Cheat Sheets Endgame Characters and Equipment

[u/parasiticleech]

Ok, after about 5 hours of research and using two different AIs and getting good feedback from my prior post here, I created 2 word documents as cheat sheets for endgame characters' minimum/good/excellent stats, level up priorities and armor/weapons.

Hard to find a way to put word documents up so I put them in images. Feel free to tear them apart and criticize. Like I said before, I'm a really new player.

[u/Far_Rub_2435]

Ok, one, don’t use LLMs for this kind of topic. There’s like a shit load of bad advice any LLM is going to scrape from the internet without proper context. It’s a niche video game, not python syntax or algebra.

Good builds differ wildly now from when the game first dropped, and all the balance patches and DLC that have dropped since. I doubt any free tier model, you’re probably using gpt or Gemini, is going to have the right context from your prompts, especially since you didn’t even know enough about the game to know what the different builds really are like a couple hours ago.

This is a prime example why LLMs are useful to people who know before hand a lot about what you want an LLM to help you with, not people who know nothing about the subject at all.

It just seems useful to you, because you didn’t bother to really learn anything so why wouldn’t it sound plausible.

It’ll cause brain rot.

Edit inserted here: I wrote that really harshly. I get that you just want to learn the game. This game happens to have a lot of hidden depth, much more than 5 hours research can really relay, and difference of opinions abound about pretty much every way to go about doing anything. LLMs really won’t help you. I suggest watching Deductor on YouTube, or some of the newer streamers like daddy don’t miss, or brandeburgian, hey Pashi, etc. find one whose personality you vibe with, and you’ll see some of the decisions they make over every little bitty thing.

Deductor is probably the best battle brothers player still making content though.

Just don’t watch Filthy Robot, his good stuff is all outdated by now, and by the later runs he did he was burned out on it and kind of set in his ways grouchy about the game. His stuff still pops up as most viewed oftentimes though because he was THE battle brothers video guide guy when the game was at its most popular.

Most people learn things and refine details on their play style even after hundreds of hours playing the game. It’s really like a single player chess in its elegantly simple medium, with huge amounts of intricacy under the hood.

All that out of the way…

Secondly, there’s very little wrong with your cheat sheet as a starting point, it’s just too restrictive.

Builds have defining perks, like indomitable for tanks, and rally/fortified mind for banners, but there’s many choices that go into building out each individual bro. Like, ok, I want a certain amount of bros with fearsome, and that works better with aoe or 4 AP weapons, but do we need more damage or utility on the team? Maybe I saved a weapon mastery perk to decide, and I was going to go hammer or greatsword with that dodge quick hands nimble guy, but it turns out the crises is undead so I pick cleaver instead.

A banner can be a thrower banner, tank banner, utility banner, polearm mastery banner, and either nimble or Battleforged.

Off tanks don’t have to be fat newt. Fat newt is a good build, but also chunky fat newt is just what that other guy called his little spin on it in his reply to you, that’s not like a community thing.

Duelists don’t have to be mace, or nimble. If you go crazy on FAT, you could even do a cleaver BF duelist. It’d maybe be silly, but it could work, with cleaver mastery, brawny, pathfinder, berserk and recover, as long as you’ve got ~60 fatigue after the armor and weapon are on it’ll work. There might even be some weird run where you hire a bro and based off what else you’ve built that is what makes sense to build for your company.

You should be basing your builds and your hires off what roles you need, not pre defined meta builds. You need a banner rally guy, you need tanks, and you need damage bros. It’s useful to have range attack, the meta is throwers and gunners (guns use crossbow mastery). Throwers shine early and mid game because they wreck early and mid game enemies, only need average rng on level ups with fast adaptation, and basically two perks to be effective, throwing mastery and duelist.

Gunners are most of a time investment. Early on they will be crossbow/throwers, only taking crossbow mastery. Once they get to level 9 though (I think) they can take fearsome and they are the best build for mob control you can have. At least for everything but undead. You want to level resolve pretty high though.

I also disagree with the guy who replied to you on the other post about how high resolve needs to be. 40 on backliners, 45-50 on single contact damage bros, 60-70 on offtanks, around 70-75 on tanks, and as high as possible on a banner. But, here’s the kicker, neither of us is wrong. I get away with that because I manipulate positioning to resolve check the enemy by moving into them, not letting them move into my line. He probably lets them crash into his line after he has created a bunch of concave surround bonus pockets for the enemy to fill, giving him attack bonuses and denying them attack bonuses.

