Random Darkest Dungeon Tips

I've been playing The Darkest Dungeon for years, and decided to put together some useful tips for any newbie in no particular order. This is nowhere near finished and will receive updates as new ideas occur to me. I'm new to making guides and I'm not sure what's considered common knowledge in this game's community, some of these may be so painfully obvious you laugh at me for bothering to write them down, and all of them should be taken with a grain of salt.

This guide is mostly spoiler free in terms of specific details of boss abilities and story stuff, but everything else is fair game. I also write this based off of my experiences at Darkest difficulty, I know some mechanics change in Radiant or Stygian, but I've never played them so I don't know enough of the specifics to offer advice.

This guide also advocates a very low risk approach which some may find less fun, but I find having to spend hours replacing a high level hero even less fun than being fastidiously cautious.

The old man says this a lot, and it's essentially the motto of the game.

Never get too comfortable and never get cocky, as the second you do so the game's RNG will turn against you, you'll get hit by a half-dozen crits in a row and your party will all fail their death saves.

Maybe that's a slight comedic exaggeration, but its happened to me enough times that it feels true.

The second you stop treating every fight and enemy with respect the game will make you regret it.

The grand majority of effects within darkest dungeon operate off of a random number generator, and most modifiers work by adding or subtracting points from the generated numbers.

Essentially this means that combat is decided entirely by how you handle whatever the game throws at you, as well as your ability to stack the deck in your favor.

Don't assume your dodgy hero will avoid all, or even most attacks, or that highly accurate heroes will always hit. Even if it's true most of the time, you need to be prepared for when the game decides to screw you and has all of your attacks miss and all of your enemy's crit.

When it comes to trying to stack the deck in your favor you have a choice to make, whether to boost a hero's strength or compensate for their weaknesses. I can't tell you how to choose there, though I will note that consistency is generally king.

Take the leper for example, a hero with excellent damage and durability in exchange for aim that makes a toddler's look good. You can choose to either make him even more of a walking battering ram, or improve his aim enough to actually hit things, you don't really get enough trinket slots to do both.

I'd prefer a Leper who hits most of the time but with less damage to one who misses half his shots but hits like a bus when he does hit. Not only does it mean that you don't get as frustrated by the constant missing, but it means that he won't be quite as badly countered by enemies who can dodge.

For heroes with less extreme and obvious weaknesses the choice is a lot less clear and comes down to personal philosophy more than anything.

Every mission needs supplies, food torches, shovels, etc, but the game is intentionally very vague on what you need and how much of each. You also need room to carry your loot out of the dungeon, since that makes up a solid 2/3rds of the money you bring back, plus heirlooms needed for upgrades. I tend to follow a principle of oversupplying and tossing out excess supplies as needed rather than risking not having enough.

Food generally needs 8 for short missions if you're good enough to not need it for healing, if you aren't bring twelve. For any mission that involved camping you want 8 per camp, plus four for random hunger checks. In the warrens you can get away with halving this if you bring medicinal herbs to cleanse any food curios you find.

Torches are absolutely mandatory because if you need this sort of guide you aren't ready for full dark runs. Darkness makes everything harder for more loot and I generally find that trade to not be worth it. Bring a stack to short runs, two stacks to medium, three to long, etc. Bring a single stack to the courtyard and none to the farmstead, they have lighting mechanics that work differently to most places. Don't stick your torch in weird places, it has nasty consequences like STDs and summoning eldritch horrors.

For shovels you need one or two for short missions, two or three for medium, and four for long missions. They're expensive but a lot cheaper than the health and sanity costs of your party digging through a wall of corpses with their bare hands.

Antivenom and bandage use depends on the region, you don't really need both outside the darkest dungeon. Bring whichever one you need to counter a regions most common enemy type in similar quantities to shovels. both are sometimes useful for curios but its lot less common than other options.

Medicinal herbs are one of the most useful items in the game, not only removing some truly nasty debuffs, but they also work to cleanse a lot of dangerous curios to make them safe to interact with. If it looks like it's poisonous or plagueridden try some herbs on it, it'll probably work. Bring at least three everywhere.

Skeleton keys unlock things, which often massively boosts the loot you get from anything that looks like a chest. Bring one everywhere and add one more to that per camping site. Never open the chest in hidden rooms without one, since if you open it with the key you get either some really nice relics or 10k worth of gemstones.

