Game Breaker / Darkest Dungeon II

While Darkest Dungeon II is markedly difficult, there are strategies that could help you make things just a bit easier.

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Skills and Paths

• The Hellion's final skill, Howling End, does ridiculous damage (rivaled only by Occultist's The Burning Stars) for only the cost of a single Winded token. With decent damage rolls you can easily oneshot weaker enemies on the first turn of combat, and since Toe to Toe+ clears Winded, you can clear the Winded without losing much momentum. This was eventually nerfed in the Altar of Hope update by giving it a much longer cooldown so you can no longer simply alternate it with Toe to Toe, but it's still very good.
• The Plague Doctor's Surgeon path gives her more HP and boosts the damage of Incision, which was already a good skill. As a further bonus, it also boosts her healing skills. The only downside is reduced Blight infliction chance, but the Plague Doctor usually only needs Blight because she lacks direct damage — with the buff to Incision, you don't need to bother!
• The Grave Robber was generally considered one of the worse classes, but the Nightsworn path let her be Rescued from the Scrappy Heap. It boosts the damage of her two strongest skills, Lunge and Pirouette, while also giving a universal damage boost while in stealth; Shadow Fade is actually worth using now. The downside is that she has less HP, turning her into even more of a Glass Cannon, but you'll be killing enemies so fast they'll hardly have time to hit her.
• The Man-at-Arms' Vanguard path significantly boosts the damage of both his basic attack, Crush, and his Counter Attacks. Given the most popular strategy was already to spam Retribution to set up ripostes, this lets him do that even better. He also gains a boost to his already-considerable HP. The downside is that he loses all resistance to Damage Over Time effects, but with how much health he has that's hardly a concern, especially if you have a Plague Doctor in the party.
• Combining More! More! and Deathless makes the Flagellant and his team, well, deathless. More! grants him taunt tokens, but would also heal him whenever he takes damage. Deathless lets him damage himself to heal a teammate. Since he gets healed at the end of his turn and suffers no consequences for being on death's door, he turns into a free heal farm.
• The Seraph Path is the ultimate support Vestal. You get a Conviction token every time a Consecration procs, while also extending the effect of Consecrations from three rounds to five rounds, in a game where most battles rarely extend beyond that. Since you can have Light and Fortitude up at the same time, you're guaranteed to have two conviction tokens every single round, allowing you to make the most of your Judgment or Divine Grace skills.
• The Monarch Path for the Leper invokes Magikarp Power, but doesn't turn the Leper into that much of a Magikarp to begin with, allowing him to break the game wide open if properly supported. First of all, -30% Max HP is only slightly more than the Tempest path penalizes, and 36 base HP is still pretty durable. Second of all, it gives a hefty 75% damage reduction to his Chop skill. And only his Chop skill. You can still use Hew (which has more value compared to the first game thanks to the addition of enemies that can go into Death's Door) and Break (which does less damage but has the benefit of purging defensive tokens) to without issue. What's your reward for overcoming these ultimately minor handicaps? When fighting Cosmic enemies (i.e. Cultists and the Final Boss of each chapter), he gets a staggering 50% boost to his HP, +2 to his Speed, and the damage of his Chop doubles, meaning you've basically already won if you can get him to the Mountain. A post-release patch added the ability to pay relics to change a hero's path at the inn, meaning if you're willing to save up enough, you can forego the handicap entirely and spend most of the run on Tempest or Poet, then switch to Monarch just before the Mountain, making the path even more of a no-brainer for the endgame.

