Can you give us noobs some thoughts on the gold system.
Like the OP, I played about 4 hours about a year ago, then waited until full release. Played a couple hours last night, and gold runs out quickly. Worst, if you don't use what you bought at the beginning you only get back pennies on the dollar when you finish a dungeon.
Did well until my first medium dungeon. Got surprised during camp and all of my characters died of a heart attack on the same round. lol. Sucked because I lost at least one good character.
note I haven't done a play through of the most recent release of Darkest Dungeon
my last play through was around the Houndmaster release and had the Heart Attack / corpse mechanic along, the Cove dungeon, and higher costs to fix quirks / diseases
I tended to try to play it safe with things meaning ~8 torches for small runs, ~12 torches for medium runs, and ~16 torches for long runs. I'd lower my torch for greater loot return if I was nearing completion of a dungeon and my characters looked to be good on health & stress. some people do torchless runs. I don't since I prefer more consistency and less RNG critting from monsters. at some point, there was a release that had a chance to spawn a boss monster when going through a dungeon completely dark
I prioritized getting the armor upgrade ASAP to increase HP & dodge rating. I also prioritized upgrading the discounts for the town stress heal to reduce future gold costs.
I tended to favor classes that could health heal and/or stress heal or provide decent stun utility. I never leveled with some classes like Jester and some classes like Highwayman don't seem that great to me.
I tended to focus on leveling a large group of characters instead of focusing on a specific group. I'd do Lvl 1 bosses with a group of full upgraded Lvl 2 chars, Lvl 3 bosses with upgraded Lvl 4 chars, etc.
the corpse mechanic can be used in your favor at times by positioning enemy mobs around with movement skills. if you want to try to lengthen out a monster encounter to health heal / stress heal your party up, you will likely need to keep 2 mobs alive. something like the Plague Doctor's stun skill on the back 2 rows can help lengthen out an encounter. a stress mechanic kicks in if you keep 1 mob alive and lengthening the encounter may or may not be worth it depending on your character's health pool vs stress pool.
I tend to favor killing stress generating monsters first because stress costs gold to heal in town while the HP pool goes back to full in town. there are some exceptions like the corpse exploding zombie in Coves due to the potential for massive HP loss being too great.
always remember to equip trinkets. I tended to favor the +hit, +damage % & +dodge rating trinkets and would usually have 1 character with a +scouting or less surprise trinket.
my party composition usually had 2 melee, 1 range, 1 healer, and class preference was towards those that offered health heal, stress heal, stun. I didn't value movement skills that much. Debuff skill value depended on what boss I was going up against.
I'd recommend researching boss mechanics instead of trying to figure it out yourself. there are some bosses which can become much much harder depending on party composition.
some dungeons will have specific DoT damage. for example, Coves has many monsters that inflict bleed. so be prepared and bring bandages or classes that can remove the bleed DoT.
try to keep a reserve of gold available so if catastrophe hits a party, you'll still have enough remaining gold to provision the next party instead of being caught with your pants down.
at some point you're going to need to do some inventory management while in a dungeon and decide whether the value of a provision, gold, trinket, or upgrade currency is worth the inventory slot or not.
be aware that selling trinkets will give you gold