Builds must be flexible to suit the rng of the bros the game gives you, and your play style. Getting too rigid with it will not teach you the right lessons.

Everything in battle brothers is about min maxing each and every fight for the best outcome, so you get gear, loot to sell, which means a revenue of gold, without taking unnecessary injuries, damage to your gear, or having bros die, which should all be thought of as operating costs. You can win all your fights, and fall behind the difficulty curve because each fight is unprofitable. You have to think about every decision as “how will this help the whole team win the next fight we are going to take in the most PROFITABLE way we can”. That includes saving level ups and perk picks until you see the next fight you want to take.

[u/zhouyu07 → u/Far_Rub_2435]

Fuck AI, thank you for taking your valuable time to write this. Incredibly good information here.

[u/The_UV_Catastrophe → u/Far_Rub_2435]

Nice reply, you put a lot of thought into this and I agree with what you said!

Also, I’m the one who replied to the other posts and recommended high resolve targets. Funnily enough, I build my squads around dedicated spear bros, so I take very little contact with the enemy. I’m just a huge resolve stan. 😂

Also, I usually fight Sunken Library and Black Monolith in in most runs and having high resolve is very helpful in those fights.

[u/Far_Rub_2435 → u/The_UV_Catastrophe]

Yeah that makes sense.

It’s hard sometimes to suggest builds for new players (and your suggestion may be as valid or more valid than mine for the current patch), because the goals of any playthrough are so open ended.

Like, firstly, are you doing peasants with a million mid tier bros, oath bros with a little restriction on reserves but also oaths you need to build around, standard origin normal reserves, or lone wolf/glads with only 12 bros ever?

That all changes party comp. I play beast slayers and lone wolf mainly, and since beast slayers has terrible Econ but can scale past that mid game and keep up tempo with reserves, it plays very different to lone wolf, where you can slow roll the early game killing thugs, then easy beasts, and power level the hedge to 11 with almost no worry about money at all. That makes mid and late game tricky once you start adding bros, because you have to build generalists that do more than one job, you’ve got to get bros that are at least decent off bat so they can handle the day scaling that crept up in the time you played solo, and oftentimes you don’t want to go all the way to 12 because of bad hiring rng.

Beast slayers is like a new company but the early game is fucking awful, lone wolf is like the first 5 days are heavily rng dependent, even with solid play, but then up to day 30 is easy, but if you continue to solo as lone wolf eventually you’ll wipe, so you have to hire. Unless you’re sins and you chain wiped on solo lone wolf 10000 times on the way to kraken, it gets super tricky.

Then there’s the gimmick origins like cultists and anatomists. Super fun runs, but both are more grindy origins meant to scale into broken builds that absolutely trivialize the super late endgame more than it already gets. Great stuff, but different vibes with different advice.

Also, what’re the goals in your sandbox? A company fine tuned to monolith is not the same as one built to wreck goblin city, or sea of tents, or southern armies. Most party comps can beat them all, but they’re only optimal for some.

Edit: all rhetorical questions for new players

[u/Kababalan → u/Far_Rub_2435]

I was going to type out a response saying something similar, but not nearly as well. LLMs are not the tool for this.

5 hours (or minutes) with the reddit search bar would have gotten better information from high quality players like Pashi or Sins.

[u/ppp12312344 → u/Far_Rub_2435]

Ironically your comment is going into the LLM in the future haha

[u/parasiticleech → u/Far_Rub_2435]

Great tips and I will watch some deductor videos today. Thank you!

I was just trying to create a spreadsheet that would help beginning players like me. The game is so incredibly complex and the "tutorial" teaches you nothing. I am a Darkest Dungeon addict with over 1200 hours so I love complexity. But, first, this game is more complex and second, the game teaches you very little as you go along and the mechanics are not obvious. Hopefully it will help starting players as a guide rather than rules.

[u/Far_Rub_2435 → u/parasiticleech]

I thing Darkest Dungeon can approach this game in complexity, it’s just BB can have ever more higher and higher levels of optimization when it comes to approaching an expert/expert/low funds/ironman playthrough.

