YMMV / Darkest Dungeon II

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is the Grave Robber really the game's Token Evil Teammate who genuinely enjoys killing and stealing for fun, or because she too like the rest of the heroes is looking away from the light in her Hero Shrine, does she believe that she's committed so many heinous crimes at this point that she has no choice left but to enjoy her own self-destructive behavior lest she be consumed by guilt for her actions?
  • Does the Flagellant actually enjoy being a Technically-Living Zombie because it allows him to inflict untold amounts of pain onto himself without risk of dying as his Hero Shrines suggest, or does he merely view it as better than the alternative of being killed outright by his self-inflicted wounds and like the other heroes' backstories regrets becoming Enemies with Death?
  • The Binding Blade features two more strongly morally gray characters with less obviously clear-cut motivations added to the mix which immediately prompted heated discussion amongst the fanbase:
    • Is the Duelist really just the callous, arrogant Glory Hound she appears to be? Or is she merely pushing away the subconscious guilt she feels for accidentally killing her mentor and lover so fiercely that she comes off as haughty and emotionless, and rather than searching for a Worthy Opponent is really trying to commit Suicide by Cop?
    • Did the Crusader spare the Warlord's life because he believed it was genuinely the right thing to do and offered mercy in order to be the better person and retain some of his humanity? Or because it was a Cruel Mercy which humiliated the Warlord, did his time in the Crusade make him a Sociopathic Soldier who disrespected and belittled his enemy by denying him an Honorable Warrior's Death despite knowing that's what he wanted? The Academic's narration when he actually spares the Warlord would seem to indicate the former, but the fact that the Warlord returns as his Specter in the Body of Work fight suggests that he regrets sparing him and would therefore indicate the latter.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The Warlord, Arc Villain of The Binding Blade, is significantly easier than the chain of events needed to even find him, which can feel a bit jarring. He doesn't have a lot of health despite the Armor+ tokens he can give himself and his high damage output, meaning there are easy ways to kill him very quickly. He can't even summon reinforcements after his minions are killed like Brigand Vvulf, meaning there's not even an added challenge of trying to contend with both him and his soldiers simultaneously. Truth be told, he's not really any more dangerous than the Oblivion's Rampart encounter he replaces^note barring Exemplars.
• Award Snub: As much of a Contested Sequel as Darkest Dungeon II is, one part of it that netted unanimous praise was how flawlessly it translated the first game's iconic art style into 3D. Thus, when the game lost the Steam Awards' Outstanding Visual Style Award to Atomic Heart, quite a few were displeased.
• Awesome Art: Just like the first game, this entry makes amazing use of shading and muted colors to create a beautifully dark atmosphere. The change in artstyle, as well as the 3D models, improves this atmosphere even further, making it even more artistically rich than the original. It also has more realistic body proportions, retroactively making characters from the first game look like Super-Deformed chibis.
• Awesome Music:
  • The score for "The Howling End": it starts out as an ominous, bleak tune fitting for the Lovecraftian apocalypse the Ancestor unleashed on the world, but as the Academic monologues about hope and courage, it shifts to a dramatic rendition of the first game's main theme, capped off with a bombastic sting at the end.
  • "The Winding Valley", the song which plays during the hero selection at the Crossroads and occasionally during travel, is a somber yet uplifting track which somehow both emboldens conviction and fosters cynicism at the same time.
  • "Sprawl Battle" perfectly exemplifies the chaotic city-wide conflagration that is the Sprawl, and the Pyromaniac Fanatics who dwell there. It's a constantly rising and falling theme that rapidly shifts in intensity, mimicking the flickering and slow but steady growth of a great flame.
  • "Foetor Combat" is an imposing, dangerous theme which sets the player on edge and makes them feel vaguely uneasy, perfectly accentuating battles with the Plague Eaters in the Scenery Gorn that is the Foetor.
  • "The Shroud of the Deep" is a bombastic and nautical theme with a whimsical, lilting melody that inspires courage to conquer the Fisherfolk of the Shroud, and listening to it just might make fighting The Leviathan worth it.
  • "Battle of the Mountain" plays during Cultist battles in Oblivion's Ingresses and Ramparts, and is a thunderous, intense and percussion-heavy track that really sells the danger that the Cultists pose as Elite Mooks, especially the part with the rising melody.
  • The music during the Jester's minigames, both of them. The first is a musical duel between him and a street musician, and the second takes those melodies and adds electric guitars as he massacres the abusive court. Putting the strings of melody together to sound like an actual song gets you this rockin' piece of music.
  • "The Final Combat", the theme of the Darkest Dungeon levels and the fight with the Final Boss from the first Darkest Dungeon makes its triumphant return in "The Decisive Combat" when you face down the boss of the final Confession, Cowardice.
• Best Boss Ever: The boss of the final Confession and by extension the final boss of the game, The Body of Work, is just as spectacle-filled as the Heart of Darkness and a lot more challenging. First off, the Body's design is gorgeous, being a humongous 3D model with three distinct tiers representing the different phases. Second, while the Heart was a bit of an Anti-Climax Boss with only one really dangerous attack, the Body is a legitimate marathon of a battle with plenty of opportunities to mess up by making bad decisions, and they never feel like they were just RNG screwing you over, either. Lastly, the final phase is an awesome confrontation of your mistakes as your party faces their failures and obliterates the Body using Exultation, making winning the fight feel earned.
• Breather Boss:
  • The Dreaming General is a pretty bog-standard Damage-Sponge Boss that just takes a ton of punishment and is only dangerous if you take too long and he starts restraining your party with Creeping Growth. Basically, if you brought a Damage Over Time party to the Tangle he'll be pretty hard, but a raw DPS party with a few tanky characters will have no problem taking him down.
  • The Librarian is widely considered to be the easiest Lair boss, as he has the least HP and isn't threatening unless he gets all the way to the front, which takes a long time. Damage Over Time effects also chew through him extremely quickly due to him taking multiple actions per turn. It's not uncommon for players to kill him before he even advances by one rank.
