A Perfectionists Guide to Farming and Starting the Game

[lupious]

I'll start off by saying I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I like everything to be perfect. I've done 3 significant restarts (by significant I mean week 70+ then restart) and several minor restarts (week 20 or less). It's really necessary with this game as you learn a lot as you go along. I also learned some from watching streams.

Starting the Game and Farming
Unlike a lot of other games, your goal with the start of Darkest Dungeon is NOT to level your characters up as fast as you can. Your goal is to upgrade your town and get good characters to take into the later game. That means farming the Apprentice dungeons with level 1-2 characters over and over. You probably won't be getting any characters to level 3+ until week 80+.

How It Works
You never run out of characters. The caravan simply keeps bringing more and more, so you can dismiss characters and get new ones at any time. You'll be doing this a LOT. The only characters you'll be keeping are those with the positive quirks you want to lock in and take into the late game.

Ideal Farming Party
The ideal farming party I've found is Hellion, Vestal, Antiquarian, DPS. Why these?

Hellion: The Hellion is the best tank/dps to farm with because it can hit any row and also has front line AOE stun. Being able to hit the back lines is crucial for saving money, which will be explained later. You will ALWAYS want to train the following 4 skills before heading out: Wicked Hack, Iron Swan, Barbaric Yawp, If It Bleeds.

Vestal: The Vestal is the only reliable healer early on and having the ability to AOE heal and single target stun is very nice. You will ALWAYS want to train the following 4 skills before heading out: Divine Grace, Divine Comfort, Dazzling Light, Judgment.

Antiquarian: The Antiquarian gets a loot bonus. Antiquarians are pretty much the worst at everything else and the only reason you would ever really bring one is because of the massive loot bonuses you get. It makes farming feasible. There is only 1 skill you need to train: Nervous Stab. It is not worth spending the money to train any other skill. You're going to be going through Antiquarians like water and using them in different locations within your party, so don't waste gold on other skills. ALWAYS loot things with the Antiquarian to get the bonus. This is vital.

DPS: The 4th slot is going to be for a DPS. Typically, you'll want to use a DPS that is either good in all 4 dungeons, or is good for the specific dungeon you're going into. For example, DPS that cause bleed are good for Warrens and Weald, while DPS that can Blight are good for Ruins and Cove. Other DPS like Arbalest's and Grave Robbers can be used in all 4. You always want to try and use a DPS that can hit all 4 rows, or 3 at minimum. What to train depends on the specific class. I have my preferences but you'll learn yours as you move along.

How to Farm
One of the keys to successful farming is being able to use a character as long as possible, as cheaply as possible, before dismissing it. You'll use less gold training skills this way. What makes characters last longer is being able to deal with stress. When a character gets to near 100 stress, you'll want to dismiss it and get another, though in some instances you'll want to keep a character so sending it for stress relief is fine. This means you almost ALWAYS want to deal with stress dealers first. Stress dealers are almost always in the last two spots, which is why you want a Hellion and a DPS that can hit the back spots. Antiquarian's can hit any row with Nervous Stab as well. The Hellion is also ideal because once the back two lines are dead, you can AOE stun and then heal up before finishing the fight. This is also crucial.

When adding a new character from the Caravan, make sure and train them before heading out. Keeping a healthy supply of Hellions, Vestals and Antiquarians is vital, which means you'll almost always want to add them when you see them available on the Caravan. Getting a DPS is much easier since there is such a variety to choose from. You'll pretty much only want to do short dungeons as well. You can easily net 8-12k gold + a ton of building upgrade materials.

Note: After getting the correct skills, you don't want to upgrade characters. You'll be dismissing them anyways, so what's the point in wasting money? The only exception to this, and this is optional, is the Vestal's Divine Grace and Divine Comfort skills. The two heals. After using the Vestal in one dungeon, upgrading those two skills can make the rest of the dungeons tons easier until you dismiss that Vestal and get a new one.

Building Upgrade Priorities
Your first priorities are upgrading your Caravan and Guild.

Caravan: You'll want to upgrade both your party size limit and the number of characters that come on the Caravan first. Do NOT upgrade experienced heroes until much later.

Guild: You're going to be dismissing a lot of characters and getting new ones. Having the right skills is vital, so you want to train “Training Regimen” as fast as you can. When maxed out, training a new skill drops from 1000 gold to 500.

Sanitarium: Next, you'll want to upgrade the Sanitarium, starting with the Treatment Library. This will be explained in the Final Characters and Quirks section.

Everything Else: Everything else comes in time, but your first priority should be the cost reducing things, such as the Furnace for Blacksmithing. When you do eventually start progressing to lvl 3+, you want to be able to upgrade your characters as cheaply as possible.

