Starting Fresh - Crimson Court or Vanilla?

[Turo]

So I own this game on PC but am buying it for my PS4 to binge with a visiting friend. The Crimson Edition of the game is just a few bucks more, but the reviews or it (compared to the base game) have scared me off.

Has it been tweaked since launch? Though I LOVE the misery inflicted by the dungeons, I also like to feel not-so-harassed when I'm back in town. Does it make the game significantly harder? Or just more colourful?

Thanks in advance!

[No One]

CC is kind of annoying to manage even if you know what you're doing. The actual court fights are more satisfying IMO, though. Regular areas are too easy. If you don't know what you're doing, there's a risk the disease wipes your entire roster, and since that's never happened to me, I don't know if it's a recoverable situation.

[sasiji]

Game no longer get significally harder.
I recommend using CC because it is basically more Darkest Dungeon in Darkest Dungeon.

-Bosses are fun,
-Curse is strong buff,
-Blood aka item required for cursed heroes to be alive is super common nowadays so gathering before start is basically no longer issue that many people still will give "advice".
-Districts are middle-late game buffs buyed by a lot of heirlooms that you would get too much anyway.
-Flagellant is cool class that introduce A LOT of new mechanics.

It is slightly harder but it isn't any sort of difficulty jump.
Its still the same game

[sasiji]

I don't know how now you can whipe out roaster with curse.

Seryously, chooseable battles in normal dungeons for little bit and special missions in courtyard for a lot of blood.

[No One]

...and then bleeding heroes to the fanatic. 75% spawn if all four heroes are cursed? If the blood collection quest is at the wrong difficulty, then you're going to lose 3/4 quests?

[Turo]

Hmm. How is it annoying to manage? And what is the 'curse' mechanic?

[strike478]

Game is not so much harder. After some time and purchase of districts you'r game gets actually slightly easier.

PS: I'm not mod guy and I dont like idea of modded games. But sometimes mods are so good that I make exception. Last exception I made were Movie Battles for Jedi Knight 3 Academy.
But after I purchased Darkest dungeon I realized there are tones of interesting classes and various gameplay tweaks (which I barely touched). Do not buy version for PS4. DD will work on potato PC and you can used PS4 controller if you like. DD without access to mods is not worth repurchasing imho. If you need party game which you cant run on PC for some reason pick something else.

[strike478]

Originally posted by Turo:

Hmm. How is it annoying to manage? And what is the 'curse' mechanic?

1. After encountering blood thristers (which might happen even in regular dungeon you get cursed....
(to be continued when I finish my buisness in topilet.)
2. Curse has five phases which affect your players. They provide some stat boosts and lots of penalties. with each cleared part of dungeon your infested players condition has chance to deteriorate until they die. From bloodsuckers fights however you can usually get 1-3 vials of blood which can be applied to nifested heroes in order to improve their condition. You can even improve their condition above initial level causing character to temporarily be superior to uninsected members. Of course it starts to get worse once agin.
3. Defeating these bloodsuckers can provide you with invitation you will need to visit crimson court. After clearing crimson court once your entire roster gets cured. Than after few missions infection level start to rise again.
So you again visit crimson courts epic length mission. And again. Last epic mission and final boss allows assylum to cure crimson curse like normal afflictions.

[No One]

One thing you can do with CC is enable the DLC but not do the initial mission until after you've beaten DD4. This in fact the correct way to do it, if 'correct' means most strategically optimal. Meaning basically you shouldn't enable the DLC until the base game is over.

If you do carry out the mission, then rising infection replaces variety in the various regions with a small set of samey and fairly boring fights. Fanatic aside, it's not really dangerous, it's just annoying because at least half the time infected heroes act out like they have a mild affliction. Similarly if you take an infected hero into a mission, you have to take blood too, meaning it consumes an inventory slot.

You can fix this by going into the crimson court. But you can't go in whenever you want because you don't have an invitation. So you have to wait to get an invitation. But then the infection is already high, so 30-40% of the fights are being replaced with lowbie CC fights. And then suddenly you get 2-3 invitations per mission.

