Darkest Dungeon®

Darkest Dungeon®

The Advent of the Ghost
IceMaverick 10 Dec, 2019 @ 10:01am
12/10/19 - Balance Thoughts - Spoilers
Since I didn't want to flood your comments section with long posts, here's a discussion about my personal thoughts on the trinkets. SPOILER WARNING for people who don't want to know anything about the trinkets.

Alright, well let's start from the top I suppose:
**So turns out, I'm like 4 deep here and this is just... too much writing. I honestly can't be arsed to give feedback on every single one of these now, so I'm just going to highlight the best and worst ones. If I don't talk about it after the BH's Mask, it's firmly in the C-Grade "meh" category.**

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Abomination - C - This is firmly in the "okay I guess" sector. The downside of a little extra stress is almost unnoticeable on a class who has a pretty solid self-stress-heal. That said, DOTs for 1/3 are nearly unnoticeable as well, so I suppose it's a good fit.
It takes a minimum of 3 turns of focusing one enemy to get it to any respectable amount of DOT and that only happens against bosses and the most tanky enemies. Trinkets that apply DOTs also only affect the front-most target in AOE attacks - per DD's engine - so it's not like we can combo it with his multi-hit attacks to amplify this trinket's effects.

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Antiquarian - F - This trinket is deceptive in appearing to be good, but incidentally being terrible. The trinket reduces her base health to 7-11 (depending on level) which is enough to be Death's Door'd by pretty much any hit by enemies at that same respective level.
"But permanent Stealth!" one might say. The actual effect of being Stealthed is that you can only be hit by AOEs, and single target attacks that could otherwise hit her go to somebody else instead.
That has the exact same gameplay implications as being Guarded, which she has a skill that forces allies to do. In fact, since force-Guard lets you choose the redirect's target, permanent Stealth is actually *worse* than Guarding in this case.
So the actual effect of this trinket is: "Make yourself 1-shot DD'd in exchange for freeing up your first turn and every 3rd turn for another action". And let's be honest, getting extra action economy on an Antiquarian is laughable. What am I going to do with that extra action every 3 turns? Get another +3 Dodge buff? Stab somebody for 5 damage? If doing those things would make the difference in winning or losing a fight, I'd just be straight up doing those instead of Guarding myself anyways.

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Arbalest - FFF - Exceptionally bad. Like, flat out. Not even a debate. There's no use case for this trinket. Let's go down the trinket's effects and why every single one, even the positives, are terrible:
+500 ACC against Beast. Arbalest already has *THE HIGHEST* ACC stat - on average across all skills - of any class in the game. Making her already nearly-perfect accuracy into actually-perfect accuracy is not that much of a boost. Especially since it's only against a specific subset of enemies. How specific that set is I'll cover below. You could take a Steady Bracer (Uncommon trinket) and come pretty darn close to the same efficacy, but it applies to all enemy types instead of just Beasts and doesn't come with nearly 1% of the drawbacks this trinket has.

+10% DMG against Beast. So let's break that down. Let's look at her best-case damage: Sniper Shot against a Marked Target. 6-10 damage at Level 1 Crossbow, 11-21 damage at Level 5 Crossbow. Having this trinket increases that numbers to 7-11 at Level 1, and 12-23 at Level 5. So AT BEST this gives her +2 DMG. Against Marked Targets. Of a very specific Type.
Admittedly, there's 32 enemies in the game that are in this Type, but if we look at how that actually breaks down, you'll find the actual effective list is much smaller: 1 Beast is exclusive to the Mill, and you're not taking this trinket there for just that. 10 of them are exclusive to specific missions within The Darkest Dungeon itself, so unless this Trinket is aimed at only the final 3 missions, we can safely discount these guys as counting. 3 are exclusive to Shieldbreaker Nightmares, and the last one is the Shrieker who only shows up at rare, specific times.
If we remove all of them from the pool, that leaves only 17 Beast enemies that this applies to. By the same categorical filters of what "counts", that's compared to the 22 Human enemies, 16 Unholy enemies, and 25 Eldritch enemies. So we're talking about the 2nd smallest category of enemies this applies to in the game. For +1-2 damage. Hell, it's only +1 if the target isn't Marked.