  • The Ravenous Reach is generally considered the easiest of the Confession bosses, despite being the fourth one. It almost entirely uses standard mechanics instead of complex unique gimmicks like the other Confession bosses, making it less likely you will wander in with a team composition that can't handle it. It can dish out a lot of damage if left unchecked, but it can be countered by going whole hog on damage in order to progress its phases quickly. On top of that, a move as simple as the Man-at-Arms' Bellow can almost completely neuter its third phase, which revolves around a powerful Riposte attack that it applies to itself at the start of every turn.
  • As a backline Flunky Boss, the Chirurgeon's lethality relies on the enemies you grind you go through to get through the first wave of enemies in its fight, and then the support gotten from the enemies it fights alongside and buffs relentlessly. But its behavior is astonishingly easy to manipulate as it prioritizes throwing leeches at heroes with diseases or curing debuff tokens either side has via trepanation. Provided you keep it preoccupied with taunt tokens or debuffing its allies, it's not hard to put under.
• Breather Level:
  • Despite the menacing atmosphere it provides, the Sprawl is considered by many to be the easiest region in the game. The Fanatics revolve around inflicting Burn and empowering themselves with Ignite! to use their deadliest skills, which usually means that it takes a while for most of them to pose any real threat to your party. They're resistant to Burn, an element that's rare enough you have to build a party around it, but are vulnerable to Blight, which is one of the game's most common damage types, which makes it all the easier to whittle them down before they can begin powering themselves up. The Librarian is also seen as the easiest of the Lair bosses due to how easy his strategy is to counter, making the whole region essentially a freebie to all but the most Burn-susceptible parties.
  • The Sluice, being a Bonus Dungeon without a Lair which is also shorter than other regions, feels like a breeze in between inns. Sure, it's designed to be a short but brutal combat-centric slog, but the region is almost entirely devoid of Demonic Spiders and there are no really tough enemy compositions, giving your party some much-needed respite.
  • On a smaller scale, Gaunt and Pillager road battles are designed to be this, especially compared to regional faction road battles. Most of the enemies you can encounter aren't capable of putting up much of a fight and only really exist to potentially increase your Stress and be a minor speed bump during travel. Key word here being most, as there are still a handful of enemy compositions that can be dangerous (having to fight a Woodsman and Ghoul at the same time, Implication, The Antiquarian, etc.), but these are few and far between.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • At least at the onset of the early access state, the Plague Doctor's Ounce of Prevention is a priority skill to upgrade as soon as possible to allow it to destress the entire party by 1 point each. While it has a three-turn cooldown, the fact that stress begins to have a negative effect on group cohesion much quicker than it did in the original game means a reliable stress heal is that much more important, especially before other classes with strong stress heals are unlocked. Unsurprisingly, it was nerfed in the very first patch.
  • Following the nerf of the Ounce of Prevention, the Jester became very popular because of his unmatched stress healing abilities.
  • The Plague Doctor remains a common fallback for parties due to her having the most reliable means of healing other heroes. The Vestal's introduction in the Suffer No Sin update alleviated this by introducing a second healer, but you're still likely to see players default to one or the other.
  • A common criticism is that everyone plays Man-at-Arms the exact same way: Spam Retribution as much as possible, only occasionally using Crush and other attacks. This is because Retribution is an extremely good skill, giving him two ripostes (each about as strong as his regular attacks) and two taunts, ensuring that he'll be hit to trigger the ripostes. The upgraded version also gives him two block tokens, improving his survivability at the same time. This was nerfed in the Altar of Hope update by giving the skill a 1-turn cooldown, but it's still a popular skill.
  • Whiskey gives your party relationship points, without any downside. Needless to say, it's pretty common to purchase as much as you can afford. The Pot and Still allows you to make Whiskey on the road, too.
  • Whilst there are many combat items with useful situational effects, most players will be stocking up on Healing Salves, Adrenalic Tonics and Triage Kits. In a game where healing skills are rare and situational, a free heal of 33-75% can be absolutely invaluable in a desperate situation.
  • Giving the Leper a full stack of Milk-Soaked Linens is almost always a good idea, since they can remove the Blind tokens he can give himself without having to waste a turn using Reflection and he can carry up to four of them. Therefore, it's rare to see a player having Linens without giving them immediately to their Leper.
• Contested Sequel: After a very long and tumultuous Early Access period that turned a lot of people off from the game, it has basically settled into this status. While it's understandable that a game with as much official modding support as the original Darkest Dungeon would need to undergo a lot of changes to justify a sequel, the sheer number of changes threw many fans off. Is the radical gameplay change to a more conventional Roguelite good or bad? Does the Affinity system work better or worse than the Affliction system? Is the game a boring slog that removes player agency too frequently or an engaging thrill fest that rewards careful planning and bet-hedging? Does the smaller cast of characters bring about tighter party cohesion or is it disappointing that they cut half the roster because it leads to most party compositions feeling samey? Does the game's ending retroactively taint the first game's Cosmic Horror Story Twist Ending by being Lovecraft Lite played straight, or is it far more satisfying and uplifting to just have a happy ending than being told your whole journey was All for Nothing? Is the game too hard? Too easy? All of these opinions and more have been thrown around about basically everything in the game, and ultimately there hasn't been a consensus by the fanbase on whether or not it's better, equal in quality or worse than the first game.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Returning from the first game are Ghouls, along with their tendency to appear in every biome. They still have the same attacks and moves but they are tanky and every time they attack, they gain a block token. As before, their Howl lowers the light level, which is a big problem here considering that the only way you can replenish your light level is through specific road encounters. God help you if you encounter them in pairs.
  • Swine Skivers return, and are basically the same except they're usually surrounded by Skulkers, making encounters with them drag out longer.
  • Drummers are support units for the Lost Battalion who start each round giving a free buff to the other enemies without spending their own turn, usually enabling them to use their deadliest attacks. They also deal a hefty amount of stress damage to your entire party if they're the last one standing. This may compel you to try and kill them first, but good luck with that, because they're always in the back ranks and can make the other enemies block an attack for them, making it a chore to hit them at all, let alone kill them before they can self-destruct.