Holy water boosts resistance to status effects and DOTs for a few rounds, highly situational, do not use on heroes with the crimson curse. it can also help with some curios, mostly in the ruins. if you're low on money or space this can be comfortably left behind.

Laudanum is essentially worthless outside of very specific scenarios, it removes the horror effect that adds stress over time, but the effect is pretty weak, short lived, and incredibly rare. There are like three enemies in the main game areas that can inflict it and none are common in the least. Leave this expensive waste of space home.

Accuracy is measured against the enemy's dodge to determine the odds to hit. More ACC is always good, and choosing trinkets that boost accuracy never goes amiss. Some hero classes have better base accuracy than others, whereas the leper for example can't even hit a wall without some ACC boosting trinkets.

More damage means nothing without ACC to make hits reliable, and enemies only get dodgier as the game goes on.

It's not the only stat you should care about, but it's definitely one of the most important

Stuns are OP. Being stunned essentially forces whoever is stunned to skip their next turn. Some enemies are weaker to stuns than others, but it's always good to have at least one hero with stun skills and gear boosting those skills. Unfortunately enemies gain stacking stun resistance when stunned that only goes away when they get a chance to actually attack, so keeping an enemy stunned for more than a turn or two is very difficult. Still, being able to essentially ignore an enemy for a round is always nice.

Move is similarly beneficial, albeit more situational; Backline enemies often deal horrendous damage and stress, but are very squishy when moved to the front and into easy reach of your melee. Plus a lot of backline enemies lose access to their most dangerous skills when pulled to the front. Similarly a lot of frontline enemies deal pretty crap damage when forced backwards.

Stun is a gamble with bosses, they have pretty high resists so it rarely works more than once or twice in a fight and bosses tend to have multiple attacks per turn, stuns only skip one action from the boss. However one free turn to attack with no return fire is pretty strong, so they are still worth using on the bosses with low enough stun resists for it to work more than 10% of the time.

Move depends on whether it's a boss that cares about positioning and if it has low enough resists for it to work, but it generally doesn't do much even when it does work. Bosses rarely care much about where they are in the party order, but there are a couple where moving them around can be helpful to bring them into easy range of your melee or force them out of position for their more dangerous attacks.

Marks are a debuff that boost certain attacks against the marked unit, and teams that use this can achieve phenomenal damage. Mark is unfortunately a fairly short lived debuff, and will require constant reapplication to remain active, which makes alternating between marking and attacking eat most of the benefit if the same hero is doing both. Best to bring multiple mark focused heroes if you plan to use this.

An arbalest, occultist, houndmaster, and bounty hunter is a personal favorite of mine for bosses that don't have a gimmick that makes it non-viable, as every hero can either apply mark or benefit from it. Speed trinkets on the occultist to make sure he's the first one attacking helps prevent your damage dealers wasting a turn marking or attacking without marks. This party can tear through most bosses it works on in only a couple of rounds and is even pretty good against the shambler.

Some backline enemies can mark your heroes, and your own heroes can mark themselves, drawing most attacks their way. This can enable powerful and accurate attacks from the enemy frontliners against the marked, though this is mostly in the weald. Avoid this unless you have a specific plan to deal with it, like a self marking tank to draw attention away from an injured hero. Don't even try this strategy in the weald, most self mark skills provide some degree of protection but it's not enough to counter the damage bonus fungal scratchers get against marked heroes.

Healing is vital in darkest dungeon, both physical and mental but you can't hope to outheal anything actually dangerous. Not only is healing generally not able to keep up with damage in a full scale fight, every turn spent healing is a turn your healer isn't helping to put the enemy in the ground faster.

As a general rule, unless somebody is close to death's door save healing for the mop up phase of a fight, that time where you've already won, but there's still a couple enemies with 3 HP left. Unless one of your party members is really close to the edge, then keeping them breathing becomes the healer's job for the remainder of the fight.

You have to carry food while exploring so that if you hit a random hunger check it doesn't eat half your parties health bar and stress them out, but you can also use it to heal your party outside of combat. People can only eat four pieces at a time, which will restore around half of their health, and theres a cooldown until they can eat more.

Having party members with stuns or the ability to move enemies into positions where they're useless does kinda flip this, allowing you to heal when the enemy is rendered helpless. You generally can't stun or debuff all of them, but you can reduce their dps enough to let your healers outpace them.

You also can't just reduce the enemy down to one enemy and sit there to heal for twelve rounds straight, after a round or two they'll call for reinforcements, inflicting stress on the party and returning the fight to full intensity. The game gives you a warning a round before reinforcements arrive and if you finish the mop up quick after that you can prevent the reinforcements from arriving.

Many heroes can inflict the game's two sources of DOT, bleed and blight, and many enemies can inflict them on you.

Usefulness varies by enemy, for a lot of low level enemies regular attacks will kill them before the DOT can do anything useful, but for bosses and against better protected foes bleed and blight will make things vastly easier.

Enemy inflicted DOT's are however incredibly dangerous to a hero already in dire straits, since if they're at death door the bleed/blight tic can deal a deathblow before you can heal that hero.

Bring bandages and antivenom in decent quantities everywhere. Even if you don't use them for fights they're still useful for a lot of curios

Resistances vary heavily by region. Bleed is useless in the ruins, mostly useless in the cove, and solid pretty much everywhere else. Blight is great in the ruins or cove, decent in the farmstead but heavily resisted in the weald and warrens. It's less of a non-starter than trying to bleed bones though, with a few trinkets it's very possible to make good use of a blight build.

This is ignoring debuffs cast on enemies or excessive effort spent boosting DOT effect chance. While it is entirely possible to make a gargoyle bleed if you dump enough debuffs on it, doing so is ridiculous waste of time and effort, good only for the memes.

Stress is one of Darkest Dungeon's headline mechanics and is one that you'll need to learn well to survive.

Stress serves as a second health bar for your heroes, one that fills when damaged rather than depleting. stress rises over time and with certain enemy attacks as well as traps and other nuisances. When it hits 100 heroes generally have a mental break and will spend the rest of the mission causing problems. After the bar fills to 100, it can then fill again to 200, which drops the hero to death's door instantly and if they were already there is a guaranteed kill. It then resets to 170 and can trigger another heart attack if they hit 200 again.

There is small chance at hitting 100 of them rallying, losing all stress, and gaining a buff until the end of the mission or them hitting 200 stress, but it's generally best to assume that won't happen and be pleasantly surprised when it does.

Stress can mitigated various ways, critical hits done by your heroes can give a small stress heal to the party, there's a bunch of stress heal skills and some characters specialize in helping with stress, assorted curios can heal party members if supplied with the right item, and camping skills can heal a lot of stress.

Stress, unlike health damage sticks around after your party returns to the hamlet. To deal with it you'll need to send your heroes off to relax, whether it's at the church or the bar. This costs money and carries some risks, so if you can avoid it you should. Heroes going on missions with a few points of stress to start is perfectly fine as long as it's not a lot and the team has at least one member who can help.

If a fight is obviously going wrong, there is nothing wrong with living to fight another day. This gets more common as you go through the game, and enemy crit rates go up.

Given time and experience you'll develop a sense for when things are falling apart and discretion is the better part of valor. Listen to that sense unless you want to end up spending hours training replacement heroes and grinding to get them decent gear.

retreats can fail and force you to skip whatever hero who's turn it was and try again. For this reason waiting to retreat until death is staring you in the face is a bad idea.

Retreating will stress your heroes, and the game warns you as such. However when it's a choice between stress and death, pick stress.

Losing a party member or even a full squad sucks, but remember that you only lose what you spent on them. You can and should continue on, even in the face of mounting losses, because the goal of the game isn't to keep your heroes alive, it's to beat the darkest dungeon. Heroes are temporary, you can always train more and recover the trinkets of the fallen from the shrieker.

The only thing that is permanant are town upgrades, which make it cheaper and easier to get heroes ready to fight.

However, you should still try to avoid hero deaths if at all possible, especially since it only gets more expensive and time consuming as they level. It takes a lot of gold and time to get a hero ready for the darkest dungeon, and losing that hero on their last training mission absolutely sucks.

Don't let it keep you down, no matter how frustrating it may get.All you can do is get back in the saddle and keep marching on.