Hero Synergies and Team Compositions

• Jester's last skill, Encore, can allow for incredibly broken strategies.
  • Use it on a Plague Doctor and she can apply blight for up to 12 damage per round.
  • Use it on Dismas, allowing him to Take Aim and Pistol shot, which immediately destroys most enemies. If he used Take Aim+ in the round prior, this allows you to fire two crit shots in one round.
• The Leper/Jester combo is as broken in this game as it was in the first:
  • If the Leper is ever pushed out of the first rank, Battle Ballad pushes him right back where he needs to be and gives a boost to his already absurd damage for good measure.
  • Unlike other classes, the Leper's stress heal skills don't require a threshold to be able to use. Combining Inspiring Tune and Solemnity makes it almost impossible for the Leper to ever have a Meltdown.
  • Jester's Razor's Wit moves him 1 rank forward and marks the enemy he attacks with a Combo token. Fade to Black moves him 1 rank backwards and, if upgraded, also applies a Combo token. Combine this with the Leper, whose skills ignore Blind when targeting an enemy with a Combo token, and suddenly the "inaccurate" part of Powerful, but Inaccurate is totally removed from the equation. For added synergy, go to the Tangle and collect the General's Dream (detailed below.) Now not only can Baldwin never be forced out of the front rank, Sarmenti can spam Fade to Black+ endlessly from rank 2 or 3, creating blind and combo tokens left-and-right while basically inverting which team has accuracy issues.
  • If you don't want the hassle of constantly shuffling your team, you can instead use the abovementioned Encore onto a Leper with Bash+. This allows the Leper himself to give his enemies a combo token, and then follow it up with Chop.
• The Plague Doctor's Cause of Death ability inflicts the total damage of all Damage Over Time effects present on the target, all at once. This attack can crit and is affected by Strength tokens. It takes some time to set up, but you can get truly astounding amounts of damage out of it, especially when paired with heroes who can stack DoT like the Runaway and Flagellant.
• The Grave Robber's Deadeye path gives her a 25% damage boost to her daggers and darts and increases her crit rate. By itself it allows the Grave Robber to be more competitive than her normal kit allows, at the expense of her melee damage. However, most of her skills have a 50% chance to deal a critical hit when an enemy has a combo token. If you pair her with a hero that can set her up, like a Jester or Runaway, you'd be dealing criticals with almost every attack.
• The Consecration of Light guarantees a damage boost every round for that rank for free, and the upgraded version has a chance of proccing a critical token. Combine that with heavy damage classes like Hellion and Leper and you're set for the rest of the battle.

