A fully Afflicted party... is immune to stress!

[Pixel Peeper]

How common is it right now for people to use a voluntarily Afflicted party?

I have a Leper, Hellion, Grave Robber and Vestal group that are all Afflicted. Mostly Abusive, the Hellion is Selfish.

Possibly the game's most crippling feature is that you often need to relieve your characters of stress. It makes them unavailable for a week and costs a lot of gold.

But this group is immune to that. They never need to relieve stress, which means they're available every single week and never cost me any gold to manage. They don't need torches to stay sane and they can tear down walls with their hands and only take a few points of damage (stress is no concern) so I can save gold on supplies, in combat they can mostly ignore enemies that increase stress...

In short, while there are significant penalties for being Afflicted, it also has really great upsides.

Is this common practice? Do you think it's an intended part of game design (or wasn't, but turned out to be a fun option), or will be "fixed"?

[Strudel]

Most people probably fire the afflicted characters and just hire new ones. That way you don't have to pay for stress relief AND you have a party without the afflictions.

[Pixel Peeper]

Originally posted by Strudel:

Most people probably fire the afflicted characters and just hire new ones. That way you don't have to pay for stress relief AND you have a party without the afflictions.

Well then they'd be stuck restarting at level 0 and re-buying all skill/gear upgrades, haha.

My Afflicted party is level 3, I just had them kill the Swine King and the Hag. They're getting pretty strong, I feel like I could just use them every single week forever.

No one else does this? Now that's a bit surprising...

[Shirsh]

I'm always provide them treatments in town, even if it lead to lack of equipment for next expedition (down to only 4 or 3 foods for example). I prefer to stick with three teams, specialized to different dungeons who constantly upgrading their arsenal, leveling up, tossing trinkets to each other etc and rather keep some my characters spend three weeks in asylum than fire them because of too many bad quirks.
( Yes, my progress in story is pretty slow because of such employment policy, social guarantees and medical treatment, but hey, it's an early access and game keep growing, I think than more my playthrough would be prolonged, the better.)
But hmmm, someday, when there would be no money to removing afflictions, I'll probably could try afflicted party strategy, just never thought about it before I saw this thread. Abusive Egomaniacs Squad, hmmm)

[Pixel Peeper]

Update: this strategy is still working for me. My characters are weaker, but they don't require stress relief so I get to send them on missions every week and they don't cost me anywhere as much gold as other characters.

I made a thread about it over at http://www.reddit.com/r/darkestdungeon/ and it seems like not many people are doing it. I guess, for most people, the convenience isn't worth having a weaker team.

[zverozvero]

What happens to characters who got good afliction but stayed on 100 stress when went to another trip?

[Pixel Peeper]

Originally posted by zverozvero:

What happens to characters who got good afliction but stayed on 100 stress when went to another trip?

Nothing. They keep their Affliction as long as their stress isn't removed. I send my party out every week and they don't change at all.

There are no "good" Afflictions, but Abusive is far less damaging than the other ones.

[zverozvero]

Whell they can get positive when they cross treshold, like Focused etc. becoming stronger and not spreading stress with those mumbleing. From what i read they are more likely to 'gitgut' again when they freak-out, but hey loose positive effect when return from mission so - when they go in again with no relief, how it works? They just start with full stress but no sideffect and get same check once stress ticks for them or what?

[Pixel Peeper]

I would assume something like that; either they'd be tested for Resolve as soon as they enter the dungeon or, as you say, as soon as they get under 100 Stress and then reach it again. I can't be certain because I haven't experimented with positive Resolve traits yet, only Afflictions.

Afflictions are simple because they don't go away after a run, you have to cure them.

[Uncle TwinkleNutz]

upgrade and use the sanitarium to remove afflictions

[Pixel Peeper]

Originally posted by Negaløls:

upgrade and use the sanitarium to remove afflictions

The whole point of this strategy is to *not* remove the Afflictions, haha.

[D3adCl0wn]

Sanitarium is for the negative Quirks, not affliction. Also, the only upside of keeping the -affliction is you save money, but in high levels gold is nothing. I currently have 200K. I even destress them even if they have 40 stress. Bear in mind that -afflictions lower some of your stats.

[Satoru]

Afflicted party members have massive penalties on them
For example depressed immediately triggers

"STUNRESIST-15",
"BLIGHTRESIST-15",
"BLEEDRESIST-15",
"DISEASERESIST-15",
"DEBUFFRESIST-15",
"MOVERESIST-15",
"TRAPRESIST-15",
"MAXHP-10",
"ACC-5",
"DEF-5",
"SPD-3"

That's a non-trivial amount of debuffs

[Eenhorn Flonkerglans]

It's a challenge one could do in a seperate playthrough. Once I gambled on Heroism instead of an Affliction when going in with my nearly fully stressed Bounty Hunter. He did not dissappoint, went Heroic and saved me a week of waiting and gold.

[skillius19]

I'm actually doing a no torch, no dismiss, no tavern/church run myself and have found that not worrying about stress is of comparable tradeoff to the minor inconveniences that come with afflictions. I've taken down all three apprentice bosses and am making good headway into the veteran levels. so far I've only lost a level 0 masochistic ocultust with syphilys (he had a max hp of 13).

There's definitely some afflictions worse than others and there's also some that are better on certain classes than others.

The +20% damage and +3% crit far outweighs the 5% acc penalty on Abusive (unless your a leper) making it good for damage dealers. Although it comes with a pretty harsh penalty to dodge and hp making whoever has it a glass cannon. (just noticed that its +3 crit on my Crusader and -3 crit on my Plague Doctor for some reason)

the +10% dodge and +2 speed on Fearful and Paranoid are good on your healers as they tend not to do too much damage in the first place and they can self heal to bypass the heal rejection. Fearful tends to skip turns while paranoid tends to be more random.

Selfish and Hopeless are pretty mild all around stat wise, but in a sense that makes them the worst as they don't have up sides like the others. Hopeless is probably worse as it has penalties to defense as well as a chance of damaging/marking yourself as well as a chance of rejecting heals.

Currently, the only Masochistic I have is a Leper and he's not bad as neither his damage or acc is penalized and his self heal can bypass the heal rejection. He already has high hp and a +5% prot trait anyways so the penalty to hp and dodge isn't as bad.

Haven't had Depressed or Irrational so I can't really comment on them

[GAME OVER]

A fully afflicted party would be talking about every other second. I kinda value my time.