I played the mod up until week 40+. I also played Pitch Black Dungeon a bit side-by-side. Haven't played vanilla in years. Also, I'm not a very good player.


First of all, the mod is hard. I remembered PBD being quite hard, but boy, this mod is on another level. However, I feel like this is down to many of the class or party compositions simply not being worth it. Whenever I used a religious team, things always went well. And now apparently you can find items to make anyone religious. I mean, +damage or whatever the pagans or faithless get is nice, but... Stress healing for everyone, save torch space for moneys, etc...


Many classes don't seem worth it. First of all, if it's not religious, it's not worth it unless it's jester or a vestal. And if you want non-religious teams, you need a horde of jesters. Would've been nice to have at least some options in the healing and stress healing department. Occultist never worked before and doesn't work here either, even with the vestal's cooldowns. For stress healing a high-critical low-damage class would sound interesting to me. Antiquarian fits the bill, since she's now completely useless, because you get all the money from the treasury.

Then there are some weirdos like the hexer, whose only useful skills are per-battle limited. I mean, heal 10 % + cure DOT requiring three vials is only once per battle? Makes no sense. The other skills are nice, but... Arbalest and musketeer also have similar nice skills, but also better healing, better damage, and better debuffs. Better everything.

Then there are classes like the grave robber, with armor-piercing, heavy blight, versatility, a stun attack as well I think, a mark... What else? Oh right, the +50 % blight damage trinket.


I like the more powerful trinkets, though I have to say it only seemed to last so long. The higher the level, the less useful they seemed. No idea what possesses every mod maker to follow the same route. There should be more trinket slots per character and limits to which rarity can be equipped to each, to make the higher-level ones worth it. Don't know if implementing such is possible.


One thing I adored about PBD after BR is how fast the combat was. In BR it honestly feels like a complete slog. The addition of the prep round increases every encounter length by 20-40 %, and the encounters are way too common for this length increase. Couple this with the low hit chances, which often results in you doing a lot and achieving nothing (the worst situation from a fun perspective), and I quickly found myself not enjoying the combat at all.

Another factor contributing to this are the constant buffs, debuffs, special effects and everything the enemies have. I mean, if the enemies always apply the stat bonuses at the start of the combat ANYWAY, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop them, then... Why not simply bake those bonuses into their stats and save me that time?

I'm kind of contrasting this with PBD, where I feel like the addition of affixes and some powerful positional abilities of many normal enemies can really affect how you should try to go about a battle, but it doesn't much affect the combat length necessarily.


Ultimately I stopped caring, though, because there is sort of no progression at all. Dungeons get more difficult, but that's it. Skill upgrades are the boring vanilla style +5 accuracy, equipment upgrades the same. By veteran dungeons apparently I'd seen all the trinkets there are. Then you just do the same stuff with the same people until you win, or probably not in my case. This is not a problem with BR specifically, but is set as an example by the vanilla game of course.

I mean, surely you've all played other RPGs or tactical games and have seen how this is usually handled, so again it's sort of baffling to me why you want to follow these very bland upgrade paths, instead of making it more interesting.


What's probably best about the mod is the skill information you get. I guess it sort of tells you how easy vanilla or PBD is when you don't even need to know where enemies can attack from, but having all that information readily available adds so much much-need depth to the combat. And I appreciate it's probably all done by hand, so.

All in all it seems an excellent mod and sort of like what Darkest Dungeon should've been from the beginning. But, the design simply doesn't seem to encourage playing much beyond the apprentice dungeons, unless you REALLY like the DD formula. The best trinkets are the earliest ones, you get no new classes, no new skills, no new tactics, no new anything.