It’s no secret thatDarkest Dungeon 2is a difficult game. Filled with punishing mechanics, tense fights and punishing consequences, it’s a roguelite for the hardened. But for dedicated players that muscle through the difficulty, there’s a lot of gratification and fulfillment at the end of the arduous road.
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The difficulty of Darkest Dungeon 2 even carries over to its achievements. If you’re dedicated enough you may want to challenge yourself with unlocking them to show off on your profile. This list is of the absolute most difficult ones in Darkest Dungeon 2, whether because of the time commitment they require, the presence of random chance or the extreme skill required to pull them off.
820,000 Leagues Above the Sea
This achievement is only difficult because of the sheer amount of time required to unlock it. Unlocking 20,000 Leagues Above the Sea requires you to travel a total of 20,000 leagues across your Darkest Dungeon 2 runs. Unfortunately, there’s no way to track the total leagues you have traveled in the game either, so you have to just keep trucking until it eventually pops.
One way to unlock this achievement faster is to make it further in runs, increasing the distance that you travel each time to cut down on the number of runs that you have to play. Thankfully, though, if you plan on playing enough to get the other achievements on this list, you’ll probably get this one along the way.
7The World as It Was
Finally, Some Hope
The Altar of Hope is a unique location at the start and end of every run in Darkest Dungeon 2. At the Altar, you may spend a currency called Candles of Hope to upgrade the altar, unlock specific items and assign memories to your team of heroes.
The World as It Was achievement is for fully upgrading the Altar. This can take some time as dying during a run will result in you losing most of the candles you have gathered. The best way to unlock it is to focus primarily on the upgrades while saving the memories for later once the Altar is stronger.
6Not Today!
Even Death May Die
To unlock Not Today! you’ll have to kill the miniboss Death. This is difficult to prepare for as to face her you have to have the Flagellant in your party, which gives her a chance to ambush you after another encounter. So you’ll already be weakened and battered when the fight with Death even starts.
The best way to deal with Death is with burn damage, as she has a low resistance against it, so bring a Runaway to your party. Along with the Runaway and Flagellant, we recommend a Jester to help manage stress and a Vestal to help keep everyone standing.
5Circle of Life
Leave Them in Shambles
The Circle of Life is a two-part achievement that requires you to unlock theShambler’s Spawn petat the Altar of Hope and then have it equipped while killing the Shambler miniboss. The Shambler’s Spawn pet decreases your chance of scouting regular locations by 100% while increasing your chance of scouting oblivion ingresses on your journey by 200%.
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Once you have the pet unlocked and equipped you’ll need to find a Shambler on your run. You can summon one for a fight if you come across a Shambler’s Altar in the Academic Study, but that’s inconsistent. A better method is letting the Shambler find you while traveling by keeping your flame level below 30. Then attack aggressively and bring some group heals to stay on your feet while you attempt to burst its health down before it can hurt you too much.
4Hat Trick
Your Lairs Won’t Protect You
To unlock Hat Trick, you need to kill three lair bosses in a single run. This can be extremely challenging, so you’ll want to bring experienced characters along that you know how to strategize and play well with. Of the four lair bosses in Darkest Dungeon 2, it’s best to do this against the Dreaming General, Librarian and Leviathan.
Before starting your run you should focus on building a team that can consistently deal damage to all ranks, even if one of them is temporarily out of the fight. Then stock up on plenty of combat items to help you burst down their health and healing items to heal your party while they focus on damage.
3The Clash/Utopia
It’s All About Who You Know
These achievements are grouped because they both relate to your party’s opinions of one another. At the start of your journey, they’ll all feel neutral toward one another, so you will have to plan right from the start to get them sympathetic with one another for Utopia or hostile toward one another for The Clash.
To manipulate your party’s relationships you need to keep a careful eye on how your actions during the journey impact them. Thankfully this is well communicated with blue symbols under characters in combat indicating that an action will decrease a relationship and glowing portraits while traveling indicate improving relationships. You can also change how much you have heroes help the other members of your party or purchase items like drinks and playing cards at inns to help everyone get along.
2Grand Slam
For this achievement, you need to clear all five of Darkest Dungeon 2’s actswith one team. This means that none of them can die or be swapped out to adapt as you progress through the acts. A solid team for this achievement is, in placement order, Berserker Hellion, Exanimate Flagellant, Arsonist Runaway and Alchemist Plague Doctor.
With this comp for your team, you’ll be focusing entirely on damage over time effects like bleed and poison. You can use the Flagellant to taunt enemies and heal himselffromo tank damage while using the Hellion to relieve stress for the entire party. Then just grab as many trinkets as you can to boost your damage over time and improve your speed to go before your enemies get a chance and you should be able to clear all five acts unless bad RNG gets in the way.
1Hard Mode
For Those Who Wish to Suffer
The Stygian Blaze item makes Darkest Dungeon 2 even harder and more punishing than normal, and for the Hard Mode achievement, you have to beat the game with it. This is no meager feat. There’s a comp that works well to do so, though. In order of rank take a Ravager Hellion, Scourge Flagellant, Sharpshot Highwayman and Alchemist Plague Doctor.
With this comp, you’re going to focus almost entirely on ending fights quickly with your absurdly high damage output. Focus on using skills that damage as many enemies at once as possible, anddon’t risk delaying the end of fightsto try to get more heals in. With your high damage, the early areas of the game shouldn’t be too challenging, so you should do every fight that you can to scale your party and keep the momentum going into the later regions.
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