Quite an unique class, thanks for the mod.

After trying her out I just had to wonder why are there all the self-bleeds in her kit? I don't see her having any synergy from being bled, from being low health, or just having skills too powerful that need to be compensated with a negative effect.

I would admire anyone who would dare to use Sacrifice in a champion dungeon. Not only she would tank the enemies, she would also need to tank herself (bleeds!!!). And to add insult to injury, her self-heal is a HoT, which means she is incapable of bringing herself off death's door the turn she uses said skill. Wait, there's more! She also curses your whole party when she dies. Pardon my sarcasm, but I must say that's quite the combo capability you've made into your class.

I do like the design that she becomes stronger the more stress she has. It would be quite interesting to keep her stress between 75 and 100.

I haven't play the class enough to suggest any change in the numbers, but I think it would make more sense that Writhe has higher bleed amount instead of bleed chance the more stress she has.

just wanted to be sure her first skill seem to increae the bleed amount not just the chance if that is the case I think you should add that in the tool tip

Originally posted by Frozenwest:

Quite an unique class, thanks for the mod.

After trying her out I just had to wonder why are there all the self-bleeds in her kit? I don't see her having any synergy from being bled, from being low health, or just having skills too powerful that need to be compensated with a negative effect.

I would admire anyone who would dare to use Sacrifice in a champion dungeon. Not only she would tank the enemies, she would also need to tank herself (bleeds!!!). And to add insult to injury, her self-heal is a HoT, which means she is incapable of bringing herself off death's door the turn she uses said skill. Wait, there's more! She also curses your whole party when she dies. Pardon my sarcasm, but I must say that's quite the combo capability you've made into your class.

I do like the design that she becomes stronger the more stress she has. It would be quite interesting to keep her stress between 75 and 100.

I haven't play the class enough to suggest any change in the numbers, but I think it would make more sense that Writhe has higher bleed amount instead of bleed chance the more stress she has.

The self bleed is there to balance the potential strength of her heals. Because it's % based, if you use it on heroes with higher max HP the heal is stronger. The bleed is usually not much more than a nuisance anyway, a single cast of Convalescence neutralizes it.

I do think Sacrifice needs to be looked at, but I'm not sure how. I might do away with the bleed on it. The death effect will probably get axed, it's a holdover from an earlier version of the mod. I like it thematically, but mechanically it's far too punishing.

It's also worth noting that Convalescence in the beta test used to have a tiny self heal as well as the heal over time, but the problem was that both heals can crit, which would stress heal her for an obscene amount. It's better to use Sacrifice when you're not running her as a main healer.

Writhe's tooltip is bugged. It's meant to say that it does more bleed per 25 stress. I'm going to fix that now. It does work as intended, it just doesn't say so because of my oversight.

Originally posted by jdolev7:

just wanted to be sure her first skill seem to increae the bleed amount not just the chance if that is the case I think you should add that in the tool tip

See my last point in the previous reply. It's getting fixed. Sorry about that.

Great to see somone picked up the skin, Nagatos condena felt for me to wierd and out of place. From my limited testing im strugling to find use for he keeper. Her healing seems to be pretty weak and with a chance of stressing her out and bleeding her. As somone mentioned before, using her shield ability is a death sentance or atlest a affliction if u try to keep her at high stress. Also for me she suffers from the "to many mandatory skills" problem similar to cathapract, leaveing her with basicly 1 skill to choose apart from healing and normal atack. Maybe giving her inherit prot to stand out as "tanky but supbar healer" would help her utilize her ripost and guard abilties more.

First - sorry for poor english. I finnaly try this mod and must say - its great not only about art, but about skillset ideas too. But i must agree with Frozewest - she way to WEAK. Guard ALL on BH hp hero with 1 extremely weak defence skill? Press it if you hate her.
Why she stress and hurt himself? He deal extremely low damage with almost non-existent bleed, she have worse self heal in the game... I mean - 10% hp heal its 5 HP at champion lvl at best. FIVE. And ♥♥♥♥♥♥ stun (not so like over skills tbh)
Ah yes, she perform better on high stress! Her attack start apply mediocre bleed, her heal still suck (from 5 to 8 hp heal, be jelouse and cry vestal!) but at least her stun become good.
Sadly she will be 1shotted by any stress damage nuke. And then she become afflicted. And while she afflicted she huge pain in the ass, if you dont have huge stress heal + camping - its better to abandon run, especially on champion.
BUFF HER PLEASE.:
Rework sacrifise. Right now this is a terrible skill. I cant remember worse skill in any mod in this game. Did you try to use it on champion difficulty? You can rename it from sacrifice to suicide right now.
For example it can be: guard one ally + riposte + horror. Guard+ripost is strong on 1 button, but horror her will compensate it. Or maybe horror+self damage+self bleed but big heal (+stress heal) on ally, with maybe some effects. But in last variant she will lost guard... Dunno, i can think about it later, if you inderesting in third-party ideas.
Buff her stats and skill. Just straigh +number buff. Cuz right now before 75 stress she literally 2 times weaker then any vanilla hero (exept stun start being good after 25 stress). And at 75 stress she become a ticking bomb - again, 1 stress nuke will ruin you run.
So buff her to same power lvl as over heroes. Stress scale can stay, so if player want stronger then average hero - he can choose risk. High risk high reward, instead of High risk no reward, like right now. Maybe if you buff skills this way you will need a tone down stun scale a little bit - 100% base at lvl 1 + 10% per 25 stress for example.
Also maybe writhe can transfer dots? Or at least bleed? Good synergy IMHO and great with her lore, dunno about balance but im sure its worth to try. In this case you can make few more skills self bleeding. Or all. I mean she literally tear himself apart with everything exept self heal, right?
About "bleed on skeletons" - it can be "target feel her pain" explanation.

