Dungeoneering: A Guide/Review

Well it’s here. (typical intro to probably every single review or guide to this skill within the past week.) Released 12 April 2010, the new skill Dungeoneering was introduced into RuneScape. A very odd name indeed but if you were expecting a skill similar to Crafting or Slayer, put on your dragonhide and chef’s hat. Then put on your rage face. Overall, was this skill a disappointment? Of course it was, and I even argue that it’s not a skill. However, it’s not as bad as people have blown it out to be. It’s actually kind of fun and adds some variety to the endless grinding of skills like runecrafting and hunting.

What is involved in this new skill? Well basically you ‘raid’ dungeons and ultimately defeat the boss to gain expereience. You start out in the main room which houses initial supplies, a furnace (complete with anvils), a runecrafting altar, and a summoning obelisk. Once you have collected yourself, you begin to venture through the dungeon (each seperate dungeon is considered a floor). For some reason this skill reminds me of the old Legend of Zelda games for GameBoy. hahahah Anyway, to begin, you click on a door and the next room becomes visible on your screen without entering it yet. I like this feature just in case there is a high level monster inhabiting it that you rather not fight until later. However some doors require keys which can be found throughout the dungeon laying on the ground. They are all on the ground. None are hidden or monster drops. Simply use the corresponding key on each door to unlock it. There is one more type of door to unlock: Skill Doors. These require you to use a skill to unlock them or remove the barrier. These skills range from firemaking to prayer, to runecrafting to strength. One thing I strongly dislike is being faced with a door I cannot open with my level (even after potting). These rooms aren’t necessary to get to the boss, but I will talk about that later.Anyway, opening doors is the main way of advancing through the dungeon obviously. Each room will contain either monsters to kill or a puzzle to solve. Or my personal favorite, an empty room (with a key just lying on the ground lol). Anyway, usually if there are monsters or a puzzle you almost always have to solve the puzzle and/or kill off all the monsters in that room before you are able to open more doors in that room. Are you still following me? Hopefully you are.

Which brings me to my next topic. Resources. If you’re not confused already, this might throw a wrench into things. This skill is very similar to Stealing Creation in the sense that you have to collect your resources in order to make armor, runes, food, summoning pouches, potions, etc. Every skill is used in this skill which is actually interesting. However, beware. First timers will not recognize anything. Remember how Jagex said this could be a game on its own. Well they weren’t lying. Where’s the runite you ask? God only knows. At least you have Novite to Promethium. Hungry for a lobster or monkfish? Too bad, settle for a Salve Eel or a Blue Crab. In all honesty, it doesn’t take that long to get used to. That’s because the resources that ‘spawn’ or appear in your dungeon are, for the most part, the highest you can collect at your level. Rarely are you faced with an ore you can’t mine, or a fish you can’t catch even though it does happen sometimes. It’s not enough to make an impact on your overall progress though. You will also get most of your resources and money from monster drops. They drop about 5x more loot than regular monsters in RS. I advise collecting all the coins you can during your raid because you can buy resources from the NPC in the starting room. Also, the money does not stay with you after you leave the dungeon and go back to the surface, nor does it even carry on to the next floor with you. So if you’re about to face a boss, you might as well go all out and buy the best things you can to arm yourself beforehand.

‘Carrying over’ brings me to my next…er……point? Subject? Aspect? Whatever. Bottom line, now comes the somewhat tricky part that people have hard time understanding. Don’t feel bad if you don’t at first. I think a total of about 20 people did when it was released. Visit the RS Hiscores and click on Dungeoneering. You can see those 20 peoples’ names for yourself =P. Before I get to that though, I will breifly touch on Item Binding. Basically every floor you go to you will start with nothing and have to recollect your resources. Item Binding allows you to keep an item so it carries over with you everytime you start a floor (this includes if you completely leave the skill and go slay or hunt). Mainly it’s used for armor and weapons. At level 1 you can bind 1 item, 50 2 items, etc. I advise binding a weapon first. The next kind of confusing thing is Prestige. All this is is an exp bonus multiplier. Each different floor you complete you will get a prestige point. There is a current prestige (called current progress in game) and previous prestige (called previous progress in game). By resetting your prestige, your current prestige is ‘banked’ and replaces your previous prestige points. You floor completion is also cleared. So basically this means that you can go back and do floor 1 with a 21 previous progress and get a significant amount of experience compared to when you first did floor 1. Read up on this more at the knowledge base if you’re still confused. I advise (so does Jagex) to reset your prestige after you’re not gaining any levels after you complete a dungeon to maximise your exp.

