INTRO:
Some of the appeals of Darkest Dungeon are the backstories and personalities of the adventurer classes. Unfortunately, due to an overarching design policy that has been set in stone since the conception of the game, the adventurers are meant to be little more than replaceable tools.
However, Red Hook Studios has heard the lamentations about the stories behind the adventurers not being particularly significant in the gameplay. The Shieldbreaker DLC is their response.
PREMISE:
Like the other adventurer classes, the Shieldbreaker is a damaged soul that has foolishly decided that the Ancestor’s estate is the best place that they could go to next.
The Shieldbreaker is a former slave that has earned her freedom in a rather nasty manner, specifically one which involves self-mutilation. Unfortunately, she has not entirely reconciled with this traumatic event. Somehow, this baggage has become so bad, it can put the other adventurers in danger.
NIGHTMARES:
Perhaps the most notable improvement that this DLC provides is how the backstory of an adventurer class significantly affects the gameplay. Specifically, the backstory of the Shieldbreaker is expressed as more than just a bunch of Trinkets that are associated with her.
The Shieldbreaker has an issue with nightmares. The nightmares always recur whenever her party makes camp and rests during a quest. No protection from night-time ambushes can prevent them (so the player should consider spending Respite points on something else instead, such as buffing the Shieldbreaker’s stress resistance).
The entire party is dragged into her nightmare, not unlike how the entire party is somehow sucked into another place and another time when facing the Shambler or the Fanatic.
Worse, the Shieldbreaker is hit with a serious Horror de-buff; she gains 20 points of Stress every round for 6 rounds, guaranteeing a resolve test if the player did not do anything to prepare for this; it cannot be removed either. Furthermore, she is guaranteed to gain an Affliction.
The party is then forced to fight awfully large snakes (which will be described later). Many of them appear to specifically target the Shieldbreaker above others, so the player has to keep her alive.
More importantly, the player only has several turns to slay the snakes. If the snakes are not slain by then, or the Shieldbreaker is brought to Death’s Door, the fight ends. However, the Shieldbreaker suffers serious de-buffs and also stresses out the other party members.
Obviously, the player courts great risk if the Shieldbreaker is included in the party.
REWARDS FROM RESOLVED NIGHTMARES:
With great risk comes great rewards. If the player manages to crush the dream-snakes while preserving the Shieldbreaker, the player is rewarded with considerable loot (from somewhere) and a quest-duration buff for Stress resistance.
The nightmares no longer occurs if the player has successfully resolved all 7 permutations of the nightmare (thus gaining all 7 journal entries). This means that the player will not be getting the rewards this way anymore.
SHIELDBREAKER TRINKETS:
Among the loot is a Trinket for the Shieldbreaker. This is only way to gain the Trinkets that are unique to the Shieldbreaker. There is only ever one of each, no matter how many Shieldbreakers that the player has. (All Shieldbreakers share the same nightmare progress tracker too.)
There is a risk that the player might lose such a hard-won Trinket during the course of a quest, due to bad luck, bad decisions or even bad clicks. The only way to regain it is to have the luck (or bad luck) to gain the Shrieker event, and successfully fight the Shrieker. The lost Trinkets are somehow in the Shrieker’s stash.
AEGIS SCALES:
Every snake that the player defeats yields an Aegis Scale. This is a consumable item that grants one point of the Block Buff, which will be described later.
Barring mods, the Scales are the only way for a character to gain the Block buff if he/she does not have any abilities that grant it.
SNAKES:
There are three types of Snakes. One of them is a Riposte-using, Bleed-applying snake. The weakest of the three starts each battle with the Stealth buff (more on this later) and has a high chance of scoring critical hits. The third is a two-slot brute that can heal itself, making it the most difficult of the three (if the player is trying to end the fight as quickly as possible).
The resolution of the nightmares does not mean that the snakes have gone away; somehow, some of them have slipped out of the Shieldbreaker’s nightmares and joined the menagerie of enemies that the player would encounter. There is a very small but real chance that a regular enemy encounter would be replaced by a fight with the snakes.
STEALTH:
The Shieldbreaker DLC introduces the Stealth buff. This buff prevents members of the other team from deliberately targeting a character with this buff. However, attacks that hit multiple enemies can hit the character, if he/she/it happens to be within range. There are also some adventurer classes that can remove the Stealth buff (the Shieldbreaker being one of them).
(A few classes also have some of their abilities tweaked to give them Stealth too, such as the Grave Robber’s Shadow Fade, though these only occurred later after the release of this DLC package.)
Some enemies start with the Stealth buff. This was introduced during the development of the game to protect some squishy enemies that happen to have tactically useful abilities; prior to this, most players target these enemies right away. The buff wears off after two turns, during which they can do their thing if they are not killed. Crones, Pelagic Shamans and Brigand Fusiliers are among the enemies that benefited from this.
BREAK GUARD:
Guard buffs can now be dispelled directly with attacks that Break Guard. This is to address problems with having to Stun guarding characters that might already have considerably high Stun resistances.
ARMOR PIERCING:
Armor Piercing sounds like a new gameplay element; it is an attack modifier that ignores Protection ratings, but the Grave Robber actually already has something similar.
However, Armor Piercing has another secondary statistic: the amount of Protection that is ignored. In the case of the Shieldbreaker’s Pierce, all of a target’s Protection rating is ignored. She has a camping skill that grants the Armor Piercing property to other party members, but they can only ignore 15% of a target’s Protection rating.
BLOCK:
Perhaps the most interesting gameplay element is the Block buff, which thus far, is only available to player characters. Block negates the damage from a hit that landed, no matter how much it does. Obviously, it is of great use against hard-hitting enemies, like Bosses. However, the Block also triggers for low-damage attacks, thus wasting it. Block is a buff that has no duration, but is automatically lost at the end of battle. Block does not negate the secondary effects of a landed hit, such as the application of de-buffs.
SHIELDBREAKER SKILLS:
The Shieldbreaker has abilities that shift her around the party, more so than even the Jester or the Grave Robber. Therefore, the player has to be mindful about her position in the party, as well as those of others in order to avoid disruption of the party’s combat performance.
The Shieldbreaker has a low hit-point counter, but compensates with high Dodge ratings and a skill that grants her Block. She is the only official adventurer with skills that are Armor Piercing, Breaks Guard and Negate Stealth, essentially making her the poster girl for these attack properties when they debuted together with her namesake DLC.
LAST WORDS:
The caveat with Block, Break Guard, Armor Piercing and Stealth is that they were eventually implemented in the base game, which dilutes the value of this DLC package. Fortunately, there had been price readjustments of the DLC package.
Currently, the price tag of the DLC on Steam is rather small; it is in fact the result of some readjustments, likely due to the incorporation of many gameplay elements like Stealth and Block into the main game. The most that the purveyor would be missing out if he/she skips this is the content that is specifically associated with the Shieldbreaker.