2.1 How to Key / Map Reading
This is pretty much the part of the guide you're really looking for I would suppose. But don't just read this part. Read the rest of this guide too, as there is a lot of other good information to know as a keyer, and even if there's information you know already, there's no harm in spending a few extra seconds making sure you know it correctly anyways.
In this section of the guide, I'm going to do the following 3 things:
1) Give general tips about what to do and what not to do when keying
2) Explain concepts that are important to know, such as pathing
3) Provide sample maps and scenarios to build general dungeon knowledge skills
As you should know (hopefully), the only floors you should be keying large floors for are abandoned, occult, and warped floors (furnished occasionally and possibly, but not recommended). By abandoned floors, I mean abandoned 2 floors (floors 30-35). Occasionally, people do abandoned 1 floors, but that's mainly just to set record times and other things. You could do furnished larges if you want, but once you start to unlock a couple abandoned 2s, I advise against it for both boss difficulty reasons and xp/time-saving reasons. Some people opt out of abandoned floors and rush them, but I find them still a good chunk of experience in a short amount of time, so I do them.
Here are some timeframes for what should be done by certain points in a dungeon. These will vary and change accordingly to the dungeon and the team. These times are also ideal for fast keyers and those who are rather experienced. Do not try to reach these times right away if you don't have extensive keying experience. Think of them more like goals to set for you to work towards over time. Although not the only ones, times are good indicators of your keying performance.
Note: I personally like to call out the dungeon time occasionally and sporadically throughout the dungeon so my party knows how long we've been in the dungeon. Knowing that a dungeon is going quickly encourages even faster progress, while knowledge that a dungeon is going slowly usually encourages people to pick up the pace and do better.
Abandoned
1:00 – Have everybody ready to go with runes and in some room doing something. Several doors should ideally be open already.
5:00 – Overload runs out. Dungeon should ideally be at least a quarter open by now.
10:00 – Over half the dungeon should be open by now. (Depends heavily on map layout, number of gds, and turmoiling of gds, as well as focus of teammates)
13:00 – Should be nearing ¾ of the dungeon open hopefully. Prepare to open a significant rest of the dungeon yourself and have the rest of the team do the upcoming boss if not already opened.
15:00 – You should be at the boss around now, or at least have your team at the boss, if the boss isn't killed already, in which case you'd be focusing on finishing the dungeon.
17:00/18:00 – Your dungeon should be done by now roughly. May be shorter or longer.
Occult
1:00 – Have everybody ready to go with runes and in some room doing something. Several doors should ideally be open already.
5:00 – Overload runs out. Dungeon should ideally be at least a quarter open by now.
10:00 – Over half the dungeon should be open by now. (Depends heavily on map layout, number of gds, and turmoiling of gds, as well as focus of teammates)
15:00 – Over ¾ of the dungeon should be completed fully by now, and have your team start on the boss if possible (don't if you need your party for something).
18:00 – Finish up rest of dungeon if necessary, and complete boss if not completed before for another reason
20:00 – Dungeon should be done by now hopefully
Warped
1:00 – Have everybody ready to go with runes and in some room doing something. Several doors should ideally be open already.
5:00 – Overload runs out. Dungeon should ideally be at least a quarter open by now.
10:00 – Over half the dungeon should be open by now. (Depends heavily on map layout, number of gds, and turmoiling of gds, as well as focus of teammates)
13:00 – Around ¾ of the dungeon should be finished at this time.
15:00 – The dungeon should be close to completion. Keep going if boss is not uncovered yet.
17:00 – Start the boss now if not started already.
19:00 – Your dungeon should hopefully be completed by now. If a few doors are still left, go ahead and open them only if they don't take too much time.
Like I said, these are just general guideline timeframes for when you become quite experienced. They may be beneficial or completely useless to you. I'm just putting it out there in case anybody is curious how my usual fast dungeons go or in case anybody wants to use it to help shape their dungeon time management. The times given above are ideal for keyers who are maxed or close to maxed. I personally am not close to being maxed, and I have trouble in dungeons because I often need people to open doors for me, slowing down my dungeon times by up to 2-3 minutes. Having high skills and training really does help, so do it!
I know that these times are pretty much the most optimal of sorts, so don't aim for them right away of course. Take your time and steadily work towards them. If you're not there already, aim for 30 minute dungeons, then work your way down to 25, and 20, and then you can start really working towards 15.
Now I'm going to cover a general chronological timeline of how the dungeon should go for you as a keyer at the beginning. This is not necessarily the best way, but it's what I do, and I've had great success with it.
