necromancer apprentice darkest dungeon strategy

The problem(s) with DK really came with their Update #2 several weeks ago. It’s part of the reason why I have played DK for so long. It is a particularly novel delight watching a replay of someone throwing 2+ hours of congealed time at your defenses and see them go home with nothing. Magic regenerates very slowly, such that a player looking for enough resources to purchase an upgrade are unlikely to blow their entire load just to sack your one dungeon when they could split it up inbetween juicier, less-defended targets. But what you can do is make your dungeon punishing.

Given how attacking players can use magic to bomb open your walls or remotely disable your traps, sometimes it feels like there is nothing you can do to stop attacks. But! It’s a compelling gameplay mechanic nonetheless.īefore I move on, I also want to mention that the other end of the creativity came from watching the replays of your own dungeon getting sacked.

Yes, technically this also enables the designers to wheedle in-app purchases out of you. Instead, we have X * Y variations because different people are at different levels of excavation some concentrate on digging out all the 4-hour tiles instead of the 24-hour ones, some are the opposite, and still others concentrate all their time on upgrading traps instead of excavation. Since everyone starts on the same map, we could imagine there being X variations of the perfect defensive layout had all the squares been filled with soft dirt (takes 3 seconds to dig).

Here’s the thing though: being time-locked forced you to construct novel dungeon designs with whatever you had available. Or, you know, you could spend Gems (an RMT currency) to dig them instantly. On release, the excavation was particularly lampooned in that the map was filled with tiles that took 4 hours and 24 hours apiece to dig out. Everything takes time to complete: summoning minions, constructing traps, upgrading traps, excavating rock tiles to make room for traps, and so on.

The basic principal is to construct a dungeon filled with traps to safeguard your own stockpile of resources while raiding the dungeons of others. As you might already know, DK is a downtime management game – you spend more time not doing things than actually doing them. What made DK good (and still does) is the fostering of creativity and depth through constraint.

Necromancer apprentice darkest dungeon strategy