Darkest Dungeon®

Darkest Dungeon®

The Twilight Knight
BiosTheo 27 May, 2024 @ 1:36am
This character needs some buffs
I'm having a hard time understanding why I'd ever take this character over any vanilla character that sits 1-2. Her stun and her basic strike do well, and she has crusader damage with a higher floor. Crusader damage, fundamentally, means she's a support because any other character that likes sitting 1 (Hellion, Leper, and Shieldbreaker) are going to vastly out damage her. She can be somewhat left on a stress island, but doesn't have the full independence of Leper who can take care of himself pretty much no matter what, then turn around and delete whatever in front of him, so she also needs support. Her support skills of spot stress healing is fairly mediocore and, quite frankly, useless on higher difficulties as you'll block more stress and damage just using her stun. So basically, she's a stun bot. That means we need to sit her 2, but then bounty hunter just exists and is better than her at the support/damage roll and we don't really need a back up tank when we wouldn't even put crusader there whose vastly better at that anyway.

So that leaves her with her Riposte, which is garbage and a noob trap. Its a very revealing factor if you play DD and believe Riposte is a good mechanic, because that means you think its good to take a big smack in the face for the chance of smacking back. Yes we can build around it by taking Antiquarian 1 and her 2, but that means we're not taking Highwayman which is just flat out better at this than her due to his other abilities... Also the fact that lunge is good because of its damage, not because of the riposte... oh yeah and Man at Arms exists so we wouldn't when we're doing it anyway. Great. And then we have to deal with that her is just "I riposte and +6 Dodge" so we've just farted away an entire action that could've been spent doing something productive rather than strapping a target to our forehead and praying someone hits us so we can get a free full damage swing in with our mediocre damage.

So then we come to her damage nuke abilities. +40% to Edlritch/Beast sounds good on paper, until you look down and see -40% damage penalty for 3 turns! So if you use it at the start of the fight you basically have a giant paperweight on your team, and if you use it towards the end of the fight that means you didn't need it cuz everything that needed dealing with is either 1. Dead 2. Going to be dead. And again, having a nuke on a Crusader isn't great because Hellion, Shieldbreaker, and Leper can just do that damage all the time without gutting themselves.

And then the leap... Great its a dance move that can be used in rank 2 with +20% damage upfront and -20% damage for 3 turns thereafter with additionally penalties. So not really something we want to be using when she already isn't putting out impressive damage numbers to begin with. At least there's a Prot buff, for all those times we don't want to be hit in the first place. +Prot is good, don't get me wrong, but its a bit like riposte in that it only matter 10% of the time and 50% of that time it really didn't make a meaningful difference.

And mark. Why does she constantly mark herself? She's not doing anything special. She's not out damaging anyone, she's not out supporting anyone, she doesn't do ANYTHING remarkable or better than ANYONE else so why does her abilities penalize her this much? So again we have this mechanic that only incentives enemies that specifically get bonus damage vs marked enemies to hit a character with okay tanky stats, all things considered, that can't even HEAL herself.

Quite frankly this character ranks below every single vanilla character because at least Antiquarian has her gimmicks that make her uniquely strong on endless and gold farming. She's a worse support than Crusader, can't keep up in damage with actual frontline damage dealers, doesn't have the independence of other front line characters in her role, and doesn't do a good enough job to even fill a secondary role. The main problem with this character is: she does what other characters already do but worse.