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RuneScoop.com  >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide for RuneScape       >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering            >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering - Introduction and Overview

The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering - Introduction and Overview About this Guide (Including Assumptions and Limitations)

Dungeoneering is designed around the concept of dungeon raiding. The goal is to form a party of adventurers (which can be just a party of one), enter a dungeon floor, and explore it. The goal is to get through the dungeon and fight a tough boss at the end to complete the floor. The idea is similar to how RuneScape players might form a group to go fight a high-end monster like the Kalphite Queen or the Giant Mole, but with some important differences.

The party starts out with limited equipment and supplies, and needs to fight monsters and collect resources and supplies to prepare for the final encounter with the boss. As you might imagine, bosses are high-level, challenging foes that usually have high combat levels, along with special abilities and immunities. When the boss is defeated, the team is rewarded, and can then do another dungeon.

Dungeons are dynamically generated on the fly, so each one is unique. The size, complexity and difficulty of the dungeon is strongly influenced by decisions that players make about how the game should create the dungeon floor. This in turn affects how much experience is given for completing it.

Dungeoneering is a fairly slow skill to train, but players learn over time how to complete floors more efficiently, allowing them to increase their training speed. It is the first skill to have levels above 99, reaching the “true mastery” level of 120 (at a whopping 104 million XP!)

Daemonheim, meaning “home of the demons”, is the only place where Dungeoneering is trained (at least for now). The name refers both to the above-ground area where you must travel to practice the skill, and also the dungeon where you actually train it. You are able to access it the first time via boat from Al-Kharid, and via convenient teleport after that.

There are presently 35 floors in Daemonheim, with an expansion to 60 floors predicted by the end of 2010. These floors are grouped into several themes, which vary in terms of their appearance and the monsters and bosses that appear within them. Players unlock new, deeper (higher-numbered) floors as they progress in the skill.

Daemonheim is nearly completely segregated from the rest of RuneScape. You cannot bring any items from the outside into the dungeons, except for a special ring that is part of the skill, and possibly an orb of Oculus for recording movies of your activities. Similarly, none of the items within Daemonheim can be brought out when a dungeon is completed.

One of the many ways that Dungeoneering differs from other skills is that it makes use of every other skill in the game. Just as you might need to take advantage of your ability to catch fish and cook them to prepare for a trip to the God Wars Dungeon, similarly, you may need to catch and cook fish to prepare for the boss encounter in Daemonheim. Other skills are also used in similar ways, such as Crafting and Smithing to make ranged and melee armor, Farming and Herblore to get herbs and potions, and so forth. In addition, skills are also used to get past obstacles in the dungeons, such as skill doors and challenge rooms (more on those shortly).

Resources such as fish, wood, ores and so forth are used in much the same way in Daemonheim as everywhere else, but the names of the resources and their exact statistics are different. For example, you don’t catch shark or cavefish in Daemonheim; you catch salve eels and blue crabs. Herbs, potions, branches, and combat equipment are similarly the same in overall function, but different in name and exact specifications.

To help make this new system less confusing, Jagex arranged equipment and resources into tiers from 1 to 11. You can examine nearly any item to see its tier and get an idea of its quality; higher tier items are higher in level and thus better (they heal more, do more damage, provide greater protection, etc.)

Dungeoneering is in many ways a “mini RuneScape” within RuneScape itself. Jagex took advantage of its isolation from the rest of the game to implement changes to gameplay that they might want to do everywhere, but which might alienate players who are used to things being a certain way.

One place where Jagex definitely made changes is with combat. In Daemonheim, the combat triangle has been given renewed emphasis, and there are monsters there that simply demand using the right attack style in order to kill them efficiently. You may be used to using an abyssal whip to kill everything above ground, but relying on one weapon style won’t work here!

To make Dungeoneering not be entirely about killing beasties and picking up their drops, Jagex mixes things up by adding puzzles and challenges to the dungeons. You need to collect keys to unlock doors in order to progress through a floor. You may also encounter special doors that require you to use non-combat skills, possibly in combination with tools. There are also whole rooms that will challenge your combat and non-combat skills, and even your mental prowess.

Another way that Dungeoneering is different than other skills is when it comes to rewards. In most skills, the main reward for leveling up the skill is unlocking skill abilities that can be used in many places in the game. Dungeoneering doesn’t work this way. While you do unlock certain abilities as you progress, these are only related to training Dungeoneering further. For example, higher level players can do deeper floors in Daemonheim, and bring more items with them from one floor to the next. But they don’t gain any inherent abilities that are of use anywhere outside Daemonheim.

Instead of having innate benefits like most skills, Dungeoneering uses a tokenized reward scheme much more reminiscent of how minigames work. At the end of each floor you complete, you are awarded XP based on a number of factors, including how difficult the floor was and the parameters used to create it. You then get Dungeoneering tokens equal to 1/10th of the amount of XP you received.

Tokens can be used to “purchase” a variety of special items and abilities from a rewards NPC located above ground at Daemonheim. These range from simple skill enhancers like a bag that holds uncut gems for you to save inventory space, up to some of the most powerful weapons and shields in RuneScape.

This controversy has raged since the day the skill was released. And for good reason.

The short, bottom line answer is that Jagex says it is a skill, so it is a skill. :)

The longer, more reality-based answer is that, in this author’s opinion, Dungeoneering is a minigame “peg” rammed into a skill “hole”. Everything about Dungeoneering is more consistent with being a minigame than a skill, including its reliance on other skills, its physical isolation from the rest of the game, the emphasis on teams, the lack of inherent abilities gained as you progress, the near zero impact of Dungeoneering level on anything outside of Daemonheim, and the token-based reward system.

Dungeoneering doesn’t really add any new dimensions to RuneScape as a whole, which I consider to be a prerequisite for something to be a legitimate skill. Some of the equipment rewards are nice, but equipment rewards aren’t consistent with a skill either. Taken as a whole, Dungeoneering really has a lot more in common with Stealing Creation and Barbarian Assault—and questing, for that matter—than it does with Fishing, Hunter, Woodcutting or Summoning.

But hey, Jagex slapped XP onto it and made it into a skill. Does it matter? Not really. It’s still an excellent piece of content, and very enjoyable when done right. It’s unfortunate that we have to wait that much longer until a real skill is released, but in the meantime, Dungeoneering is a fun way to pass the time.

The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering - Introduction and Overview About this Guide (Including Assumptions and Limitations)