Dungeon Start Timeline
Run to the tables and quickly grab the highest tier item(s) you can. I suggest grabbing ~2 items, and take 3 if you need to because they are low tier items. Grab rune essence off the starting tables if you can as well. You should now immediately open all base doors (pick up a base key if there is one), as well as 1 room past each room connected to a base door. Open your map after opening all base doors possible to take a glance at what the starting map looks like. As I will point out shortly n this section, you want to build into areas with more potential to expand in the map, so put primary focus on the largest path. If a path keeps going and you are able to do it quickly, continue to do so until you hit a dead end or an unopenable key door or a guardian door, at which point you should have your teammates teleport or move the group gatestone (they're supposed to have runes by now and have a personal gatestone in their inventory). Next, get back to base, sell your table items, and buy rune essence, and make law and cosmic runes. Take a quick peek at the map at this point and quickly determine which direction would probably lead to the bulk of the dungeon, and follow that path, unless that path is dead for now. Make any calls to your team as necessary. At this point, get yourself back to base by running (if you have cosmics bound, you can actually leave a gatestone at base at the beginning so getting back to base if quick and easy if a long early path is to emerge). Run the path you opened if it was unopenable and gate it if nobody gated it.
If you use DgSweeper, you can place Gold Shield keys on the map at places where you had party members gate. They're also useful for marking pot doors (this is what I use them for). But wait, wouldn't this be extremely confusing? No not really actually. Given the map, you should be able to tell which grid squares you place the keys on with the applet. Also, there are no such things as gold shield keys and doors in dungeoneering. False? Why don't you take a moment then to think of the last time you saw a gold shield key or door if ever. ;)
Map Reading
Map reading is probably one of the two most important things you need to be able to do as a keyer. For this section, I will be providing pictures to help me explain certain things. The ideas for this were partially adopted from the guide DGS has which can be found at
http://www.xp-waste.com/map-reading-pathing-t1315.html
It is important to read this part of the guide thoroughly, as some of the more important points are actually in just the plain text of information that I provide. The images are there to enhance your understanding of the concepts visually, but some of the tips and tricks are embedded in the information itself and not in the pictures.
One important thing to keep in mind is that map reading is useless unless you keep your knowledge of the map updated. Open your map whenever a door or two is opened to keep it updated and accurate for you. Having DgSweeper helps with this greatly.
The first two points I'm going to touch upon are determining path sizes and path directions. This will also slightly cover path proximity.
One of the things you need to be able to do when map reading is determining the size of paths. This is important because it basically tells you where the bulk of the map / dungeon will probably stem from and lie, and where you should probably send people. In general, drag the group gatestone along the largest path in the dungeon. In the map below, there is a base door that can't be opened, as there a room north and south of base. The north room has doors to the west and north, while the south room has a door to the west. Just based off this, you can determine that the north path holds the most potential for a good chunk of the map because it has more doors to path off of, and it also controls the entire north half of the map at this point I time. The south room has potential too, but it only holds one door. The room afterwards may split two ways to lead to the south as well, but this is somewhat unlikely, as paths tend to go straight and don't simply turn constantly / every room. The east door at base doesn't seem like it can hold many rooms. It is probably restricted to a few rooms east of base. So the north room and path is where attention should be given the most.
Here is another example of a dungeon map, only a little more developed than the one above. Here, a couple rooms north of base, there is a room with two doors. However, you can see that the east door will run into another path and probably be a dead end, and the north door doesn't make much room to work with. A similar scenario is occurring with the room yellow and light green are at. The rooms the keyer (red) and dark green are at have more space available to them and more potential to develop into a large chunk of the map (both south), despite both rooms having only one door at the moment.
Here is one more example of determining path size. In the map pictured below, the two rooms near base seem to be pressed for space and pushed up against the west wall or into a small region, so these will probably lead to dead ends soon. The door in the south middle of the dungeon isn't very close to another path per say, but look at it. It's basically restricted to the southeast region of the map, and if it's to expand further, it will have to build along the east side, which is unlikely. Meanwhile, the room light blue and dark green are at seems to hold a good portion of the map, as it controls the east part of the map. The only problem is, the map may turn and go south, and it is in proximity of the room in the south middle of the dungeon, so there is a good chance these paths may collide or block each other off from developing very far. The room the keyer and yellow are at is the best bet for the majority of the dungeon's paths. That room has two doors, meaning more possibilities for paths and branching of paths, and it also controls practically the entire north portion of the map.
