Virtue Farming for Fun and Profit

[Skinny Pete]

So I decided to do some virtue farming and wonder how you guys do this, if you do.

I was finding it difficult to get much past 100 in endless, even with team makeups like people have been discussing. It seemed I always got clobbered by the Sleeper to the point that I wasn't able to continue long after beating it.

This is largely because a VES-JES-FLA-LEP team is really weak against the Sleeper and against a number of other things where the Flagellant just isn't good, i.e. skellies and fishsticks. Also, of course, FLA actually can't get virtuous anyway.

I'd tried with this team and the Tentacle Idol trinket and failed three times in a row to get VES to go virtuous.

So I scavenged around until I also got a Hero's Ring. This took a ridiculous amount of effort, even though previously it had been showing up one, two and even three times per set of missions.

Finally got that.

I also switched out the team to VES-JES-HWM-LEP because Flagellant was just not cutting it against a lot of enemies.

I put Focus Rings on the front two ranks, the HWM's Crystalline artifact on him, and the Surgical Gloves on the Leper.

Bright Tambourine on the Jester.

Both the Tentacle Idol and Hero's Ring got put on whatever hero I was trying to farm, and their normal trinkets got swapped into inventory. This meant whatever hero was getting farmed was doing without any actually normally useful trinkets and was significantly weaker.

The basic strategy for the majority of encounters was this. Start with HWM, Duelist's Advance to R1. Jester spams Battle Ballad with occasional stress heals (except on the farmed character). Leper starts with Revenge. Vestal spams group heal, individual heal, or a stun as appropriate. The only skill I really changed often was occasionally swapping out Leper's self-heal for Intimidate for de-stealthing those damn horses.

This had always sounded involved and pretty much was. It took seven tries (at allegedly 70% chance) to get all four Virtuous, but once they were, it was a ridiculous cakewalk, with heroes randomly healing themselves, stress healing the party, buffing damage to the party, and stress healing self. I had Powerful, Courageous, Stalwart and Vigorous.

This got me past the Sleeper with zero stress and to 300, after which I quit. Congratulations to whoever manages to get thousands of kills because it sure seems like a slog and takes hours and hours.

It really seems you have to get massively unlucky for the streak to end. For instance, once I had the Swine God DD my Leper with a Crit on the "End These Two" marked characters and Wilbur squealed at him. So I could have lost someone there. Otherwise I was never in any real danger after the first two virtuous characters.

The main difficulty of getting the last two was getting them to quit getting stress healed all the time and leaving stressers like witches and acolytes around trying to get stressed.

Anyone have a better way of doing this or is this pretty much how it works?

(The only other thing is this team lacks any way to cure diseases, and my Jester alone ended up with The Worries, The Fits, The Runs, and breaking the trend of getting everything with "The Something Horrible" as a name, Rabies. Rabies is actually helpful, though.)

[Lujo]

That's pretty much how it works. It helps if you walk into the run with two guys who were really stressed on a previous run (but not afflicted, obv). You put the virtue junk on them, walk in, pop the virtue/afflicition immediately and basically start out that way. Other team comps work, too.

It's not as foolproof as it looks as there are rooms which can mess you up depending on the team comp, not all virtues are equally as useful, and you run can end at any time due to random sequence of enemy getting lucky.

And setting it up can be a pita because some afflictions are really difficult to get rid of once you get stuck with them instead of virtues, and there's other snags to it, but generally that's that.

[Skinny Pete]

Originally posted by Lujo:

It's not as foolproof as it looks as there are rooms which can mess you up depending on the team comp, not all virtues are equally as useful, and you run can end at any time due to random sequence of enemy getting lucky.

And setting it up can be a pita because some afflictions are really difficult to get rid of once you get stuck with them instead of virtues, and there's other snags to it, but generally that's that.

The enemy is also more likely to get lucky on you when your main damage dealer (like a Leper) is gimped by having two trinkets on him that are otherwise useless. Good idea about starting stressed.

Also apparently certain light effects impact stress, so that might be useful to remember next time.

And yes, all of them cause you to refuse help de-stressing sometimes but Paranoid is the worst in every respect.

[Valmar]

To get stress faster I just "pass" on his turn. Its a free 4-7 stress per turn, depeding on trinkets, buffs, quirks, etc.

A bit harder to do it on vestal cause you need to heal sometimes, but thats it.

I use double virtue trinkets (the ring plus the ancestor) and I change it from one to another after each zone.