Final Characters and Quirks
Always be on the lookout for characters that have quirks you're going to want to lock in for end game. For example, if you get a Hellion that has Slugger (+10% damage melee skills), you're going to want to keep it at level 2 and not dismiss it. As your gold pool starts to grow, use the gold and time before you start progressing to 3+ to lock in the positive quirks you want and get rid of all negative quirks. This is why upgrading the Treatment Library in the Sanitarium is important. When you start to progress to level 3+, you should have characters with 1-3 positive quirks locked in and 0 negative quirks.

Boss Fights
Always look at what trinkets are available in boss fights. You're going to be farming for many, many weeks, so you have time to be choosy about when you want to do a boss fight to ensure you get a trinket you think you'll actually use. Boss fights are the only time I would suggest upgrading weapons, armor, and skills on your party.

Almost Ready
So, you're almost ready to start leveling to 3+. What is there still to do? First, you want to level up the characters that you never used for farming. Characters like Man at Arms, Occultist, Abomination, etc. You can use a normal 4 man party without an Antiquarian to speed this process up. IMPORTANT: Do not wait to get these characters until the last second. Always be on the lookout for characters with good quirks. On week 30 if you see a Man at Arms with a 10% protection quirk, grab him and stash him.

Finish up any remaining boss fights you might have, make sure the characters you're bringing to 3+ are destressed and don't have negative quirks, and then off you go! IMPORTANT: Do not get characters to level 5+ until you're ready for the Wolves at the Door event. Make sure and google the event and read about it so you're ready for it. If, however, you mess up and gets Wolves at the Door before you're ready for it, simply send in 4 lvl 1 characters and let them die to avoid losing 2 building upgrades or a primary character. You may need to do this two weeks in a row for the event to end.

[Bytol]

Well...clearly this isn't a guide to NG+
Many things seems wrong so i'll just point out a few.

First, the Antiquarian is pretty much the only class necessary to your strategy...having always the same team seems a bit silly to me.

Doing only short dungeons will give you less chance to find secret rooms (7500 golds) and make the Antiquarian ability much less useful. Also you won't get to use their free trinket camp skill.

A camp can also heal lots of stress when necessary and make you save some golds on treatment. PD or Graverobber can also cure diseases for free.

Sure your characters will get more resolve xp, but medium dungeons sems like the way to go imo.

Be on the lookout for the "gather 3 medicines" runs. With a bit of luck you'll receive free use of the treatment ward to lock/remove quirks.

[Pixel Peeper]

A lot of these make sense.

Still... I have to admit I also doubt that only doing Shorts is the best way to go about it. Antiquarians really shine in longer dungeons, and camping yields free trinkets, stress relief and disease curing.

More importantly, only doing Short dungeons means time is going to advance quickly while your roster is not going to level up quickly. As the above poster mentioned, this is a sure way to fail on New Game +. I feel there should be some sort of warning about that.

I would also note that having negative quirks is great. If a character has a negative quirk that doesn't affect their class, you make sure it stays there until it gets locked. That way you basically delete a negative quirk slot from the character.

Since this is a guide, I think you could add relevant information and post it in the "Guides" section. It might benefit people who rise to level 5 too quickly and don't understand why the game is suddenly so freakishly difficult.

[lupious]

This certainly isn't the ONLY way to do it. It's just a method that I found works well for me. I liked short dungeons way more than medium for several reasons:
1) They are super fast and allow you more chances at getting the characters you want from Caravan.
2) Again, they are super fast so if something does happen to go wrong, no big deal.

Again, this is not to say you CAN'T do mediums. My preference is shorts. Try it out and see what works best for you. If mediums work better, godspeed.

As far as team build goes, again as I said, the party I mentioned is the "ideal farming party I found." It's certainly not the only party you can use. It's definitely a great starting party to use while you're finding what you like.

Lastly (and I've said this several times) this is what worked for ME. I restarted several times because a lot of this information I didn't know about when I first started playing. Thus, this post is meant to help people from making the same mistakes I initially did. Take the pieces of it that you find helpful, discard the pieces you don't. I definitely encourage others to post (or link to) other similar starting guides. I'm always looking for new information and new strategies to perfect things.

One of the best things about this game is that there isn't ONE way to play it. There are so many options available to you that you can play the way you want. This is just one way.

[GZstar]

I just miss the point of the advantages of this in my opionion boring grinding play from start on.

The roster size is big enough to keep one place availabe for recruting a heroe with a very positiv quirk or you can dismiss one of the other heroes anytime.

Sure, you shoudn´t send out your favourite heroes on suicide missions because you do not have the stuff to equip them appropriate for the harder runs. But there is no need to grind until week 80+ in the rookie area at all and you get no advantages for the real challenges in late game either by doing so.