Overall, this is an interesting ‘skill’. I am disappointed, but I’m not complaining and ranting my brains out like 90% of the RS population. I would recommend you to try it out. It’s worth a try. You may like it. I hate combat and I actually find it sort of enjoyable. Don’t just automatically think its gay. I did and turns out I was wrong. Then again I’m a die-hard skiller and I would prolly train anything Jagex throws at me. With all that being said, Happy Dungeoneering!

Until next time-

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2010

Wow, it’s been about 2 months since I have updated this. It’s funny too because I said that I was going to start updating this more often, and ironically I haven’t been. Oh well, I guess that people ARE reading it because I have over 800 views. Let this be motivation for you to start updating your blog if you haven’t touched it in 7 years. hahah Twitter too.

It seems that I never find the time or motivation to update this or my twitter account anymore. I’ve gotten a little bit better about my twitter, but I’m still guilty about not updating this. The only time I really feel like updating this is now (my 2nd hour drafting class). I sort of student teach the underclassmen and I have a lot of  “free time” most days. I guess this is a good time to focus my efforts on making some new posts on here.

Anyway, it’s finally here. 2010. The year I graduate highschool. Bleh. Not really looking forward to college, but hey there’s nothing I can really do about it. I just have to get through, and that’s all I really want to do for more than one reason. You know what I mean if we have talked about this before. ;P But yeah, I’m going to a somewhat small private architecture college for a 4-Year Bachelor’s degree. I guess it shouldn’t be that bad. At least I’ll be doing something I love, and not going to a huge crowded college. Not too excited about all the general classes like Speech, gay.. Oh well. May will be here before I know it. Time flies when you play video games..

Speaking of video games, that is pretty much all I have been doing lately. Not just RuneScape though. Since Christmas, I’ve been on Xbox wayyy more, and probably a bit too much. I got a lot of “new” (old actually) gutiar hero games. I’ve played through a couple of them, and you can never go wrong with Guitar Hero games unless it has Aerosmith attached to the title (then it kinda sucks lol). Aside from music games, I actually bought Modern Warfare 2 and Halo 3 over the weekend and they are both pretty amazing games. I have to say I think I enjoy the online play a bit more on MW2 than Halo, but they’re both pretty fun. Mass Effect has also grabbed my attention a lot more just recently. I beat it back in November and started my 2nd playthrough on Hardcore but got stuck on a certain part and stopped playing for a while. Just recently I started playing again and got past the part I was having trouble with. I’ve got a couple more planets to go and I should be done with Hardcore. Ironically, besides that one part, it’s not all that hard. I will probably end up throwing my controller out the window though when I playthrough on Insanity. Oh well.  I’m currently level 51 right now, and I’d like to get to level 60 before Mass Effect 2 which comes out in a couple of weeks. It looks amazing, not gonna lie. Sadly, I have not been on RuneScape as much as I used to be, but I still try to fit in a few farming runs each day, kingdom run, and battlestaves each night. I also try to check RuneWire and RSBandB forums daily. I am probably just going through an Xbox phase for now, and hopefully be back on RuneScape regularly sooner than later. I guess we’ll see. I can tell you that I have no intention of quitting though. Maybe just more of a “break”.