+200% Food Consumed. This is a massive penalty. This makes the Arbalest eat 3 Food on every check. That's 6 Food per check for the party. On a Medium Dungeon, 1-6 Hunger Checks are possible (without making nonsense map movements) but getting by with only 1 Check is only happening on Boss Mediums where you head right to the boss and do nothing else. Since only the Swing King is a Beast, we have to assume this trinket was not designed for Boss hunting, but rather for normal missions in which you explore the majority of the dungeon. The average number of hunger checks for a Medium is a value between 2 and 3 at Radiant Light so let's look at both cases.
For 2 checks, you're eating 12 Food. If you buy the entire store's worth of food for a Medium (24), you have enough to camp and Feast afterwards. If you get 3 checks, you're eating 18 food. That only leaves you enough for a standard camp.
But if we stop using Radiant Light Hunger Checks, it becomes a lot worse. Let's look at the other side: Black as Pitch Hunger Checks. Statistically, you're looking at 4-5 Hunger Checks (on average) in a Medium if you're running Torchless. Well, 4 checks with this trinket is all of the food you can even buy from the store, plus now you can't camp. If you roll on the other side of the statistical range, you're looking at all of the food in the store, starving at least once, AND not having a camp. So this Trinket (if it wasn't already out for the lackluster positives) is entirely out of the question on Torchless.

-12 Dodge. As if this trinket hasn't kicked us in the nuts enough, we are also going to be getting rid of the Arbalest's only defensive stats entirely for the first 3 Armor levels and reduce it to nearly nothing for Level 4 and 5 Armor. -12 Dodge is grievous on any class, but especially on the Arbalest because it's basically guaranteeing that she's getting hit any time she's targeted since she already doesn't have a lot of Dodge to give away.

0/10 - Nobody should use this trinket, ever, for any reason. You're literally better off selling this trinket and using the money to buy a Crossbow upgrade for your Arbalest instead.

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Bounty Hunter - B - This one is a little hard to evaluate because it changes relevant party compositions that you'd take on the mission in the first place. But I still think it's quite a solid boost. It just requires you to change things like party members and trinket compositions to make it work.
You can probably still run a Marking Party with this trinket. You'd just need to make sure everyone else in the party has +SPD to ensure that they're going before the BH is. The -SPD on the Mask helps that along, but it's still not enough to guarantee he goes last when you have somebody like... the Arbalest in the party. It just ties for her SPD, so they'll - on average - alternate who goes first. If you manage to set it up so BH goes last, you can maximize your +Mark effects with the rest of the party, and then the BH can kill off a target with a heavy finishing attack. Since the target is dead, consuming the Mark doesn't really affect much. Despite that, I think taking this in a Marking Party actually weakens the party's overall effectiveness because of the trinkets you have to give up to make room for +SPD to play around the BH eating the Marks. This does however, open up the Solo BH play. If you can drop his SPD enough that he goes last in the entire fight, you maximize the chances that he applies Marks to enemies so he can hopefully slap somebody off the face of the earth once his turn finally rolls around. The BH already hits like a truck against Marked Targets, so the +25% DMG just seems like it's cleaning up the edge cases where the BH's 30+ DMG attack left an enemy with 1 HP or something. Overall, it's not my cup of tea, but I think it's... just a good trinket. Nothing to write home about, but it's solid.

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Flagellant - D - So, he can't Crit anymore without at least Weapon Level 3 unless he's Bleeding. And that's only on Punish. His other attacks just can't Crit - no matter the weapon level - unless he's Bleeding. He also gets +20% Stress when not Bleeding. That's on par with Collector trinkets and even more than Ancestral trinkets. Let's see if the upside is at least as good as an Ancestral trinket.... No, no it's not. The upsides require I be Bleeding (an activation cost, which is yet another downside) and gives me only as much Crit as an Ancestral trinket does while giving me double the stress and having a setup/activation requirement. Maybe the goal is for these to be weaker than Ancestral trinkets. Great then. Objective achieved, because I'd immediately replace this with an Ancestor's Pen or something for similar effects at lower cost.
I'm sure you noticed I skipped over the -Stress while Bleeding effect. That's because it deserves as much attention as I gave it before now. If you're playing a High Stress Flag, it actively slows you from getting there. If you're playing a Low Stress Flag, it's almost negligible. It doesn't help de-stress or really help you get to a Low Stress state.

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Grave Robber - F on Apprentice, B on Champion - This trinket has a weird power level because you've directly tied its effectiveness to what level dungeon you're taking on. On apprentice dungeons, this is basically worthless. You get +5% PROT, which might reduce damage by 1 on a good day and you're gambling really hard on that slim, 3% chance of finding the right Gem. On Champion, you've got a 20+% chance of finding the relevant gem in any given loot drop, so you're way more likely to be able to trigger the effects. The effects are fantastic on a GR. Easily A or S-tier effects for this class, but it drops to a B simply because you have to gamble on getting it still and there's no guarantees. In a game about managing RNG, introducing extra layers of RNG to be successful is a suboptimal strategy.

