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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

The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering - Strategy and Trade-off Analysis The Speed Versus XP Trade-Off and “Rushing”

Since you get more XP for higher-numbered floors than lower-numbered floors, players would normally prefer to just repeat the highest floor they are able to do over and over again until unlocking the next one. Jagex decided they didn’t want this to happen, so they created the prestige system. This mechanism is either a “carrot” or a “stick”, depending on how you look at it. :)

The “carrot” is that prestige entices you to do lower-numbered floors by giving you substantially more XP for doing low levels if you’ve already been able to unlock deep levels. Someone with a prestige of 35 doing floor 1 will get far more XP than a Dungeoneering newbie with a prestige of 1 doing floor 1.

The “stick” is that the system forces you to do these low-numbered floors by imposing heavy XP penalties whenever any floor is done twice without the other floors being done first in between. Even though you get more XP doing floor 1 with prestige 35 than doing it with prestige 1, you get even greater XP doing floor 35 with prestige 35. In fact, you get a little less than half the XP with floor 1 prestige 35 that you’d get with floor 35 prestige 35. However... if you do 35 more than once without doing floors 1 to 34, every subsequent time you do it, you get a prestige value of zero for those floor 35 repeats. That cuts your XP in half.

As with all carrot-and-stick incentive systems, the people subjected to them try to find ways to maximize the benefits and minimize the penalties. If everyone did all of the floors the exact same way, they’d end up with, on average, an XP rate around 25-30% below the rate they get for the best floor. But it is possible to shift that percentage downward by not doing all the floors the same way.

Most players improve their overall XP rate by doing whatever they can so that they spend more time and effort on the high-XP floors and less on the low-XP floors. This is usually done by tweaking the floor parameters based on the floor number. There are many different techniques that players have come up with for doing this, which we’ll look at later in this section. To summarize, though, these are some of the more popular approaches:

• Doing small maps for the low floor numbers, and medium or large maps for the high floor numbers.
  
  
• Soloing low XP floors and using larger teams for the better floors (which is related to floor size, of course).
  
  
• Skipping more of the monsters, and even sometimes bonus rooms, on low numbered floors. Even though that means getting XP penalties, it lets a team get through these floors faster so they can concentrate on the high XP floors.
  
  
• Playing the low floors in a team with a reduced difficulty level, like 5:3 or 5:1, while doing high floors at 5:5.
  
  
• Running the low XP floors on a reduced complexity level to get them done faster.

While this does complicate training somewhat, it is recommended that you do take floor XP into account in coming up with an overall training approach. This allows you to get the most out of the time invested in what is already a rather slow skill to level.

The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering - Strategy and Trade-off Analysis The Speed Versus XP Trade-Off and “Rushing”