  • Knights are absolutely terrifying Smash Mooks with loads of health, the ability to do lots of damage and inflict bleed(which allows them to in turn do more damage thanks to a special buff they have) and can give themselves Riposte to make themselves that much harder to kill. It only gets worse if they're paired with a Drummer (see above), who will continuously allow them to decimate your frontline with Flashing Blade. Oh, and they get stronger upon reaching Death's Door and get a big speed boost, meaning getting them there is actually counter-intuitive and may cause you to lose heroes as a result.
  • Carrion Devourers are the spiritual successors to Large Carrion Eaters, possessing the Pulverize ability which simultaneously truncates a hero's damage and makes them receive extra. And they spawn with two Block 2 tokens and have Death's Door resistance, meaning they take a while to go down. They can also eat corpses and give themselves guaranteed crits with Necrophagia, so if you forget to clear a corpse you'll be in for a world of hurt.
  • Evangelists are a constant hassle to put up with for the very simple reason that they can reliably give themselves Crit tokens and cleave the first two ranks while also being well-armored and possessing Death Armor, meaning they're going to be inflicting a lot of steady damage on your heroes in those ranks while receiving buffs and support from their backline allies and being generally difficult to take down. All this makes them tricky to contend with no matter how late in a run they show up.
  • Heralds are a basic Cultist enemy you can encounter as early as the first biome. They have a move that can deal two points of stress damage in a single use, and they also have a powerful cleave if you let them stay in the back ranks. God help you if you don't have a Jester or some other means of recovering stress quickly.
  • Spearmen and Swordsmen are an interesting example of this, as whether or not they fall into this depends entirely on if you can kill them quickly. If you can't, then the buffs they can get from their buildings paired with their disturbingly high crit rate and ability to inflict Bleed means that they can start seriously tearing into your party after just a few turns of staying alive. This only gets worse if you happen to encounter the enemy composition consisting of three of them at once, as the boost in their action economy will only make this problem worse.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • The Warlord, even if he's not that difficult of a fight, is an extremely memorable encounter from The Binding Blade. Between his cool heavily-armored design and the fact that he serves as the last thing keeping you from rescuing the beloved fan-favorite Crusader makes him stand out extremely well from other humanoid minibosses like the Chirurgeon and Antiquarian. Not to mention he briefly shows up in the Crusader's Hero Shrines as a Duel Boss, where he's much more of a down-to-the-wire fight.
  • The Fanatics get major awesome points for the absolutely gorgeous area they reside in and their unique fire-centric abilities and appearance making for a nice spectacle compared to the somewhat more subdued menace of other factions.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Abyssal Artillery is once again affectionately referred to as "ceiling spaghetti".
  • "Dance parties" for party compositions that make heavy use of movement abilities.
  • Players typically refer to trophies as "[Boss] heads" rather than their full name, referring to their in-game appearance as the decapitated heads of defeated bosses.
  • "Bonk" for Vestal's Mace Bash and builds constructed around it.
  • Like the Heir in Darkest Dungeon, the Player Character is given a handful of unofficial names. On the official wiki they are referred to as the Protegee while on This Very Wiki they are called the Scholar.
  • "The Baby" for the Harvest Child.
  • The gigantic shackled brain in the background of the Shackles of Denial battle used to be referred to as "The Brain of Darkness" in a cheeky reference to the Heart of Darkness, which was used to refer to the boss fight as a whole back when the game was in early access and the Shackles didn't have an official name yet.
  • The Final Boss' first and second phases are often referred to as "The Carious Gut"^note based on the Academic quote "The carious gut of the coward, rife with toxic pusillanimity!" and "The Infernal Gaze"^note based on the Academic quote "Its infernal gaze pierces the veil of reality..." respectively since they don't have official names and it's easier to say than "The Body of Work's first/second phase".
• Fanon:
  • A popular explanation during the game's Early Access period for the Crusader and Vestal's absence was because they sacrificed themselves to the Heart of Darkness, since it normally takes two characters' sacrifices to defeat. This one ended up getting Jossed hard, as the Vestal was added to the full game and the Crusader was reintroduced in The Binding Blade.
  • It is widely assumed that the Harvest Child is a result of the gentry turning to eldritch help during a difficult childbirth, which unsurprisingly Went Horribly Wrong, as well as that based on several Academic quotes that the Child is responsible for the Horror Hunger that consumed the Foetor.
  • Due to Flagellant's primary source of damage having changed to blight from bleeding in II compared to the first game, many fans assume Flagellant will somehow switch again to burning damage if he returned for a third game.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
• Genius Bonus: The Fanatics are based on the Real Life followers of The Renaissance-era Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, a dogmatic church reformer who introduced democracy to Florence, which not very many people besides a few dedicated history buffs would know about.
• Goddamned Bats: The rule of thumb is that if it spawns with or can give itself Dodge, it's probably a Goddamned Bat.
  • Foot Soldiers start with two Block 1 tokens and are one of the very few Mooks in the game to have Death Armor, meaning that while they do pretty mild damage and a little bleed with Atrophic Cut, the real challenge is that they'll be eating your high-damage attacks a lot before they go down.
  • Cherubs are incredibly annoying backline Cultist enemies which do nothing but throw debuffs at your party while you try to bypass their Dodge tokens. It's easy to forget about them to focus on bigger threats like Deacons or Cardinals in Oblivion Tear encounters, which just allows them that many more opportunities to give your party Meltdowns and inflict Blind and Weak on them.
  • Altars are even worse in Cultist battles, because their entire existence serves just to make other enemies take longer to kill. Every single turn they'll be buffing a random guy with either block tokens or a LOT of regeneration, making usually pretty difficult battles slow down to a crawl. They also always immediately give a unique buff depending on what Confession you're doing to all of their allies, which is just the icing on the cake.
  • Wharf Rats are very easy to kill, so it's tempting to ignore them for higher priority Fisherfolk targets like Captains or Dockers, but this just gives them opportunities to inflict more Bleed onto your heroes and slap them with sneaky Death's Door checks in really unlucky circumstances.