My first attempts I wasn´t ready for the challenges in late game also and I started new when too many of my heroes had died like flies on championship runs and I no longer dared to send people on the runs. So what? Going forward and starting new makes more fun than staying on rookie level for ages in my opionion, even if you are a rookie. It went better the second try and now I can handle championship as good as they are to handle. Besides people die on championship runs sometimes, no matter how good you play or how good your equipment, the quirks etc. is. It´s just part of the game. To learn to avoid this as good as possible in my opionion you just have to play these missions and analyze why some things worked out fine, others not.

The primary goal of the game is not, to get rich without risk but to beat the dungeons. If you like playing the beginners missions, it´s o.k. but it´s not a guide for the game at all.

Besides going with optimal geared characters in the rookie and medium dungeons you learn not a lot about the hard dungeons because there nearly everything works out fine. There it´s just no need bringing an optimized team at all.

It´s not a game for a perfectionist by the way because even perfect things does often not work out in the game. The tactical gamplay contains a significant random component.

[lupious]

I disagree with about everything you said, but hey, we all haz our opinions. As I've said all along, my way is not the ONLY way. Find a way that you enjoy and that works for you. This is they way I enjoyed and that worked for me.

[Bytol]

Well if it's just for you, don't call it a guide :p

[Pixel Peeper]

Essentially, this says that new players should be wary of trying to level up quickly. Leveling up in this game only makes things harder; level 3 and level 5 dungeons are essentially identical to level 1 dungeons except harder, and costlier if you lose people. It's best to farm level 1 dungeons a lot so you have the gold, heirlooms and trinkets required to make an adequate level 3 team before you move on. Even then, level 1 dungeons may be better to farm than level 3 ones.

It's sound advice, and there are some decent tips in how to do this most efficiently (again, I would disagree with doing mostly Short dungeons), though of course everyone is free to do it however they want.

So yes... it's more of a PSA than an actual guide.

[Pastapockets]

The man at arms is incredibly good to pair with an antiquarian because of riposte+protect me.

[Hedning]

Farming is not necessary in this game, but I'm sure this guide is fine for those that still want to do that. Maybe a better title would be "Guide to farming for those who can't manage gold the way you are supposed to." Your current title gives the impression that it is a good way to start a game. I don't think it is a good way to start the game as, like others have pointed out, when you are not challenged you don't learn, so when you finally get to that champion and darkest levels your party may be ready, but tactics wise you are not and you'll just blame rng for your constant failures. I watch baertaffy on youtube and I feel this is his problem in his ng+ series. He got so used to the game on normal mode that he can't learn new and better tactics which are required for ng+.

[GZstar]

BearTaffy will beat ng+ I think. He can play tactics if it is needed - like he did fighting his first darkest dungeon run. He has no fear fighting battles in non-optimized condition. It works surprisingly often compared to my style trying to keep my people safe. That´s just not always is possible no matter what you do. He is used to dangerous situations and how to cope with them because he is searching and even provoking them from the beginning. He is not in fear of risking something sometimes and you need this ability to finish the game. And - there is no boring farming but he´s going straigt to the target from the beginning. He´s not looking for the best tactic but only for a functioning one. Do no underestimate his abilitys.His style is a great show additionally of being quite sucessful.

Yeah, with the different title a lot of the things in the text would make more sense to me. I didn´t like it especially because farming and grinding is not necessary in the game and too many people already complain. The title and text gave the impression you have to do it.

[Ist]

The weakest spot i see in this guide is that 80+ weeks of grind is way toooo nerdy for the most of the gamers. Plus, i personally doubt it is all so nessasary, as the lvl3 and 5 runs brings you much more loot and better trinkets and having good trinkets make live much easier. More than that, persanlly i was never short on gold till the Champion level dungeons.

Obviously, i'm not questioning your right to play the game any way you want but i'm afraid fallowing your guide won't be useful for the most of beginers. Still, it's an intersting opinion to read.

[Sojiro]

Originally posted by lupious:

Starting the Game and Farming
Unlike a lot of other games, your goal with the start of Darkest Dungeon is NOT to level your characters up as fast as you can. Your goal is to upgrade your town and get good characters to take into the later game. That means farming the Apprentice dungeons with level 1-2 characters over and over. You probably won't be getting any characters to level 3+ until week 80+.

I think that's the part that really need explaining. The beginning of this paragraph is an important lesson that applies to everyone playing the game. The end of the paragraph is a conclusion that only applies to perfectionist who want to exploit that fact to grind slowly* and effectively.

It's true that in Darkest Dungeon, you don't really get progress by levelling up your heroes like in most games. When your heroes gain experience they get stronger, but the challenges increase in difficulty much more quickly. Additionally, everything you've poured into strengthening a hero can be lost in a single bad expedition. On the other hand, improving the town is a net benefit which will make everything easier, and it's progress you can't lose.

Saying to players that their goal should be to improve the town more than improving their heroes when they start is very good advice. Both are a sign of progress toward beating Darkest Dungeon, but the town is much more reliable and rewarding.

