Should I play Darkest or Bloodmoon ?

[HixBozo]

I started playing Bloodmoon right away, skipping Darkest, but now I am having doubts. Maybe I overestimated myself ?

I am unable to progress much, max week 50, and always some kind of catastrophic event will happen and I have to start all over again.

Also I don't dare start Courtyard or Crimson Court due to obvious more difficult areas and I am afraid that I might be missing on a lot of cool content.

But if I play Darkest will there be any kind of meaningful challenge or that is easy mode ?

[<[MIA]>ltgen Dr Zero Army 2]

Darkest is normal mode, radiant is "easy" (a bit easier early game, but same difficulty late game), radiant is also quicker
Bloodmoon/stygian is hard mode, where enemies have more health, you have a limited ammount of time to beat the game, and you can only lose so many heroes before you get a game over
Bloodmoon is not meant for a first time playthrough in the slightest

[No One]

Time limit aside, bloodmoon gives you 20% more enemy health and that's basically it. In most cases it's hard to even notice the difference.
It matters in Endless, on the champion Hag, and when fighting the Thing from the Stars.

[deidian]

If it's your 1st DD play Darkest or Radiant. You have all the time in the world to fiddle with things and learn the game. After that you can play Bloodmoon to have a little planning ahead with the roster and constraints.

Going blindly to Bloodmoon is a big time sink due to restarts. Combat wise doesn't change: after all developers called them(Radiant/Darkest/Bloodmoon) "game modes", not difficulty settings:

Radiant: no limits. Faster development of roster and heroes for less grinding.
Darkest: no limits.
Bloodmoon: with limits.

There's a few combat modifiers, but +2DODGE here and there and things like that don't really change too much the combat. Biggest is +20% HP which just changes how you schedule enemy deaths in combats due to some enemies resisting some blows which wouldn't otherwise.

[HixBozo]

Yeah I think it is a mistake starting on Bloodmoon. I will be stepping downward to see the full extend of the game and later might revisit Bloodmoon.

And also I have to say that Bloodmonn is not very fun, not very player friendly. I will first try to have fun with Darkest

[No One]

Pretty sure you're going to find the game itself not player-friendly.

The time limit is just poorly thought out, IMO. The difference between finishing 50 weeks early and finishing 1 week early is nothing. Either way you win. If you're not sure you're going to make it, you might as well stop. You get nothing for almost making it.

CC applies soft time pressure. The problem gets worse the longer you wait. You get feedback about whether you're going fast enough and can adjust. You can be wrong about how long you have and not actually die, instead managing to pull out. It can cost you part of your roster instead of the entire estate, which may or may not be a fatal setback, depending on whether you still have more stops to pull out.

Also if you know what you're doing the 99 week limit is kind of not a limit. Finishing by like week 60 can't even be called a speed run. You have to deliberately challenge yourself, e.g. killing every boss including all CC bosses before finishing the story dungeon. Even then, while the tolerances are low, you don't have to actually stretch to finish.

If you don't know what you're doing, bloodmoon just makes it harder to learn. You're worried if you have time to go exploring. And you're right, you don't: if you haven't played before 99 weeks isn't going to be anywhere near enough.

Because the week limit is a hard binary pass/fail, it's only challenging to an extremely narrow subset of players. For anyone else it's either comically over-tight or so lax it might as well not exist.

A pass/fail thing can work if you intend to repeat it and measure how far over you were each time, but a runthrough of DD takes like 60-80 hours, not something anyone remotely normal is willing to repeat. Especially with a single-flavour game like DD. (It's 4v4 battles. It's a 4v4 battle game.)

[Bacaniel]

Stygian and Bloodmoon aren't too difficult on their own, but Crimson Court and especially the final missions have some gimmicks that are designed to ruin your day the first time you encounter them. Which isn't terrible when you can take that knowledge back with you and try again with a new party, but with the time/death limit, it's setting you up to fail right at the end. Play through on Darkest first. Hell, you can even pick Radiant since it doesn't make the actual combat (that much) easier, it just adds in some anti-grind features.

[HixBozo]

Originally posted by Bacaniel:

Stygian and Bloodmoon aren't too difficult on their own, but Crimson Court and especially the final missions have some gimmicks that are designed to ruin your day the first time you encounter them. Which isn't terrible when you can take that knowledge back with you and try again with a new party, but with the time/death limit, it's setting you up to fail right at the end. Play through on Darkest first. Hell, you can even pick Radiant since it doesn't make the actual combat (that much) easier, it just adds in some anti-grind features.

In such a case it might be better to actually finish the Darkest Dungeon before ever stepping foot in Crimson Court ? Or in the Farmstead ?

Let me ask this question the other way. At what resolve level should a party ever step in the Farmstead and the Crimson Court ? Regardless of difficulty mode.

[<[MIA]>ltgen Dr Zero Army 2]

Originally posted by HixBozo:

Originally posted by Bacaniel:

Stygian and Bloodmoon aren't too difficult on their own, but Crimson Court and especially the final missions have some gimmicks that are designed to ruin your day the first time you encounter them. Which isn't terrible when you can take that knowledge back with you and try again with a new party, but with the time/death limit, it's setting you up to fail right at the end. Play through on Darkest first. Hell, you can even pick Radiant since it doesn't make the actual combat (that much) easier, it just adds in some anti-grind features.

In such a case it might be better to actually finish the Darkest Dungeon before ever stepping foot in Crimson Court ? Or in the Farmstead ?

Let me ask this question the other way ? At what resolve level should a party ever step in the Farmstead and the Crimson Court ? Regardless of difficulty mode.

Maximum resolve for the respective difficulty of the dungeon
For farmstead, theres an apprentice and then a veteran mission before the endless one
So 2 and 4 respectively
Similar with the courtyard, one apprentice, one veteran and then the rest champion
You can do the 4 darkest dungeon missions before attempting either, but the constant town events related to the first courtyard mission will drown out most other events

[No One]

Yes, you can beat the required story dungeon before starting CC. This does make it easier. It also makes it eyewateringly boring.

Especially as, outside bloodmoon, you have no time limit, so going into CC can't make you lose a game you wouldn't have otherwise lost.

[HixBozo]

Originally posted by No One:

Yes, you can beat the required story dungeon before starting CC. This does make it easier. It also makes it eyewateringly boring.

Especially as, outside bloodmoon, you have no time limit, so going into CC can't make you lose a game you wouldn't have otherwise lost.

Yeah I start to see the reasoning behind why the time limit of Bloodmoon is not well thought a concept. What it does is to handicap the DLCs. It discourages the player to pursue the DLC content to their fullest, just because their is a time limit not allowing comprehensive play. It is counter-productive. I think a difficulty mode should not discourage from playing the DLC content. I can understand how the time limit really pressures and punishes mistakes, but yet at the cost of almost half of the game's content ? That's a weird one

[Narrowmind]

It's a challenge, and even then, it can be limited. You basically don't even have to leave the ruins if you don't want to, or beat any of the bosses. How you spend that time is up to you.

[DT]

Originally posted by HixBozo:

I started playing Bloodmoon right away, skipping Darkest, but now I am having doubts. Maybe I overestimated myself ?

Originally posted by Your Ancestor:

Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.

[No One]

There are 16 regular bosses and 4 CC bosses. There are 15 regular classes and 1 CC class.
You will spend at least 96% of your time not fighting bosses, and something like 10% of that in CC fights.

There are 28 regular bosses if you include the re-fights.