I guess that is all I have to say for now. If I think of something else I’ll save it and say it in my next post. It might give me a little bit more motivation to pay more attention to this thing. If you have read this far I’d like to thank you for sticking with me and reading all this. Leave a comment to show that my time is not wasted by typing all this. I appreciate it. Check out my twitter and follow me if you want.

twitter.com/davo338

runewire.com/davo338

Until next time-

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Boo

Well, it’s Halloween again. Time for whores to have an excuse to dress up and act even sluttier than they already do.. No thanks. I’ll take my dream girl over that and any amount of candy. Oh well. I will probably be spending my night right here, but quite frankly that doesn’t bother me. I’ve been doing a substantial amount of songwriting over the past week or so and currently have about 4 to 5 new songs in the making. One of them just recently received a solo written by someone special and it is absolutely ridiculous! It adds a whole new sound to the song. In a good way of course! Anyway, I’ve become a lot more familiar with Guitar Pro 5, and I’ve decided to tab out all of the songs I have written so far that will be featured on Simpatico’s debut album (release TBA). If you haven’t already, check out our Facebook page to stay updated. It should be linked in the right toolbar of the blog. Also, feel free to follow me on twitter for some music and rs updates (Davo338).

After attaining 99 Construction in RuneScape last week, I’ve been casually training some slayer (bleh…combat) and got 70, as well as 70 summoning. Which means I have all 70+ skills now! I think my goal now is to shoot for all 80+. I’ve been at ape atoll the past 2 days training agility and looking to hit 80 in a week or so. I’ll probably end up doing that after I post this.

That’s pretty much it. Another Halloween is here and will be gone in a matter of hours. Time flies too fast sometimes.. Unfortunately, you don’t really know what has passed until it does. Sorry, I had to include my little philosophical thought for the day. So with that said, I guess I’m off to do a whole lot of nothing. Perhaps some agility training, music writing, or thinking about someone. Anything’s possible.

So until next time-

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Love Match…? :P

Over the past few months, I have taken somewhat of an interest in the Zodiac signs and some astrology stuff. It’s actually quite intriguing. Browsing through some websites, I came across a link that said: “Who is your ideal love match?” I figured that I would check it out. It’s actually pretty fascinating and freakishly accurate with describing my personality/sign, Scorpio. Here’s what it had to say.

Scorpio and Capricorn

When Scorpio and Capricorn make a love match, they get an opportunity to not only enjoy a loving relationship and learn the value of being a pair, but also to grow and mature as individuals. These two may be wary about sharing themselves with one another at first, and this emotional caution may dampen the initial impact of this relationship. These two tend to be a bit cautious (Capricorn) and pensive (Scorpio), and it takes a while for them to feel comfortable with a significant other. Though they may be shy of getting involved and not the quickest to trust and share, these two Signs will discover that they can have quite a profound connection — one of friendship and deep loyalty.

Much can be learned when a Scorpio and Capricorn get together — and the lessons they learn, while difficult at times to endure, are worth the trouble they might cause. From their stable, capable Capricorn mate, Scorpio can learn to bring their overheated emotions into control. Capricorn must be careful, though, not to seem too emotionally shallow when leveling any criticism on their sensitive love. Detached comments can backfire with Scorpios: They desire depth, intense feeling and the utmost in sincerity in all situations — most especially in love! Capricorn, so busy with achieving and with how others perceive them sometimes fails to take a chance with their emotions. From Scorpio, Capricorn will learn the value of looking below the surface of things, the rich pleasure that can come from deeply knowing another person. Both Signs share a love of committing to a task. If they decide a relationship is their next big goal to attain, there’s no stopping these two.

The Planets Mars and Pluto rule Scorpio, and the Planet Saturn rules Capricorn. Mars and Pluto represent aggression, courage, sexual energy, rebirth and renewal. Saturn teaches the great lessons in life — hard work, diligence, ambition and responsibility. These three Planets can combine in the Signs to form an industrious union bound by Scorpio’s fierce emotion and Capricorn’s ambitious action. This is a dynamic team for business, sure, but all that achieving energy could will translate well to affection and love.

Scorpio is a Water Sign, and Capricorn is an Earth Sign. Earth Signs are all about practical matters, about material possessions. What a good balance, then, for those of the Water element. Water Signs mold to the shape of the situation they’re in and often respond with emotion rather than logic. A match-up of Capricorn’s goal-oriented stability and Scorpio’s exciting mutability makes for quite a team — whether they translate to love depends on whether love is their goal. If it is, expect success.

