Dungeons

Each dungeon sits in one city. You must be standing in that city to enter, and your current rank must meet its gate. After an Ascension your rank resets, so the gates close again until you climb back.

• Ashen Crypt: Cinder-choked burial halls beneath Ashenvale, where the restless dead guard what the fire spared.
• Drowned Catacombs: Flooded tombs under the Shadowmere docks, thick with black weed and things that never surfaced.
• Duskholm Deepmine: Abandoned shafts below the fog-bound keep, still echoing with picks that no living hand swings.
• Citadel Undervault: The sealed treasury beneath the obsidian spire, guarded by the oldest oaths and the cruellest wards.

Entering costs energy, paid once. It is 20% of your energy pool up to 50 energy, then 10% of the rest, so a big pool is not punished in a straight line. Everything after the gate is free: fights, locks and gathering cost no energy. The Ascendancy energy discount applies to the entry. You cannot enter while you are in jail, and you can only be inside one dungeon at a time.

Each dungeon has its own cooldown of 20 hours, counted from the moment your last run there ended, however it ended. A run you abandon does not wait forever: it expires 24 hours after it began, and the cooldown counts from that expiry, so coming back late never lengthens it.

Every run is a fresh route of 8 rooms. Room 4 is the mini boss and room 8 is the end boss. The other 6 are forks: two doors, left and right, and a different kind of room behind each. Each door gives only a vague hint, such as claws on stone or a glint in the dark, and several kinds of room share every hint, so a hint never names its room outright.

Scouting a fork shows exactly what is behind both doors. It costs mana: 20% of your mana pool, rounded up, never less than 10. You can scout each fork once. Every route is guaranteed to hold at least one gathering node and at least one locked room.

The chance of each room type differs a little per dungeon (the Drowned Catacombs lean towards herbs, the Duskholm Deepmine towards ore). These are the relative weights, in the order of the table above:

You can walk past any room except a boss, or a monster once you have engaged it. Walking past a room earns nothing from it.

• Monster: a foe that mirrors your own stats at 70% to 80% strength. You fight it blow by blow, clicking Attack, just like a boss (see below), but it is a short fight of a few seconds whose blows land harder. You win XP, gold and a drop roll. If you lose, you are knocked out.
• Chest: open it for gold, a guaranteed material and a chance at gear.
• Locked chest: the same loot as a chest, behind a lock you have to pick.
• Locked door: a vault. Pick the lock for a bigger pile of gold and better drops than any chest.
• Mining node, herb patch, hunting ground: a ten-second tap game that pays materials and profession XP.
• Shrine: rest once to restore 25% of your maximum health.

Every lock hides a secret sweet spot somewhere on a half-turn dial. You turn the pick to an angle and the lock answers with how far it rotated: 0, 25, 50, 75 or 100 percent, where 100 means it opened. The closer you are, the further it turns. A miss adds strain to the pick, and a bigger miss adds more. When the strain reaches 100 the pick snaps. You start with 3 picks, and if every pick breaks the lock beats you and you walk on with nothing from it.

Owning any jailbreak tool gives you one extra pick, and the best tool you own widens the sweet spot by 1 degree (common) up to 6 degrees (divine). A Steady Hand costs 15% of your mana pool, rounded up, never less than 10, and halves the strain of your next attempt.

A node is a 10-second tap game, one per profession. You can start it when you are ready, and it cannot be cut short. A better score pays more pulls, from 1 up to 4. Each pull rolls the same rarity odds as a profession expedition, using your own profession level and tool, and each pays 4 profession XP. Take longer than 45 seconds to hand in your result and the node is spent for nothing.

• Mining: hit the glowing weak spots in the vein and leave the solid rock alone.
• Herbalism: pick the ripe herbs and skip the thorns and the wilted ones.
• Hunting: beasts dash between bushes and are hidden inside them. Tap them in the open, never your ally hounds.

Materials go straight to your material stash, not to your expedition bag. Gathering pays profession XP only, never character XP.

Health and mana potions work inside a dungeon exactly as everywhere else, from the potion bar on the dungeon page. There are no energy potions, since energy is paid at the gate. Your health is your real health: fights cost real HP, and you need at least 25% of your maximum to start a fight, so drink or rest at a shrine first if you are low. Health you lose also wears your equipped gear, in proportion to the damage taken.

Every fight is live, not one click: monsters and both bosses alike. Press Engage to begin, then click Attack to swing. A monster falls in a handful of swings; a boss takes far longer, and neither boss can be skipped. A boss mirrors your own unbuffed stats at 76% strength (mini boss) or 80% (end boss), with about 2 times the health of a normal PvP opponent. A player at full health in repaired gear should usually win, at a real but modest cost in health.

• You swing: you can attack once every 1 second. Swinging early is refused and costs nothing.
• Your foe strikes on its own clock: once every 2.5 seconds, whether you click or not. A red mark warns you just before each blow.
• Walking away pauses the fight: your foe does not keep hitting while you are gone. When you come back it lands at most 3 strikes at once, never a whole backlog.
• Potions: drink one mid-fight and it counts from your next blow.
• Divine gear works here: its effects proc on both your swings and your foe's strikes (Rending Strike, Aegis of the Undimmed, Mirrored Riposte, Wrathful Echo, Second Wind).

If your foe falls you are paid at once. If you fall first, your health stops at 1 (you never die), the run ends and you keep what you already won.

A full clear is built to pay about 2 times what the same energy would earn from crimes in that city. Each fight pays a share of that budget: 12% per monster, 25% for the mini boss and 45% for the end boss. A chest adds 8% of the budget in gold and a vault 20%. Dungeon pay is not boosted by your buffs, though your Ascension XP bonus and any loan repayment still apply. Character XP only ever comes from winning a fight.

• XP and gold: from won fights, plus gold from chests and vaults.
• Shadowgems: only the end boss pays them, and only once the run is cleared. The amount is in the table above.
• Materials: monsters roll for drops. Chests, vaults and both bosses always pay at least one material, and a vault pays more than a chest.
• Gear: chests and the mini boss roll for a piece, a vault often has one, and the end boss always drops one. It goes to your inventory, never equipped for you.
• Profession XP: from gathering nodes.

Everything is paid the moment you earn it, so nothing is lost if the run ends early.

• Cleared: you beat the end boss. You collect the shadowgems and the run counts for your quests and achievements.
• Retreat: leave whenever you like. You keep everything earned so far, and the cooldown starts.
• Knocked out: lose a fight and the run ends. Your health is left at 1 and your gear is worn by the damage, but the loot you already collected stays yours.
• Expired: a run left open for 24 hours closes by itself. What you earned is kept.

Only a cleared run counts. A daily quest asks you to clear one dungeon.