And then the optimal way to do a CC mission, especially on time-limited bloodmoon, is to do it all at once. Or maybe twice - swap teams just before the boss. I like the CC fights, but two hours of the same party against the same enemies and stalling like mad on every fight...it's kind of not cool.

Or, again, you could beat DD4, thus no time limit. This is still expensive because abandoning an epic mission has the same penalties as abandoning a regular mission, even though epic missions are designed to be abandoned 3-4 times.

All these issues are minor, but you may notice there's several paragraphs worth of them. In theory I rather like how CC applies time pressure gradually but increasingly, unlike e.g. the bloodmoon time limit where everything is perfectly fine until suddenly it isn't. In practice the balance is all screwed up.

[Turo]

Cool. Thanks for the answers, all.

I think I'm gonna go without, since an added time pressure is not something I'm interested in at all and I think for our purposes--a two day binge--the base game is just the right amount of brutal fun.

[No One]

CoM endless harvest is extremely challenging, without adding a bunch of silly contradictions to the rest of the game. Though it has the same horrible time commitment that CC epic missions do. I really need to make a dedicated CoM estate. Most of my estates are for testing various parties, and I can't do that if I'm 150 kills into an endless run but get bored and want to stop.

--

Time for a little thaumaturgy.

CC comes with a repeatable bonus boss. It is by far the most tedious boss in the game. It has 245% resistance to everything, meaning it's immune to every mechanic except the most common - straight damage. On top of this it has about 1000 effective HP and only one attack. Meaning endless rounds of this one attack. It's not dangerous, it's just incredibly boring. You can speed it up some by paying $4 for the shieldbreaker. (Or just not fighting it - it is optional.)

By law of similarity or contagion, much of CC is contaminated by this. The infection replaces many regular dungeon fights with mechanically impoverished monotony. Which, as per earlier, you can simply decline to do until after DD4 if you want, which fixes at least half the problems...at the cost of neutering the difficulty.

[Skinny Pete]

Originally posted by No One:

CC is kind of annoying to manage even if you know what you're doing. The actual court fights are more satisfying IMO, though. Regular areas are too easy. If you don't know what you're doing, there's a risk the disease wipes your entire roster, and since that's never happened to me, I don't know if it's a recoverable situation.

I didn't have this happen on my first run, Radiant with CC turned on. Nor with any subsequent run. It's actually somewhat easier also having Color of Madness because there's an infrequent event that lets you cure a disease on every hero in the roster for 30 shards, so always have that reserved.

It wipes out the Curse on all heroes, if you want to do that, without actually fighting the CC enemy. It does leave the Infection level untouched, but allows you to stall more or less indefinitely.

If you want maximum convenience, you can just leave the Baron quest right before the Baron and do this indefinitely, then knock over this clown to reduce Infection whenever you feel like it (at the risk of bringing back the Fanatic if you killed him).

[unkn0wnx]

I say Crimson Court. Most CC trinkets are pretty nice (a few are awful). And the four bosses are not that hard. The place is huge but you can download the maps online. Once you beat Countess you can remove the curse.

[Asuzu]

Originally posted by Turo:

So I own this game on PC but am buying it for my PS4 to binge with a visiting friend. The Crimson Edition of the game is just a few bucks more, but the reviews or it (compared to the base game) have scared me off.

Has it been tweaked since launch? Though I LOVE the misery inflicted by the dungeons, I also like to feel not-so-harassed when I'm back in town. Does it make the game significantly harder? Or just more colourful?

Thanks in advance!

Personally, I am playing one Darkest vanilla game right now (all DLC disabled), and only skin mods, no torchlight, to enjoy the classic suffering.

When that's done, after a while, next game will be Stygian will all DLCs and no torchlight, to enjoy maximum suffering. Yeah, slap me baby, slap me hard.

[Wild colonial boy]

Vanilla. CC is ♥♥♥♥♥.

[Wild colonial boy]

Originally posted by Dixon Sider:

Who buys DD for anything but the challenge?

I bought it for artstyle and general setting atmosphere.