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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 - Core Concepts

The Ring of Kinship and the Dungeoneering Party Interface Segregation of Items and Binding Equipment

The amount of experience you get for completing a floor in Daemonheim is based not only on the floor’s level, but also on your prestige number, which is a measure of how deep into the dungeon you have explored. Understanding how this mechanism works is absolutely esssential to getting the most possible benefit out of Dungeoneering. Despite this, it’s probably the area of the skill that confuses players the most. So read on for a thorough explanation.

As you proceed down through Daemonheim, you encounter deeper levels of the dungeon that are more challenging, and provide more experience point rewards as a result. The natural tendency of players would be to always do the deepest level they had unlocked, even repeating it over and over until a new floor was available.

After all, that’s how most skills are trained: when you get to higher levels, you engage in activities that provide more XP for your time. The exceptions to this are skills where lower-level activities are often faster in terms of XP per time, such as those who “power level” using low level items such as willow trees or iron ore.

Dungeoneering is designed, however, so that you do get more XP the deeper into the dungeon you go. Jagex decided that they didn’t want players to just play these same high XP levels over and over again. The prestige system is specifically designed to encourage players not to repeat floors, by instituting a reward for higher level players who redo earlier floors, while imposing a severe experience reward penalty when you do the same dungeon floor over and over.

I think one of the reasons people find prestige so confusing is that the name, while colorful, doesn’t describe very well what the number means.

A more practical, if more sterile, name for this feature would be “consecutive unrepeated floors”. Because that’s what prestige is: it represents the number of different dungeon floors you have completed without repeating any of them. Keep this simple fact in mind and it will help you greatly to understand the rest of this page.

XP in Dungeoneering is rewarded upon completion of a dungeon floor, and is calculated by starting with a base XP value and then applying modifiers. The base XP is influenced by various factors, including the number of monsters your team killed and how many rooms were explored. But the main determinant of base XP is two numbers: the floor number and your prestige number.

Two base XP figures are calculated, one based on the floor and one based on prestige; these are then averaged to come up with a final base XP value to which modifiers such as bonus rooms and difficulty are applied. Since the numbers are averaged, you get more XP for doing deeper levels, but only if you do them while keeping prestige high as well.

The prestige figure used for calculating XP is the higher of your current progress or your previous progress (which I’ll explain in a moment). However, you only get this progress figure if you do a floor you haven’t done previously in your current run of floors. If you repeat a floor, the game uses a prestige figure of zero, greatly reducing your XP!

Since players get less XP for the lower floors they are forced to repeat, they tend to develop strategies that skew time spent towards deeper floors.

When you start training Dungeoneering for the first time, you have obviously not completed any of the floors. As soon as you finish floor level 1, the game will set your current progress to 1. This means you have completed 1 floor without repeating it. If you do floor 1 over again, your current progress remains at 1, but when you complete floor 2, your current progress will change to 2. The progress figures can be seen in the ring of kinship interface.

Since you must have a particular Dungeoneering skill level to get to each floor, you will eventually reach a point where you cannot get to a new floor you haven’t done before. For example, you need to have level 9 in the skill to go to floor 5, but it may be that after doing floors 1 through 4 you don’t have the necessary XP. This means you can no longer increase your current progress; it will remain at 4 until you are able to get to floor 5.

The XP that you are granted for completing floor 4 the first time will be calculated using floor number 4 (of course), and a prestige figure of 4 as well. But if you repeat floor 4, the second time you do it, the game will use a prestige figure of zero, and you’ll get much less XP.

Once you have completed all of the floors you are able to do in your first run, the game will tell you that you can’t do any new floors, and will prompt you to “reset your progress”. This would probably be better called saving your progress, but nonetheless, what it does is to move your current progress to a “save slot” called previous progress and mark all of the floors you did in the prior run of floors as not completed. Essentially, then, it saves how deep you got into the dungeon, and then makes it so you can redo earlier floors without being penalized.

This is where people usually get lost, so let’s go back to our example. In the scenario described above, we’ve completed floors 1, 2, 3 and 4, but can’t do floor 5. We don’t want to repeat floors or the XP will use a prestige figure of 0. Instead, we “reset”, which moves our current progress (prestige) figure of 4 to our previous progress (prestige) number. We will now have a current progress of 0 (since we just “reset” and are starting a new run) and a previous progress of 4 (from when we reset).

Now we can go back and do floor 1 again. When we complete it, the game will see that we have a current progress of 1 (from completing floor 1 in this run) but a previous progress of 4. It will calculate XP using the previous prestige of 4, not 1. This will be averaged with the floor numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 as we do those floors. This ensures that we are rewarded for having done 4 floors in a row without repeating any.