  • Swine Skulkers do enough damage to be a noticeable threat, spawn with two Dodge 1 tokens, can give themselves not 1 but 2 Stealth tokens and can shuffle around your backline. And sometimes you will have a Resistance encounter in the Sluice consisting of nothing but four of them, resulting in a battle that will drag on for a while longer than it has any right to.
  • Creature Dens are essentially Goddamned Bat Central. Rabid Gnashers, Webbers and Spitters and Carrion Eaters can all spawn here, none of which do that much damage by themselves but will constantly be inflicting Bleed and Blight and be infuriatingly hard to hit at the same time. Oh, and Carrion Eaters have a new ability called Necrophagia, which allows them to eat corpses and transform into Carrion Devourers. Bring corpse-clearing abilities if you value your sanity.
  • The Binding Blade DLC added the Spiked Barricades, literally spiked wooden shields put up by Pillagers in some road encounters. These don't directly harm you, but what they do is provide automatic protection for the enemies standing behind them while taking reduced damage from ranged attacks, inflict bleed on any melee unit that attacks them and place combo debuffs on anyone attacking them at all. This means that, unless you brought someone who can bypass guarding, you're forced to take your sweet time bringing down these barricades while the actually dangerous enemies are free to harass your party without worry.
• Goddamned Boss: The Antiquarian is an annoying trudgefest of a battle, as she will constantly be buffing her allies with Armor+ and Dodge tokens as well as guarding herself, meaning not only does it become hard to hit her, it becomes hard to hit or do any amount of damage to her goons as well. This draws out the battle longer, which just means more opportunities for her to use Festering Vapors and for her Pillager friends to wear down your heroes' health.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Flagellant's new Sepsis attack allows him to cash out all accumulated Blight on an enemy to deal tons of damage in exchange for removing the Blight. Not even half a year after Darkest Dungeon II's full release, the full release of Wizard with a Gun would feature Sepsis Bullets, which work almost identically in that they convert stacked Poison levels on an enemy into pure damage.
• I Knew It!: When Red Hook teased a new hero on April 18th to be added for when the game released on May 8th, fans were quick to theorize it would be a blight themed Flagellant, based on the quote on his teaser being the same as the Ancestor's quote for him in the previous game, replacing blood with blight, and the fact that the introduction of the Vestal brought with her a fully modeled version of a Flagellant based character in one of her shrine battles. Surely enough, their theories would be confirmed the day after with the return of the Flagellant, now a rotting corpse using blight as his new element.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The Binding Blade was the subject of some discourse over the fact that it was essentially a glorified hero pack for ten dollars, effectively only adding two new heroes and a Road Battle faction^note not helping matters were accusations that the basic new Mooks added were blatant asset flips of Hero Shrine enemies from the base game rather than being designed from the ground up. Compare that to the first game's first DLC, The Crimson Court, which added what is effectively a separate side campaign revolving around three giant Brutal Bonus Levels in addition to adding an entire new enemy faction with six new bosses and a new hero for the exact same price. The fact that The Binding Blade came out only six months after the full release of the game whereas The Crimson Court took over a year to come out after the release of Darkest Dungeon has led to arguments that Red Hook Christmas Rushed getting The Binding Blade released in hopes of increasing player retention (possibly due to the inclusion of the fan-favorite Crusader attracting more legacy fans) when they should have taken more time to add more content to it as a means of increasing the DLC's overall value.
• Memetic Badass: The Leper, even moreso than in the first game. Being the heroes' Token Good Teammate who's shown to have zero regrets over his past unlike the others, as well as continuing to see the positives of life despite the suffering he's endured, has caused fans to label him a "Chad" for being so genuinely heroic in such a bleak setting. His accuracy issues being easier to work around compared to his previous outing certainly helps.
• Memetic Loser: Hellion's Breakthrough is widely regarded to be her worst skill if not the worst skill in the entire game, which has led to a lot of jokes either exaggerating its uselessness or pretending it's incredibly overpowered.
• Memetic Mutation: Has its own page.
• Narm: Prior to the rework of the relationship mechanic in The Voids Between Us update, many of the relationship barks that were supposed to be poignant instead became comical through repetition and the way they interrupted battles at the most inopportune times. The Big "NO!" from an Inseparable partner getting hit, which is drawn out to last as long as a full sentence's worth of speech time, was particularly ridiculous.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • The Foetor in general qualifies (see Squick below), but the Boss Battle with the Harvest Child takes the disgusting cake: During the battle, your heroes are supernaturally compelled to eat the meat surrounding the Harvest Child, which is described as putrid and rotting. The meat is in fact so disgusting it even inflicts Maximum HP Reduction when the heroes do this.
  • You may experience this in the Sprawl upon realizing that the reason the Fanatics' skin is so loose and droopy, collecting in lumps on their body is because they're burning themselves so much that it's melting off like candle wax.
  • The Flagellant's redesign is designed to invoke this in spades, and he was already a pretty disturbing character concept. Sure, it's awesome that the Flagellant managed to beat himself so hard that he accidentally cheated Death, but it came at the cost of rending his body black and blue, meaning he is now a walking gangrenous pile of permanently rotting flesh. Some of his moves play into this, including Sepsis and Necrosis, which heal him by absorbing Blight in probably the exact way you're imagining.
• No Yay: Despite Shipping being reasonably popular in the Darkest Dungeon fandom, the Runaway is the one exception. This is because it's implied she's in her late teens at best. This doesn't stop any of the adult characters from developing an Amorous relationship with her.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Death can show up in any fight after you win, as long as there's a Flagellant in your party. Death is very difficult to kill, especially with a party that can't move her around or hit her at long range. You cannot retreat from battles once you're in them. If you commit to a Resistance encounter with a Flagellant and scrape through by the skin of your teeth, you will be biting your nails praying that Death doesn't appear and wipe your party.
  • With the addition of the Collector to the game, carrying a Trophy and encountering a Road Battle will make you sweat bullets, especially if you're starting to feel the attrition of a region, since the Collector has a flat five percent chance to spawn in one while you have a Trophy. That may not sound like much, but picture a d20 rolling every single time you encounter a Road Battle. If it hits a nat 20 and you're not prepared, you have to fight That One Boss. There is no escape for you. Even worse? It's entirely possible that you may have to fight him twice in one run.
