I really like this game but

[snuggleform]

The class balance seems a bit off. Man at arms, jester, and plague doctor seem to out perform just about anyone else. My best teams use 2 out of these 3 consistently and any time I only try to use one of them (or even none of them), the game honestly feels like a slog where I'm losing characters left right and center.

I know the game is supposed to be tough and you can't just slap any old team together, but the difference between using PD and Jester in the back versus just about anything else is silly.

In general there are soooo many skills/paths which just don't feel good enough to use. Even on those aforementioned characters it's a bit too easy to figure out which skills are good and which are way too niche to be of any real consideration.

[Overeagerdragon]

Weird... I haven't touched PD, Jest or MaA in ages... my fav team atm is Flag/Hwm/GR/Vest but I've been consistently lucky in finding good relics for the HwM and the GR

[snuggleform]

Originally posted by Overeagerdragon:

Weird... I haven't touched PD, Jest or MaA in ages... my fav team atm is Flag/Hwm/GR/Vest but I've been consistently lucky in finding good relics for the HwM and the GR

That sounds pretty cool what's your paths for those heroes?

[Muh macht die Kuh]

Flagellant is the real MVP.

If you get lucky with trinkets, he can literally solo a whole run.

[Aria Kawa]

I'm close to unlocking everything, some team comps are so much better than others that you are left wondering why even try others. My team to bulldoze everything at the moment is GH, PD, Flag and MAA. The plague doctor is the class with the best role compression in the entire game, while also being the best boss killer. This game heavily favors DOTs and the alchemist path can apply insane amounts of blight.

As for the characters, I loved the Leper in the beginning, but now I see him almost as a joke. It doesn't matter if you stack two censors trinkets on him to get his debuff resist to 90+: in every single battle a coinflip is going to happen and he's potentialy going to start either with one or two blind tokens disregarding the resist stat. Possibly one of the worst design decisions that I've ever seen created just to make every battle with a leper drag on.

[Oni]

i came to the exact same conclusion after 30 hours

DD2 is all about Plague Doctor, MaA & Jester

you basically only have 1 free slot for DPS

the other classes can't mitigate risk or bad RNG quite like the top picks, one bad crit or meltdown, and the entire party crumbles

[The Face]

Originally posted by Oni:

i came to the exact same conclusion after 30 hours

DD2 is all about Plague Doctor, MaA & Jester

you basically only have 1 free slot for DPS

the other classes can't mitigate risk or bad RNG quite like the top picks, one bad crit or meltdown, and the entire party crumbles

Myself and many others have had plenty of success with the other characters. Heck one of our better players just posted how he just beat act 5 with the craziest infernal flame with a pretty odd team

Actually, hilariously, the poster of this thread is the one that just beat it like that. Heh

[Longsword]

Clutch, Just the way it is, even in DD1 plague and jester were preferable for easier play. My games are much harder without Jester. Plague is best because vestal and Occult are so unreliable on heals or at least...not as reliable as PD.

[Ashfelt]

Originally posted by Oni:

i came to the exact same conclusion after 30 hours

DD2 is all about Plague Doctor, MaA & Jester

you basically only have 1 free slot for DPS

the other classes can't mitigate risk or bad RNG quite like the top picks, one bad crit or meltdown, and the entire party crumbles

Flag literally can act as a tank/DD role and has huge support utility where you dont even need a MaA or PD, same goes for Leper whos blind weakness can be mitigated greatly with a team of combo generators like Highwayman, occultist etc. I only use MaM for the act 3 endboss because Flag is just much more fun/flexible.

I wont deny however the PD is a very safe+strong bread and butter character and can slot into the majority of team comps but PD, MaA and jester are not the centre focus.

[Mask]

the game's balance is absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥ in certain aspects, you're not crazy. pd is really strong rn if you put more than five seconds into learning how to play her
a big reason why early on, like someone earlier in the thread put it, her starting five moves actually form a complete moveset and don't feel like she's handicapped in some major way (imo chaotic offering should be base kit for occultist, i have no idea why vestal starts with hand of light instead of both consecrations)
part of it is her being dead simple to understand, you don't need to worry about (what feels like early on) weird ♥♥♥♥ like how firestarter works on any move that targets enemies (try giving firestarter to maa and using bellow...dragon breath grampa lol) or how one jester path causes friendly fire bleed damage or how dismas can apply stronger debuffs with a crit token. her only "weird" moves are indiscriminate science and cause of death, but they're both dead simple once you get a hold on how the game works

all of that said i'm one of those lunatics that runs no-blight-damage-at-all surgeon builds with rank 2 vestal and upgraded hand of light so take what i'm saying with a grain of salt

[Aria Kawa]

A tl;dr:
In DD1 you will oftenly have no big troubles for being creative with your teams because runs are short and there are ways to mitigate your troubles, like a lack of a full time healer or stress remover. You can camp, eat food and leave the quest midway. If you lose a character it can be a pain, but you can raise another in a short amount of time.

