how flagellant works?

[Karambo]

hi everyone.
just got my first flagellant and wanted to make a blood damage party:
Vestal-Jester-flagellant-hellion
while i was looking at flagellants abilities i realized that one camping skill gives him stress, another one is only useable if his health is below 40%.
thats the reason why i was asking myself whats the strategy with the flagellant works

thx in advance

PS: any tips for that team (trinkets/abilities) are welcome

[Panfilo]

Skinny Pete a écrit :

Going back through my records, for my entire history playing this game, Flagellants are the characters with the most deaths. This isn't because they're bad, it's because they're so good I always have them, and they always suck up a lot of abuse.

Do you know what character I have the least deaths with? Leper. I have literally never had a Leper die (except in DD4 where I deliberately killed one). These ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ things are as indestructible as a cockroach.

"But you always say Leper is the worst hero in the game!" Why would I say that? Because the worth of a hero isn't just that he always survives, it's what happens to the REST OF THE TEAM.

And Flagellant is a monster because no matter what else he does, the REST OF THE TEAM survives. There is a game theory and a moral lesson here, both left as an exercise to the reader.

Same, same! One Stygian run all but one corpse in the graveyard all are Flagellants.

Lepers are survivors, which is great in principle but doesn't do much good when they can't keep the rest of the team alive. Meanwhile even if your flagellant gets chumped his mechanics help cover your escape (or power your way to victory!)

[Tenjen]

you can also build him for support with stress heals and heal over time. (his heal does not work with +healing % but will with + healing received) Itemization is key for what you want here. - stress taken etc for the support build to make it viable.

Otherwise cant go wrong with +bleed trinkets early and later on anything with trinkets that have +stats for low health or deaths door, death blow resist %. If you go with low health trinket then health % and protection trinkets for the 2nd slot are good

The reason being that with either a bigger hp pool and less damage taken he can remain at <40% health longer before hitting deaths door or he can even get healed without going above 40%.

Then there is the true flagg meme build which involves the deaths door items like martyrs seal and Eternities collar, anyone of them is enough to put him at the 87% death blow resist cap (along with his suffer ability) but this is a very high risk high reward build with one or both of them. A good 13% chance at best for each hit taken to be his last, so guardian shield, dodge and removing dots from him is crucial but he gets a 60% damage, 14% crit boost and +20 dodge at deaths door (and another 20% more damage with +85 stress). All this ontop of his affliction being activated for an even larger boost and much more risk.

If you go this way, expect a massive damage potential but also to burn through your flaggs like all hell. This build is pure darkest dungeon RNG at its most concentrated.

I've had flags plow through bosses and major enemies at deaths door, resisting every time along with whatever dodges and guardian shield i could afford them.

I've had flags die one turn after deaths door because they got a dot (despite high resistance) between enemy turns just before the flag got a turn.

I've had flags stress out my entire team and/or beat the hell out of them EVERY TURN, forcing me to retreat from that fight but have also had flags go in and out of deaths door every turn, doing mass heals every time and essentially sustaining us against impossible odds while blowing chunks out of the enemy.

[Original Gengar]

Death blow resist is a waste of a trinket slot tbh. And unless you wanna get cute with it, +stats on deaths door are also not very good. Even if you guard the FLA, one AoE or 1 stun on the MAA is very bad news. 87% sounds high, but 13% is far from little.
Not to mention that FLA doesn't benefit all that much from +damage cause most of his damage comes from bleeds. So it's really more of a very high risk, medium reward kinda play style.

As said before in this thread, best way to play FLA is like you would play any other hero. Deaths door flag is a fun off meta thing, but too dangerous to be viable as an actual build.

[RopeDrink]

87% death blow resist cap (along with his suffer ability) but this is a very high risk high reward build

High risk, certainly, but high reward is a stretch. The reward is barely worthwhile compared to improving a Flagellant across the board via normal means, which is much less riskier and doesn't require them to be injured or dying to justify their trinkets (which only come into play on death's door and effect very little else).

[Skinny Pete]

Original Gengar a écrit :

As said before in this thread, best way to play FLA is like you would play any other hero. Deaths door flag is a fun off meta thing, but too dangerous to be viable as an actual build.

About the only difference is if I have a choice of healing one of two characters, and one of them is FLA, I'll generally tend to favor the other character. I don't deliberately court Death's Door. Most of the time. And I absolutely never use the DD trinkets. I also generally don't use the low HP trinkets because I'm not planning on using them unless for whatever weird reason I'm using FLA as a main healer. This is generally not optional because his strength is as a damage dealer.

