How does this team not work for champion Long cove?

[Escapegoat]

Vestal, Plague, Knight, Shieldbreaker. I have range, I have healing, I have stress healing, I can respond to bleed, I have blight to eat through penetration, I have stuns, I have guard penetration, I have debuffs, I have anti-shuffle/knockback, I always got for the stressers first except thralls, I have an answer to everything and yet somehow, it failed against almost everything. Never had enough damage, never had enough stress redux, never had enough healing. I made it through the level but painfully slow with every over hero constantly over 100 stress, and made it through without heart attacks only because Vestal became virtuous twice.

[No One]

What's a knight, does it have reach?

It should be fine. blinding gas on the back, then kill it. Could be a trinket issue. Or - just checking - upgrades?

[Purple]

Probably Crusader, the comp is fine

[Sandboxhead]

(1) If you bring bandages, medicinal herbs, holy water, etc... you wouldn't have to waste hero actions negating bleed and debuffs.
(2) Make sure your heroes don't have quirks like Fear of Eldritch, or Cove Phobe, or somesuch.
(3) Lots of torches and lots of food. For long dungeons, bring minimum 18 food 12 torches.
(4) Cove Explorer helps a lot. Bound to get ambushed when you're exploring blind.
(5) Upgrades? Trinkets? All "Commons" won't cut it. Most "Uncommons" won't cut it.

[Escapegoat]

Originally posted by Sandboxhead:

(1) If you bring bandages, medicinal herbs, holy water, etc... you wouldn't have to waste hero actions negating bleed and debuffs.
(2) Make sure your heroes don't have quirks like Fear of Eldritch, or Cove Phobe, or somesuch.
(3) Lots of torches and lots of food. For long dungeons, bring minimum 18 food 12 torches.
(4) Cove Explorer helps a lot. Bound to get ambushed when you're exploring blind.
(5) Upgrades? Trinkets? All "Commons" won't cut it. Most "Uncommons" won't cut it.

I did all of that, had such a full pack I couldn't pick up any items for like 4 rooms. All the trinkets were orange or above, brought plenty of bandages, garlic, cleansing crystal so I wouldn't have to waste plague's actions. Only had one "fear of mankind" and "fear of unholy" on one champ, who wasn't even the one getting the most stressed and also became virtuous.

[No One]

'orange or above' so you brought the ancestor's hankerchief, the ancestor's mustache cream, ancestor's coat, the ancestor's bottle, the ancestor's idol, and the goblet?

Vestal/plague/crusader is actually kind of bad because you can't lunge for range without screwing up blinding gas.

[Escapegoat]

Originally posted by No One:

'orange or above' so you brought the ancestor's hankerchief, the ancestor's mustache cream, ancestor's coat, the ancestor's bottle, the ancestor's idol, and the goblet?

Do you not know that you need to complete long quests to get those in the first place?

[WhiteWolf]

Originally posted by Escapegoat:

Originally posted by No One:

'orange or above' so you brought the ancestor's hankerchief, the ancestor's mustache cream, ancestor's coat, the ancestor's bottle, the ancestor's idol, and the goblet?

Do you not know that you need to complete long quests to get those in the first place?

You can get them in chests as well. For example on vwolf event chests. Rarity on items is not that important. What is important is how they fit into your build / party setup. Some common items are extremely powerful.

Your party setup is "OK". Provided you have the right items, upgrades, quirks and playstyle, you should be fine.

You could also to maximize your party composition.
For example, Occultist is better than Vestal in Cove.

In my setup Plague Doc. + Occultist will deny enemy actions on position 3 and 4 90% of the fights. This means that the only stress damage I take is due to enemy crits from position 1 and 2. That alone is not enough to bring a hero to 100 level stress over a dungeon run. Especially if you have a reasonable crit chance in your party.

Crusader has additional damage versus unholy. That is not going to help you in cove. Man at arms has a better stun and mitigates more damage. For example Groupers on position 1 and 2 can only hit position 1 and 2. If you nuke the backside with doctor + occultist and use guard on your shieldbreaker, then all the enemies will hit the man at arms - which has a heavy protection buff.

