Darkest Dungeon II – The Leper Hero Paths

The Leper is the latest Darkest Dungeon II class to get a dedicated article on the official website. In particular, we get a chance to learn more about the Poet and the Tempest hero paths available to this particular class known for its resilience and high if unreliable damage output.

Here’s more on that:

The Leper.
“When pain is accepted, strength flows in abundance.”

Poet or Tempest?

The Poet’s Path is one of acceptance and serenity in the face of hardship. With increased self heals, stun resist and move resist, the Poet Leper is able to take a great amount of damage, and become a veritable King of tanking.

A Leper who walks the Poet Path sacrifices damage in the name of incredible resilience. Rendered all but invulnerable to Stun, Daze, and movement skills, the Leper can easily maintain his position in the front ranks. While the buff to healing won’t affect his combat consumables, it turns Solemnity+ into a full self heal and allows him to recover from the brink of death with ease.

Liberal use of Withstand and Intimidate will keep the Leper under fire, protecting the rest of the team while he soaks up the damage. Pairing those with Ruin will allow the Leper to overcome the Path’s damage debuff, or you can lean into the reduced damage role and use support skills to set up your more offensively minded Heroes; Bash primes well for a Hellion’s Wicked Hack, or Purge can set the Highwayman up for a Pistol Shot Stun.

The strength of Solemnity means you can easily forgo healing Trinkets. Similarly, there’s no need for additional Move or Stun resistances. Stacking the Greater Hale Draught and Hag’s Hoard will drive the Leper’s HP up while the Reverberating Redoubt can turn the many hits he’s weathering into additional actions of his own.

If you’d rather focus on the Leper’s damage role, the Greater Gnarly Knuckles will undo the Path’s inherent damage penalty. As his attacks are frequently at risk of missing, the Enlightening Element and Calibrating Censer can offer excellent bonuses in the event of a failed attack.

The Tempest Path enrages the Leper, greatly increasing his Damage as well as giving him a higher debuff and disease resistance. Even though there is a decrease in the Leper’s Max HP and SPD, the higher damage allows him to dispatch enemies quickly.

The Tempest Leper sacrifices HP and Speed in favor of raw damage via the Chop skill. In addition to being able to score much larger hits at the top end, this raises the minimum damage of the skill to a much better value – those of you who always roll minimum will appreciate this. You know who you are.

The massive Disease resist buff renders the Leper all but immune and the 33% increase in Debuff resist helps protect him from Weak Tokens (keeping his damage up), Vulnerable Tokens (keeping his lower HP pool safe), and Blind Tokens (keeping his hits landing).

Did You Know: Debuff resistance helps the Leper resist his own self-inflicted Blinds. It will not, however, protect him from Intimidate’s Taunt Tokens.

The Tempest Path’s Debuff resist means that, in addition to Chop, you may be able to spam skills like Hew or Break without going Blind, particularly when stacked with Reflection+ for a whopping 73% base resistance.

The high Debuff resistance, coupled with easy access to Block Tokens, means that the Leper can still perform as a respectable tank in spite of reduced HP. He can easily shrug off side effects that would be inflicted on other Heroes; resisted Vulnerable Tokens won’t chip away at his supply of Block Tokens, after all.

Consider kitting the Leper out with Silent Treatment or Greater Protectorate to push his Debuff resist to unprecedented levels. If you really want to see the Big Numbers TM, Greater Gnarly Knuckles coupled with Grim Mask will maximize Chop’s potency. If you’d rather shore up some of the weaknesses introduced by the Path, Greater Hale Draught will undo most of the HP penalty and Greater Wolfsblood will get this sluggish Hero moving again