  • Due to the prolific iconography of the Iron Crown showing up in tons of random mundane objects all throughout the game, you may start to see it everywhere. Even outside of the game.
• Replacement Scrappy: The Academic is this to some, but that's purely because he's following in the footsteps of The Ancestor as the game's narrator, who was widely beloved for his Large Ham Narm Charm speeches and his completely unrepentant evilness. In that regard, the Academic is a lot more sympathetic and has fewer hammy moments.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Affinity system at the time of the initial Early Access release had a lot of flaws. It was hard to stop relationships from deteriorating, one deteriorating relationship often causes everything to snowball into inevitable failure, and it often felt like it took any real choice out of the player's hands. To make things even worse, a positive relationship can also be detrimental, as close characters can refuse to buff anyone other than their closest friend or get killed leaping in front of a blow meant for their full-health ally. It is telling this was completely reworked so that relationships don't change during combat - rather, a positive relationship causes one random skill to give a buff to the other person in a relationship, while a negative one instead bestows a debuff, identified when leaving the Inn. Appreciated or annoying, but can be accounted for, at worst it causes the player to need to vary their skills a bit.
  • Even with the reworked Affinity system in the full release, it is still very irritating that negative relationships cause the negatively affected skills to be locked in for an entire region, especially if they're un-upgraded skills that go against what type of subclass you currently have equipped for that hero.
  • Prior to The Voids Between Us update, every time one of the relationship events triggered during a fight, a character would stop the combat to pose dramatically and deliver a one-liner. When all four characters have relationships, positive or negative, this quickly reached the point where combat was continually being stopped as everyone kept assisting or sabotaging each other. The repetition and over-dramatization created a lot of Narm, too. Fortunately, they were changed to be much less obtrusive after that update, as the one-liners are normal barks that do not interrupt combat.
  • Prior to the Redemption Road update, road battles were Timed Missions that had to be finished in 5 rounds or less, or the battle would immediately end with no rewards given. This generated a lot of annoyance, as when fighting the normal enemies for a biome, their health is way too high to beat them in five turns, and it forces an aggressive playing style that often does not align with longer battles. You can lose the rewards from these fights just from bad luck due to the fact that enemies now have the Death's Door mechanic, which combined with you being forced to play aggressively likely means your party is much worse for wear than it would have been for no reward.
  • Prior to the full release, Academic's Studies were a notoriously unreliable Luck-Based Mission. They have a significant upfront cost (often inflicting stress or negative quirks), but your rewards can vary from a pittance of relics to a Game-Breaker trinket. In the full release, the map icon for a Study shows what it has, so you can decide in advance if you want it.
  • Enemies with multiple actions per round can set up a combo with one action and then immediately activate it the next, giving you no opportunity to interrupt it. This was alleviated in the Altar of Hope update, thankfully.
  • Prior to the full release, it was the case that if you failed a run outside of an inn, you lost almost all your candles of hope, only keeping the pittance from Wanderer heroes and candle items. This was poorly received, with a lot of players saying it killed their motivation and enjoyment of the game. This was particularly contentious given it replaced the old progression system, which never made you lose any of the hope you acquired during a run. The release patch allowed you to abandon the run without any penalty, instead giving you bonus candles for making it to the inn.
  • Prior to the Redemption Road update overhauling the mechanic, stagecoach travel was largely seen as boring, empty, and pointless, with one person hating it so much they let loose the rant seen in Memetic Mutation above. Putting a bunch of road hazards did much to make it actively interesting again.
  • Occasionally during combat, your heroes' Affinities will increase or decrease for a variety of reasons, including healing somebody, using a certain skill or just moving your characters around. While it makes sense in-game, it's quite annoying that you can lose two Affinity points at a time from just trying to get somebody off of Death's Door or reorganizing your party after they get shuffled.
  • Unlike the last game, where inventory management is a crucial part of gameplay and you have to make a choice on whether to keep stuff you find or get rid of it or sell it, in this one there's no option to sell things you don't want. If you're unable to make room in the inventory, you're forced to discard items. Not only is this a step backward from the previous game's inventory management mechanic, it also makes things artificially more difficult, because you're forced to just throw away things clogging up your inventory instead of selling them for money or dismantling them for useful materials.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Specifically, the Infernal Flame compared to the first game's Harder Than Hard mode. In Darkest Dungeon, Stygian (or Bloodmoon with the Crimson Court DLC installed) was a permanent difficulty level you were stuck with for the whole playthrough and imposed some harsh requirements. Besides buffing enemies, it was a Timed Mission that you had to complete in a certain number of in-game weeks, which meant you couldn't waste any time being Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer. It also had a character death limit which would cause a Non-Standard Game Over if too many heroes died. Here, difficulty levels have been replaced with The Infernal Flames and the Radiant Flame, which you can attach to your stagecoach at the beginning of a run, the most difficult of which is the Stygian Blaze. All the Blaze does is guarantee enemy advantages in fights, make your torch drain quicker, and lessen the chance of your heroes forming positive relationships, none of which is anywhere near as restrictive as Stygian difficulty was in the original game.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • Many, many of the Cheese Strategies from Darkest Dungeon have been axed, reworked or otherwise changed. Buffs are no longer a mathematical constant, instead being tokens that are applied and disappear after a single use, and no buffs persist for an entire battle except in very specific cases. Notably, the entire concept of the "Mark Party"^note A party consisting of high-dps characters who could do insane levels of damage by applying the Marked condition to their targets, usually having the Bounty Hunter, Arbalest, Houndmaster, etc. has been thrown out the window in place of a new status effect replacing Marked called Combo, which powers up various moves if they hit a target with the effect applied. It's also no longer possible to bring duplicates of heroes, meaning certain Game-Breaker party compositions have been effectively patched out.
