great game which is definitely worth getting.

Darkest Dungeon, the final one was brutal at times but mostly because a failure means leveling up a full team to lv 6 again. You can only bring a person once to Darkest Dungeon(lv6) they won't go back, but a successful run means they don't take up roster space so that's something :)

@daveydave: I know Walach said that he though the Level 1 missions were quite easy, and I agree to a point. They are easy once you know what you are doing and understand the underlying mechanics or else have a good familiarity with this style of game and understand how RNG works. It's easy in the same way that the start of a Dark Souls is easy if you've played a lot of those games. It's not easy the way a mainstream AAA game is easy. You party can get wiped on the tutorial if you don't know what you are doing.

Thanks for the replies guys I appreciate it.

I don't mind a challenge, but does the tutorial show you the systems adequately to get used to them. I don't need everything explained to me but as long as I can get the gist of it.

@daveydave: The tutorial explains just about every single mechanic, and then it's up to you to look at the various character classes and combine their skills and positioning as you see fit. The easy-tier missions are nearly impossible to fail, because I think the devs expect that new players may occasionally screw up basic stuff like party composition or buying enough supplies, so the difference between your party's HP/damage isn't that different from the enemy's HP/damage.

One of the things not told to you is that certain random objects in the world need certain supply items. I think the tutorial explains this concept, but not what the actual combinations are. Like, you might find a desecrated altar or something, and if you just click on it then you get loot or it might curse you instead (will randomly be one or the other), ORRRR you could use holy water on it and it always gives a positive benefit. There are a bunch of objects like that in the game that each have specific supply items that sorta "defuse" them, and frankly you should just look up a guide of how each of them work, because trial-and-erroring your way to figuring out which supply items work on which objects isn't worth the trouble, and then it isn't even saved in any in-game compendium, you just have to remember it every time (by which I mean "keep that shit open in your browser").

The learning curve is pretty reasonable, just know that when you jump from easy-tier missions to medium-tier missions, you need to get that much better at having very efficient party combinations that can kill quickly, and also you need to grind out base upgrades so that you actually have appropriate gear/skill upgrades to go against medium-tier enemies. Ditto for when you eventually reach hard-tier missions; your tactics won't wildly change because they aren't doing anything crazy new, but their HP and damage gets pretty high so you really need your wits about you.