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Houndmaster - S - This trinket is nuts. -10 Dodge is pretty hefty, but the Houndmaster is one of the few classes that can take that hit and not be too upset about it. He's got a lot of base Dodge. Scouting is OP in Darkest Dungeon. Being able to know exactly where to go cuts down on the amount of supplies you use, the amount of risks you need to take, and directly correlates with your ability to succeed with minimum casualties and maximum loot. This trinket gives you even more Scouting chance than the Ancestor's Map does and that's pretty widely regarded as a top-tier, must-take Trinket because it gives you +25% Scouting chance. If you could be so blessed as to have both this and the Ancestor's Map in your inventory at the same time, you're basically scouting the entire dungeon on every run and finding the Secret Room on basically every 2nd Mission. Having to hold back on eating 1 Dog Treat and forgoing 1 round of slightly better attacks in exchange for perfect information on the dungeon is not even a choice to think about, especially since you can always eat the last Treat on the final fight of the dungeon after Scouting literally everything.

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Last edited by IceMaverick; 10 Dec, 2019 @ 10:02am
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Showing 1-4 of 4 comments
IceMaverick 10 Dec, 2019 @ 10:01am 
Leper - FF - This one actually baffles me. I have no idea what this is hoping to achieve. Clearly the intention of the design is to try and max out your Virtue chance, and then have a Stress check to hopefully proc the Virtue, but the entire Trinket goes exactly in the opposite direction of allowing you to do that. So let's look at what we're trying to do and why it's just... not happening.

Max Virtue chance is capped at 70%. You start at 25% by default and this trinket gives us +3% every time we use a friendly skill. Now, we could use his limited skills for this, but it only lasts for 4 Battles, so that means we have a time limit on how long we have to get there which means going for the only Friendly Skill he has that isn't limited. So we have to cast Solemnity to build this up.
So to get from 25% to 70%, we need to cast 15 Friendly Skills. Oh, but we can pop the Leper into slot 1 for +10% Virtue, so we can chop off 3 casts. Which means casting Solemnity 12 times. Which means getting -5 Stress 12 times and unless you're really playing super dumb and going infinite-stall on a fight trying to sit here and let your Leper use Solemnity 12 times in 1 fight, that means we're doing this over a couple of battles, so the buff will start to trickle away and expire only a fight or two after we've maxed it out.
So you're telling me, that you want me to have my Leper spend 2-3 fights doing NOTHING but casting Solemnity over and over, and then you want him to somehow go from 0 to 100 Stress in 1-2 fights? While wearing this trinket that's giving him MINUS TEN PERCENT STRESS.
Nothing about this trinket works. The stats this trinket gives you flies directly in the face of what the other stats are trying to achieve. This is just a big paradox machine that takes a member of your party out of the running for half of the dungeon so you can get a 70% chance to maybe get some pretty decent buffs for the last half of the dungeon. But oh wait, maybe you do all of this work and STILL GET AFFLICTED! So all that work was for literally ♥♥♥♥-all!

The only stipulation to this (and the reason it avoids FFF-tier), is that you can just choose to ignore most of the design of this trinket. You can slap it on and put him in slot 1 to get a free +10% Virtue and a little less Stress. But honestly, going from 25% to 35% is not worth the trinket slot and the lessened Stress doesn't matter as much on a class with a Stress Heal. You're better off bumping up his ACC and DMG with other trinkets so he can perform his intended role better.

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Man-at-Arms - A - This is a great trinket (with a typo in the name in the Google Doc, assuming you didn't use the same name in-game, in which case both have a typo). The downside is -SPD, but our MAA is already one of the slowest characters in the game, so it's not like it's going to make him go more-last than he already is. Then the upsides just make him overall better at his job. He's tankier, he guards for longer, and now, he can sit back and stress heal between Guard casts! It's almost entirely upsides with nearly no appreciable negatives.

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Occultist - A - This is also a great trinket. +15% DMG is a nice extra few points in the conditions you take the Occultist (Cove) when stacked with his +DMG against Eldritch passives. Extra ACC is a great boost since he's hanging out in the lower-third of the ACC-tier-list. Just that +10 pushes him up into the upper-third of ACC. The downside of losing health from Wyrd means doesn't really affect him terribly much. It can stack up a lot on him, especially in earlier dungeons, but it's not like you're taking an Occultist without characters who have secondary heals you can use to mitigate stuff like this. Turning his heal into a DMG buff just kind of helps this along because you can make back a little of the lost DMG by using a secondary healer through your new DMG and ACC buff you just gave out. I hesitate to say this trinket has almost no downside... but it has almost no downside.