  • Similarly, healing abilities have pretty much been Nerfed across the board. As mentioned above, the Vestal is no longer a Crutch Character who can heal a 75 HP Leper on Death's Door back up to full with a crit and the right trinkets (and can do so every turn), because Divine Grace has been given a cooldown and requires Conviction to work and Divine Comfort has been changed to giving Regen instead of flat healing. All other forms of healing only work at certain times, like if a hero is below 50% health, or are extremely situational like the Runaway's Cauterize ability^note  It only works on heroes with Bleed on them, meaning you can only use her as a backup healer in certain encounters. Instead, the game expects you to make good use of Combat Items that provide healing and occasionally turn away from battle encounters and spurn good loot so your party can Travel Heal over time. This makes survival in the game feel a lot more Slay the Spire-esque, with long droughts in between big heals to make every region a battle of attrition. Luckily, in a rare case of Red Hook throwing you a bone, heroes do not remain on Death's Door outside of combat and gain a few Hit Points back as well as no longer keeping Damage Over Time between encounters, meaning your heroes can't die to traps, bad Curios or just walking around like in Darkest Dungeon.
  • Stun has been almost entirely Nerfed in favor of the Daze mechanic from The Butcher's Circus, which forcibly sets a character's action to the last in the turn order. Granted, it is still possible to fully Stun monsters for a turn, but nowhere near as many abilities offer it outright like they used to, instead applying Daze which, if stacked, applies Stun. Gone are the days of buying your entire party free rounds to buff and wail on their enemies with very little risk; in its place is a more nuanced mechanic that requires you to have careful knowledge of each of your heroes' Speed and their placement in the turn order. Surprise rounds, perhaps unsurprisingly, have also been removed altogether^note This makes in-game sense, too; all combat either requires you to willingly participate in it and therefore alert the enemy to your presence or are roadblocks in the middle of the road.
  • Getting hit while on Death's Door is no longer a flat check that a hero has innate resistance to^note there was an achievement for surviving five Death's Door checks in a row in Darkest Dungeon, instead incorporating the way it worked in The Butcher's Circus as well. Every time a hero gets hit, their Death's Door resistance decreases by ten percent (except for the Flagellant, who has always been a Mechanically Unusual Fighter when it comes to Death's Door), meaning it's no longer possible to take huge risks while your heroes have no health without all but guaranteeing their deaths.
• Squick:
  • One of the positive relationships that characters can develop is Amorous. This relationship is assigned at random, with no regards to the characters involved, which can lead to things like the Man At Arms entering a relationship with the teenaged Runaway, or anyone being paired with the Leper.
  • If you're emetophobic ("vomiting; irrational fear of"), the Foetor's going to give you paroxysms. All of the enemies have abilities involving overeating and vomiting. Even worse, they don't care if the corpse they're eating was recently gobbed up by one of their allies.
  • If you suffer from carnophobia (the fear of meat) then the Foetor's areas and enemies are going to become a hell of a lot harder to go through on your part, due to its area and enemies being nothing but raw cancerous meat all together.
  • During your first run, the only food you'll have access to is slime mold. It's so disgusting even the heroes might find themselves squicked, as the "Fussy Eater" quirk prevents them from eating slime mold.
  • Death will cause this in players with trypophobia. The beehive-like holes scattered throughout her and her steed's bodies are a guaranteed trigger for that phobia.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • A minor one but when the roster was revealed, many were sad that Dismas the Highwayman was present without Reynauld the Crusader. These two are universal constants in any playthrough, so people were surprised that one is without the other.
  • The Vestal initially not appearing, in a similar vein to the Crusader but to a lesser extent, since she's another guaranteed beginning hero and rounds out the rest of the Usual Suspects. Fortunately, she was eventually made available as the game progressed through Early Access.
  • The Bounty Hunter not being a permanent part of the roster, instead being hired from inns. Most agree that it's interesting from a lore-perspective, but dislike that he isn't available from the get go and is only available for one region.
  • In a broader sense, the Early Access version of the game had some serious flaws that Red Hook eventually ironed out, but some people who played during that period still associate that flawed experience with the current iteration of the game and refuse to replay it.
• Take That, Scrappy!: The Antiquarian was widely considered to be a middling-to-low tier character in Darkest Dungeon with weaker buffs than other support characters and worse combat abilities. Basically, there was always someone who would be stronger than her in any party composition, and she was only worth bringing along because of all the extra loot she would find if the player was strapped for cash, making a chosen quest into a sort of Escort Mission for her. What's the obvious solution Red Hook cooked up for her in II? Make her one of the villains and have her act as a Support Party Member for Pillagers in road battles, allowing the player to gleefully delight in killing her.
• That One Achievement:
  • "The Clash", which requires you to enter the Mountain region with a full party and all of them having negative relationships with one another. First off, this is a huge Violation of Common Sense, since the whole point of the Affinity system is to prevent bad relationships from breaking out, meaning there's absolutely no way you'd accidentally get this achievement. Second, this is almost entirely a Luck-Based Mission, since you can't intentionally lower Affinity, only raise it^note Outside of Encounter choices which tick the meter up or down by 1 or 2 and are sometimes mutually exclusive, meaning the strategy for this one boils down to "never give anybody whiskey and hope they all bicker enough during coach travel and combat that they form bad relationships." And that's not even mentioning the amount of debuffs you're going to be saddling yourself with for the entire run, even on the shortest Confession. It's telling that this achievement has a similar unlock rate on Steam to some of the harder challenge run achievements.
  • "20,000 Leagues Above The Sea" requires you to travel 20,000 leagues in the stagecoach. The average Confession is only around 200 leagues, meaning to get this achievement unintentionally, you'd have to be really bad at the game and restart dozens of times. Otherwise, you'll hopefully get it while doing other difficult achievements, because if you don't then you'll have to spend a long time grinding for it.
  • "Eidetic", which is awarded for having a full roster of heroes with memories attached. This essentially means that you're going to have to get three successful Confessions, which is already not easy, and then on top of that you will have fewer and fewer heroes to select from, meaning you're going to either get this one pragmatically by accident or have to carefully plan so you don't wind up having to clear an entire Confession with DPS characters who can't heal themselves.
