Shrieker just one shot Dismas and flew away. Time to delete my save. Again.

[The Old Song]

I really hate when devs don't include important information in the game, prior to it mattering. So many games do this all the time, I don't even know how often I've had to look up how statuses worked or things scaled or what have you on some wiki because a given game failed to give anywhere near enough information to explain its own mechanics.

Today's nuisance and rant: Losing trinkets and the shrieker mechanics in Darkest Dungeon.



Did the game ever tell me I'd lose trinkets if someone died? No, no it did not, so until I lost a bunch of good trinkets all at the same time I thought they'd just go back into my inventory. Nope, lost. I don't object to that, it's perfectly fine, but it's annoying the game didn't state that would happen beforehand.

Then it gives me the mission to go get them back. "Kill this boss, it's only a level 5 mission." Cool, I'll grab my best people and do that. Because based on the info being provided it's just another boss fight. Can't flee? That's fine, I wasn't going to. Oh look, it has 999999 dodge and nothing I do can hit it. Would have been nice to know it was a weird fight like that before starting. Oh dang, you just one shot one of the 2 specific characters I can't let die. That's ok though, I can get him off death's door a------ and you flew away, doing a full-party attack, dealing the deathblow, and ending at the fight at the same time. So I couldn't do anything about it, and it's already autosaved. Would have been wondrous to know this was a timed fight, so I could have acted accordingly.



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In all seriousness the complaint about games not explaining themselves is much more about things like "how does this mechanic work" where people are left debating online, and less about things like "I wish I knew this boss did that thing". Like I neither want nor expect text popups explaining all the boss mechanics before starting a mission, that would be too much. But the Shrieker specifically is something I feel the game should definitely provided a lot more clarification about before letting you enter the level.

[alicerinz]

Wait a second, the shrieker deals damage...?

[Sir Francis]

How about not taking dismas into an encounter you know nothing about? Going into a bossfight blindly is always dangerous, that much you should have learned, not being able to flee cranks that up even more. Sending him in was just irresponsible.

[Dreadnought]

ehhh now wait for the event where you can pick one of three colours

[PalmTree]

Originally posted by 𝔉𝔯𝔞𝔫𝔠𝔦𝔰:

How about not taking dismas into an encounter you know nothing about? Going into a bossfight blindly is always dangerous, that much you should have learned, not being able to flee cranks that up even more. Sending him in was just irresponsible.

Pretty much this. On the Old Road We Found Redemption is probably one of the tougher achievements to get, and when you're specifically going for it you need to be careful with Reynauld and Dismas.

It really isn't something worth resetting a file for in my opinion. There's always the chance you could get him back from the resurrection event, after all. That's how I got the achievement.

[SKull]

I don't care what people say, the Shrieker is idiotic. In a recent save I killed it, finally, on my third go to retrieve my trinkets. Then two weeks later it suddenly appeared again to steal everything. I killed it!!!!!! Leave me alone!

It's stuff like this that keeps me away from DD.

[Dreadnought]

nah there are lot of classes you can use to reduce his dmg,dodge,speed etc...

[Sir Francis]

The shrieker only steals trinkets once per savefile but can be used to get lost trinkets back indefinitely, a fair deal id say.

[Purple]

Oh ♥♥♥♥, is it only once per save? Learn something everyday

[SKull]

I am absolutely sure that this is wrong, because I just had it stealing from me twice in a row. Two weeks after I killed it (!) it appeared again to steal all my stuff. Read what people are writing instead of making stuff up.

[Purple]

Brah, there are two ways for big bird to spawn, calm down

[K E N N I]

Back in my day you didn't have to kill the Shrieker, just survive until it flies away. Has this been changed?

[PalmTree]

Originally posted by patryk.drobinski:

Back in my day you didn't have to kill the Shrieker, just survive until it flies away. Has this been changed?

No, it hasn't. You only need to survive the encounter but if you do manage to kill it you have a high chance of getting the Corvid's quirks and you don't have to take the stress nuke from Shrieking Flight.

[Skinny Pete]

Welcome to roguelikes.

Originally posted by patryk.drobinski:

Back in my day you didn't have to kill the Shrieker, just survive until it flies away. Has this been changed?

You should try to kill either the nest or the bird. The nest gives you a number of Puzzling Trapezohedrons worth 3500 each (3-5 for Champion). It's also a lot easier to kill and killing it immediately causes the bird to leave, so it's the safest option.

Killing the bird is considerably more dangerous, requires overcoming its absurd Dodge and getting lucky, or at least avoiding getting really, really unlucky if you can stack ACC. You should be able to kill it well over 90% of the time.

Killing neither is the worst option because you take as many attacks from it as possible and then massive stress hits.

Personally, unless I'm really short on gold I always go for the kill because the quirks are god-tier. The trinkets aren't worth much (other than the ACC one) unless you're playing a low light strategy in which case they're also god-tier.

[SKull]

Originally posted by patryk.drobinski:

Back in my day you didn't have to kill the Shrieker, just survive until it flies away. Has this been changed?

No, but the third time I fought it it died. And then it came back again two weeks later and stole my stuff, which is why I quit my last game. No point even trying if the game is just going to cheat anyway.

[PalmTree]

Originally posted by SKull:

Originally posted by patryk.drobinski:

Back in my day you didn't have to kill the Shrieker, just survive until it flies away. Has this been changed?

No, but the third time I fought it it died. And then it came back again two weeks later and stole my stuff, which is why I quit my last game. No point even trying if the game is just going to cheat anyway.

It's already been said, there's THREE ways the Shrieker can appear:

Two separate town events, A Thief in the Night and The Shrieker's Prize. They can both trigger on the same save, so that's probably what happened to you.

The other way is if your heroes keep dying or you get a party wipe and lose a total of 8 trinkets. If that happens, a mission appears to fight the Shrieker a few weeks later.