Please Whitelist This Site? I know everyone hates ads. But please understand that I am providing premium content for free that takes hundreds of hours of time to research and write. If I can't make at least a little bit of money to support my family via this site, I'll have to stop working on it. One alternative is to become a RuneScoop member. It's cheap, you get access to all of the site with no ads, and you help keep the lights on around here. If you want to use this site for free, I'd be grateful if you could add RuneScoop to the whitelist for Adblock. To do so, just open the Adblock menu and select "Disable on Runescoop.com". Or go to the Tools menu and select "Adblock Plus Preferences...". Then click "Add Filter..." at the bottom, and add this string: "@@http://*runescoop.com/*". Then just click OK. Thanks for your understanding! Sincerely... Qeltar, aka Charles, your hard-working host and RuneScape guide-writer extraordinaire. :)

RuneScoop.com  >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide for RuneScape       >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering            >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering - Strategy and Trade-off Analysis

Dungeon Floor Parameter Trade-Offs - Floor Size, Team Size, Difficulty Level and Complexity Level Whole-Dungeon Training Strategies

These strategies are rarely used by players for all floors; they are more often combined into particular whole-dungeon training approaches. They are listed roughly in descending order of time required and floor difficulty, starting with the most relaxed methods and ending with the “rushiest”. :) All assume a complexity level of 6, except for the last one.The desire to increase XP rates and the large number of options for floor parameters lead to many different approaches being taken for floors. I cannot possibly list all of the strategies that players come up with for clearing Daemonheim levels, but I did want to highlight some of the more popular ones here.

The idea here is to simply forget about efficiency and have fun. The whole dungeon is usually explored, but if a door or room represents an obstacle that would be really annoying to get past, it may be skipped. Players may pause to harvest resources and process them into items, even if not strictly necessary, engaging in a form of “skill crosstraining”. Full XP is obtained, but it takes a while to get it.

Be aware that this is not a particularly fast way of training anything: I’ve checked and you get a very low XP rate on all skills. But if you enjoy doing it, that doesn’t really matter all that much.

This approach is mainly used by casual gamers, especially when playing with a small group of friends, on small and medium-sized floors. Some soloers also do it, especially if they are soloing deep (high-numbered) levels.

The team goes into the dungeon with the goal of exploring the entire floor, and killing all monsters except for those in dead end rooms. This is seen by many players as being the best compromise between maximizing floor XP and minimizing time spent killing monsters. You get high base XP and full bonus room modifiers; the level modifier is often small or slightly negative, but not hugely negative.

This is the most common strategy taken by players for large, high-numbered floors. If you see someone advertising for a team to do floor 25 or higher in a large 5:5, this is usually what they are planning to do (though not always).

This is the same as 5:5 / 4:4 etc. dead end rushing, but with the difficulty level reduced. The goal is to make the floor go a bit faster, make the boss a bit less nasty, and insulate the team against the risk of a player leaving in the middle of the floor.

It may be hard to get a team to agree to a reduced difficulty floor, and it is rare to see the difficulty lowered by more than one while still trying to do most of the floor. For example, I like doing 5:4 for large maps, but few other players use this approach, preferring 5:5. The 3:2 and 2:1 options are often used by small groups of friends who want to go a bit faster, or on teams with variable combat levels.

Players attempt to rush the entire floor, killing only monsters that must be dispatched to open guardian doors, or that require killing for other reasons. Other monsters are left intact, even if they are in rooms players have to go through. All doors are opened and challenge rooms solved.

This method places a high priority on speed. It results in lower XP because the base XP may be reduced, and a significant negative level modifier applied to the total. But it can yield substantial time savings as well.

This method is quite a bit more dangerous than dead end rushing. Skipping monsters in rooms other than dead ends means they will stick around, and keep taking “pot shots” at players every time they pass through the room. If a player ends up in the starting room injured and with no food, he or she may be unable to leave. I advise against leaving high-level monsters with ranged or magic attacks in rooms adjacent to the starting room, or in branches of the dungeon that are likely to be traversed multiple times.

Another issue with “monster rushing” is food for the boss. Monster killing uses up food, true, but it usually provides more than it consumes. If you kill very few monsters, you won’t get as much food to save for the boss. Combine that to the matter of “pot shots” just described, and you may give back some of the time you saved skipping monsters, sitting around with a fishing rod.