  • "A Life Well Lived" requires you to apply five memories on a single hero. This boils down to beating the entire game flawlessly without dying with at least one character. If you screw up at any point, you'll have to start back from the beginning. Thankfully, doing the Confessions in order is not a prerequisite, so they can be done according to the needs of that particular hero.
  • "Grand Slam" is functionally, the party-based version of "A Life Well Lived". This means you have to complete all five Confessions with the same party. While you can swap your heroes' Paths at the Crossroads in between Confessions to vary their roles for different situations, this still means your party composition will have to be air-tight, and if you mess up or just run into some plain old bad luck, you'll have to try it all over again.
  • "Circle of Life" sounds simple on paper; just defeat the Shambler when you have a Shambler Spawn pet equipped. In reality, it's quite the Luck-Based Mission due to the Shambler Spawn hitting you with a -100% scouting modifier, meaning you can't readily scout ahead except to spot Oblivion Ingresses and Ramparts. Barring location-revealing region challenges or significant additional scouting gear, you simply have to progress blindly. Road battles have a chance to be replaced by the Shambler at low torchlight too, but it's not guaranteed and carries negative consequences to all other battles along the way too. And that's just getting to the battle, a battle in which the Shambler gets a 100% damage and +4 speed boost, making one of the hardest bosses in the game that much more dangerous.
• That One Attack:
  • The Woodsman's Fell The Tree attack is effectively a toned-down version of the Blighted Giant's Treebranch Smackdown. Granted, it almost never instantly brings your party member to Death's Door and he doesn't prioritize it over Protect The Child and Carve The Toy, but it's still a mighty wallop doing upwards of 20 damage and it's quite annoying to deal with considering encounters with Gaunts are usually meant to be Breather Levels in between difficult fights, so a hero losing a lot of HP to Fell The Tree can put you at a disadvantage in a harder fight down the line.
  • Dockers have an attack called Hull Breaker, which just does a shitload of damage and knocks your heroes back. Nothing too nasty in terms of status effects there, but the amount of damage is consistently enough to almost or entirely one-shot a hero to Death's Door if they don't have any Block tokens.
  • The Obsession boss, the Focused Fault's Limerence attack used to be like this, because it did disgustingly high damage and the Fault would spam it relentlessly until the party member it was targeting was dead, meaning the only way to defeat the boss was to sacrifice a tank hero and hope you could keep them alive long enough to kill it, or worse, hope they could die Taking the Bullet and allow the rest of the party to survive. Fortunately, the developers reworked the boss so that it not only no longer spams Limerence, but Limerence's damage was also heavily truncated, allowing you to finally forego that tank hero for Obsession if you want.
• That One Boss:
  • The Leviathan is widely considered to be the most difficult of the region bosses. While the other bosses have reliable counter-strategies, the Leviathan hits like a train, and twice per round at that. It also has the extremely nasty ability to capture your heroes, which screws up your formation and hurts your action economy even further. The latter can at least be blocked with move resistance, but that's still a Luck-Based Mission.
  • Exemplars are as tough as region bosses if not moreso, and unlike region bosses, they're not optional. They get two actions per round, can generate their own Worship tokens, and their Exultation summons another cultist in addition to dealing tons of damage. If you can't deal with the summoned cultist quickly, the Exemplar will sacrifice them, giving it Worship, riposte, and regeneration. Even a well-prepared party will likely suffer multiple meltdowns and survive only by the skin of their teeth.
  • Death is an absolutely terrifying roaming boss, similar to The Collector. For starters, she can appear randomly after you've already won a fight against some Mooks, so your party is guaranteed to not be at their full strength. On top of that, her attacks are hard-hitting and constantly moving her around. Finally, she comes with two un-interactable tombstones that prevent close-range heroes from hitting her at certain times, meaning you may be plumb out of luck and have to wait for her to move forward until you can hit her again while she tears into your party.
  • The Shambler is back, and it's mostly the same, except its growths can heal it if they attack a party member with Combo on them.
  • The second Confession Boss, The Seething Sigh, is extremely tough even among the Final Bosses. It has a ton of HP and two attacks per round, all of which can inflict nasty side-effects including torch damage. The intended counter-strategy is to attack its lungs, which will prevent it from using Sundering Exhalation at the end of every round, but with the Seething Sigh constantly spewing Blind and Weak tokens you can't do so reliably, and the lungs have so much HP you're unlikely to survive long enough to kill both them and the Sigh itself. This means that you have to carefully manage your four actions per turn so that one of them deals at least 11 or so damage to the powered-up lung, and if you can't hit it or do enough damage then you're out of luck. This is still mostly manageable because it's only powering up one lung at a time, until it reaches half health and starts powering up both of them at once, meaning suddenly you need to hope you have two attacks per round every round that you can dedicate toward dealing at least 11 damage, and this is on top of everything else the Sigh is throwing at you. This means that no matter how swimmingly the fight goes up to the end, if you can't kill it quickly right at the finish line then you're done for.
  • The third Confession Boss, The Focused Fault, may be a Glass Cannon, but if you didn't figure out its original mechanics on your first run, you'd probably get wiped - and then you'd get wiped a couple more times for good measure, because even if you managed to focus its attacks on your tankiest hero, Limerence and its healing debuffs would quickly obliterate them and the rest of your party unless you could quickly take it down with burst damage. Luckily, Red Hook heard the complaints and completely reworked the boss, so most of the things that made it frustrating are gone.
• That One Disadvantage:
  • The Unforgettable trinkets dropped by Cultist battles almost always have some kind of penalty that makes them not worth using, especially since their abilities can only be activated with a Stained trinket, meaning in order to use just one of them you have to sacrifice both of a hero's trinket slots^note Unless you have the Shambler's Spawn pet, but even that has the awful disadvantage of removing all scouting chance when entering a region.