What’s the best thing about the Scorpio-Capricorn love match? Their determination toward shared ideas and their strong devotion to one another. They can open doors to one another’s souls and show one another new ways of perceiving and feeling.

Well that’s all for now. Looks like Capricorn is my ideal match. I thought this was an enjoyable and insightful read.

Until next time.

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Rebirthing

Well, I could open up with a cheesy reference to a Skillet song but I’ll spare you the suffering. It’s been almost a year since I have updated, nevertheless looked at this thing. As you can see I have made some significant changes to the blog. The most obvious is probably the new header image. I thought it was a cool idea so I figured I would see how it looked. Tell me what you guys think!

On another note, it’ s been quite a year. Everything from founding a new band to college searching. That has been stressful by itself, but I won’t bore you with the minor details. I will save that for future posts when I feel there is more to write about and fill you guys in on.

As for RuneScape, I’ve come an awful long way since my last post. I was roughly in the low 80’s in runecrafting just pushin’ through to get to 91. 11 months later I stand with level 99 Runecrafting, 99 Smithing, and on the home stretch of getting 99 Construction! I’m hoping to squeeze in one more 99 for 2009, but we’ll get there when we get there. A couple sub-goals for 2009 are to meet or exceed 2,000 overall level and 100m overall experience. If I stick with it, I think it might be possible. If not, it’s not too far off. I’ve also purchased an Xbox360 since last year and play it semi-regularly alongside RuneScape. Gears of War 2, Midnight Club: LA, Rockband 2, Guitar Hero(any), Peggle, and Castle Crashers are the main titles I play.

Not much else to say besides just some basics. Hopefully I will keep this updated more often than I have in the past. If it’s been a week or so, please don’t hesitate to give me a nudge and tell me to update. Sometimes I just need that extra little push. 😉

Well, until next time…

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Seventeen

A new magazine subscription? I think not………. It is in fact my birthday tho! 🙂

If I had to sum it up in one word I think it would have to be: “AWESOME” lol

First off, I woke up and had a couple guys from the band over to do some recording for our debut album to be released this winter. We were actually very productive which is a major plus. Usually when we get more than 2 people in the studio nothing ever gets done. We got the basic tracks for about 3-4 songs done. Not near finished but great progress for one day. After that we had some pizza then both of them had to leave. I decided to get my hair cut afterwards cuz it was gettin a little on the longer side….

After that we went to an italian restuarant for dinner. They were extremely busy and the service was not exactly perfect, but I understood. 😉 So then my grandma spoke up and told our waitress it was my birthday…..(Just so you know I don;t enjoy when they all come out clappin and singin and shit. its kind of embarassing) The rest of the night she kept apologizing to me cuz she forgot I didn’t like that. haha I forgive her tho. She was just havin some fun. So we came home and had some cake and all that. I opened my gifts and I’m pretty happy with the stuff i got.

CDs:

-The Illusion of Progress by Staind

-The Fallout by Default

-The Sound of Madness by Shinedown

Misc:

-250GB external HD

-Special plated snare pad

Some friends and neighbors of mine are throwing me a party this weekend down at my lakehouse so I’ll prolly get a couple more things, but overall I had a pretty kickass day. Thanks everyone for all the “Happy Birthdays” and whatnot.

One more year of:

Life

RuneScape

Music

Friends

Family.

Here’s to SEVENTEEN. Here’s to a great year!

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This is SPARTA!!!

Ok, so today is pretty comparable to a day in the 10th ring of hell. First marching band competition of the year, and yes I bet you’re thinking “Oh boy, band how bad can that be?” lol I’m not really writing to be a douche and try to get defensive about marching band because you’ll think what you think and i can’t control that. Just thought I’d tell you about my “spectacular” day…lol

Call time is 9am so i get to school around 8:55. We end up sitting around for about an hour loading the trailer and getting everything on the buses. (4 buses btw, we have 140 kids in our band. 28 of which are in drumline.) Anyway we leave and head to the town of Sparta where the competition is. We get there and chill for a bit, then start warming up.

Just so you know, there are 2 parts to the competition. There’s the parade part and the field show part. Parade obviously being a parade, and the field show is pretty much like the halftime show at football games. The 3-4 songs with special marching that makes formations on the field.

