Remember when I said I’d make doing this a bi-weekly thing? Well, promises are made to be broken. In my defense, we’ve had nearly non-stop overtime at my job in the past month and it might be destroying my health.

Where we last left off, I wasn’t having a great time with champion level missions. Everyone that faced the Shrieker and survived were severely stressed out. But alas, I did not have the money to finance mental health services, so I needed to let them stew in their despair a bit.

I wanted to play things a bit risky, so I decided to take a long apprentice mission into the Warrens with the rookies. Leading the front was Pipin the Shieldbreaker – sure, they’ll get attacked by her ghost snakes when she goes to sleep, but hey, the Shieldbreaker is fun to use and I have to get rid of these nightmares eventually. Ozzy the Flagellant and Vats the Jester tagged behind for the sake of bleeding those pigs, while Boteler the Vestal – soon to no longer be a rookie – joined in for some healing.

The first leg of the journey went okay. While Pipin’s blight attacks weren’t useful against the pig enemies, they were handy against the occasional human cultist and thief. Eventually, everyone settled in to sleep. Thankfully, Pipin’s nightmares did not strike that night, though it might possibly because of Boteler’s “prevent ambush” skill? I’m not sure, since Pipin getting jumped by dream snakes doesn’t seem like a normal ambush.

All went well… until I found a stack of books and thought, hey, Vats, what if you torched them?

And so, despite being at like, 10 stress, Vats immediately became a masochist from doing a Farenheit 451. Honestly, I’m surprised it took me this long to stumble on this interaction. Don’t burn books, folks.

Thankfully, Vats becoming a doomer was the worst thing that happened. The rest of the journey went fine – the second campfire wasn’t even needed, so that was thrown out for more gold.

Upon heading home, the champion level adventurers thought, “dang, maybe we should do some easier missions again instead of getting owned all the time.” So hey, now’s a good time to go fuck up a mid-level boss.

Peis was finally sent to spend time with his partner and Cairon teamed up with Vats to go gambling since Vats also has a terrible gambling addiction on top of everything else. Meanwhile, an expedition was set up to fight the Unstable Flesh back down in the Warrens. Beans the Flagellant was chosen to lead the pack since the denizens of the Warrens seem vulnerable to bleed, and since Boteler was getting diseases fixed, her expert Vestal counterpart, Cambrai, was chosen as the designated healer. Aubert the Hellion joined to provide more bleed and uhhhh, hey, since experts are helping out on this mission, I said “fuck it” and decided to give the last slot to Durandal the Antiquarian so we could get more money. Besides – I spent way too much upgrading and healing everyone, so I gotta get that money back somehow.

The expedition was going a-okay. Beans bled people like crazy while Cambrai handed out some crazy good heals. These two were really carrying things, so thank god for this town event. Having them around did make you feel better about bringing Durandal on board. After a quick camp, everyone continued on and –

Oh goddamnit, of course you attack right before the boss and after I spent the campfire.

It was super rude of the game to do this, but thankfully…

The Hellion’s Iron Swan was made for killing this guy. On top of the insane bleeding that got stacked on it, the Collector died before it and its minions could do any serious damage.

Anyway, now it’s time for the fight that matters:

Oh, the fight immediately opened with the boss lunging at Durandal to bring her to death’s door with a crit and the blight it inflicted killed her before I even got to do anything. Welp, RIP to her I guess.

On the plus side, Beans was made for killing this thing. I imagine that the Houndmaster’s bleed skill would also be mighty good here. Too bad Fritz died last episode.

But we don’t need him or his dog, this crew handled things just fine – well, minus Durandal’s cruel and sudden death, of course. With that fight, Beans and Cambrai achieved the highest level achievable in Darkest Dungeon. Cambrai even got a Love Interest to celebrate, good for her. Sorry about the Spotted Fever though, Aubert.

The gang went home and – no, I’m not even going to fucking try. Let the bird stay in its own lane.

I’m… also not going to try a champion mission yet. I don’t feel confident enough, yet, after the shitshow of the last part.

So, I decided to end things off with another rookie excursion. Pipin and Beans return, along with Ponty the Man-at-Arms and a new healer in the form of the Occultist, Tree. Tree’s definitely short for something, but since I renamed him in the last part three weeks ago, I have no clue what Tree’s short for.

As for the actual mission, well, it went about as well as you’d expect a novice mission should go: uneventful. But that’s good! You gotta take breaks from high pressure situations, and honestly, that’s an interesting part about Darkest Dungeon. Since your higher level guys tend to be susceptible to dying or getting stuck at town to cool down, you’re inevitably pushed to do something easier with a fresher batch of guys. Even as the game pushes you to do harder content, its design innately encourages you to take things easy every so often.

Maybe you think I’m taking it too easy. Well you know what, I wish things were easier on me in general. I’m two years into my day job and I’m fucking sick of it. My body feels like it’s falling apart, my life is out of sync with almost everybody else I know, but I’m scared that I can’t find an alternative to it. So goddamn it, I will take things easy if I want to.

Anyway, doing the mission made the local farmers happier, yay.

Next time, we’ll be taking advantage of the free supplies for a mid-level boss quest, and maybe finally build up the confidence to do a champion level quest. I gotta head into that Darkest Dungeon eventually…

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Next week, we’ll be taking a look at two demos! Stay tuned…