qeltar

Better hatchets are faster but otherwise not needed. But better pickaxes mean less of the stupid "you crush the useful ore" messages -- you get more ore. A better pickaxe also wears down the bulwark beast faster.

Excel is more useful for this, and better for the environment. ;) I only do it for medium or large maps, though. Mixed feelings about automapping; it might make things a bit too easy. Maybe you could buy the ability with tokens. LOL I gave up trying to discuss this with him about 30 pages ago. He seems to have more antipathy towards people who dislike Dungeoneering than those people do towards the skill itself. Not sure why he's so defensive about it. It's also tiring that people point to the worst integrated past skills and think it's a good thing for Jagex to be using them as models for the future, instead of the skills that are well integrated, like Summoning.

I think it was pretty cynical of them to deliberately exclude under-18s from this event for pretty much no reason. Sure, a lot of adults like to have alcohol at events, but it is really not necessary. It seems they did this on purpose to exclude their younger players, in order to give the impression that RS is primarily a game played by adults. That's pretty unfortunate. Edit: 16+ is better, but IMO it should be 13+, as they themselves stipulate for the game.

The trick is simply to move when he attacks, and take in plenty of food. Use the regular antis, but not every time you get poisoned, just when it adds up. Use enhancing prayers and a familiar to speed things up. If you have a good weapon and a plate bound, you rarely need to make anything else. If you are below level 50, it does take longer to smith something unless you get a good drop. This minigame really does get better with experience. Give it time. I timed a level 19 I just did and it came to 20:26. That's with all rooms explored and all monsters killed. I didn't get one of the really slow puzzles, but those are pretty infrequent, and I did have to run keys around a fair bit. The upper floors are faster.

Well, you *should* be skipping stuff. It all depends on what you're skipping and why. You need to explore the entire dungeon. You *don't* need to mine every rock, fish every spot and hunt every mastyx. And you shouldn't, if XP is what you're after. Just like in any skill, really. So you'd need to explain in more detail what you're doing for us to understand why it's taking you so long.

As opposed to Runecrafting or Agility? Not true.

Sorry, but I can't agree with you there. You may not like the skill, but it is almost *objectively* less tedious than nearly all other skills in the game. There is much more variety, more ways you can play, solo and team options, different floor sizes, different bosses, different familiars to try out, and dynamic floor generation. It is absolutely beyond me how that could possibly be seen as more tedious than turning oneself into a monkey and running in circles for umpteen hours, or standing in front of a wall chopping ivy for days on end, or traveling back and forth between a bank and a runecrafting altar 10 million times. I suppose the AFK argument is valid, but not all skills are AFKable. And this is still less tedious than the ones that are. Also, there are different reasons why this skill and others can't be AFKed. I can't AFK agility because I have to click every 2 seconds. This I can't AFK because I actually have to think about what I'm doing. I noticed that even though I usually watch Hulu or do other things like that to keep me occupied when training skills, I can't here. I find that I keep missing things in the show because I'm focused on what I'm doing. That's illustrative. With more experience, you'll learn what you really need to do, and what you really don't. It's not necessary to make every piece of armor, or most potions, or most of the other things that you *can* make. Just to take the example you gave: you don't need antipoison potions for Har'Lakk the Riftsplitter. I am a fairly casual raider and it usually takes me 15 to 25 minutes to do a floor solo. I'd prefer to be able to save progress in the middle, but this isn't bad -- longer than a Barrows run but I view them about the same way.

There are two fonts in the back of the room that will restore your stats (at the cost of slightly healing the boss).

Calling someone a "failure" and a "waste of air molecules" is not stating a fact, it is flaming.

How long is going to take before you realize that you are a failure in other words a waste of perfectly good air molecules ? Now srsly - if you don't like it ... or let's say 1 to 5% of the players .. made up facts ftw anyways lets continue ... so if you don't like it but 95% of the players do like it and believe me they will continue to like it .. well this means that Dung is no failure what'so'evah Here's a better idea: if you don't like her posts, put her on ignore. She has as much right to post as you do. More, in fact, since you keep flaming and she usually doesn't.

BTW, since everyone seems to think I hate Jagex, I'd like to give them big kudos for one nice little feature I just discovered: Shared XP. It's a very elegant and intelligent way of reducing any fighting over resources among teammates.

No offense intended, but a test that doesn't take accuracy into account is of little value. That's especially true in Dungeoneering, where having the wrong attack style can make a *major* difference in how long it takes to kill things. I just talked to a player who is over level 70 and just dropped a primal maul or primal 2H to make a promethium spear. It wasn't for no reason.