I really like ideas behind her skills and really hope that you will buff her.

P.S. i dont use strong profanity btw. Just dont know that steam censor "a-s-s" (poor donkeys). Its like in Soviet anecdot - "Teacher how it possible? Everyone have it but this word didnt exist?"

Generalist characters need to be better than mediocre at everything if you want them to be viable. Generalist characters with a ton of trade offs (self stress,self damage, low base stats, horrible affliction) should be pretty good at everything. The keeper is pretty mediocre at everything (except art and animations) and also has trade offs.

I would take a long look at something like the hollow and rebalance your character.

This class feels... underwhelming, to be honest, at least to me. Let me go through this class a bit, and my experience with it (Do keep in mind I'm playing with Heroes Unchained mod, and not the Vanilla Darkest Dungeon experience)

-Writhe is just not good enough for me. You need to ramp its stress for it to be any good, and my Jester or Flagellant can do a better job at turn 1, plus deal more direct damage. Now this is supposedly a support class, so OK, no problems here.
-Convalescence is decent, but slow, making it hard to keep (no pun intended) her out of Death's Door. I'd need a support class for my support class, or someone guarding her constantly, which makes for a turn I'm not using on damage/stun/other things.
-Rebirth nice with enough stress and can become quite powerful, specially when used on tanks. However, if by chance you need to get her stress up, then it's really, REALLY bad, as it barely heals a Jester or Flagellant for a significant ammount in higher level dungeons.
-Daemon's Yoke is decent at best. A Plague Doctor does a better job at stunning and as I've said before, Writhe is just not good enough to be worth the two turn setup. Again, it's a support class so whatever.
-Phantom Wail is probably my favorite skill. At higher levels it lets you demolish everyone with some nice placed guards.
-Cacophony is interesting. Always critting vs stun and thus activating riposte is nice, but the Keeper is not a DPS class, and the value of this skill really lowers itself for this reason. If I throw a Cacophony it's a turn I'm not using Phantom Wail, for instance, and thus I'm losing much for decent damage at best.
-Sacrifice. This skill I have a bit of a problem with. I love the idea, but for me it's esentially a death sentence. Sure, combined with some trinkets and/or Phantom Wail/Cacophony's crit could be pretty good, but if I invest money and resources on a character to make them as good as possible, I'd rather not have to throw them under the bus with a high chance of death's dooring them.

I love the concept of a class that relies on Stress, and the artwork of it, the idea behind the skills... It's just that I have better classes with better results and less risk, so why would I ever take something that might lash out if I f**k up and ruin the run for me? I'd rather have a Plague Doctor, Vestal, Occultist or Antiquarian on their behalf, as they're better support classes for me, and they're way less risky and more useful (for example, Plague Doctor has an AoE stun on the backline, preventing some serious Stress attacks, Occultist has damage/debuff/mark/heals, etc etc).

Nevermind what I said, I just found out how good phantom wail is. Fantastic class!

Cool concept, but... Even at 80% stress, I just don't seem to be getting much damage or healing out of this character class.

Even at max level with maxed gear, skills as well as red-rarity items...
She just doesn't compare to most base-game classes.


Her self-heal in particular, while handy for stress, only activates just before her next turn.
As a self-heal skill that flatlines at 6 points, this is pretty terrible for saving her from lethal situations and even if used preemptively, it's just not strong enough to offset the activation time.

Her ability to heal an ally is handy... But normal healers can do better without bleeding themselves out. I gave her 110% bleed resist, yet the effect is still applied.


Her damage, too, is extremely low. It's supposed to stack with her stress, but with such low numbers, the percentile boost is garbage. Her strongest attack, even, still has a negative percentile as its base, alongside her already low damage listings on her weapon at max level.

She has a stun skin, a skill for crits on stunned enemies, but her stun doesn't actually last long enough to actually make this a COMBO attack.
Her only viable combo boosts Writhe, but again, the damage total is so low as to be negligible even WITH high stress and the combo to boost the attack.


All in all: Cool concept, artwork and animations... But this class needs some serious buffs and some better solo-use synergy.

Originally posted by Nebran:

This class feels... underwhelming, to be honest, at least to me. Let me go through this class a bit, and my experience with it (Do keep in mind I'm playing with Heroes Unchained mod, and not the Vanilla Darkest Dungeon experience)

-Writhe is just not good enough for me. You need to ramp its stress for it to be any good, and my Jester or Flagellant can do a better job at turn 1, plus deal more direct damage. Now this is supposedly a support class, so OK, no problems here.
-Convalescence is decent, but slow, making it hard to keep (no pun intended) her out of Death's Door. I'd need a support class for my support class, or someone guarding her constantly, which makes for a turn I'm not using on damage/stun/other things.
-Rebirth nice with enough stress and can become quite powerful, specially when used on tanks. However, if by chance you need to get her stress up, then it's really, REALLY bad, as it barely heals a Jester or Flagellant for a significant ammount in higher level dungeons.
-Daemon's Yoke is decent at best. A Plague Doctor does a better job at stunning and as I've said before, Writhe is just not good enough to be worth the two turn setup. Again, it's a support class so whatever.
-Phantom Wail is probably my favorite skill. At higher levels it lets you demolish everyone with some nice placed guards.
-Cacophony is interesting. Always critting vs stun and thus activating riposte is nice, but the Keeper is not a DPS class, and the value of this skill really lowers itself for this reason. If I throw a Cacophony it's a turn I'm not using Phantom Wail, for instance, and thus I'm losing much for decent damage at best.
-Sacrifice. This skill I have a bit of a problem with. I love the idea, but for me it's esentially a death sentence. Sure, combined with some trinkets and/or Phantom Wail/Cacophony's crit could be pretty good, but if I invest money and resources on a character to make them as good as possible, I'd rather not have to throw them under the bus with a high chance of death's dooring them.

I love the concept of a class that relies on Stress, and the artwork of it, the idea behind the skills... It's just that I have better classes with better results and less risk, so why would I ever take something that might lash out if I f**k up and ruin the run for me? I'd rather have a Plague Doctor, Vestal, Occultist or Antiquarian on their behalf, as they're better support classes for me, and they're way less risky and more useful (for example, Plague Doctor has an AoE stun on the backline, preventing some serious Stress attacks, Occultist has damage/debuff/mark/heals, etc etc).

Spot on. She needs some form of passive ramping up for her abilities ASIDE from stress OR her stress needs to buff her skills harder OR her skills themselves need to be flat-out buffed.

Originally posted by Salty Sis' 4U:

Cool concept, but... Even at 80% stress, I just don't seem to be getting much damage or healing out of this character class.

Even at max level with maxed gear, skills as well as red-rarity items...
She just doesn't compare to most base-game classes.


Her self-heal in particular, while handy for stress, only activates just before her next turn.
As a self-heal skill that flatlines at 6 points, this is pretty terrible for saving her from lethal situations and even if used preemptively, it's just not strong enough to offset the activation time.

Her ability to heal an ally is handy... But normal healers can do better without bleeding themselves out. I gave her 110% bleed resist, yet the effect is still applied.


Her damage, too, is extremely low. It's supposed to stack with her stress, but with such low numbers, the percentile boost is garbage. Her strongest attack, even, still has a negative percentile as its base, alongside her already low damage listings on her weapon at max level.

She has a stun skin, a skill for crits on stunned enemies, but her stun doesn't actually last long enough to actually make this a COMBO attack.
Her only viable combo boosts Writhe, but again, the damage total is so low as to be negligible even WITH high stress and the combo to boost the attack.


All in all: Cool concept, artwork and animations... But this class needs some serious buffs and some better solo-use synergy.

You can use Phantom wail with tanks and she becomes ok-ish. I still found her underwhelming even with that playstyle so I modded her to focus more on DoT/ramping stress buffs with her abilities causing horror instead of stress directly. It is a pretty fun class now, I would recommend anyone who has similar complaints of her being underwhelming to go this route of modding her.

My suggestions are as follows:
~ Convalescence: Too slow to use when hit hard, too weak to use preemptively. Boost the healing by a metric ♥♥♥♥-ton to offset the delay properly, leave the stress healing as-is, leave it as a delayed-use skill.

~ Writhe: This skill shouldn't have a negative percentile for damage, IMO... BUT. I think you could offset this with a high crit-chance so as to showcase her riposte more often as well as get her teeth bared in combat. I'd suggest pushing the crit chance up to 20% and leaving the damage percentile as-is.