Then, it's true the Apprentice level dungeons is the easiest way to get materials by far, and they don't require strong heroes at all. But focusing your entire strategy on them to the point of firing functional heroes who are too experienced to do those expeditions and give up completely on strengthening and maintaining most of your heroes does not automatically follow.

That strategy of farming Apprentice expedition and spending few to no resources on adventurers is where you move from the general-use guide to the strategy that's specifically tailored for players who are willing to spend lots of weeks and heroes to make steady progress.




*slowly in term of in-game time, it's probably rather fast in real time.

[LaserGuy]

Unlike a lot of other games, your goal with the start of Darkest Dungeon is NOT to level your characters up as fast as you can. Your goal is to upgrade your town and get good characters to take into the later game. That means farming the Apprentice dungeons with level 1-2 characters over and over. You probably won't be getting any characters to level 3+ until week 80+.

I can't imagine a more boring way to play. You can finish the game in well under 100 weeks even if you have no idea what you're doing to start with... My first win just missed then 91 week achievement, IIRC, and my NG+ followup was, I dunno, 60 weeks? Playing all those short dungeons is seriously crippling the efficiency of you play if you need this long to hit Veteran level. You'd probably get much better productivity by dropping your Antiquarian and doing Medium/Long dungeons with a stronger party. You'll end up with better loot, better trinket rewards, more heirlooms, and if you're feeling brave, you can farm the odd Shambler for ancestral trinkets.

I honestly have a hard time imagining a new/newish player reading this guide and having any response other than "If that's how you have to play, this game isn't worth playing."

[Pixel Peeper]

Originally posted by JellySlayer:

Unlike a lot of other games, your goal with the start of Darkest Dungeon is NOT to level your characters up as fast as you can. Your goal is to upgrade your town and get good characters to take into the later game. That means farming the Apprentice dungeons with level 1-2 characters over and over. You probably won't be getting any characters to level 3+ until week 80+.

I can't imagine a more boring way to play. You can finish the game in well under 100 weeks even if you have no idea what you're doing to start with... My first win just missed then 91 week achievement, IIRC, and my NG+ followup was, I dunno, 60 weeks? Playing all those short dungeons is seriously crippling the efficiency of you play if you need this long to hit Veteran level. You'd probably get much better productivity by dropping your Antiquarian and doing Medium/Long dungeons with a stronger party. You'll end up with better loot, better trinket rewards, more heirlooms, and if you're feeling brave, you can farm the odd Shambler for ancestral trinkets.

I honestly have a hard time imagining a new/newish player reading this guide and having any response other than "If that's how you have to play, this game isn't worth playing."

That would matter a lot if "Progress per Week" were important, but that only matters in regards to Vvulf (and then only if you get level 5 characters), achievements, or NG+. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what week you're on or how powerful you are in relation to how many weeks have passed. The game doesn't care about your efficiency. You can be super inefficient and it won't punish you for it at all. I know it's weird, but that's how it is.

And of course, in-game weeks and real-life time have little to do with each other. If you could do 1-minute quests that give 2,000g each, you'd be on Week 350 in no time, but you wouldn't have spent any more time playing than someone who's only done Long missions and is on Week 20.

Still, I too prefer to do Medium runs (or Long runs if I have an Antiquarian).

Ultimately I think the one great point that the OP is making is that rushing to get to higher levels will only make things harder on you. Noobie dungeons are easier, pay about as much and will let you properly skill up and gear up your characters before moving on to Veteran dungeons. There's no rush because it doesn't matter what Week it is.

[LaserGuy]

Originally posted by Tripoteur Ventripotent:

Noobie dungeons are easier, pay about as much and will let you properly skill up and gear up your characters before moving on to Veteran dungeons.

Apprentice short dungeons don't pay anywhere near as much even as Apprentice long. Apprentice short you're lucky to end up with 10k gold by the end of it, and you still need to cure stress and (maybe) quirks. The same group on Apprentice long might get 25-30k gold, and the cost for stress/quirk treatment is the same (lower, IMHO, due to camp benefits). If you can do 3 shorts in the time it takes to do a long... you'll still probably be ahead in terms of cash, trinkets, and heirlooms doing the long. And spending all of your time on short missions means that you'll be desperately low on useful trinkets when you try to go forward. At least on Apprentice long, you can get up to Rare trinkets, some of which are fairly useful (eg. Sun Rings), but you need to tackle some Veteran dungeons to get those Very Rare ones as well.

If you were to do this, after you do max out all your skills and smith and decide to visit your first Veteran area with your perfect-quirk team... you'll get destroyed because you haven't been working on strategy at all.

And again, the main problem I have with this strategy is not how unproductive it is (although I do feel it is very unproductive), but rather how boring it is.