As the depths of Daemonheim reach ever closer to the strange power at their end, its magic has begun to affect the inhabitants who stalk its halls. Those humans abandoned on the floors above are the lucky ones, as the ones driven further down by their master have…changed, and have been joined by the magically gifted and the undead.

Members who venture through the twelve occult floors will have to face these tainted foes, mostly in the form of six new boss monsters. One boss that requires some skill to defeat is the Grave Creeper, who hides in a series of tombs – if you don’t quickly bless the graves he taints, the room can become engulfed in flame…and you with it. Then, as mentioned in this month’s Behind the Scenes, there’s Yk’Lagor the Thunderous, so named because he’s a talkative guy (voice acting supplied by the developers). Heed his warnings or be the focus of a melee pummelling, but don’t stray too far away else his magic attack can quickly take out your whole group!

Before you get to face these new bosses, you’ll likely come across one of nine new challenge rooms. These are not all exclusive to the occult floors and will tax both members and free-players alike. Withstand the pain of deadly herbs (slaughtercress, papreaper and parslay came from player suggestions in the Aggressive Herbs – Name Ideas! forum thread), build bridges over bottomless pits, and perform last rites on a tormented spirit.

Traversing through the occult floors will allow you to increase your maximum prestige up to 47, with which you should be earning anywhere up to about 40% more XP than if your maximum prestige were 35 (depending upon your dungeon setup and how well you do). In turn, you’ll earn more Dungeoneering tokens – just the thing for buying some of the five new rewards. Free players can learn a technique to become more efficient at smithing and charge special boxes with spells to cast. Members can enjoy such delights as herbicide (an automatic herb burner) and Rigour, a new prayer for rangers, among other things.

Mod Mark, Mod Chris L, Mod Liono and Mod Trick
The Dungeoneering Team

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In other news…

As previously mentioned by Mod Trick, we’ve now implemented the feature to reset your Dungeoneering class rings. This is a one-time only option, so choose wisely this time.

We’ve added a useful new item to the Dungeoneering smuggler’s shop. The toolkit contains a selection of the more useful items used in most dungeons which should help speed up the start of your dungeons.

When progressing through dungeons, if you’ve purposefully selected a lower complexity, the complexity level will no longer increase as you progress through the floors.

Barnabas in Varrock Museum has noticed the popularity of the strange rocks and can now help you further by offering a bag to store them in. On a related note, the chance of getting a rock from Construction activities has been increased slightly.

The music interface now has a search feature so you can easily find the tracks you’re after, which should be useful when you’re creating a playlist or simply looking for those tracks you’ve just unlocked.

From what I’ve read it looks great especially the construction hotspots.

Off to try this update out.

This week we bring you extensive improvements and new rewards for our brand new skill, Dungeoneering!

Hidden Resource Dungeons
Experienced dungeoneers will now be able to locate secret dungeons scattered far and wide across the world of RuneScape. Not only will these dungeons give a one-off Dungeoneering XP reward for locating them, but they also contain extremely useful resources within. Each dungeon requires a specific Dungeoneering level to access, from level 10 up to level 85. Rewards include new rune rocks, greater numbers of ‘busy’ monster spawns, herb spawns and trees to name a few. For a full list of the reward dungeons, including four for the free game, check out this Knowledge Base page.

Construction Hotspots
Players will be able to use their Construction skill in a dungeon to build useful locations in the start room. Requiring a hammer and some of the logs and bars found within the dungeon, you’ll be able to make:

* A group gatestone portal
* A photo booth
* A farming patch
* A range
* A prayer altar
* A skillcape stand, to show off your mastery of Dungeoneering.

Group Gatestone
The group gatestone portal is the default location found in the Construction hotspot. A group gatestone is given to the party leader, and anyone using the group gatestone portal will be teleported to wherever the group gatestone is, or next to whoever is carrying it. We’ve also added a Group Gatestone Teleport spell to allow you to teleport directly to the group gatestone from anywhere in a dungeon, not just through a group gatestone portal in the start room. This is available in the free game. Also, the Gatestone Teleport spell now requires no runes to cast, and the Create Gatestone and Group Gatestone Teleport spells each only require one type of rune to cast.

Class Rings
Dungeoneers will now be able to upgrade their ring of kinship to help them adventure through Daemonheim. By simply right-clicking on the ring and spending a few Dungeoneering tokens within any dungeon, you’ll be able to improve your ring from Tier 1 through to Tier 10 in any of the ways noted below. For more information, visit this Knowledge Base page.