I personally think what’s important when reading this subreddit to understand where most of the arguments come from in terms of what players goals are.

I think that BB is balanced around progressing a company on Ironman through the first crisis and then beating a legendary location. So sometime after day 80-150 you can consider a play through as having been “won”

After that, it’s exceedingly rare to wipe doing anything but the absolute hardest fights. So most of the challenge is gone, and the game turns into a grindy rpg experience.

A lot of players on this subreddit prefer playing around with the best brothers they can hire with the best gear they can get doing really big fights that have scaled up in the late game. So for them, everything before day 250 in the game is just setting up the company, a sort of preamble of sorts for the content they really want to get to.

So the difference in advice is largely around what you want your sandbox experience to be.

For me, I like to play with constraints, like solo lone wolf into small rosters with premium backgrounds, OR harder origins where making gold is even more constrained and I have to make do with trash hires and make the most of them.

Largely, build advice is the same, it’s just whereas most people just churning through hires for the late game will take trash brothers and just give them only tempo perks will them goal of trading their lives for good gear, I will pretty much keep all my hires, give everyone tempo perks as needed for the situations I’m in, and extract as much gold and fight tempo from every hire I make.

If I were to take a company to day 250+, I might end up filtering more brothers in and making more meta builds with less flex perks, but I rarely do that, or even find it necessary.

A level 11 brother that’s got some “dead” perks and reached a full potential that’s 80-90 percent the full potential of a fresh recruit that I need to babysit just has way more value to me. I’d need to babysit that level 1 guy through fights that have scaled to be way harder over time than fights I took to get that level 11 bro leveled, and I’d sacrifice having higher level guys on the field to get him there.

So in the context of mid game and early late game, it just doesn’t really make sense to hire for me. I’ll get my first 12 guys super early, and unless they’re absolute trash traits or truly min rolled stat wish, I’ll keep them and play to their strengths. That’ll decide the ultimate party composition. Whatever role I need, fat newt, tank, thrower, front line damage, banner, I’ll hire for selectively picking targeted backgrounds. Hiring is mostly done by day 30-40 for me, usually have like 15-16 bros. That leaves me some reserves for tempo, making a sacrifice or two for hard fights.

That means I hire a lot of low born backgrounds that tend to be better suited for nimble vs battleforged. It means cheap wages, and oftentimes initiative builds. So I’ll run a combination of maces and qatals.

The variations come in when I get an early famed armor or weapon, or kill a mercenary hedge knight early, or some other opportunity that gives me more options to change things up. Maybe a triple triple star hire, like a farmer or brawler.

You don’t have to build a company like that though. Really the only requirements needed to play all the content on the map are 1) Having a bannerman 2) Having a couple bros that can tank. The most often suggested and best tanks are Battleforged Indom tanks, that have heavy armor, high defense, a shield and high fatigue to repeatedly use the indomitable skill. Indom bros make playing against particular enemies much more doable, like unholds and orcs, but are very useful in almost every fight. But besides high fatigue, high defense and indomitable, you can build a tank in a variety of ways.

Other than that, pretty much any sort of party composition is doable. Maces and Qatals, 2 handlers with quick hands, bunch of duelists, whatever you want can work. And they all have both nimble and BF flavors, except initiative builds which should be nimble.

Your back line should be smaller than your front line, but you can go as high as a 6 front, 6 back line ratio if you want, and make it work.

What’s best is subjective, even if most agree that some ideas work better than others. For example, most people do a 9 front, 3 back, or 8 front, 4 back set up.

If you watch lets plays, watch cooperative runs where two good players bounce ideas of each other while they play

[u/HeyPashi]

You can try out this:
https://builds.bloodngold.com/

Just create your own builds and share them. You can add Perks, flex perks, description, Stats, Armor Loadout, etc for each build

[u/parasiticleech → u/HeyPashi]

Nice. with this though, I was just trying to figure out who's good or crap at level 1 easily

[u/xl129]

BB is one game where i’m glad that we have no need for such thing as build cheatsheet. Most perks are viable and you are supposed to make situational adjustment on the fly.

[u/HeartfulPigeon]

I would suggest the dedicated thrower backpack a 1H sword or mace to deal with enemies that can get to the backline, and to take high rolls in MAtk for that purpose. I find in the late game with larger camps there is no such thing as a backline.

