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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 - Strategy and Trade-off Analysis

How Prestige Affects Dungeoneering Floor Strategy Dungeon Floor Parameter Trade-Offs - Floor Size, Team Size, Difficulty Level and Complexity Level

The slow pace of the Dungeoneering skill has led to many players attempting to find ways to, well, speed it up. Part of this is related to the prestige / floor number issue we just looked at, but the desire for optimzation goes even beyond that. Players have developed a number of techniques even for extracting the most XP on the highest-number floors. This is all based on the inherent trade-off between doing dungeons quickly and doing them completely.

The way to get the most experience from a floor in Dungeoneering is to ensure that you explore every room, open every door and kill every monster. Doing this gives you the maximum base XP values possible for the floor, as well as the highest bonus modifiers.

But it takes a lot of time. In a 5:5 difficulty large floor, it can take several minutes to clear out a single room of monsters, or do even one challenge room. With the potential for 62 rooms (not counting the starting room or boss room), this means that floors can take well over an hour.

Most players don’t necessarily want to maximize the XP they get on each floor; they want to maximize the XP they receive per hour in the dungeon. The way to do this is to find ways to speed up floors so that you save more in time than you lose in XP. If it’s possible to give up 20% of the XP gained but do a floor in 40% less time, most players consider that a fair trade.

This is the term most often used to refer to a strategy where you deliberately avoid doing certain parts of the dungeon in order to get through it faster. You’ll frequently see it used by players trying to form teams; for example: “floor 21 5:5 rush”.

When you see this, you know that the team leader is placing a priority on getting that floor done quickly, not on attempting to get maximum XP. Unfortunately, “rush” can mean different things to different people. It can mean any of the following, ordered from the least to most “rushy”:

• “Dead End Rushing”: The floor is completely explored, and all monsters are killed, except for ones in dead end rooms. These are rooms that only have one door and so do not lead anywhere. An exception is often made for rooms that have valuable resources, especially prayer altars, which are vital and can’t be used easily with monsters around.
  
  
• “Monster Rushing”: To save time, all non-mandatory monsters are skipped. Usually, this means killing only monsters in rooms with guardian doors (since they won’t open otherwise). Monsters in rooms with colored door keys or skill doors are left alive, except perhaps for very dangerous ones like dragons. The dungeon is still explored fully to get the maximum +13% bonus room modifier.
  
  
• “Room Rushing”: The next level in rushing is to not even bother exploring bonus rooms. The goal is only to get into the boss room and defeat the boss.
  
  
• “Suicide Rushing”: In extreme rushes, players won’t even bother to prepare for the boss. They run in as soon as they find it with whatever they are carrying and do their best. If they die, they run back and keep at it, ignoring the death penalties to XP.

Those names are arbitrary; I made them up just so I can refer to them more easily. As you can see, there’s quite a spectrum, so it is always best when making a team to specify what you’re planning to do, and when joining a team, to ask what the leader intends. Don’t just assume what “rush” means—I’ve been on teams where disagreements occurred only after the floor started, and one player ended up leaving, thereby ruining the level and wasting everyone’s time.

Players will often increase the degree to which they are rushing when they are doing low-numbered floors. For example, if a team of 5 is doing a 5:1 small on floor number 1, they are just trying to get it marked as done and will skip everything they can; even dying doesn’t matter that much because they know they won’t get a lot of XP anyway. But in a large 5:5 floor 35, most players only skip dead end rooms. I use “suicide rushing” as part of my “snake eyes” method.

Note that it goes without saying that in any sort of “rush” floor, players are expected to concentrate on getting the floor done and not spend time on extraneous activities like making potions just for Herblore XP.

How Prestige Affects Dungeoneering Floor Strategy Dungeon Floor Parameter Trade-Offs - Floor Size, Team Size, Difficulty Level and Complexity Level