Quirks and Gear

• Prior to the Trinkets & Baubles update, the Befuddling Sundial trinket was this. Though rare and found only through Academic's Studies, it gave the wearer a small heal every turn — guaranteed, unlike similar trinkets that only trigger a small portion of the time, so you would automatically recover from Death's Door if you were on it. Most bosses attack multiple times per turn, so you weren't completely invincible, but it made the hero very hard to kill. The Trinkets & Baubles update cut it down to size by reducing the heal chance to 80%, and adding the downside of giving the hero 2 stress the other 20% of the time. It's still a good trinket, but not gamebreaking.
• The Goading Gargoyle trinket has a high chance of turning Blind tokens into Strength tokens at the start of a hero's turn. Putting this on a Leper basically removes the Necessary Drawback of his Powerful, but Inaccurate abilities that sometimes he will give himself Blind tokens after using them, and it gives him extra damage to boot!
• The Snappy Swig indelible trinket gives the holder a 50 percent chance to gain a crit token at the start of their turn if their Speed is greater than or equal to eight. Not only do a ton of hero paths automatically raise a hero's starting Speed to eight or more, but it's pathetically easy to just give a hero two Stimulating Poultices(which are almost always available at Provisioners and Hoarders for dirt cheap prices) and raise their Speed that way. If pretty much any hero in the game has that high of a chance of getting a guaranteed crit at the start of their turn, they can already output two times the damage they would normally, and enemies will have no chance against you if you put this on a Glass Cannon like the Occultist or Lightning Bruiser like the Leper.
• The Highwayman's Rat Skull trinket is almost identical to the Snappy Swig, only it has an even higher chance of giving a crit token(66%) and only works if he's the first in the turn order, which can be easily acomplished by increasing his speed(see above). The supposed "downside" is that it will sometimes Immobilize him after he uses Duelist's Advance, but this just means that it's irrelevant to a Sharpshot Highwayman and a Rogue Highwayman can just use this to potentially do two crit-boosted Point Blank Shots in a row if they use Duelist's Advance to get into Rank 1.
• The Leper's Uncommon Seashell indelible trinket grants him a minus ten percent Damage Reduction bonus for every negative token applied to him. This means that if you can give him one or two negative tokens and a Block+ token, you can guarantee he will take 0 damage from the next attack that hits him. The best part? Taunt tokens count as negative tokens, meaning you can simultaneously Draw Aggro and also negate the incoming damage he'd normally take just by using upgraded Withstand.
• The Stone Mount and the Parrying Patriarch on a class that can give themselves Block and Dodge, respectively, will convert those tokens into their upgraded versions at the end of the turn. It's basically a free 75% reduction to damage at any given time and, depending on your playstyle, means you could save your upgrade points for other skills.
• Wounding Words on Hellion. Wounding Words massively boosts damage while reducing your HP, but the Hellion's special effect is that she gets stronger the lower her health is. These stack her damage. Heroes with a Guard skill can easily defend her from unnecessary damage. Effectively, she is able to kill just about anything.
• The Deathless quirk makes the hero regenerate 5% HP every round — effectively a pre-nerf Befuddling Sundial without the cost of a trinket slot. It's notable that under the old progression system, it was the very last reward unlocked.
• The General's Dream trophy can break the game wide open thanks to a permanent immobilized status effect. This means that abuse of something like Point Blank Shot is possible, without needing to take a turn to reset.
• The Complete Catalogue trophy dropped by the Librarian is right out of a Damage Over Time and Critical Hit Class party's wet dreams, because it applies 3 Burning, guaranteed, with no resistance chance anytime a party member scores a crit. This means you can stack even more DoT onto enemies and kill them even faster than normal if you have a Soloist Jester or Grave Robber in your party, completely melting boss' health bars and steamrolling encounters with Heavily Armored Mooks. It's supposedly "balanced" because it has a chance to give your entire party 3 Burning at the start of combat, but it's a low chance and a pittance to deal with anyway.
• Similarly, The Leviathan's The Beck and Call trophy doubles both the amount of Bleed you inflict and the amount of Bleed inflicted on you. This sounds like a balancing Necessary Drawback, until you realize that there are loads of enemies and several Confession bosses with no bleed attacks, meaning you can seriously beef up your Damage Over Time output completely risk-free. It also stacks with other Bleed-increasing trinkets, meaning you could potentially apply 30 bleed for 3 rounds in a single turn under the right circumstances. The only thing to really watch out for is when traveling through the Shroud and Evangelists in Cultist encounters; otherwise you'll be steamrolling your way to the mountain.
• The Reverberating Redoubt is an incredible trinket for tanky characters that can Draw Aggro. It deals a flat 2 damage in backlash to any enemy that hits the wearer, and this damage is capable of dealing Deathblows to enemies at Death's Door. But its real highlight is its secondary effect, which gives a 20% chance of granting an extra action every time the wearer is hit. 20% is significant, if you can keep taunt up to funnel attacks onto the wearer, you'll likely get several extra turns per-battle, and it can even activate multiple times in a round. This allows for things like a Leper dishing out several massive-damage Chops in sequence or a Man-At-Arms stacking up an absurd amount of defensive tokens. It does have the caveat that it only works on heroes with 2 speed or less — but the aforementioned Leper and Man-At-Arms already have 2 speed at base, and several quirks and inn items can lower speed to meet the threshold for other heroes. Meanwhile, the sheer possibilities given by the constant extra turns more than outweigh the drawbacks of being a Mighty Glacier.
• The Jealous Whisper gives a hero a positive token whenever they move or are moved by an ally's skill, which greatly benefits heroes whose abilities put an emphasis on movement like the Jester and Runaway, since they are frequently going to be moving around due to their skills. The cost is them losing all their positive tokens when enemies move them, but it doesn't happen that often and since the trinket is likely equipped on movement heavy characters, it's not hard to regain those positive tokens.
• The Selfish Motivation increases a hero's damage by 50% for every negative token they have, at the expense of giving them one negative token per round. While this works pretty well on most classes, an Occultist that uses Chaotic Offering (which provides additional negative tokens) and The Burning Stars can deal staggering amounts of damage.
• The Jinx is an incredible quirk if you get it on classes like the Man-at-Arms or Flagellant who can force enemies to attack them. It causes any enemy who attacks them to be inflicted with either a blind, weak, vulnerable, or combo token. Crippling enemies just by getting attacked speaks for itself.
• Silent Treatment. This trinket gives you +50% chance to crit while stealthed. Most of the Grave Robber's move set boasts a high crit rate but special mention goes to Lunge. It by default has a 20% crit chance and 30% when upgraded, meaning that her Lunge can potentially reach 80% crit chance. If she's Nightsworn, she gets an additional +50% damage so don't get surprised at how quickly she deletes everything.
• Breacher is great for any class that thrives in rank 1 (i.e. all tanks and riposte classes), giving you two Block+ tokens, two damage tokens and two taunts. On these classes, this quirk either skips the set-up round or gives your ripostes a good boost.