Melee rings:
Tank – Damage is reduced when wielding a shield
Tactician – Increases chance of hitting in accurate stance
Berserker – Increases Strength levels when calculating damage

Ranged rings:
Sniper – Increases chance of max-hit in long-range stance
Keen-eye – Chance of reducing target’s Defence when in accurate stance
Desperado – Increases Ranged levels when in rapid stance

Magic rings:
Blazer – Elemental spell damage is increased
Blaster – Chance to slow down your opponent’s attack speed and snare them
Blitzer – Increases the chance of casting elemental spells faster

Skiller:
Medic – Increases the amount you heal other players
Gatherer – Chance of extra resources and skill task damage reduction
Artisan – Chance of saving resources and increasing rune production

New Titles
You may have noticed the titles displayed on the dungeon completion interface (what we affectionately refer to as the WINterface) and likely have received some or all of the existing 32 titles that you can get. With this update we’re adding 18 brand new ones, which were inspired by our own playing styles during this year’s testing of the new skill. Good luck finding them all! For more information on titles and how to obtain them, check out the Dungeoneering FAQ.

Dungeon Instances
If you log out or lose connection, your dungeon will now persist for up to 10 minutes, which should give you plenty of time to get back into the game and dungeon. When you log back in, you’ll find yourself exactly where you left, not in the waiting room as before. This means you’ll be able to take a short break if in a single-player dungeon or rejoin a dungeon if you’ve been caught by a nasty bout of lag. Dungeon instances will not persist over a system reboot.

Dungeon Sizes
Solo dungeoneers are now able to select medium-sized dungeons, and parties of three or greater can now select large-sized dungeons.

The Grouping System
Autogrouping rooms will now allow a player to select a specific floor from those available in the selected theme, and you will only be grouped with 3-5 players who have also selected that floor, so you will not incur an XP penalty due to level differences.

Prayer Improvements
Players can now use bones found within Daemonheim directly on a prayer altar. Doing so will give 4x the usual Prayer XP for burying those bones.

Have fun!

Mod Mark, Mod Chris L, Mod Liono and Mod Trick
The Dungeoneering Team

In other news…

After some feedback about the World Map marker feature, we’ve implemented a couple of changes: their name has been changed to “Your Marker” to avoid confusion with quest start markers, and you can now right-click to remove them.

Please note that this was not the boss hunt, that is still to come within a couple of days, will keep you updated about when it will happen. So if you haven’t voted on the poll yet please do, as it will finish soon. I cashed in the penguin points to get the last of the experience as it was easier then to make everyone that came to go to my slayer task. As mentioned at the end of the video I made around 85m or so from 94-99.

Here is the video I made

Here are some screenshots from 99 slayer

This is another picture from 99 slayer, after I clicked the slayer skill itself once I had leveled:

Thanks to everyone that came to the small gathering this morning, and for supporting me the whole time during my slaying.

08-Dec-2009 – Kuradal’s Dungeon

Kuradal, daughter of Duradel, left Shilo Village to experience the fullness of combat and surpass her peers in the art of Slayer. Years later, she has settled somewhere she would call “comfortable” – the Ancient Cavern! Using only her raw power, she has rounded up various creatures of RuneScape and secured them in an off-shoot of the dungeon. Here, she’ll offer her skills as a new slayer master, allowing exclusive access to the dungeon if you have something in there to kill.

Is there more to this slayer master and dungeon? Kuradal is a keeper of many secrets and she has one task she might offer you that’s a little less conventional than other Slayer tasks…but that’s for you to discover. As for the dungeon, who knows what the creatures have foraged from their new location?

Summary:

* To be assigned a task from Kuradal, you need 75 Slayer and 110 Combat.
* 86 Agility is required for the low wall-climb shortcut
* 90 Agility is required for the dungeon wall-run

Mod Chris L
RuneScape Content Developer

In other news…

The Contact NPC spell from the lunar spellbook has been reworked. You should see at least one new face and some extra functionality that you might find quite useful!

The Cryptic Clue Fest event has now been removed.

All fonts should now be back to normal.

The pharaoh’s sceptre change is a good one… I hated having to examine it every time to examine the amount of charges left in it.

Potions, Spells and Runes

We’ve taken a careful look at the extreme Herblore potions we released a few weeks ago and have now reintroduced them to safe PvP minigames – that includes Castle Wars, Soul Wars, safe Clan Wars, TzHaar Fight Pit, and the Duel Arena (but not ‘no-potion’ fights or Tournaments).

As part of this, we’ve slightly changed the way in which the extreme magic potion works – it now provides a visible Magic stat boost of 7, which decreases over time as with other stat-boosting potions. The normal magic potion’s level boost has been increased to +5. We have, however, also made a change to the Magic skill itself, so that if your Magic level is boosted by any means, you will inflict +3% magic damage per boosted level. This is on top of the +10% magic damage you inflict when wielding certain staves.