This method is often used by very high level players, who feel that getting floors done as fast as possible is the best strategy. I’ve heard of 5:5 large floors being completely cleared in 30 minutes (by real Dungeoneering experts, mind you.) It is applied to large maps on higher-level floors, and sometimes small maps on lower-numbered floors.

These are almost always done in 5-man teams, so you’ll see 5:5 a lot more than the other numbers.

This is basically the same approach as 5:5 / 4:4 etc. monster rushing, but the difficulty level is reduced substantially to speed things up. The more the difficulty is reduced, the more the team is placing a priority on getting the dungeon done, as opposed to doing the floor for its own sake.

This strategy is often used on small maps for low-numbered floors, by players who want to get these done quickly so they can concentrate on large maps for the deeper floors. Difficulty settings of 5:3 and 4:2 are the more popular of the listed difficulty parameters, because they let players blast through a floor very quickly, while still giving a pretty decent XP reward. Sometimes 3:1 or 2:1 are used by duos or trios.

These are not often used for high-numbered floors.

This is my own invention, and represents “extreme rushing”; the name is just a cutesy reference to all the “ones”. The idea is to blow through floors as fast as possible, sacrificing nearly all XP in the process. I discuss why you’d want to do this when I get into whole-dungeon training approaches. I’m explaining it here in a bit more detail than the other strategies, because it’s quite different than the way most players do levels in Daemonheim.

For this method, you play solo, and use a complexity level of 1 rather than the usual 6. This makes completing the floor very fast for a number of reasons: you start with a full complement of melee, ranging and magic armor, weapons and supplies; there are no puzzle rooms or skill doors; there are no bonus rooms (so you never get side-tracked); many of the doors are locked key doors rather than guardian doors, so you can skip monsters in those rooms; and the bosses tend to be very easy (below combat level 100 even for a maxed player).

Form a party with just yourself in it and enter the dungeon on whatever floor you want (usually beginning with floor 1). Select complexity level 1. When you enter the starting room, look for a key on the ground in the middle of the room; if present, pick it up. Now grab 2 or 3 high-healing foods from the starting tables, and leave everything else.

Explore the floor, aiming to find the boss door as quickly as possible, and ignoring all monsters that can be ignored. Before fighting anything, tilt the camera angle and check to see if there are any guardian doors in the room; if there aren’t, then run past the monsters and go to the next room. If you do have to fight, use Piety or Turmoil liberally.

The only dead end rooms will be ones with keys in them, so just grab the key and then run out. Continue until you find the boss room. Pick up decent food drops from monsters if you cannot use Soul Split; if you can, ignore them. Make mental notes of where locked doors are to save time later on.

As soon as you find the boss room, go right in and start fighting. Change armor or weapon based on the style you need, using the conveniently-supplied starting equipment in your backpack. Use Piety or Turmoil to speed up the fight, and add Soul Split if necessary. Most bosses on complexity level 1 floors are trivially easy. You can even often ignore the combat triangle; I routinely melee Rammernaut here, when I certainly wouldn’t on a 5:5 complexity 6 floor! That said, watch out for some bosses, because the potency of their special attacks may not scale down with their combat level. It usualy does, but not always; I once was hit for 732 life points by the “melee slam” attack of a level 39 Night-gazer Khighorahk!

When the boss dies, click the ladder and say “Yes”. As soon as the rewards screen shows up, immediately hit the “x” in the top right hand corner of the screen, and exit to the lobby. Log back in and go back down the stairs and you’re done, ready to do the next level.

The typical time required to do a floor with this method is 3.5 to 5 minutes, which is much faster than any other technique by far. Occasionally you’ll get a boss that will slow you down and it may take 6 or 7 minutes; Stomp is the absolute worst for this because him being low level doesn’t make the long pauses between phases any shorter. On the other hand, I have also done whole floors in only 2 minutes 30 seconds! The average comes out to somewhere between 4 and 4.25 minutes per level.

There are other benefits in addition to speed. You are soloing, so you don’t need to waste time making teams, advertising, dealing with stupid players who don’t know what “rushing” means, players who quit the team in the middle, and so forth. You can squeeze in a few floors whenever you like without a lengthy time commitment. You can play slightly slower if you want to, or go for broke. You’re entirely in control.

The drawback? Abysmal XP, averaging under 500 XP per floor even with a prestige of 35. Again, there’s a reason why this isn’t as bad as it sounds.

Dungeon Floor Parameter Trade-Offs - Floor Size, Team Size, Difficulty Level and Complexity Level Whole-Dungeon Training Strategies