Exception: Punishment's Hood but its main feature is boosting bleed, which can be okay for bringing him along in dungeons like Cove with high bleed resist enemies.

Shard of Glass is an even better bleed booster, but unfortunately, the other half and the set bonus itself suck. I am not a huge fan of +HP at all. In theory it seems like this kind of thing should be good for keeping you off DD, but the issue is by not bringing a better trinket that actually kills enemies, you (and the rest of the team) are sucking up more damage anyway, so what's the benefit? I can possibly see it for a character like Grave Robber who is absurdly flimsy but even there, not really. And the biggest benefit for +% to HP would be for characters who already have high HP. And things like Leper are already built like a brick ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and never die anyway, so again, what's the benefit?

This said, I don't really recommend -% HP trinkets either, so I only occasionally use the Acidic Husk Ichor despite an absurdly good DMG bonus (+30%) that comes at the cost of an HP debuff (-25%).

So in short, most of the FLA trinkets are actually pretty bad, but he benefits from a lot of the normal trinkets. I usually go with a generic strategy of maybe Shard of Glass, maybe Punishment's Hood, but in general, +ACC, +DMG (to the most prevalent enemies in a specific dungeon), maybe +SPD (if I have a bleed team and want to start stacking bleeds from the very beginning).

[RopeDrink]

Given his high baseline SPD, a bit extra greatly helps in rolling out those bleeds immediately (before the majority of the bestiary), which you absolutely should be doing as the best bleeder in the game. Alas, he'll risk the good ole 'go before healer' death-trope as an average health front-liner prone to being slapped by crits and dots into critical states (and might even help the enemy do it via self injury - build dependent), hence threshold heals exists but are not fool-proof.

I recall using shard of glass and the -HP% trinket in the endless video for fun. Some might argue that lower health = easier access to threshold skills, but that isn't really a perk - and less so since the per-battle & healing-debuff nerfs that prevent him from benefiting much when said abilities are used in quick succession.

Still - for as long as he was kept alive, he was frequently pumping out raw damage comparable to an endless-trinket HWM, nevermind the fact it had his bleeds on top - but you could achieve similar with normal trinkets as well.

[Panfilo]

See I'm a pretty pro +HP player, because Flagellant's base damage is already pretty low and you're not going to wring a lot of frontloaded damage out of him. Since his bleeds also debuff bleed resist on targets he doesn't need to boost bleed chance that much either. More HP means more wiggle room when he gets below 40% hp and it also means he can absorb more DoT damage. I really like giving him Flesh's heart as it's hp and bleed resist which is pretty good.

It's too bad the random act outs, semi random turn order, and tendency to implode in spite of an 87% deathblow resist build make it hard to to play him on his designed strengths. Like the whole point of Endure is that he'll get 'stronger' when afflicted. But since he randomly acts out its actually really risky and more of an affliction than anything. So why take a skill that trades stress when you can just take a hero with a better net effect? Same for Suffer, which is neat in concept but the lack of healing means I see little practical use for it most of the time unless the flagellant got to roll his resists.

[Panfilo]

Similarly Lash's Anger is another swing and a miss. Why waste respite to get rapturous when that can easily happen on its own? For things like Rapturous to be worth it there needs to be quirks/items/skills that reduce act outs. They should have made the +virtue items do this, as it would make them work regardless of the virtue check outcome.

So for example Hero's Ring give +25% virtue chance and -25% random act outs. If you fail your virtue check you can still keep it on to reduce the self harm or refusing to heal. Skills like Lash's Anger and Endure need to give a temporary buff with this affect as well. This would be powerful on the Flagellant as it would make Rapturous more reliable and encourage you to hulk out with him.

[RopeDrink]

See I'm a pretty pro +HP player, because Flagellant's base damage is already pretty low and you're not going to wring a lot of frontloaded damage out of him. Since his bleeds also debuff bleed resist on targets he doesn't need to boost bleed chance that much either.

His raw damage potential isn't terrible if you're willing to spec for it. While his attacks do reduce bleed res, you really want them going off immediately to get the most benefit. Slapping an enemy for a turn and then maybe getting a bleed off after a second attack (assuming you even apply the res-reduction debuff which can be resisted) is not nearly as good as guaranteeing the bleed is landed on the first hit whenever possible -- especially when dealing with high-health enemies where you really want to wrack up that dot-count quickly.