Part of the reason for these changes is that we’ve added four new high-level elemental battle spells to the standard spellbook. The Wind Surge (level 81), Water Surge (level 85), Earth Surge (level 90) and Fire Surge (level 95) spells each require one blood and one death rune, and some air runes (and some water, earth or fire runes for those respective elemental spells).

The max hit of Fire Surge is:
28 without boosts
30 with a magic damage-boosting staff
33 with extreme magic/overload
37 with both extreme magic/overload and a magic damage-boosting staff

With those updates, you’re going to need some more runes, so, to top it all off, Runecrafting also gets a tweak. As of today, crafting multiple runes out of one essence has changed for the better. Before, you would only gain the ability to craft an extra rune at specific Runecrafting levels (e.g. 2 air runes at level 11, 3 air runes at level 22, 4 at level 33, and so on). Now, there is a ‘chance’ of getting an extra rune on ‘some’ of your essences if you are between those set levels, with that chance increasing as your level increases (e.g. at Runecrafting levels 12-21, you will gain 2 or 3 air runes per essence). If you want to imagine it visually, what used to be a step graph has been smoothed out into a curve. This is explained in a little more detail in the Game Guide, but the bottom line is that you’ll receive more runes for your hard work.

Mod Chris L (potions/Magic), Mod Rathe (new spells) and Mod Nancy (Runecrafting)
RuneScape Content Developers

In other news…

Your run mode setting is now stored between logins.

You can now take Ava’s Attractor and Accumulator to Lanthus and you will be able to retrieve dropped ammo while in Castle Wars. There’s also a toggle option on both items to allow you to stop receiving junk.

The pharaoh’s sceptre now displays its remaining charges in the name of the item.

The Summoning skillcape now has a boost option to match other skillcapes.

Cannons will no longer waste cannonballs on NPCs in the process of dying. You can now also top up the ammo when it’s already firing and there’s an auto-setup feature.

Bones to Peaches and Bones to Bananas can now be used to convert any bones up to and including big bones.

The lowest new potion is the Recover special, which requires 84 herblore, a Super energy potion and a papaya. The recover special recovers one quarter of special attack bar. Super antifire is next at lev 85, followed by extreme combat potions. The highest level potion is Overload which requires 96 herblore, the 5 extreme potions, and a torstol. The Overload potion gives…

Overload is so strong that it racks the body with spasms and burns the digestive tract, so be prepared for 50 damage in chunks of 10 when you drink it! You will regain these 50 Hitpoints when the stat effects wear off.

Overload gives you the stat effects and magic boosts of ALL five of its potion ingredients – extreme attack, extreme strength, extreme defence, extreme magic and extreme ranging – for a period of five minutes. Unlike the other extreme potions, which gradually return your stats to their normal level, overload will keep these bonuses at their boosted level for five minutes and will then reset them back to their original state (healing the 50 Hitpoints at the same time).

So the overload potion looks very strong. It is also untradeable and gives 1000 herblore xp.

The right click on the glory will be helpful too

High-level Herblore Potions
This week, high-level herbalists will find a variety of new, untradeable potions at their disposal. Using your increased knowledge of the Herblore skill, you will find you now have the ability to add tertiary ingredients to some potions to increase their effect.

These potions aren’t just limited to stat boosts either. Have you ever wanted to take your godsword on dragon-slaying trips? Now’s your chance, with the super antifire potion (at level 84). Are you approaching near mastery of the Herblore skill? If so, there’s a potion that may just ‘overload’ your entire body (at level 96) – dare you drink it?

On a side note, those who can mix the extreme magic potion will find it doesn’t work in a similar way to its lower-level equivalents. When used, this potion will boost all offensive spell damage by 40% for a duration of six minutes, and will stack with magic staves that boost magic damage.

Mod Chris L
RuneScape Content Developer

In other news…

As part of the conversion of the worn interface and inventory to a newer internal file format, certain items now have clearer right-click options when using them. For example, the amulet of glory now lists the four different destinations it can take you to instead of just saying ‘Operate’.

The Game Engine team have made sure the player list is now randomised to prevent priority being given to some players over others because of their IP address.

You can now navigate around the world map using arrow keys.

To see the guide click here.

Anyway, Jeffsterz is an elite Runescape player with many skills at 99. He has a rank of 504 at the time of this post in runecrafting, so he certainly knows what he is doing. Jeffsterz was kind enough to provide Bestrunetips with a very comprehensive runecrafting guide.  You can view this guide here.

If you have any comments or suggestions for this guide, please make them here.