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Plague Doctor - B - This just barely missed out on A-tier for me and only because you have to wait around for DOTs to tick for it to really kick in and the other upside doesn't really help its case. Extra ACC doesn't mean much here, PD is in the top quarter of ACC characters. -HP hurts a tad, but translates to losing 2-4 HP in most cases, so not that bad of a downside. Blight Others is a pretty decent combo piece and you can really chain an entire enemy group to death in one go if you're properly setting them up to fall by manipulating where you're applying DOTs and DMG. I've played with another trinket from a different mod that has a similar effect and I know that this has the potential to 1-turn combo out an entire enemy team if you play it right.
The Hero-Killed effects are negligible. If a character dies, you're probably ditching the mission anyways. If you're ditching the mission, the stress and now new Diseases you'd get from this just means you're dismissing the entire party and hiring new ones instead of paying through the nose to treat them.
The only time that doesn't apply is a part of Level 5-6s, but why are you even losing characters at that stage of the game anyways? You should have your upgrades and trinkets locked down at that point that you're just grinding away to finish the game.

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Vestal - S - This is basically a different flavor of Junia's Head. Same Stress penalty, -5% Healing comparably, and in exchange you can more free Torchlight. Junia's Head is a top-tier trinket, so this is right alongside it. Basically a choice between whether you want 1-2 more points of Healing versus 2-3 more points of Torchlight. The correct choice might even just be to run both of them and get stupid amounts of Healing AND extra Torchlight.
Like the PD, the Hero-Killed effects are negligible for the same reasons, though even less harsh in this case.

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Ghost's Puzzlebox - S - Based on the Trivia description, I can only assume you've made some normalized bell-curve distribution for getting the buffs where we're most likely to get the middle buffs and least likely to get either extreme. This review only applies in that case. If there's some other distribution of buffs that you've chosen, consider this moot. As I said earlier on, adding extra layers of RNG to a game about managing RNG is usually bad form, but since the extra layer doesn't have any downsides (outside of potential opportunity cost in the event you roll the extreme low end), it's one of the few times that's actually not a bad idea. If we're assuming a normal distribution and we're getting median buffs, that's basically a +10% boost to all of your combat stats, which is pretty solid. The extra DMG and PROT will usually result in 1-4 points difference for most classes, but the potential for an extra +10% CRIT is a big one. That doubles and even triples many class's CRIT potential. The +ACC brings low ACC characters into the average brackets, and makes high ACC characters incredibly likely to hit. Since this also has the potential for every attack to boost your Torch, you'll likely be leaving every single fight with a filled Torch too. The extra Stress is equivalent to a Collector trinket, but the upsides are definitely much greater.
Last edited by IceMaverick; 10 Dec, 2019 @ 10:11am
2ScoopsPlz 11 Dec, 2019 @ 4:19pm 
Dang, was hoping to see the shieldbreaker's trinket get mentioned here... Still, now I know I made a bad call by not going for the houndmaster's trinket. Thanks for all the work you put into this review m8!
GriM  [developer] 12 Dec, 2019 @ 2:52pm 
This was very helpful, thanks!

@2ScoopsPlz

Do you feel the Shieldbreaker trinket is too powerful/weak? Or maybe just too weird or specific?
2ScoopsPlz 13 Dec, 2019 @ 6:31pm 
Originally posted by GriM:
This was very helpful, thanks!

@2ScoopsPlz

Do you feel the Shieldbreaker trinket is too powerful/weak? Or maybe just too weird or specific?
I haven't gotten to use it much quite yet, I was hoping OP had.

I've only just recently purchased the class itself and managed to snag the trinket as well, so I've only gotten to use them both a handful of times. But so far I'm liking it.

I haven't yet had the chance to make use of the additional blight vs bleeding on enemies that have a high enough HP to not just die to my party, but I'm looking forward to trying it out against something like a boss, seems like it'll be effective. Right now I'm mainly using it for the +10 Dodge, but I can see this trinket being useful when paired with other characters with some decent bleed abilities. I've been getting by with a houndmaster with a trinket to increase their bleed chance, seems to be working well, though the additional blight still hasn't seen much use. It's helped with killing a few enemies that wouldn't have died that turn otherwise though, so I think there's plenty of incentive to use it right now.
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