  • Certain trinket effects, such as one of the Dark Impulse variants or the Blood-Smeared Calculations, have the possibility of inflicting damage to the wearer at specific times^note like when they take stress damage or end a turn. While this is mere Scratch Damage, usually only 1 HP, the self-damage from these trinkets can deal Deathblows. This means that equipping them puts the hero at significant risk of instantly dying with no way to stop it if they reach Death's Door at the wrong time. And even if they do survive the trinket hit, every Death's Door check reduces Deathblow resistance by 10%, making it more likely for subsequent enemy attacks to finish them off instead.
• That One Level: The Tangle is crawling with Demonic Spiders and Heavily Armored Mooks who hit hard and take a lot of punishment, meaning combat in this region can feel a lot tougher and take a lot longer to get through than in the other regions. Plus, the most dangerous enemy compositions often come with Bishops who can resurrect their comrades if you don't get rid of the corpses or kill them first, so if your party can't hit the backline you'll also have that to deal with. The only real respite is that the Lair Boss, the Dreaming General, is pretty easy, but even then you still might have a tough time with him if the two fights preceding him in his lair were both difficult by themselves.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Some of the Hero Shrine missions are notoriously hard. In particular, the Jester's fourth chapter, "A Dark Song", is badly explained; you're instructed to "Play 3 Melodies" and dropped into a battle screen with 3 floating musical notes on your side and 4 on the other, and some of yours will have little tuning fork status effects with a description that doesn't explain much; your skills always stress you out except Melody, which you have to bring online through a manner that is not immediately made clear, and if you hit 10 Stress, you're kicked out. On top of that, even once you do figure out what you're supposed to do (the pattern of notes on your side of the battle screen needs to mirror the pattern on the other, with the Jester serving as a wild card that can fill in for any note, and the tuning fork means a match), you can still run into problems if the Jester is in a bad position or your notes are arranged frustratingly.
  • Hero Goals, being randomly generated, can be either pathetically easy or this. The worst ones are usually the goals that involve killing a certain number of enemies, since they have a tendency to spawn on Support Party Members who don't deal a lot of direct damage and are unlikely to be the ones to finish an enemy off. The absolute worst among those, however, is killing Cosmic enemies, which are exclusively found in Cultist battles and also the Shambler, meaning they are both tough on their own and rarely found. If your Vestal or Runaway's Hero Goal is to kill eight Cosmic enemies, just don't bother.
  • Completing the Lost Crusade and rescuing the Crusader in The Binding Blade isn't honestly all that irritating or confusing (the only true Guide Dang It! moment is when you have to use the Holy Standard combat item on specifically a Bishop enemy, which is only found in the Tangle in certain enemy compositions) as most of the quest is pretty easy to parse and consists of delivering specific key items to inns or specific locations, but the sheer length of it means that you'll likely have to go through multiple Confessions to complete it unless you get super lucky and manage to get it in one go, which can make its length feel artificially extended.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Despite the fact that Wilbur returns in the Sluice as a pseudo-miniboss, almost nothing is done with him and he's really just a Palette Swap of a Swine Brute with some unique attacks. Since the Sluice is already a region without a Lair, it's disappointing that Wilbur wasn't made into a fully-fledged lair boss, like a scarily-competent, non-mindless version of the Swine King.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Given that it's been confirmed that the Flagellant was the Torturer that the Vestal defeated in her backstory, one would think that they would have some kind of unique interaction or dialogue when put in a party together, perhaps even being more likely to develop a negative relationship, but alas, no.
• Ugly Cute:
  • The pets you can unlock in the Altar of Hope. Most of them are based on some of Darkest Dungeon's more horrifying creatures, including an actual Shambler Spawn! But being rendered with chibi proportions makes even the most grotesque of horrors look oddly adorable. It helps that they generally give buffs with no downsides.
  • The Lord is a a horrifically mutated Plague Eater just like the rest of his faction, but his goofy animations and model make him quite endearing after a while.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The Shroud has a unique effect during Resistance encounters where occasionally a fog will pour through the arena, applying debuffs and giving the player a brief glimpse of the Leviathan's mechanics, and it goes away after the Leviathan is killed since it's actually its Breath Of The Sea ability. It would have been cool to see this kind of Early-Bird Cameo/random equalizer event in the other regions (Arboreal growths restraining your party in the Tangle, Putrid Meat causing heroes to lose turns to Horror Hunger in the Foetor, etc.) that also get removed upon defeating the lair boss, as yet another incentive to actually do so.
• Unexpected Character:
  • When she and the Crusader were absent from the initial line up, people assumed that the Vestal wouldn't show up in the game at all and assumed that she, along with the Crusader, were sacrifices to the Heart of Darkness. It seems that the devs just took extra time reworking her kit to gel with the game's new mechanics.
  • Being a DLC character in the first game, and one with rather unusual mechanics at that, the Flagellant entering the game as part of the base roster came as a surprise to some. His transformation into a blight-focused undead ghoul was even less expected.
  • It's a shock to see the Antiquarian return at all in this game since she was a Low-Tier Letdown in the first, let alone as what is effectively a roaming boss encounter who drops unique trinkets.
  • It's a little understandable due to his Memetic Badass status, but it's still very surprising to see Wilbur of all people come back in the Sluice, this time just as big and strong as his former master.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • The switch to 3D was initially very contentious, especially among mod creators since Darkest Dungeon has a very active modding scene and II's 3D models as opposed to 2D sprites make it very hard to mod, until the gameplay reveal trailer was shown and showed off the game in motion (particularly the new animations).
  • The Void Between Us streamlined and simplified relationships, making them a consideration but not a Luck-Based Mission, and one that remains constant throughout a biome, much to the joy of players who hated them for their unpredictable nature.
  • Road hazards in Redemption Road, combined with biomes getting a visual upgrade, made the stage coach a lot more fun, especially with the removal of the turn limit for road battles along with making it so only relatively weak Pillagers and Gaunts can be encountered as ambushers. Regional enemies would later be re-added to Road battles with the September 2023 update, but since the biggest point of contention was the turn limit, the decision was not met with anything which could be called hostility.
  • The announcement that the Crusader would make his grand return from being a Sequel Non-Entity with the The Binding Blade DLC piqued the interest of a lot of fans who had written the game off because he wasn't in the game from the start.

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