So we suit up and start marching the parade. We get judged on our parade technique and all that fun crap or whatever. Little did we know, the parade route was 3 MILES LONG. For those of you who don’t know, thats a long fucking way to march with a drum… So were more than halfway done with this parade and we approch this large podium stand thing with a bunch of official looking people standing on it. I don’t think you realized how pissed we were when we saw this. We all thought there would be judges marching along side of us critiquing and whatnot. NO, there was only like 40 seconds total that was judged and here we all are playing our hearts out the whole parade in hopes to score high. Well by this point we are pretty much spent because its 2PM, the sun is blaring, our uniforms are maroon and black, and we’ve been playing constantly for the past 30 min….. Meanwhile my left arm is just short of completely numb because my carrier was digging into my shoulder and cutting off circulation. lol

3 miles later……we get back to the buses and have some lunch. I can honestly say food never tasted so gooood. In fact, I’ll brb I’m gonna go grab some Doritos. XD jk It was pretty nice after that tho cuz we just kinda hung around for the next 3 or so hours because we didn’t take the field for our show til 7:30. Of course, the time soon came and we suited up again and started to warm-up. There were these little piss-ass black gnats that kept biting us while practicing. Damn near drove us all nuts lol.

So we’re minutes from taking the field lined up on the track. My stomach starts getting all funky. Not really a nauseous feeling it was just weird. Anyway we play our show and march off the field and put our drums down. We end up standing around watching the rest of the bands perform. At this point, I’m thirsty as hell, and my friend goes over and gets me a diet coke (everything else was gone) I start drinking that to ease my stomach a little.

Finally awards are announced and turns out we got “1st place percussion” for the parade section in our class and “2nd place overall” in the field show for our class. Overall i think we did alright. Here comes the fun part……..we get our drums on and we start walking back towards the buses to pack up and head home. My stomach is really bothering me at this point. Not sure if it was the fact that we “lost” or what but my main goal at this point was to keep my mind off my stomach. We get to the buses and my throat gets all dry. I ask my friend to take my drum off cuz i feel sick and i ran over to a tree and a lost it… =/ I was really trying not to puke, but i couldn’t fight it any longer. I have to admit tho that I feel a lot better now that I did that.

So we loaded the trailer and headed home. It was a pretty good bus ride. I can say its my first ride on a school bus at night…haha. We get home and I realize i have some college history homework that I have to submit online before midnight. I got it done with 3 minutes to spare so I’m still kinda shaken up about that whole thing.

All I can really say about today is….WOW. lol It was fun yet brutal. It was a good experience nonetheless tho. One down, three more to go. BRRRINNNNG IT ONN! haha That is all.

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Total Levels Re-Thought

Ok, so I’ve been thinking recently about 99’s, and I noticed that a lot of players like to brag about how much better they are at the game because of their total level. As we all know, this can be easily raised with simple and non-complicated skills such as cooking and fletching. In my opinion, for example, a player with 80 summoning is a “better” player than one with 99 cooking or fletching etc.

While thinking about this, I started to develop a formula that would recalculate a total level and have it reflect upon the difficulty of the skills rather than just straight numbers. In other words, a maxed out cooking level would be somewhat even with a mid level construction or runecrafting.

I did some research and found the amount of people that have 99’s in each skill. (Yes I could be more accurate with times and cost, but this is just a rough idea and I think this way pretty much captures the main idea.)

Basically what you do is take each of your skills and multiply your level by the “difficulty rank”. We’ll call that total for each skill your “skill value”. Once you find all of your skill values, you add them all up and divide by 24.

The scale is as follows:   (All 1’s and 10 HP) = 14.375   (All 99’s) = 1237.5

Not a very uniform scale, but like I said its just a rough idea.