Darkness makes the game more dangerous in exchange for better loot. Whether the risk is worth it is up to you. however, try to never let the light hit zero, or you'll find a normal fight replaced with something decidedly more hazardous.

Don't walk in pitch darkness, or offer a torch to the Shambler's alter unless you want to fling yourself into a fight more dangerous than most of the game's bosses.

Heroes level up by completing missions, and as they level up you can upgrade their equipment and skills, but once they get good enough they start turning their noses up at easier missions. There's a bit of wiggle room, as mission difficulty only has three tiers and there's seven possible levels, but it's meant to force you to either send in different heroes or send your team on deadlier jobs.

This also forces you to continuously upgrade heroes skills and gear, because sending a fresh level three team on a veteran mission with level one gear and skills will not end well. Paying for these upgrades and keeping heroes stress in check are the main thing you spend money on in the hamlet, but take care not to spend too much or you'll be forced to sell trinkets to be able to pay for a mission to bring in more cash.

There is a rare event that passes through town once or twice a playthrough that makes heroes ignore level restrictions when picking a mission for one week, so if there's any level one boss you've been avoiding...

Many curios can be interacted with using an item to guarantee a good result, always bring more supplies than you reasonably expect to use for fights,

Knowledge curios are rarely good, at best giving you a positive trait or a journal page, but usually stressing your party, dousing the torch, or giving them negative quirks. They're best avoided.

Bring extra herbs to the warrens, theres a lot of food to found down there if you can clean it.

if you have an antiquarian in your party they should always be the one to interact with curios, since that allows valuable antiques to drop.

Negative quirks range from mildly irritating like the ones that force harmless interactions, to absolutely intolerable issues. You generally want quirks that won't effect a mission, or if that's unavoidable, ones that don't make the hero worse at their specific role

Completely avoiding them is impossible, so you have to triage and choose which quirks are the least likely to screw things up. The quirks that limit town activities are generally a safe bet since they don't effect your actual missions.

The quirks that stress a hero in specific regions can be either a massive issue or a non-issue depending on hero, I wouldn't want a flagellant in the cove or ruins most days, or a plague doctor in the weald. However if you flip the two it becomes an issue.

Same goes for the quirks that stress out a hero VS enemy type, if they plan on fighting that kind of enemy regularly it's an issue, but otherwise it's fine.

Kleptomaniac, imposter syndrome, perfectionist, antsy, anything reducing AC, and quirks that weaken a hero's specialty are to be avoided and removed at all costs.

Town upgrades improve the assorted services of the hamlet like stress reduction, quirk management, disease removal, equipment upgrades, and skill improvement. Upgrading your town doesn't use money, instead using heirlooms acquired during exploration to pay for restoring the buildings to their former glory.

The stagecoach gets special attention since it's what you use to get new heroes, and upgrading it gives you more hero slots as well as bringing more heroes in per week, providing more options when selecting a new hero.

I'd recommend upgrading it a few times and then focusing on the blacksmith and guild, as those two are your only means of ensuring your heroes can keep up with the monsters they fight. The guild and smith both have a max level they'll upgrade heroes to, and the only way to raise that level is to upgrade the buildings themselves. Level three heroes will refuse to go on easy level one missions and if you send them on the challenging missions they demand without good gear and improved skills they're much more likely to die.

Districts are a feature from The crimson court DLC, and they exist mostly to be a money pit for late game players. They offer pretty decent, if situational bonuses at extreme cost, and aside from the sanguine vintners (which is cheap and basically mandatory if you have the dlc active) should be left for the endgame when everything you care about is maxed out.

Negative quirks can become locked, which means that they no longer have a chance to get swapped out at the end of a mission. This also makes them much more expensive to remove, to the point where if the hero in question is low level you should consider getting rid of them.

This check happens at the end of each mission, so if you have a hero with a particularly nasty quirk that you can't afford to fix and don't want to risk getting reinforced then you should leave them home until you've gathered the money. Heroes can have a maximum of three locked negative quirks so once they hit that cap any further negative traits can generally be ignored since they're only temporary.

There is a common quest in the weald that lets you make the sanitarium free for a week. Considering the sheer cost of removing locked quirks or locking positive ones, if either of these is on the agenda that quest is basically mandatory.

It's generally not worth it for non locked quirks or diseases when the average expedition can pay for removing five or six.