~ Rebirth: Remove the stress effects, reduce the bleed to 1/bleed for 3 turns. Up the bleed chance to 80%. The fact that the bleed proc chance bypasses even her bleed resistance is enough to make this skill lethal for her, due to her already low HP value.
The percentile heal is nice, but 20% is still less than most proper healers can output on tankier targets. Furthermore, this percentile heal DOES NOT scale with heal-boosting items, thus it has a less linear potency.

~ Demon's Yoke: Needs an increase in the stun chance to make it viable against foes with stun resistance. Alternatively, and what I highly suggest based on having played other custom classes with similar effects, DEBUFF the enemy's stun resistance every time this skill hits.
About -20% stun resistance for 2 rounds, for a max stack of up to -40% at a time.
Keep in mind that enemies automatically get +50% stun resistance just after a stun wears off.

~ Phantom Wail: A nice skill for the reflection... Provided the enemy actually deals hard damage to your SINGLE ally. The stress placed on your target is too high, though. I suggest removing the stress applied to allies entirely and giving a 30% damage reflection to ALL of them minus The Keeper. Increase the random hit chance for afflicted allies to 15% as well, and give Phantom Wail a duration of 2 rounds so as to allow its reflection as well as random hit chances to stack to twice their base values.
Rather than using stress to imply their increasing madness, this is a less suicidal manner of making their will and conscious actions crumble. Stress kills, folks.

~ Cacophony: Since stuns from her own skill don't last long enough, unless you have someone else stunning, this skill is pretty worthless. The damage scaling isn't nearly high enough to justify its use and worse still, it has a horrible percentile reduction to the base damage.
I suggest increasing the damage scaling to 100% per 25. Remove the auto-crit, give this attack a multi-target strike zone of the 3 front targets.
This will make the skill weaker than Writhe to start with, but make it more lethal as her stress rises -to an actually useful degree- as well as allow her to more effectively spread the damage over what are usually the front-line grunts of boss fights.
Set the self-stress value to 0 so as to make this skill one that requires the use of others to cause it to ramp up its damage.

~ Sacrifice: I can't think of any normal means to salvage this skill. Simply put, the Vestal is already one of the better, if not best, classes for party healing. There's also an overabundance of custom classes which utilize heals+stress for allies. The guard effect is cool, but for such a squishy class, it's a poor choice and is likely to get The Keeper killed in a single round...
To make the skill more viable and to retain its namesake, remove the ally-healing effects.
Grant The Keeper 50% Protection for 1 round -keeping in mind that Protection has a maximum value, thus even this seemingly high value poses no issue as it discourages the use of Protection-granting items and makes her unbuffed state squishy as usual- as well as having her Guard all allies. Furthermore, grant The Keeper a passive healing effect instead, lasting 1 round... And leave the Horror effect chance and duration as-is.

When choosing your active skills, it should be a DIFFICULT decision. Not one with only one or two viable skills, but a decision which makes you ponder HOW you want to build the class.
The weakness of versatility should be choice and the downfalls of those choices, not that one choice be effective whilst all others are worthless.

Originally posted by Hilm:

You can use Phantom wail with tanks and she becomes ok-ish. I still found her underwhelming even with that playstyle so I modded her to focus more on DoT/ramping stress buffs with her abilities causing horror instead of stress directly. It is a pretty fun class now, I would recommend anyone who has similar complaints of her being underwhelming to go this route of modding her.

care to elaborate ?

Originally posted by Madder Red:

Originally posted by Hilm:

You can use Phantom wail with tanks and she becomes ok-ish. I still found her underwhelming even with that playstyle so I modded her to focus more on DoT/ramping stress buffs with her abilities causing horror instead of stress directly. It is a pretty fun class now, I would recommend anyone who has similar complaints of her being underwhelming to go this route of modding her.

care to elaborate ?

Exact change log would take forever as I did a lot of small tweaks (and without looking closely I forget some I made). Overall big changes,

-Base stat rebalance
-I rebalanced her with 1-3 horror/5 rounds on skills with convalescence having a % chance to remove horror (plus a small heal over time and small base stress heal).
-Most debuffs were removed.
-Her stun is front 2 ranks now. Low initial stun chance with high stun chance at high stress.
-Cacophony is a AoE bleed now with a stress buff similar to writhe, increasing the bleed amount.
-Sacrifice has prot on use.
-Her affliction is even worse now, impeding many of her defenses and causes her to frequently attack allies.

I'm the only one using this so I adjust it if I find balance issues. Trade offs for underwhelming low stress abilities vs the danger of missing a convalescence at high stress (or even taking heavy stress from enemies) make her a lot more fun imo. Jester or Lamia opens up builds without convalescence that can be really interesting, though might lean towards the "overpowered" side of things (especially Lamia). Honestly haven't had time to look into trinkets, but I want to eventually. I got distracted rebuilding some of my personal class mods that broke ages ago.