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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

Specific Floor Completion Strategies Weapon and Armor Selection and Binding Alternatives

Players who are training Dungeoneering most often think of the skill “one floor at a time”. After all, the floor is the basic unit of training here; you get XP upon completing a floor, not each time you kill a monster or hit the boss.

The prestige system, though, means that to be efficient, you cannot look at Dungeoneering floors independently. Some floors are worth more than others, and you are effectively forced to do all floors before repeating any. So you really need a whole-dungeon strategy that takes into account all of the floors and focuses on giving the most benefit over the course of an entire prestige run.

Most players do this by using a hybrid of the floor strategies we just examined, changing them as they move from the lower-numbered levels to the higher-numbered ones. There are any number of ways of doing this, but I’ll lay out here some of the common approaches I’ve seen players use.

The majority of efficient overall dungeon strategies are based on using a different floor technique for low-numbered floors and high-numbered floors. However, there is no universally agreed-upon “dividing line” between what is considered a low-numbered floor and what is a high-numbered floor. Some players view floors 1-20 as low levels, and 21+ as high floors, while others draw the line at floor 25 or even floor 30.

This is yet another trade-off. If you switch to a slower method at a relatively low floor number like 21, you won’t be getting nearly as much XP as if you wait until floor 31. However, you’ll be doing 15 pretty good floors before you reset. On the other hand, if you “rush” floors 1 to 30, you’re guaranteed to be getting great XP on all of the floors you do large maps on, but you’re spending a relatively small percentage of your time doing these more potent high-numbered large floors.

The exact number you choose is up to you; my personal preference changes, but is usually to consider floors 1 to 25 as low-numbered “rush” floors, and 26 to 35 as ones I do large dungeons for in teams.

This strategy yields fairly slow XP overall, but is the only option for those who either cannot or will not do any Dungeoneering with other players. It is sometimes used by those who find teamwork stressful and solo play relaxing, even if it takes a lot longer to level up.

If you are only going to solo, I recommend not having a single “line” between low-numbered and high-numbered floors. Rather, try an approach that gradually ramps up the time spent in the dungeon (and the XP gained via base XP and bonuses) as you go deeper into it. Floors 1 to 10, for example, could be done quickly using the “snake eyes” method to get them out of the way; you could then switch to a 1:1 “monster rushing” technique for floors 11 to 20, then “dead end” rushing for 21 to 30, and then do 31 to 35 as complete floors to maximize XP.

Even though I dislike teaming, I would not use this approach. It’s just too slow, and it gets tedious after a while. Consider using the “snake eyes” plus large teams technique described below.

Note that if you do use “snake eyes” while strictly soloing, use it for only the lowest-number floors. You should not use “snake eyes” from floors 1 to 25 if you don’t do teams from 26 to 35, or you’ll spend too large a percentage of your time getting only 5k XP/hr.

If you like working in teams, you’re in luck: that’s the preferred way of doing Dungeoneering. You should always join teams to get lots of XP and also for the enjoyment of the raid.

As always, I recommend using a different floor strategy depending on where you are in the dungeon. For the low floors, I suggest using a reduced-difficulty “monster rushing” approach, such as 5:3 or 4:2. This lets you get through these floors quickly while still getting decent XP.

For the higher-numbered floors, do 5:5 or 5:4 large dungeons.

I designed this strategy as a compromise between straight soloing and doing teams for all floors. I dislike teaming with random players, but I can’t bear the thought of giving up the big XP numbers possible with teams on the high-numbered floors. This hybrid approach expresses my overall view of teams: “I can deal with them, but I only want to bother if I’m going to get plenty of XP each time I do it!”

The idea is simple: you solo the low-numbered floors using the very fast “snake eyes” (1:1, complexity 1) floor strategy, and then switch straight to 5:5 or 5:4 large team dungeons using dead end rushing (not monster rushing). Again, I usually do 1-25 using snake eyes, and then switch to teams at 26 using 5:5 or 5:4 dead end rushing.

