Dungeons: the eight the game quietly left behind

Dungeons are the oldest group content in the game. They rarely come up, because development stopped in favour of fractals and no new ones are coming.

The eight that exist still work, though, and they hold things you cannot get anywhere else.

The list

1. Ascalonian Catacombs
2. Caudecus’s Manor
3. Twilight Arbor
4. Sorrow’s Embrace
5. Citadel of Flame
6. Honor of the Waves
7. Crucible of Eternity
8. The Ruined City of Arah

Parties are five, though smaller groups can attempt them.

Two modes

Story mode is the narrative one. It follows Destiny’s Edge, the fractured group of heroes whose members turn up throughout your personal story (how that works). There are cutscenes and dialogue, and the runs themselves are gentle: a random group gets through without trouble.

Explorable mode unlocks after story and asks for considerably more coordination. Each dungeon has several paths, usually three, and the party votes on which to take.

Levels

Story modes begin at level 30 with Ascalonian Catacombs and run up to 78 with Crucible of Eternity. Explorable versions sit 5 to 10 levels higher. Arah and fractals want 80.

Which makes dungeons the rare content you can enter long before level 80. For a player still levelling, it is close to the only way to see group play.

Rewards

Explorable mode pays Tales of Dungeon Delving: 20 per completion, plus a first-run-of-the-day bonus of 35 to 80 more.

They are spent with a Dungeon Merchant on weapons, armour, runes and other items. The dungeon skins are distinctive and appear nowhere else, which is precisely why appearance collectors still run them.

The reward numbers, and what year they are from

Each explorable path pays 20 Tales of Dungeon Delving as a base, plus 80 more the first time you clear that path each day. So a fresh path is 100 tokens and a repeat is 20.

The coin is where the age shows:

• Ascalonian Catacombs paths: 50 silver each
• Caudecus’s Manor, Twilight Arbor, Sorrow’s Embrace, Citadel of Flame, Honor of the Waves, Crucible of Eternity: 35 silver per path
• Arah: 1 gold for the Jotun, Mursaat and Seer paths, 50 silver for Forgotten
• Twilight Arbor’s Aetherpath: 66 silver, and it is longer than everything else on this list

With 25 explorable paths in total, a full sweep of the game’s dungeons pays somewhere near ten gold. In 2013 that was a serious evening’s income. Nobody has adjusted it since, and nobody is going to.

Are they worth it

For looks, yes. Dungeon armour sets are recognisable and only obtainable here.

For story, yes. Story modes explain who Destiny’s Edge are, and without that parts of the personal story read oddly.

For income, no. The rewards have aged, and the time goes further on metas and world bosses or fractals.

For learning group play, yes, with care. The mechanics are old and occasionally unfair, and the community is used to running specific paths quickly.

The state they are in

This is preserved content. It is not balanced or updated, some paths are cleared in strange ways, and finding a group is harder than for anything else.

But it is free, it opens at level 30, and it shows the game as it was at launch. As an excursion, it is worth an evening.

Why people still go

The honest answer has nothing to do with the coin.

Dungeon armour and weapon skins are still some of the best-looking gear in the game, and they cannot be bought on the trading post at any price. Ascalonian Catacombs armour, that bone-white set every guardian eventually wants, comes out of a dungeon nobody runs and no amount of gold will produce it.

There is also the thing that happens when five people who have never met walk into a 2012 dungeon designed before the game knew what it was. Somebody dies to a trap everyone else forgot about. Somebody who ran this a hundred times in 2014 starts narrating. The whole thing takes twenty minutes longer than it should.

You will not get rich. You will get a set of armour that marks you, in a very quiet way, as somebody who went and looked at the old parts of the world.

What it says that they are still here

A short thought before you go.

Dungeons were abandoned over a decade ago. The obvious commercial move is to remove them: they split the player base, they confuse newcomers, and nobody is paid to maintain a mode nobody is selling.

They are still in the game. Still enterable, still paying out, still holding skins you cannot get elsewhere.

That comes from the same instinct behind gear that does not expire and a story you can return to after three years away. The game is unusually reluctant to delete your reasons for having played.

Not every old room deserves a visit. It is worth something that the door is still unlocked.