Darkest Dungeon 5-A downgrade

[Wokistan]

So, currently late game Darkest Dungeon has "At least Low 7-C, possibly 5-A" as their tiering. Low 7-C scales off a feat a boss did, with 5-A scaling off the Heart of Darkness eventually blowing up the planet. However, the latter part is problematic, and really should not be scaling out to anyone.

Scaling Issues
Let's for a moment assume that the Heart of Darkness is correct in that it will eventually blow up the world. That really shouldn't be scaling to the party. If we take the heart's statements as fact, we'd also have to take into the account that this is portrayed as inevitable, which means the party members don't exactly have a chance of stopping it. You wouldn't scale to something you have no hope of fighting off. The current reason for this scaling is "it's not known how close the heart is to that goal", but that doesn't really matter. If they were at all comparable, the planet bust shouldn't be inevitable. THis means that either:

• They aren't actually comparable
• The Heart's statements are dodgy, which would cast doubt on tier 5 in the first place

Thematic Reasons
The Heart talks about how when the stars align, it will emerge from the shell of the earth, annihilating it. However, the key thing here is "when the stars align". Darkest Dungeon is a work drawing very heavily on cosmic horror tropes and stories like the Cthulhu Mythos, where the formations of celestial bodies will often have dramatic events on the statuses of such beings. A good example is with Cthulhu (Cthulhu Mythos) himself. His apparations on earth got killed by a boat once, because Cthulhu is dead and dreaming at his house. In other words, Cthulhu is not fully awakened, and we should note that the stars are not right in this case. However, Cthulhu was also said to have extinguished stars before when drawing upon its full power, when these cosmic formations fit into place. This sort of parallel would further the idea that the Heart that the party faces is nowhere near it's peak. We fight a dormant version to attempt to fight it before it gets to tier 5 and is unbeatable. This is even supported by Stygian/Bloodmoon/NG+, which places a time limit until the Heart just emerges on its own and ends the game permanently (which also supports that you can't actually fight a tier 5 Heart). It seems clear to me that we're attempting to fight it before it can reach the height of its power, as opposed to challenging it in a way that would scale us to said power.

The Sleeper
The Sleeper is another cosmic entity summoned for a DLC. It's the source of Low 7-C. It's also implied to be of a similar nature to the Heart, and it's said that the Heart would battle it for domination should the Heir fail to contain it, and that it would not be a battle humanity would survive.

Sleeper really throws a wrench into tier 5 scaling. There's several possibilities from this:

• The Sleeper apparently being comparable in power casts the "inevitability" of the heart's tier 5 into question, which casts the statements of the heart into question
• The Sleeper's apparently comparable to this thing, and is literally the source of the tier 7 feat that happens very directly. Meanwhile, the tier 5 thing is vague and shadowed in doubt.
• Given that a battle between a matured sleeper and a matured Heart would not be one humanity survives, this would mean that party members shouldn't scale to tier 5 anyways.

Proposal
So yeah in summary, 5-A is just not reliable to scale human party members to. This also applies for bosses. Ratings would be as follows:

9-A for early game (level 1 and 3 dungeons)

Low 7-C for late game (level 5 and 6 dungeons, some bosses like Sleeper, Ancestor, and Vuulf only have this key)

Possibly 5-A for a fully matured Heart of Darkness, with the stipulation being that its a key that assumes the Heart is correct

 

[DMUA]

Them eventually reaching that level of power through an onslaught of endless attempts and destroying the world doesn't mean the party is incapable of stopping them when they're close enough to be in the 5-A range, just that when they're there, everyone's dead.

Do we have any proof of that in the actual game, though? You bring up Cthulhu Mythos but Darkest Dungeon isn't even EU material. Drawing heavy inspiration doesn't mean that it's going to have all the same functions as another distinctive entity. Heck, way back when, you mentioned name similarities between Nyar and The Heart, both being called the Crawling Chaos, but now you're drawing on Cthulhu to say the heart is severely weakened when the stars aren't aligned?

The Sleeper section does have good points though, so I may have to agree just from all that, since it is pretty solid proof towards the contrary that I simply don't have sound answers for.

 

[Mr. Bambu]

I'm fine with nixing Tier 5 what with the whole "humanity can't survive this" thing, but I will say I don't buy into disregarding it due to it being called Inevitable. If The Sleeper gets a profile it should obviously scale to Heart.

 

[AkuAkuAkuma]

Agree with the potential adjustments, though unknown should likely be at play with a matured Sleeper alongside its Possible 5-A tiering.

@DMUA, Cthulhu Mythos is brought in for parallels not for the proposition that is part of the Lovecraft EU by virtue of being inspired by it. And personally, proof for both sides is effectively moot with generally nothing suggesting for or against it; Much of it's built on rampant speculation as to HoD's power by the time the PCs encounter it.

 

[Stillwinston]

I guess I'm neutral on this, 5-A heroes always seemed a bit iffy in my mind as its a joint effort. I'd have put them as like 5-C or even tier 6 but that's not how we operate.

The ending is rather vague and that can make calling it rather hard so tier 5 can be called into question in general, kinda like explaining Dark Souls background and lore so go figure. Gotta say I'll miss tier 5 Ancestor if this goes through, so I press F to pay respects.

 

[DMUA]

I don't see how showing the planet exploding on screen is vague

 

[Stillwinston]

Fair enough it was cause I saw this WMG on TV tropes, but like I say it can be interpreted in different ways. Anyhow I'll be quiet now cause I'm not really fussy on the downgrade one way or another.

 

[Wokistan]

Rebump

 

[Wokistan]

bump

 

[Mr. Bambu]

Does this need bumped? I think it can just outright be applied, all staff members relevant to the verse have responded, and multiple users as well.

 

[Stalker_Maggot]

This seems fine

 

[DarkGrath]

Apologies if this is a bit too late to bump this thread; this is a game I played a while back, and I've had similar opinions regarding the topic before.

While I believe the 5-A feat is legitimate myself, I've heavily disagreed with the scaling for it for quite some time. Even after having "defeated" the Heart of Darkness, it's directly shown that their efforts were futile against it and that it hadn't truly been stopped for good. On top of this, this is explicitly the version of the Heart of Darkness who was still preparing to become strong enough to perform the 5-A feat and actually destroy the world; if they were powerful enough to do it already, they would have done so, and doing so would have killed everyone.

In my eyes, a group of 4 characters, all collectively just barely able to beat back an explicitly significantly weakened version of the Heart of Darkness, in a battle that turned out to not truly kill it anyway, where the Heart of Darkness couldn't even perform the 5-A feat is just... really, really bad scaling.

I think the Ancestor page should be split into multiple keys; one for the final boss, and another for their full power. I'm fine with their full power being 5-A if we consider the feat legitimate, but their final boss form is explicitly far weaker and not capable of performing the feat at that point in time. Hell, if you're on Stygian, it is literally possible for the Heart of Darkness to get the powerup they need i the final boss and then you can't do anything to stop them. The main cast should only scale to Low 7-C, and the final boss should scale to "At least Low 7-C" via normally taking 4 of the main cast at once to defeat in battle.

 

[DMUA]

It's not really clear what not killing it means. It definitely stops moving after being stabbed too much, it's just that even if they're beaten back now, they'll just come back later, start collecting power again, and blow the joint up.

I could say more but it's just redundant, and considering the sleeper and heart fighting would wipe out humanity, it's obvious that them reaching full power is not the Doom purely because the planet is blowing up and they wouldn't be able to do something like breathe

 

[Antvasima]

So has this revision been accepted then?