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The Sluice faction. Only 4 enemies here, and no boss. The comps here seem to be fairly counterable with any comp, though having some flexibility for enemies like Skiver is important. Bring stealth clears. Omni-cleaves will also go a long way, as two kinds of pig spawn with dodge.
Darkest Dungeon 2 Swine Guide
Swine Skulker
Priority: 2
HP: 15, Speed: 4
Spawns with 0-2 Dodge tokens
The stealthy damage dealing pig, the skulker’s main gimmick is his tendency to use Skitter to give himself 2 stealth tokens and a strength. He then follows this up with any of his moves: Pigsticker if he’s up front, which will have a massive crit rate, and fouled shank or ragged hook from the back. All of these will deal blight from stealth, though the fouled shank will always deal some and can inflict a disease. Front-rank Skulkers can deal some huge damage with pigsticker in particular, and are often best countered with a tank that’s using taunt. Stealth clear is the obvious counter to these guys, and it’s worth packing some chalk dust or a stealth counter move when going to the sluice just for their stealth, to avoid their high output and ability to hit you multiple times from stealth with blight.
Swine Skiver
Priority: 1
HP: 20, Speed: 3
Starts with 0-2 (1-2?) dodge
He’s back. You remember him, don’t you? From a nightmare, in DD1. Yeah, he’s still an ♥♥♥. He uses Cripple them to absolutely decimate your back 3 ranks with blight, damage, and stress, and he uses spit to roast to turn your Leper off for an entire fight by pushing him all the way to the back and stunning him. If you’re lucky, he’ll use Shrieking flight up front, which will only do some damage and move him all the way back, so that he can start again.
Skivers do tremendous damage to a team. They should be killed immediately and with extreme prejudice.
Swine Brute
Priority: 3
HP: 40, Speed: 0, DBR: 25%
Spawns with 1-2 block
A very tanky and hard hitting combatant, the Swine brute exists to soak damage and to hit your front line with powerful attacks like Squeal and Smash. Squeal is a single target stress attack, and Mallet is a front rank cleave that mainly deals high direct damage but can deal a bit of stress. If he’s in the back he can use gore to stun, bleed, and knockback a target while moving him up front, which means he’s actually more irritating in the back. Normally it’s better to mitigate him and kill some/all of his friends than to rush him down because of his bulk, but without a mitigation strategy he can deliver quite a lot of damage to any team’s frontline.
Wilbur
Yes, That Wilbur
HP: 48, Speed: 0, DBR: 33%
Spawns with 1-2 block+
The champion variant of the Swine Brute and our old friend. Or allegedly anyway, he sure can show up a lot. He is a harder hitting version of the Brute and uses many of the same tricks. However, the Skulkers gain the ability to mark targets while he’s around, and he will use Obliterate Body, his special move, on anyone unfortunate enough to get hit with a combo token. There’s no rallying-flare to save you anymore, though moves like Stand Fast can be used to remove said tokens. Treat him like a harder swine brute and be wary of his high damage with Obliterate Body and Masses in particular.