If You Did Buy Darkest Dungeon
Then here is a basic walkthrough on how to break the game wide open because the affinity system is laughably terrible and super easy to abuse/be abused by.
The game is basically predicated entirely on being able to control whether or not your people can stand each other. Health? Nope, ignore it. Stress? Irrelevant. Resource management? Did you think this was a tactical game? No, this is Darkest Dungeon Dating Simulator.
So buckle up, lubricate, and let’s get in it.
Step One: Make friends with the plague doctor, she will be on every mission.
Step Two: No, seriously. Unless you want to play a run on Nightmare Mode difficulty, you have to have her. She heals and strips conditions with the same skill, and her Resistance buff dings down your stress once it’s mastered. With those two skills you have a one-girl control
Step Three: Do literally anything that boosts the largest amount of affinity regardless of its effect on your game. You get so many items just passively from necessary battles that between combat items which do not take your turn to use, and your salty Plague Waifu, you will never have to worry about health.
Step Four: Make sure you equip those Combat Items. Prioritize anything that heals, ideally on high-speed characters. In addition, a stack of laudanum on someone goes a long way towards spot healing stress to keep your characters from having a meltdown and flagellating 90% of their skin off on the fly.
Step Five: Playing Cards. Collect Them. Seriously, they are your best friend. At inns they will trigger about a half-dozen rapid-fire affinity events back to back, with a high chance of positive gains. So when you get to an inn, immediately purchase every playing card deck the provisioner has, then use them all at once. Don’t worry, if you get bad luck and get a bunch of negative affinity, you can reload your save and you’ll be back at the inn without having spent anything and you can try again! Rinse and repeat til your wagon crew is a gambling addicted polycule.
Healing Salve is a good default Combat Item equip for everyone but if you don’t have enough then just equip whatever is the most relevant condition-stripping healing item for the zone you’re in (Salve for the Sprawl, Bandages for anywhere, etc...)
Have one person with Laudanum. A Meltdown will ruin affinity.
Do not hoard items. Use them. Suckle at the teat of the item god because they are a generous being that lactates a pure stream resources straight into your open craw.
The map when you load into a zone has green roads and broken-up blue roads. Green is good. Blue is bad. That’s all you really need to know. Unless there’s something at the end of a Blue road that you absolutely need, like a quest objective, avoid them at all costs. Fewer fights are always better.
Hospitals cure bad quirks. Save your gold for this and affinity items. The negative quirks in this are absolutely devastating and many of them will rob you of a turn.
DoTs are better than almost any other form of damage in the game. The end-boss basically requires you to be able to dot them or you will die. No seriously. You will die if you don’t have enough DoTs.