If done properly, this actually yields a net XP per hour rate over the course of the entire dungeon only slightly lower than straight teaming; it’s maybe 2-3k XP/hr less, and the difference may be even lower than that.

This seems hard to believe, especially given that you get very poor XP rates while doing snake eyes (it comes to about 5k XP/hr). So how can this technique yield comparable results to always teaming, when team rushes on even 5:5 small floors give far more XP? The answer is that you sacrifice XP on the low floors to get to the high floors as quickly as possible, so you spend more time on the large maps where the really juicy XP is. You also eliminate the overhead involved with teams on nearly three-quarters of the floors you do.

The extremely high speed of “snake eyes” allows you to blast through the low-numbered floor very quickly: doing all 25 low floors in under 1 hour 45 minutes is entirely possible. if you assume it takes about an hour to do the high-numbered floors, that means each cycle takes 11 hours and 45 minutes, of which 85% of the time is spent getting prime XP on the deeper floors.

Most team rushing techniques are fast, but they aren’t that fast. A 5-man rush on a small floor will often average out to 7 to 8 minutes per floor. You get more XP doing these (since they are complexity 6), but it’s still nearly twice as much time spent on the low floors. Instead of spending 85% of your time doing floors 26 to 35 large maps, you’re only doing maybe 75% of your time. This diminishes the higher XP you get during the rush when always teaming.

The other nice aspect of this approach is that it eliminates from the lower XP floors all of the overhead and risk of mess-ups associated with teams. Players who team up have a habit of calculating XP rates looking only at the time spent in the dungeon itself; they tend to ignore the time wasted posting threads on the RuneScape forums, dealing with PMs, standing around calling out for teammates, dealing with people who log out in the middle of a dungeon and need to be replaced, and so forth. This can really add up when doing 25 floors, because finding a full team of reliable players who all want to do all of those floors at the same time is very difficult. Add in this overhead, and doing “snake eyes” for the first 25 (or whatever) floors becomes even more attractive.

For example, suppose we use these figures: 4.25 minutes per floor with snake eyes, 7.5 minutes per floor using 5:3 rushes, and 60 minutes for large 5:5 floors on the deeper levels. Typical XP figures would be 450 XP per floor using snake eyes, 4,500 XP for the 5:3 small rushes, and 50k XP for the large 5:5 dead end rushes. Let’s further assume an overhead of 30 minutes for assembling and dealing with the 5:3 small rush teams for 25 floors.

These numbers yield an approximate training speed of 45.0 k XP/hr using a combination of 5:3 smalls and 5:5 larges, and 43.6 k XP/hr using “snake eyes” and 5:5 larges, a difference of 3%. Is it worth 3% slower training to spend only 10 floors out of 35 dealing with team hassles instead of all of them? It is to me! :)

This hybrid approach involves using small teams of two or three for the low floors and then switching to larger teams for the high floors. Usually with this approach, the early floors are done using a reduced difficulty “monster rush” approach with a setting like 3:1 or 2:1, and as usual, the high floors are done at 5:5 (or sometimes 5:4).

This is a compromise strategy between using “snake eyes” on the low floors and using 5-man teams for them. It is much easier to find one or two friends online at the same time as you and needing the same floors, than it is to find four of them. And even if recruiting random players, you are less likely to find a “dud” in a small group than a large.

Some players who work in small teams will use medium-sized floors instead of switching straight from small maps to large maps.

Some of the very highest level players do monster rushes (as opposed to dead end rushes) on all floors. They start out with small maps for the low floors, and switch to large maps for the high-numbered floors, but don’t otherwise change technique. The theory here is to focus on speed, speed, speed, rather than worrying about XP bonuses even on the deepest levels.

I assume that this is an efficient method, or these high-level Dungeoneers wouldn’t do it. However, I cannot comment from personal experience, because I’ve never been able to do a whole prestige run this way. Doing it properly really requires a team of friends who know what they are doing, and a large block of time to let the team do many floors in rapid sequence. Neither is an option for me, nor is it for most players, but if you can pull this off, it might be the best way to go.

Specific Floor Completion Strategies Weapon and Armor Selection and Binding Alternatives