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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 - Raid Mechanics

Exploring the Floor Handling Skill Doors and Challenge Rooms

Most teams do medium-sized or large dungeons, and these can have 10 or even more colored shape keys and matching doors. Keeping track of these keys and the doors they go to is essential to ensuring that the dungeon is completed efficiently—or even that it can be completed at all. One person should be charged with the job of dealing with locked doors and keys.

I call this role the “keymaster”, and it is one of the most important in a team. Unfortunately, it is also the one that is often done the most poorly. I’ve been in teams with very high level players where nobody knew how to be a proper keymaster, and this had a negative impact on everyone. Missing even one key can lead to the dungeon not even being finishable, and trying to find a missing key after you’ve explored most of a large floor is an arduous task—you have to go room to room checking every red dot on the minimap. Even when keys don’t go missing, a bad keymaster forces players to constantly waste time traveling back to doors they’ve previously been unable to open, never knowing if they’ll then have to leave and do it all over again later.

I’ve gotten so frustrated with poor key tracking that I now always volunteer to do the job myself; even though it means more work, at least I know it will be done correctly. I’ve put a few of the things I’ve learned on this page to hopefully assist others in being good keymasters!

As keymaster, you should “own” all of the keys on a floor. Nothing messes up this role more than having four different players all carrying different keys and nobody knowing who has what.

That doesn’t mean you necessarily have to always have all of them in your personal backpack. In fact, there will be times when it makes sense for someone else to grab a key from a room or take a key to unlock a door in part of the dungeon. But you should know where all of the currently outstanding keys are. If someone else gets a key, ask them to drop it at home or when you next meet up with them.

Some players will react negatively to your being possessive of the keys. Simply explain that you need to keep track of all of the keys to ensure you can unlock doors quickly when they are found. Most decent players will understand that you are being anything but selfish. If they don’t, then just offer to let someone else do the task, because if you can’t rely on players to keep you informed about keys and where they are, this role is a real nightmare.

It’s not a bad idea to ask once or twice during the raid if anyone has any keys. I’ve heard many tales of teams where a lot of time was wasted being “stuck” because some player had a key in his/her inventory and forgot about it.

I’ve done floors where I had as many as seven keys in my inventory at once. Add to that runes, the occasional tool, food for healing and so forth, and your backpack fills quickly. Summoning a beast of burden can really help out with the keymaster role (though I’m pretty sure the keys themselves can’t be put in one.)

The keymaster should not only carry keys, he or she should watch for and record any locked doors for which the key has not yet been discovered. This is probably the part of the job that is most often neglected, even by high-level players. It isn’t that important to do with small floors—and I usually don’t bother when I am soloing—but it is quite important for medium ones and essential for large dungeons. If you don’t keep track of where the doors are, your team will waste a lot of time, because when a new key is found, they won’t know what door it opens.

There’s a very simple tool I use to help make this job easier: a spreadsheet. Using a program like Microsoft Excel, open a new worksheet. Highlight the first 15 rows and then set the row height so that the cells are all squares instead of skinny rectangles. Now click on cell “H8”, then find the highlighting tool and change its background to bright yellow or some other color. This represents the starting room.

When you find a room with a door you can’t unlock, open the in-game map and take note of where your current room is, then find the appropriate square in the spreadsheet and record the key that is needed. I use a simple short-hand where I put in the first two letters of the color and the shape. For example, suppose I get stuck in a room with a green crescent door and open the map to find my current room is 3 squares west and 2 squares north of the starting room. I then move 3 squares left and 2 squares up from the yellow start room in my spreadsheet and enter “grcr”. Then when that key is found, I’ll know where it goes. Once the door is opened, I erase the entry.

If you don’t have a spreadsheet program or don’t feel comfortable using one, you can do the same thing with graph paper or even hand-drawn squares on a black sheet.

This spreadsheet can also be useful for recording the locations of important resources that players may want to come back to later, especially prayer altars.

You’re in charge of the keys, but you’re still in a team, so work together with your teammates. Here are some specific ways:

• Encourage teammates to tell you if they see a key in a room and you don’t appear to be grabbing it. Sometimes you might have seen it but just be busy in combat, but they don’t know that. It’s easy to miss a key, and as we said before, missing even one can ruin a dungeon. It’s a lot better to be given a reminder you don’t need than not be given one that you did.
  
  
• If the party isn’t all together, ask others to pick up keys and give them to you later.
  
  
• Ask party members to call out when they find locked key doors, so you can tell them if you have the key needed, and can record them if the key hasn’t been found yet.

The Create Gatestone / Gatestone Teleport spell combo is tremendously helpful for keymasters. I most often use gatestones when I find myself far from the starting room with a locked door for which I don’t have the key. I set a gatestone and then go somewhere else; when the key is found I can teleport back quickly and unlock the door. Sometimes this will just be a dead end and so you can save your whole party having to trek up there for nothing.

When party members are not all together, gatestones can be used to quickly “transport” keys from one location to another. Suppose I’m in the northwest corner of the dungeon and I have the purple rectangle key, and a teammate in the southeast corner just found the purple rectangle door. We both create gatestones and drop them in our current rooms, then teleport home. I drop the key, he picks it up, and we both teleport back to where we were.

Exploring the Floor Handling Skill Doors and Challenge Rooms