When a hero hits 0 HP, or 200 stress they drop instantly to death's door, where any time they take damage they roll the dice on if they live or die, plus their stats are debuffed heavily.

If they are healed off of death's door they receive a pretty major debuff to stats and increased stress for the remainder of the mission(aside from the flagellant), which can only be cured by certain camping skills.

DOT's can instakill heroes if they are one shot down to death's door and the attack applied a DOT. this is particularly common if a boss attack crits your fastest hero. It's also the number one cause of ragequits.

Death's door chances can be raised by a variety of effects but is limited to 85 percent, so I would advise you not to rely on the hero getting lucky with the dice rolls.

Generally speaking a hero hitting death's door is the signal to run from that fight.

I'm not going to go over every class in the game, frankly I don't have the patience and the wiki is a google search away if you need that level of detail. However I will cover this one because of how unique her role is. Unlike every other hero in the game the antiquarian isn't there to kill enemies, heal your party, or provide meaningful support, she's there to make you money.

In terms of direct combat she's pathetic, offering scratch damage, weak poison, and the weakest healing skill in the game. However in a support role she's much better, her buffs and debuffs are surprisingly decent, weakening enemy dodge or buffing your party's own. Arguably her best skill is "Invigorating Vapors" which boosts the entire party's dodge by a couple percent points for a three rounds, it's still relatively weak, but it stacks and can be spammed, so it's decent once it's ramped up for a couple rounds. You'd still be better off with any other support class in her place, but if you're bringing her anyways she's not completely useless

Though she's the weakest character in the game by a wide margin combat wise, she offers incredibly increased loot and makes coins stack more efficiently in your pack. If she's in the party any fight has a chance to drop antiques that are worth a lot of money and stack very well in your pack, she also can pick them up if she's the character to interact with curios and loot. One mission with an antiquarian in the party can fund two or three unprofitiable missions by itself.

Basically you can double your cash from a mission in exchange for wasting a party slot on her. Avoid bringing her for boss-fights(aside from the siren for reasons that I can't spoil), or on missions where you aren't absolutely confident in your skills and equipment.

The game's regions each have their own characteristics that encourage specific heros and strategies.

Regions introduce more difficult enemies on higher grade missions, alongside giving basically everything a stat boost, some are more dangerous than others, but take extra care in the weald and cove. The veteran grade enemies there can easily kill your more vulnerable party members if not properly managed. Champion exclusive enemies in every region have a very real chance to kill your entire party if you don't manage them properly.

The Ruins is by far the easiest, with relatively straightforward enemies even on the higher levels. Bring blight and raw damage, as well protected enemies are fairly rare, but almost everything is immune to bleed. Watch out for bone nobles, bring movement skills to drag them forward so they can't use their only dangerous skill. The plague doctor is absolutely magnificent here.

The cove features similarly bleed resistant enemies, though to a lesser degree, and enemies capable of inducing ruinous bleeds and stress at higher levels. Bring bandages, and blight. Raw damage is less useful with high prot enemies being relatively common. Shieldbreaker shines here for her ability to ignore prot, blight enemies, and screw up enemy formations.

The weald brings backline enemies capable of marking your soldiers and boosting the frontliners from an annoyance to a serious threat. Blight resist is generally high enough to make parties focused on it a poor choice. Enemies are often fairly well protected against direct damage, but bleed works really well.Bring solid healing and the best tank you can, but avoid skills that self mark, whatever buffs they give aren't usually worth the buffs the enemy gets.

The warren focuses on disease and stress, with a variety of enemies each capable of inflicting them in large amounts.Enemies are very blight resistant, but will bleed like a stuck pig and usually don't have heavy prot. Mark parties excel here, taking advantage of the fact that enemies have little defense against direct damage, and most are beast/human, which the two of the best heroes for mark parties have bonuses against.

There's three things a party needs and a bunch more you probably want. Damage, defense, and healing. A party needs to be able to deal with enemies quickly to prevent them from dealing too much damage, be able to take a few hits without people dying, and be able to fix those hits when things are calm. Stress healing, debuffing, and a dedicated marker for parties focused that way are also useful.

A party full of self-sufficient characters or weak healers like the crusader, leper, and abomination can generally get away without a dedicated healer, but if you're trying that I'd recommend bringing more food.

