(Image credit: Red Hook Studios)
Darkest Dungeon 2's battle makeover started with a radical move: ditching accuracy altogether POE currency trade . "We found over time that people just dislike missing so much that we ended up tuning up accuracy quite a lot over the lifetime of the [first] game," Sigman says. "So what if we just got rid of accuracy as a stat? You hit. You know you're going to hit – unless the opponent is dodgy, unless they have a block." To convey a dodge or a block, they condensed percent chances into tokens that represent concrete effects. If your character or an enemy has a block token, they're guaranteed to absorb 50% of their next hit.

"We started doing that with all the mechanics and it was kind of an experiment at first. The concern was what if we make it too simple, but it ended up working." Sigman compares the token system to a card game like Hearthstone, where if an enemy has a creature with taunt on the board, that's an obstacle to work around. Almost all the effects from the first game have been converted to tokens – immobilise, stun, bleed, blind, even team-up combo attacks.

"It gets people thinking a little bit more," Bourassa adds. "I found that it erodes the natural inclination we saw in the first game for people to just use damaging attacks all day long." And so you now get to see the next few turns in the turn order, letting you plan out multiple moves in advance.

Trinket for your thoughts
Characters do still have some stats: hit points, speed and resistances to status ailments like blight. But the simpler pool helped Sigman go wild designing trinkets, the only gear you'll be equipping. Once you found a trinket in the first game you could keep it forever, so popular strategies revolved around the most powerful ones. Trinkets usually had a negative stat trade-off, but only a few stats really mattered, so the design options were limited POE divine orbs .