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[Bauglir]

Generally, my experience is that when you hit a brick wall you want to grind up some gold and heirlooms with your Levels 0, 1, and 2 groups so that you can afford to fully kit out your Level 3+ ones with upgrades. Proper armor, weapons, and techniques make for a very solid party even without clever strategies. And good strategies have let me level dudes entirely sans upgrades up to around level 3 or 4, depending on how forgetful I get. I don't think they should put that advice in one of the loading screens, though - that sort of thing is the kind of thing that's intuitive enough to let people discover it. It'd be almost like telling people that a Plague Doctor works well with an Occultist because she can stop bleeding.

Also, pro tip: fight bosses at the maximum level the game will let you. So Level 2 for Tier 1, Level 4 for Tier 2. Tier 3 doesn't matter so much since there are no upgrades to be purchased at level 6, but IIRC you still get a bit of an edge in resistances and so might as well wait.

Also, think about party composition. My rule of thumb is to always have 1 healer, 1 "support" character, and 1 brute force attacker. Last one is a wild card, filled with whoever's convenient or happens to work nicely with the rest. Support, for me, means a character that enhances others but isn't great alone - a Plague Doctor setting Blight or Stun, or a Man-at-Arms providing buffs, or a Houndmaster managing group stress or setting bleed as situations call for it. They tend to fit well into any party, but some cute synergies can be useful (a Man-at-Arms can use Rampart to stun things while pushing a Crusader back far enough to use Holy Lance, for example). Try to make sure at least one, preferably two, have access to a self-moving ability to help keep you from spending a ton of dead turns if folks get pushed around.

I really like what Early Access has done for the game, actually. I've got a sense that many games use it as a means to charge for an unfinished product, but in this case they've used it effectively as a mechanism for getting feedback as development proceeds.

[Spehss _]

Seriously a button to remove all the trinkets from the heroes a la x-com would do a lot of good.

This is a thing actually, as of the holiday update or the human bondage update. It's a button in the trinkets "chest" menu.

Spoiler: party composition discussion (click to show/hide)

For party compositions, I typically go with a healer, a support, and 2 frontline dps. Dps is typically 2 hellions, 2 crusaders, 1-2 abominations, or 2 bounty hunters; healer is usually a vestal or arbalest or plague doctor, and support is generally a plague doctor, houndmaster, or jester. Plague doc heals status effects, blights/stuns targets, or buffs the damage of dps roles, houndmaster marks targets or inflicts bleed or heals stress, jester sits in the back playing a lute for everyone (buffing speed and crit or healing stress).

If the mission is short enough sometimes I'll take another support or backrow dps dealer (highwayman or houndmaster) instead of a healer. What classes I take depends on the other classes and where the mission is. Houndmaster, arbalest, and bounty hunters work well together because one could mark a target and the others could attack the marked target in the same turn, for example. Abominations can't work with vestals or crusaders. Bounty hunters are good vs humans, and humans most often appear in warrens or weald, or plague doctor and abominations work well in the cove due to low enemy blight resist, etc.

[Sirus]

Spoiler: Party composition (click to show/hide)

I've never gotten very far into the game, so I try to experiment with party layouts to find what works. Typically I shoot for a healer, a tank, and a couple of randoms for damage/support. If I have enough mobile characters I try to group them together.

One class I really love and try to bring often is the Plague Doctor. They've got a good number of useful support abilities, which are even more useful in the release version. They can inflict all major status effects on enemies. Disorienting Blast, for instance, is now a stunning shuffler that clears corpses, so it's great for forcing rear-rank harassment enemies forward. Combine that with the ability to potentially blight any ranks of enemies and a decently-powerful bleed attack...well yeah. I know some people say Plague Docs are terrible, but I don't really see it.

[Cthulhu]

Did you know you can change abilities during a mission?

[Sirus]

Yeah, I saw that in a stream a couple months ago. Could be useful, if you bothered to unlock and upgrade most of a character's skills I guess.

[Cthulhu]

Yes, especially if you made a mistake or didn't foresee issues in a teamcomp.

I just did a tier 2 with Abomination, Jester, Plague Doctor, and Occultist.  It didn't occur to me that abomination can't do anything in front row without transforming and that Jester doesn't have a lot of options in second row if the 2 and 3 slots are empty.

Overall though I'm liking Tier 2.  It feels more like what older Tier 1 was like when the difficulty was at its best.  It's tough but not crushingly so, and the investment needed for level 3 characters makes things more interesting too.  Not to mention the new monsters.  Don't want to spoil but there's lots of oh shit moments when you move into tier 2.  Some disappointing, some pretty fucking scary.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've only seen some so don't spoil anything for me bubbies.  The corpse eaters in the warrens aren't that scary, though they have a marking ability and I've been able to pretty effectively stun-juggle  them out of doing anything else, so I'm guessing I haven't seen what they're really capable of yet.

The ghouls are pretty scary but nothing crazy.  The swinetaurs are real fuckin' nasty though.  They're too strong to ignore but they take forever to kill and their allies are also nasty.

[Sirus]

I lost an entire team to The Collector, my first encounter with it. I'm not quite sure how to deal with it; you can't dish out enough damage to kill off the summons, you can't heal fast enough to outlast the damage the summons dish out, it can heal itself (via damaging your party members) AND summon healers AND can critheal just like your own healing can do...

You can't even build a party based around it like you can for bossfights, since there is no indication that it will show up and even scouting seemingly doesn't reveal it. Does it just randomly show up in order to wipe parties?

RIP Man-at-arms, duelist Highwayman, Bloody-Herb PlagueDoc, and Vestal.

[Cthulhu]

It's not that hard, really.  Kill the highwaymen ASAP, stun the man-at-arms when he guards a highwayman or the collector, ignore the vestal, and focus everything else on damaging the collector. 

He only has four possible drops, and three of them are unique, so once you've killed him a couple times he's basically just a gold dispenser.  The fourth item is 2500 gold.

[Sirus]

Ignoring the vestal goes against all that video games have taught me about going after the medic first. With a single good heal it can undo a round's worth of damage or more, the way my party was set up.

[Bauglir]

Aye, the Collector is basically a test of "Do you have good DPS targeting the enemy 4th rank?" If you do, it's no trouble. If you don't, you are in for a slog with a good chance of unavoidable failure. It's one of those things that pissed me off so much about it the first time, but I started hauling that sort of thing around anyway because boss fights often benefit tremendously from it anyway.

I don't bother killing any of the minions, even Highwaymen, until the Collector is dead. The only exception is Men-at-Arms, if I don't have a stunner available.

[LordPorkins]

Yah, the collector was no problem for me. I was just so pumped i had discovered a brand new enemy, unspoiled. Also, watch Baertaffy's experience with him. He died so fast Baer didn't really get to experience more than like 2 moves.

[ndkid]

I just got a TPK against the Hag with a Lv 3 party... I think my not bringing bleed was my downfall. Still, I am finding the Veteran levels more challenging than the early levels, so I do think they just adjusted the difficulty curve.

[Cthulhu]

They're fun.  Abilities like battlefield medicine become a lot more important as enemies can stack dots really heavily.  Plus with more and more heavily resisting monsters, and your own characters' higher direct DPS and crit chance, I feel like your own dots aren't as useful.

[Bauglir]

I wouldn't count out those conditions so soon. Against high Prot% enemies, they become very handy, especially once you start stacking them. It's important to keep them upgraded to keep pace with direct damage, though, since their power has nothing to do with equipment (I think).

[Sirus]

I think equipment just effects how much damage the initial hit does, if any.