The prestige system means that when you reset progress and then go back to earlier floors, you get more XP than you did the first time you completed them, but less than you will when you repeat the deeper floors. For example, if my previous progress (prestige) is 9 when I reset, then when I go back to do floor 1 the XP will be based on averaging 9 and 1. When I do floor 2, it will be averaging 9 and 2, and so on. I’ll get the most base XP when I work my way back down to floor 9, where I’ll be averaging 9 and 9. Overall, this works out to about 25% less XP than if the game let you repeat your deepest level without a prestige penalty.

Note, though, that I’ll still get more XP for even floor 1 than the first time I did it, because the first time, I was averaging floor 1 and prestige 1 (yielding base XP calculated on an average of 1) and now I’m averaging floor 1 and prestige 9 (yielding base XP calculated on an averge of 5). This means that, all else being equal, I’ll get as much XP doing floor 1 with a prestige of 9 as I did the first time I did floor 5 with a prestige (current progress) of 5.

Similarly, there is rarely any reason to ever redo a floor and take the “zero prestige” penalty. If you think about it, you’re always better off to save progress and start over at floor 1, because averaging a 1 from floor 1 with a high prestige figure is better than averaging a high floor number with a prestige of zero.

As we do our second run of floors with our previous progress of 4, we’ll be getting XP as we go. Most likely, we will have enough XP to unlock floor 5. When we do, our current progress will become 5, which is higher than our previous progress. So, the game will now use a prestige figure of 5, not 4. The same will apply to any other floors we’re able to unlock: the previous prestige figure is only used for floors with numbers below ones you unlock.

Say we are able to get down to floor 7 before we have to stop, being unable to do floor 8. We should now again “reset”, this time locking in a previous progress value of 7. That will then be our prestige number the next time we go back to floor 1 and start over. This pattern should be repeated each time you run out of floors to do, slowly building your prestige and ensuring you get more XP as you level up, even on easier floors.

Each time you prepare to enter the dungeon, the game will show a display with a checkmark next to each floor you’ve completed in the current run of progress. This will allow you to avoid repeating floors you’ve already done. In multiplayer teams, the team leader will see these checkmarks for all team members, hopefully allowing him or her to pick a floor that has not yet been done in the current run by any members of the team.

Most players, after resetting (saving) progress, go back to floor 1 and go down the dungeon linearly. This is the simplest and least confusing method; you can more easily keep track of what you’ve already completed this way, and of course the game automatically moves you down one level each time you clear a floor anyhow. This is what I recommend in most cases.

However, it is not necessary to do all floors linearly—all that matters is that they are not repeated. So if you are able to do floors 1 through 4 and have reset your prestige after floor 4, you can redo floors 1 through 4 again in that order, or do them in reverse order if you wish. Your prestige will remain at 4 as long as no floors are repeated.

While linear order is simplest, in some cases doing floors non-linearly is necessary, especially if you do some training solo and some in teams, or you work with multiple players in different teams. It might be that you just reset progress and want to play with a friend who has already done floor 1 and floor 2 in his current run. It would be a waste for him to replay them (he’d get the zero prestige penalty), so you’d likely agree to do floor 3 with him, then go back and do 1 and 2 on your own later.

The only slight complication here is that for some reason, the game doesn’t like to unlock new floors until you both have enough XP and you have just finished the floor above the one you unlock. For this reason, even if you go out of order, I recommend saving the floor that has the same number as your previous progress until last. So in the example above, it would be best to save floor 4 for last, so it then immediately unlocks floor 5 when you have enough XP.

In certain circumstances it may make sense to violate the usual rule of thumb about doing all the floors you can and then saving progress. This is especially true when you get to higher levels in the skill.

Suppose you just completed a run of floors 1 through 27, but find yourself around 500 XP shy of being able to do floor 28. If you reset, your prestige will be locked at 27, and that’s the figure that will be averaged with your floor numbers for floors 1 through 27 on your next run through Daemonheim.

But if you do floor 27 again, even though you’ll get zero prestige on it for the repeat, you’ll then have enough XP to level up. You can then do floor 28, and lock in a prestige of 28. Then, when you go back up to floor 1 and start a new run, you’ll be getting XP based on that higher prestige number of 28, rather than 27. The extra XP you get over 27 floors using a higher prestige figure could well be more than you gave up by repeating a floor.

The Ring of Kinship and the Dungeoneering Party Interface Segregation of Items and Binding Equipment