So why take a skill that trades stress when you can just take a hero with a better net effect?

Because it has good potency, buffs his speed, and is on a hero who can casually dump 50 stress for minor camping cost if you really need it. Endure's relief is equivalent to a stress-trinketed CRU @ 10 stress at level 1. They can both stress-heal from any position, which is amazing in itself. Nobody can deny that JES is still the best at that particular task, but then, you can't have stress-flex seeing as he's restricted to the back for the most part.

FLA works very well with a JES because they can flit between the role to suit a fight. FLA is good for normalizing stress unto himself so that his own camping skill (or a JES) can casually dump it. The JES stress-red-buff also causes Endure to inflict less on the FLA as well, as do the stress-red camping skill, so you end up with obscenely high stress-relief without forcing one hero to deal with it all himself.

[No One]

No frontloaded damage: 11-17 isn't good enough for you? With up to half of that going straight through prot?

Just don't bring him to the ruins unless you thought vestals had too many stuns, needed weaker heals, and attacked too far away.

[RopeDrink]

Does decent raw damage and applies one of the strongest bleeds in the game on top of the res-reduction. It was disgusting when Punish could hit R3 in the past. Imagine it hitting for high raw damage + high bleed even with his current 2-rank v 2-rank post-nerf?

Honestly, damage was never a problem unless all you want is raw physical burst, in which case sure, you can do better - but he still has perfectly fine damage roped into a generalist kit no matter how you spin it.

And yes, FLA is the biggest sufferer when it comes to the Ruins, despite the fact you'll meet cultists, bandits and beasts all day. If not, you'll just have to accept that you have a relatively decent backup sustainer at best. Other bleeders are a different story. I don't think anyone will complain about having a ♥♥, HEL, HWM, HM, or even a stress-heal JES in the ruins, with or without bleed options. Could include BH but that'd mean actually slotting Caltrops.

[No One]

by 'all day' you mean 1/3 of the time at most
This from someone who thinks 100 dodge isn't reliable enough.

[RopeDrink]

Methinks you mistake 'all day' as 'only' or something. A shame I don't keep most of my recordings/streams so I don't have to refer to memory. Whether it's maggots, spiders, cultists, bandits, or even bleedable undead later on, only the FLA legitimately feels hampered. Been many a time where I'd head over to the ruins and meet so few Unholy that you could change the background and be convinced you were in a different zone.

Not sure how that has any relation to my opinion of dodge as a full-on strategy at any value of dodge.

[No One]

Rather than subjective impressions, I went to ruins (with FLG) and counted. It's 1 in 3.

The chance of a 100 dodge jester being hit twice in a row at all is extremely low, let alone being crit, not getting a heal in time, being hit again, and failing the deathblow check. The chance of a FLG being unable to contribute more than 8 damage a round in the ruins is 2 in 3. Feels like running a 3-man party. VES and FLG, by their powers combined: attack as much as any one other character.

P.S. I just realized how completely terrible the FLG +stress camp is. If rapturous was in fact good instead of bad and you wanted your FLG to rapture all the time, you would put on dismas+junia's head and then simply never take him on a whipping frolick. He'll stay insane almost forever. It's nothing more than a waste of a slot and development time.

[RopeDrink]

The reason I mention recordings is because I remember one such instance taking place while I was yapping away on twitch about this very topic which I could have posted as reference. That isn't me saying that has been the 'only' case, just one that doesn't rely on memory lane (which is rife with those situations over the years). Bandits, maggots, spiders, cultists, brawlers and madmen left and right, ghouls and whathaveyous. It has happened many a time (for me).

How common either case is, I can't say, but it's less about that and more to do with all the other bleed-capable heroes. None of them would care about the subject even a quarter as much as a FLA would. It's just awfully convenient how most of the bleed-capable heroes are some of the best in the game for various reasons. FLA's good too of course, but every aggressive option is bleed-centric.

FLA is the most effected by the whole don't-bleed-ruins trope, no doubt nor argument here, and I doubt anyone of sane mind will put a case forward for his +stress camping. The idea of using respite to stress yourself would remain alien to me even if Rapturous was half-decent.

As for the DODGE point, I never proclaim those things to be outright down and out bad - often just questioning the turn-efficiency when so many battles will be won in so few rounds via the good ole reliables. I consider buffing, debuffing and marking in a similar vein, knowing full well that all of them can work.