Use the Plague Doctor on position 4 instead of 3. Orca can hit only position 1,2,3. Plague doctor has a lower bleed resistance. It is better to take the bleed roll with a different character. Additionally,since your plague doctor is the fastest in your group (or should be), you can heal the character before the bleed ticks.

In my opinion, cove is the easiest champion dungeon.

[Escapegoat]

Originally posted by WhiteWolf:

Originally posted by Escapegoat:

Do you not know that you need to complete long quests to get those in the first place?

You can get them in chests as well. For example on vwolf event chests.

Yes, I've gotten them from chests, it's not reliable to depend on chests, you could very well have better luck winning the lottery.

[WhiteWolf]

Originally posted by Escapegoat:

Originally posted by WhiteWolf:

You can get them in chests as well. For example on vwolf event chests.

Yes, I've gotten them from chests, it's not reliable to depend on chests, you could very well have better luck winning the lottery.

Yes,but they are not mandatory. I did 2 times Long Cove Champion without any trinkets. I simply forgot to equip them. It still went ok.

basically:
Turn 1: Kill back row or stun + damage back rows. Mitigate damage with remaining moves.
Turn 2: Kill back row. Mitigate damage / start recovering.
Turn 3/4/5: Recover /mitigate damage.

For most of the fights you will end up with the same health and little/no stress taken. Two camps will heal whatever stress you managed to gather during the fights.

[Mazile]

My favourite cove party is PD/OCC/ABOM/HEL
Helion can help finish enemy in 4 position
Abom + Pd equals melting down 2 and 3 positions
Occ can provide nice dmg to any enemy since most of them are eldritch

[No One]

My favourite party for cove is HM-OCC-♥♥♥-MAA. Or PD-OCC-BH-HEL. Or GR-VES-JES-SBR. Or PD-OCC-HM-FLG. Or PD-JES-♥♥♥-OCC. Or HM-PD-CRU-FLG. Or JES-VES-BH-LEP. Or GR-VES-MAA-HEL. Or OCC-OCC-OCC-OCC.

Originally posted by Escapegoat:

Do you not know

Are you going to share which trinkets you actually brought, or not?

[Skinny Pete]

LEP is actually okay for Champion Cove missions, because the Champion apex monster (Squiffy Ghast) likes opening with a move to the front, and is fairly fast. Ghast has to come to the front to use his special Horror attack, and does it usually before Leper moves. So Leper's first move near the end of the first round is quite often just to one shot the prick before he can get off his big move (I usually attack him at least once before then to make sure though).

[Butt Goblin]

Insufficient backline damage. Your only good long-range damage dealer is SB, and Pierce's damage is merely average relative to other raw damage dealers. A single damage dealer can't control the backline even with the help of PD's stuns--they won't be able to kill two enemies in two turns if you open with the stun (so they'll tank the damage for a turn, become stun immune, and just stress your party on turn 2) and if you open with PD's blight they'll just stress you immediately because PD's blights take a long time to do anything significant to enemies.

Crusader is also not a good choice for this party. For one, he's slow and thus can rarely respond to frontliners in a timely manner (thus meaning a lot of damage from enemies will get through even if his kit is alright for dealing with frontliners), and for another he's limited in range in his frontline build. Not much sense in using Crusader when you have no use for Battle Heal (due to Vestal) and you can't dance in the midranks to fix his range--he can stress heal but currently your stress intake is being caused by a lack of backline damage, not by a lack of stress healing.

Basically, your party has answers to most things enemies will throw at you but because it's so slow at responding to threats, enemies will just do what they want to you anyway.

I would suggest either swapping out Crusader or reworking your backline (Ves+PD backlines have good healing and prevention but they're terrible damage-wise and need the rest of the party to compensate for their low immediate damage). Swapping out Crusader may also entail swapping out Shieldbreaker as her dancing makes her incompatible with a lot of classes.

Poor trinket choices can exacerbate your issues but we don't know exactly what you took so we can't be certain. Rarity is a lot less important than the stats your trinkets give.