And, one assumes, you'd need to grind the mid tier to reach the higher. Like, personally I find that too punishing, the only way to learn the mid game is to grind the early game (which takes some number of hours) a good number of times. Yup, that more or less is how that game goes. Got to the mid tier, got crushed, back to start. I really like this game, but holy cow can things take a turn for the worst in the span of a few turns. I then decided to take a couple of lvl 1 characters to the first Cove mission in order to get them leveled up and eventually end up retreating from there as well.

I end up retreating with only my highwayman remaining and abandon the quest. Some 120 hp monster completely wrecks my crusader, vestal, and plague doctor in the span of 3 turns. It was a complete-100%-of-room-battles run I see the light, I'm done with the final hallway and about to head to the final room.

All my food was gone by the final 2 rooms, all my units had about 25% of their health remaining. With about 20k gold and a solid team of a lvl 3 Crusader, lvl 3 Highwayman, lvl 2 Vestal, and a lvl 2 Plague Doctor I decide to take a short length lvl 3 run in the Weald. In all that time I only had a single casualty, a lvl 1 plague doctor. I was doing pretty good for about 8 hours. I absolutely loved the art style, narration, hub world, and overall feeling of satisfaction this game gives you. So I bought this game over the winter sale expecting a cool dungeon crawler.

Darkest dungeon leveling characters