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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:
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:
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
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
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.
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