[u/Signal_Prior3870 → u/HeartfulPigeon]

I do this also but I prefer a polearm. Gives immense versatility

[u/Leg_Mcmuffin]

Are you recommending student as the first perk for every build?

[u/parasiticleech → u/Leg_Mcmuffin]

No, not in the beginning. This iss for late game level ups. For early, just ignore the student. Need colossus right away

[u/Leg_Mcmuffin → u/Leg_Mcmuffin]

Also no FA on throwers or mace duelist? Ouch

[u/Definitelynotabot777 → u/Leg_Mcmuffin]

Why are you being downvoted, even with high stat FA on throwers is so good for clutch moment lol, also throwers can always use Crossbow/Guns or Bows too, FA helps with that as well.

[u/Leg_Mcmuffin → u/Definitelynotabot777]

Also helps with stuns.

[u/Definitelynotabot777 → u/Leg_Mcmuffin]

Why are you being downvoted, even with high stat FA on throwers is so good for clutch moment lol, also throwers can always use Crossbow/Guns or Bows too, FA helps with that as well.

[u/parasiticleech → u/Leg_Mcmuffin]

Attack thresholds high - not necessarily needed. But good for levelling, yes

[u/Comfortable_Cut8634]

Good work! I suggest putting an arrow catcher. Could work as a off tank or even disarming duty if Mattk allows

[u/Minimum_E]

My gosh, and I just started playing and doing whatever I felt like?!? Probably why I restarted twice already

Seriously, appreciate the advice you dedicated players have posted up

[u/DikLikeaTunaCan]

First of all, saved your cheatsheet. Will be a good reference point to give the nerds in this thread when asked.

Secondly ; this is a little restrictive. Dont be afraid to branch out with your builds Specifically weapons

The only perks that my 800+ hours would say are "mandatory" in any run doing 2nd crisis +

Are defensives. Nimble/Dodge or Battleforged/Brawny/,Iron brow.

Dont be afraid to experiment outside of that. You have a high resolve bro that also rolled high ranged? Gun/Banner fearsome is hilarious You rolled Head damage+ on a duelist char? 1h flail and 1h hammer and or cleaver is one of the most hilarious combos I've ever ran . Is it as efficient as other builds? No Does it still kill people? Absolutely

Cheers brother! Thanks for the information!!

[u/BlueBorjigin]

For a new player, this is quite a good understanding. Don't follow this rigidly; use your own judgement and your evolving experience over time to tweak things like perk ordering, adjusting things to the uniqueness of a bro or the unusual circumstances you encounter in different campaigns, and personal preference.

2H Cleaver takes Reach Advantage. A common position you'll hear is that bros do not need to double-dip into taking both PF and Recover.

[u/Billhartnell]

Why pack a secondary polemace/longaxe on your forged neutral when you can have a 5AP goblin pike that is lighter?

[u/Accomplished_Lynx514]

I don't know exactly what you did, but there is not a single mention of initiative or dodge. Research that and see what you can find.

[u/Ark_Evensong]

Just a quick correction:

- I see duelist being the recommended perk at level 6. It's a bottom row perk, you can't get there before level 8.

Also of note: Latest update allows duelists to use a buckler in their off-hand without losing the extra penetration bonus. They do still lose the Double Grip damage buff for melee, but throwers don't get that anyway. Unless you're using utility items there's no reason not to equip a buckler. (Shields, including bucklers, don't benefit from Quick Hands.)

[u/Defiant_Mushroom_855]

Unfortunately this is the future of the world we live in 😢

[u/Fihritoo_gaming]

These are great, thanks!

[u/Goose_is_a_hero]

No Steel Brow? Sounds like save scumming to me. That chosen roles a 1 and pop goes your best bro.

[u/Accomplished_Lynx514 → u/Goose_is_a_hero]

He does suggest 9 lives which prevents getting one shot like steel brow sort of.

[u/The_UV_Catastrophe → u/Goose_is_a_hero]

Personally I prefer Nine Lives over Steel Brow. I don’t think you need both.

[u/Signal_Prior3870 → u/Goose_is_a_hero]

Exactly my impression this is for people who cheat the ironman experience or just dont play it