In DD2 after a dozen of hours you stop experimenting and stick only to teams that will give you a victory because you are going to be playing with those guys for THREE HOURS a run. There's plenty that can go wrong, and the reason why everyone uses Jester and MAA so much is because just ONE meltdown will take 90% of a characters health, plus it can give you the worst negative quirks that will absolutely destroy a character, like that one with - 20% hp% and debuffs in the start of the battle plus increased chance for more meltdowns.

Besides of that you need to fight the bosses from act 3 and 4 with their load of overtuned BS, so you don't want to take chances to lose.

[snuggleform]

Originally posted by Mask:

the game's balance is absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥ in certain aspects, you're not crazy. pd is really strong rn if you put more than five seconds into learning how to play her
a big reason why early on, like someone earlier in the thread put it, her starting five moves actually form a complete moveset and don't feel like she's handicapped in some major way (imo chaotic offering should be base kit for occultist, i have no idea why vestal starts with hand of light instead of both consecrations)
part of it is her being dead simple to understand, you don't need to worry about (what feels like early on) weird ♥♥♥♥ like how firestarter works on any move that targets enemies (try giving firestarter to maa and using bellow...dragon breath grampa lol) or how one jester path causes friendly fire bleed damage or how dismas can apply stronger debuffs with a crit token. her only "weird" moves are indiscriminate science and cause of death, but they're both dead simple once you get a hold on how the game works

all of that said i'm one of those lunatics that runs no-blight-damage-at-all surgeon builds with rank 2 vestal and upgraded hand of light so take what i'm saying with a grain of salt

If you run surgeon + rank 2 vestal, what dps is carrying you and what tank? My guess would be hellion + HWM to try to make up for vestal/surgeon being so defensive.

[Mask]

Originally posted by snuggleform:

Originally posted by Mask:

that said i'm a lunatic

If you run surgeon + rank 2 vestal, what dps is carrying you and what tank? My guess would be hellion + HWM to try to make up for vestal/surgeon being so defensive.

rank 4 orphan runaway and rank 1 vanguard maa usually. sometimes leper instead of maa

[Divvu]

Only 3.2% of players play on cowardice OP. Most of what you read on these boards is theorycrafting from people playing denial and little else.

I like both occultist and runaway but anyone playing on higher difficulty levels will confirm that PD outperforms ANY backliners. Period. Both in damage (bar foetor and even there she can do with the right trinkets) and amount & frequency of healing.
It's not an opinion and it's not even funny.

She's not an S tier hero (like MaA, Jester and BH) but def A tier and, once again, above all other possible dedicated backliners.

[snuggleform]

Originally posted by Divvu:

Only 3.2% of players play on cowardice OP. Most of what you read on these boards is theorycrafting from people playing denial and little else.

I like both occultist and runaway but anyone playing on higher difficulty levels will confirm that PD outperforms ANY backliners. Period. Both in damage (bar foetor and even there she can do with the right trinkets) and amount & frequency of healing.
It's not an opinion and it's not even funny.

She's not an S tier hero (like MaA, Jester and BH) but def A tier and, once again, above all other possible dedicated backliners.

I'm on board the PD hype train. My opinion of the MAA and Jester has shifted - I don't think they're irreplaceable anymore (I did the Hard Mode achievement without MAA or Jester handily), but PD is definitely a cut above the competition for rank 4.

She has abundant reliable fast cooldown healing with the ability to easily apply blight to any rank. And rank 4 is safe the vast majority of the game, the sluice notwithstanding.

I will say that a team someone used to clear Grand Slam does make me think you can sort of get away with using GR instead of PD provided you have some other way to clear dots and do some healig (ala flagellant).

To me Occultist and Vestal are very very meh. With Vestal I am willing to believe there is some OP build that revolves around a jumping team with Consecration of Light, but I feel like you really have to overengineer that one. Her offense is far too lacking to compete with the PD in rank 4, and her heal being on 2 cooldown doesn't make her competitive in the healing department either. So it all comes down to her token generation.

Occultist is just like...he requires a lot of good itemization to get rid of his weaknesses (+healing, +status resist so he doesn't debuff himself too hard with Ritual), but even if you manage to do that the output isn't that amazing. If you just use him as a damage dealer (aspirant) you really might as well just use MAA or HWM in that slot. I think aspirant is his best build and most of the time I just used his slash ability, at which point I honestly may as well just have taken MAA to do some stress relief and Crush or just HWM to shoot /slash any rank.

[nerdcommando.gamestudios]

Yeah, those are all top-tier. You're forgetting the flag, though - tbh, the flag is so insane that I'm not sure if MaA is even worth it anymore (as they're sorta mutually exclusive).