In short, if you feel the game is being gnarly-levels of punishing initially, don't worry - it's just how it goes and becomes easier later once you start gaining more familiarity with the game and the features it throws you.

You'll be recruiting level 0's, have limited (if any) trinkets, have to wait until the Hamlet is unlocked to begin levelling/gearing heroes properly and unable to select desired skills, etc, etc - all of which aids you in managing stress in various ways. Indeed - first 10-20 weeks of the game will be the roughest patch. You can also pull them to the front as stress dealers often have pathetic attacks in the frontrow. Your goal is to nuke at least 1 of the stress dealers within the first or second round. The Plague Doctor and Bounty Hunter can work great together one can stun, and the other can FINISH HIM on the 3rd position. Remember that if you can't outright kill them (like Hellion) you can focus on trying to stun them for a while (like with the Plague Doctor or Vestal) so they lose their turn. Plague Grenade and Blinding Gas can take out the back row alone) Occultist (Sacrifical Stab, Abyssal Artillery, Daemon's Pull) Grave Robber (Lunge, Throwing Dagger and Poison Dart) Bounty Hunter (Come Hither and Finish Him) Arbalest (Backrow is the intended target.

They are not all born equal in the job but they can do it. The following Heros are good for dealing with the backrow. If you build a team that only hit the frontline hard, you will suffer a heavy stress attack as they will have free reins to just hit you with stress attacks. The game place the stress dealers in the backrow and have damage dealers and blockers in the front row. They are typically the following enemies: Since healing is rather easy to solve, you want to nuke down the stress dealers. There is a few types of enemies but the majority of enemies fall into: But the best way is to prevent it as much as possible.

Darkest dungeon stress wipe