June 13, 2010

90 Cooking and 68 Dungeoneering. Slowly creeping up on 2300 levels.

Some dungeoneering thoughts:

1) I’m not arguing it’s not a minigame. But I will argue that it’s a capstone skill. People say that it doesn’t help your other skills (not really). Maybe it’s not meant to. Maybe it’s meant to be the culmination of all your other skill’s training. Like writing your final dissertation in college.

2) Each person in your party is worth 5%. It pays to go with more people, even if they aren’t very useful.

3) Most people are decent. I hung out in W117 a bit and joined a random group. It went surprisingly smoothly, I think we did floor 33 large in about an hour. I’ve met 3 true jerks doing dungeoneering. I’ve also added 7 friends who I think are good folks to stay in touch with even if not dungeoneering. That’s a pretty good ratio. (Not including the decent people I met who I just didn’t feel like adding or they didn’t want to add me or whatever).

4) Doing floors below level 25 as small with a friend is my preferred method. It’s faster and more fun then soloing, if you get a sudden dc you can get back in and still keep your xp and the extra 5% a floor makes the xp a wee bit better. Better still, I go with one person who knows what they are doing and one person who is totally new. The new person plays tourist (kills a little, skills, gets lost, figures out stuff) and the other person and I run through it like crazy. Works well and goes fast enough. The new person is racking up xp much faster then they would otherwise and ends up quite happy. Everyone wins.

5) People get annoyed when you go through the checklist at the beginning but it really helps things along. What’s in the checklist?

Who’s doing tools

Who’s doing keys (preferably the leader so they can mark)

Are we clearing dead ends (DE)?

Are we clearing rooms that don’t have guardian doors (gd)?

6) I’m starting to see the logic in the prestige thing from a game design point of view. To a certain degree, more experienced people are rewarded for helping others (see item 4). And it keeps it from being a total grind.

7) I probably use mage and range more in dungeoneering then on the surface. It’s easy enough to get set up, runecrafting is faster and the triangle is more balanced. Plus, vengeance is such a nice help.

8) I don’t understand why people are still so bitter about it. I know one guy keeps calling it “faileneering”. First of all, that’s not clever. It was clever in April. Now it’s just old. Secondly, everyone likes different skills differently. If you don’t like it don’t do it. To be honest, I think for every skill I can come up with one training method that I find somewhere between ok and enjoyable and one which flat out makes me want to quit. Figure it out or ignore it, but either way quit your whining.