Sure they do, but only very tangentially. They really have nothing to do with actually building up a *skill* in something. Okay, the gem bag is useful. But so is a fighter torso. Does that make Barbarian Assault a skill? Of course not. What you do and what you accomplish in Dungeoneering has really nothing to do with a gem bag or a bone crusher. They are completely unrelated rewards, just like getting a fighter torso or a horn that helps you train Agility from BA. In other words, it's not like you train Runecrafting so you get better at making runes and at some point you get to make new runes or get more runes at an altar. It's more like you train up Dungeoneering, achieve a level that has no impact on anything but doing more Dungeoneering, and then someone says "Thank you for training Dungeoneering, please take this trinket as a reward". It's a kludge, and a very noticeable one at that. IMO, it's indirect to the point of near meaninglessness -- you start to get into "six degrees of separation" stuff where you can say anything you do is related to anything else. It's also not really that significant. It's a side benefit, a tweak, an improvement to the real skills, just like a quest reward or something from a minigame is. The relationship is very weak, and also quite artificial. I find it amusing that I can do a "skill" to get a reward of a gem bag or a coal bag, when there isn't one gem or piece of coal in the entire dungeon. ;) A sad but amusing realization I had earlier today is that for many players, the most significant impact of Dungeoneering on how they do other skills in RS is the free teleport near a bank, which is a new capability you get not from the actual skill, but from the ring you get the first time you show up. LOL.

When I farm I get tons of items I can use to train other skills. For many players it is a *primary* source of materials for Herblore. Do I get that here? Nope. Nothing but a trinket or two I can buy once, sometime down the line. I also get food I can use for combat, combat which yields seeds for Farming. Is there any sort of integration like this with Dungeoneering? Nope. And no plans to do it, either. I think one point many are missing in this debate is that one of the reasons some of us have a problem with this being called a skill is that it takes the slot of a *real* skill. It used to be that Jagex put out a new skill every 6 to 12 months. This time they waited 27 months, and the skill they released really isn't. But now they'll say "new skill released in early 2010" and it could be 27 *more* months until we get a real one. Again, I do think this is a nice piece of content. But it's really a minigame wearing skill's clothing. And yes, it does matter.

The idea of having thousands of paying customers "beta testing" released content should make any self-respecting software engineer or development manager cringe with embarrassment. I wonder how many of the people who are willing to give Jagex a free pass on this, also feel the same way when Microsoft puts out a buggy release? I'm guessing not many. And at least they *do* have a beta testing program. They at least try. Jagex simply doesn't care enough to expend the money and effort to ensure that their new features are properly designed and implemented before springing them on the world.

I'm saying I agree that they could have done this a bit more intelligently. But at the same time, I disagree on principle with people who get something for free complaining that it isn't good enough for them.

Why didn't they just apply the cap to *members* playing on non-member worlds then? Though as usual, F2Pers have nothing to legitimately complain about here. You got a very nice, very large update to a game you pay nothing for. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

I'm not much of a person who spends a lot of time outlining logical arguments to someone who seems to proudly admit that he is not much of a thinker. Simply put: a bad law is much worse than no law at all. And one of the prerequisites for making a good law is a very clear definition of what it makes illegal. Without that, it becomes more about persecution than prosecution. If nobody can agree on what the law prohibits, then anyone can be in violation of the law and not even realize it. That's not just bad, it's idiotic.

Not only is this absolutely false -- as demonstrated innumerable times throughout history -- the fact that you even suggest it demonstrates that you haven't really thought this issue through very well.

There's been so much confusion about prestige that I sat down and wrote out what I hope is a very comprehensive explanation of it. It's a bit long but a worthwhile read if you are new to Dungeoneering. Prestige Explained, Once and For All.

This is probably too broad to answer definitively but I can give you some tips. 1. Always play on complexity 6. 2. Play one instance only of every floor you are able to reach, then reset your prestige and repeat. 3. Fully explore every dungeon room. 4. Kill most of the monsters. 5. Don't use guide mode. 6. If you play with a team, choose friends whom you know are reliable and cooperative, not random players.

Okay, so leave aside the minigame/skill issue for a moment. Have you actually given this a decent chance?

Prohibiting something that you cannot accurately define and describe is a recipe for disaster (and I don't mean the quest).

I think you go a bit too far with some of these conclusions. Yes, it's a minigame shoehorned into a skill. That much is obvious to anyone with a shred of objectivity. But while the content itself is similar style-wise to a couple of other minigames, it is definitely not "extremely similar" to anything else in terms of gameplay. I disagree with the comments about solo players. I soloed up to level 55 and just now did a couple of team levels. And you know what? Soloing is easier. It's easier to do, it's less hassle to set up, and it's (for me) a lot more enjoyable because I can do what I want, when I want. Good teams *should* get more XP -- they earn it. And don't be overly swayed by screenshots showing huge XP totals for teams. Most teams do not do as well as these groups. And all the time spent coordinating schedules and reset points and world hopping and role assigning and so forth -- that doesn't show up on the screen. This is not BA where you *must* have a team of five. It's flexible enough that you can play with various sizes, and that's a good thing.

Uh, read what I said again. Take your time. (Hint: You're "agreeing" with something I never said or implied.) Oh, and thanks for the nickel. I get one every time somebody misuses the word "troll" and I nearly have enough to get that new Ferrari I've always wanted. :roll: