Dungeons can be a very frustrating experience. Everyone in the group tries to do his or her own thing and get overwhelmed, nobody is close by to resurrect each other and attacks come out of nowhere that down you. Next, some players skip mobs while others don’t know how and die and struggle to get through mobs alone. Eventually everyone is angry and frustrated and some people understandably quit the dungeon.
There is hope though. You can get that beautiful dungeon armor too and the journey can be a very smooth, exciting and satisfying experience by just taking some general guidelines into account when you’re running with a random group. Not to mention you’ll find some great friends and be called to do dungeons with in future.
First off you have to STOP doing what you normally do in PVE, change your gameplay from regular exploring. Dungeons just aren’t that forgiving. You can’t charge in and smack down everything you come across. You can’t dance or go to sleep in the middle of a fight to make fun of the enemies, and you can’t solely focus on yourself. That kite doesn’t fly in dungeons.
The reason people experience so much frustration in dungeons is because it often gets treated like PVE. There’s the enemy, run in and kiiiill iiiiit!!! We have to take a different approach here. While PVE pretty much allows you to play single player with an audience watching, dungeons require true multiplayer, teamwork and focus.
So how do we go about this ruan? Well good question!
A party needd teamwork and focus. There’s no easier way to make this happen than having a leader in my experience. Too often I’ve seen dungeon runs fail because there was no leader. No one knows what they should be doing or attacking and everyone is dying against weak mobs even though they are wearing exotics and have good builds. Someone must give the group direction, and guide them. This is important even in the case of experienced groups.
Sadly leading can be a confusing task if not done properly. So let’s take a look at what it is:
In my personal experience a leader is the person with the highest standard and strongest relationship with the group. By strong relationship I mean you care for the other players and constantly give advice wherever you believe it might help.
Leadership does not mean you should attack players who aren’t doing as well as you’d like, or insult people who are new to the dungeon, it just means you set the standard and you help everyone in the group achieve it.
So if you want to go about running dungeons with random groups it’s generally a good idea to share any important information throughout the run to make sure everyone is able to perform as well as possible. This includes even the simple things like “make sure you guys kill any poisonous blossoms as you run through, because the poison they leave behind will harm the players following you”. And it’s also very important to set a strategy for encounters “we will attack the enemies one by one starting from left to right ok guys” . As a leader I would suggest you ALWAYS target enemies.
There are optimal ways to go about taking down mobs, but I’ve found over time that that isn’t as important as just a good amount of focus. Any amount of teamwork is much better than no teamwork at all.
Finally, this is to help the players and not to get an ego trip. So try your best to keep it playful, be patient, and to encourage the players as well as congratulate them after tough encounters.
This goes for the times you don’t even know the dungeon as a group. Even if none of you have done the dungeon before, make sure you target and share anything you learn or plan with each other along the way. It may not be the best strategy you come up with, but it’s very important that you have some strategy and some teamwork.
By keeping to these guidelines we create great environment to play in and dungeons will be a much more rewarding experience than the frustrating one it often is for random groups at the moment. And hopefully this helps a few players out who can share it and help even more players.