The difficulty ranks are based on the number of people who have 99. (24-Least People – 1-Most People)

Summoning – 24
Construction – 23
RuneCraft – 22
Herblore – 21
Mining – 20
Agility – 19
Farming 18
Slayer – 17
Smithing – 16
Crafting – 15
Hunter – 14
Prayer – 13
Thieving – 12
Fishing – 11
Firemaking – 10
Magic – 9
Woodcutting – 8
Range – 7
Defense – 6
Hitpoints – 5
Attack – 4
Fletching – 3
Cooking – 2
Strength – 1

Yes I realize this will take a bit of time, but keep in mind I just kinda came up with this, and its past 3AM so I’ll prolly improve on it more. Actually, I think I’m going to code a program to do all this for me, but thats another day.

Feel free to post you “new total levels” here and see how you compare.  🙂

I’m 823.75 as of right now.

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Testing…1..2..3…

Alright, well it’s passed 1 AM and I “should’ve” been in bed a few hours ago because I do in fact have school tomorrow. It seems that I have, once again, wondered aimlessly into the vast land of Procrastination. This is a land of which I sit upon a high throne and spend most of my days pondering excuses and finding ways to postpone homework.

Ok, time to quit that analogy XD

Anyway, I’m just going to cut straight to the chase. You will see that the title coincides quite well with this paragraph, that is if you use your imagination a little. Basically, I’m not quite sure if my blog is being read by more than a few people. Why do I assume that? Well the only proof I really have of visitors is the hit counter on the side of the blog. I appreciate you guys taking time to read my stuff, and in no way am I complaining, but drop a comment every once in a while. Let me know what you think of the post, your insights, anything like that. Let me know that my time is not being wasted typing up long posts for only about 4 people to read. It sort of serves as my motivation to keep posting. I really don’t feel like posting anything anytime soon if i have a post that is like 8 paragraphs and a month old and virtually no comments.

And I don’t expect to get like 8 comments per post either. If ya like the post, tell me. If you agree with one of my rants, tell me etc. Most likely if you let me know what you think, chances are I’m gonna check out your latest entry and return the favor. Keep this ball a rollin’ 😛

I should be updating sometime within the next week on the start of school or whetever comes to mind when the time comes. Until then, take it easy.

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Gukes and Duts

Jul 19- 3 hr Drumline clinic

Jul 28- 4 hr Drumline auditions

Aug 1- Placement

Aug 4-8- 7 hr drumline practice

Ok, I seem to be getting pretty far ahead of myself already… As I mentioned in the recent post, drumline auditions and such were quickly approaching. On clinic day, we pretty much just got aquainted with each other and intrustors. Then the next week until auditions were pretty nerve racking. Auditions came and went, and I felt like I was pretty sloppy and a bit unprepared for what was expected of me. I drove home with modest thoughts about my skills and didn’t expect to get placed on anything mind-blowing. Btw, the spot I auditioned for was snare. (For those of you who don’t know what that is: If you’ve ever seen the movie drumline, it’s the type of drum that Nick Cannon plays) There were roughly 2-3 open spots for it out of 5 total. Like I said, I didn’t get my hopes up for anything.

The following few days were focused on marching techniques and warm-up drills. There are 5 different percussion instruments that the drumline consists of: Snares, Tenors (Quad Toms), Basses, Cymbals, and Bells (Pit). We each had our turn marching with and playing basic warm ups on each drum. Placement day finally came and snares were announced first. Jake, Shane, Tyler, Anthony, and………….Dave! Yes, I actually made it on snare. I couldn’t believe it. lol But anyway I’ve been extremely happy with that.

Full camp has started now and of course its 100 F+ degrees outside…ugh. Today was the first day and it was basically hell. That’s all I’m gonna say. Out on the field with a 50 some-odd pound drum on is no fun activity… Our show, field show, feature, and pre-game music were handed out today, and wow it was amazing how rusty all of us were. I, being 1 of 2 new guys on snare, was really havin to go thru rudiments and such to get the cadences right. I still got a lot to practice, but practice makes perfect right? It must be working because everything I’ve done today since ive got home has a tempo of some sort and I keep time. It gets a little old after a while tho. XD

Thats basically it. Kinda dreading the rest of the week and whats to come, but I’m gonna try to keep my head clear with some music and RS of course.

-And I bet youre wondering what the hell a “Guke” and a “Dut” is… Basically its drummer talk for counting off to begin playing. Just thought it would be interesting for a title. =P

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