Every character has their strengths and weaknesses when the dice roll, most characters with decent dodge are relatively fragile and can take less hits, characters with highly accurate attacks and status effects tend to be relatively weak in terms of direct damage, those with a lot of health tend to be weak or inaccurate. Support types like the vestal and occultist are generally not great at dealing damage, but they keep the rest of the party alive and can make fights easier.

Lets go back to my favorite example of a powerful but finicky hero, the leper who has the best health and damage in the game in exchange for being half blind, slow, and clumsy. He can take hits all day, and can cleave a horse in two, but the man can't hit the broad side of a barn without something to improve his accuracy. He's also slow and has weak resistances to debuffs and diseases. With the right trinkets or a supporting party member he can easily be your best dps while being near-impossible to put down.

Party composition essentially boils down to finding ways to compensate for weaknesses and build off of strengths.

Firstly, DD has some of the best DLC I've seen outside of a Fromsoft title, every one adds something unique and well worth it's cost. However, some are better than others. I'll not go into details here, you can always check the store pages or wiki for more detailed information.

I don't recommend the crimson court to a new player, it drastically raises the difficulty, and it's mechanics feel very frustrating unless you know how to deal with them. The Flagellant, the hero of the DLC is very strong, but requires some practice to use effectively, and districts are late enough in the game that most people quit before they can make more than a couple.

It's an amazingly fun dlc if you're experienced in the game, and the reviews are incredibly unfair, but It's best avoided for a newbie

The color of madness is a much smaller scale dlc than CC, impacting the game far less. Its endless mode is aimed more at experienced players than newcomers, but it's much more new guy friendly than the CC.

The Shieldbreaker only adds a new hero, but she's one of the best in the game, being able to ignore armor, drag irritating enemies to the front, and use poison damage to great effect. She has a mechanic where if you camp with her you can get ambushed by seriously dangerous enemies, which is somewhat irritating, but the loot is also pretty good. Overall I'd recommend to a new player.

The musketeer is a re-skinned Arbalest and offers nothing else to the player. Take it or leave it.

The butcher's circus was a surprise free DLC dropped not all that long ago. Overall it's good fun, with no risk to your heroes, and it's good practice with the game's mechanics. Highly recommend.
WARNING! heroes have different stats and abilities to the base game in the arena to better balance them for multiplayer, don't get too used to the specifics of their abilities. IE the antiquarian is actually good in a fight at the circus

There is no such thing as over prepared for a boss-fight, level all your equipped skills as far as they'll go, upgrade your gear, equip the best trinkets you can, train camping skills to block ambush and boost stats, bring as many supplies as you can, the cost is worth it.

If you can swing it there's a quest in every main region that boosts heroes XP gain and damage on the next quest in the region. Amazing for any boss fight, but don't send the team you intend to send for the bosses, as if they get too stressed you'll be forced to delay and waste the buff or send in heroes that are less than ideal.

Bosses always spawn at the furthest possible point from the starting location by hallway tiles, knowing this you can usually camp right before the fight and stack as many buffs as you can to make it easier.

if you aren't willing to use the wiki, send a disposable scouting party in to get a look at the boss to learn its stats and as many of its moves as you can. Don't make them too disposable, as if they die before they reach the boss, or are too badly damaged to survive enough moves to give useful intel then you'll have wasted the cost of sending them. This is only worth doing for the first time you encounter a boss, the two upgraded versions have the same moves, just better stats.

Don't be afraid to retreat if any hero hits deaths door, the stress is cheaper to fix than replacing the hero.

Bosses all have some form of gimmick that makes them unique and dangerous in their own right, expect the unexpected.

Be careful bringing the shield-breaker along unless you've finished her quest chain, her nightmares can ruin an entire expedition. It's true of any quest but that goes double for one you've invested so much into due to the boss. Note that nightmares are limited by mission level, if you've beaten the level two nightmare you won't encounter the level three on level one missions.

With only a couple exceptions I would avoid bringing the antiquarian to boss fights, her crap damage, weak support, and low survivablilty makes her a liability. Boss loot is mostly unaffected by her loot boosting ability, and whatever extra cash you pick up on the way to the boss thanks to her isn't worth the problems bringing her causes.