So in general, you want to have most of your party members along the larger paths, because those will contain the majority of the dungeon rooms, and you want to be able to open the map as quickly as possible. In addition, having more people on these paths can help with making guardian door rooms go by faster.
The next point I'm going to cover is the idea of the critical path and bonus paths. For simplicity's sake, consider the critical path as the path of rooms leading from the base to the boss. This is not exactly true though, but it is not very important. Skill doors along the critical path can be determined because the skill level requirement for the door will range anywhere from the maximum level a player on the team has in that respective skill to that same level – 9. For example, with a maxed player on the team, all critical path skill doors will have level requirements ranging from 90-99. In addition, the experience you get from these skill doors is the level required * 5 + 10. This can help you determine if a door you are opening is a critical path door or not, and it can also indicate whether a door is a pot door or not (especially during the first 5 minutes of the dungeon, if you overload). This is why having shared xp off is important.
It is important to keep in mind the following. The majority of rooms in the dungeon are not critical path rooms, as that is only about 1/3 of the rooms. You do not, however, want to open the boss door last unless you have to. Why is this? Depending on the situation, sometimes it is better to have one or two people do the boss while the others are completing the dungeon. If the majority of the map is open, I'd say have one person start the boss by him/herself. It's also a pain sometimes to open the boss last because it's the only thing you can do before ending the dungeon, and the boss can take several minutes sometimes, stretching your dungeon time that ideally, you would probably want to be short. And of course, if you miss a key and it so happens to be the last room, which is the boss... which has happened many times to me by the way... your life gets really hard really fast, and people get annoyed. Hence, it is important to have your team on the critical path in the earlier stages on the dungeon and get that developed quickly. Afterwards, you should have members split up, pathing or doing certain guardian door rooms.
In the map below, you can clearly see what the critical path is, as the boss has been opened. This is actually quite an interesting map, as everything that's left and emphasized heavily (in this case, entirely) in the south part of the map. It's probably a good idea here, as those rooms are all rather close to each other, for someone to start boss (generally either the keyer or someone with food), while everyone else finishes up the dungeon. At this point, everybody else should have the four current active rooms gated in order for smooth progression. Here is a good question though: Let's say all 4 rooms are guardian door rooms. Which one should the group gatestone be moved to first? If you go back to thinking about path sizes and directions, you'll see that you should be moving it to the east-most of the four rooms. Yes, the boss is already opened, but this is still important nevertheless. Despite the critical path being a major determining factor in planning out where the group gatestone should be, it is still important to have these things in your mind even after the boss is open so that the rest of the dungeon can be done as soon as possible. If you first think about it, it seems like the order doesn't really matter because in the end, the same amount of work will be done to complete everything. But in this case, establishing and completing the east path is important because it has the potential to be a rather large path, and when the boss is opened, it's nice to have people finish their paths and then go help with the boss for a smooth ending to the dungeon. You don't want to leave someone with a large path he/she can't complete and have to go back to it after the boss or something.
In this next map, the critical path is the one going south, and therefore, the north path is a bonus path. The south path is also bigger. So technically then, shouldn't the team be heading south? In theory, yes, path size takes precedence over bonus paths, but in this case, it was actually better for the team to head north (we were not limited to north, but we all went north). Can you think of a reason why? There are several plausible explanations.
In addition to being able to identify critical paths and bonus paths, you should be able to identify when the rest of the map is soloable. This, of course may take time, especially if there is a difficult guardian door room. However, it is better to have somebody solo the rest of the dungeon if it's fairly manageable and there aren't a lot of rooms. This way, the dungeon can be finished when the boss is killed. Below is a great example of when the rest of the dungeon should be soloed. With the exception of rooms like levers or emotes, the remainder of the dungeon is regionalized to the southwest corner of the map, making it very easy for a person to maneuver through the rest of the dungeon. Hence, one person can finish up the map while the other four kill the boss. It is even okay if there are one door rooms spread out throughout the dungeon left in addition to a small chunk like the one seen below. Remaining key doors should be gated by other party members, so after the acquisition of a key, a simple quick teleport from the boss can get those rooms done easily, while that person returns to the boss fight. If it seems like you won't be able to solo the rest of the dungeon, move the group gatestone immediately and notify your team immediately. Do not wait. It is a mistake to wait because you ideally want both the map and the boss completed at the same time, rather than having to go back to doing the map after the boss is already dead. As to whether or not your party members should all teleport to come help you out, that depends. This really depends on the amount of the dungeon left, who each person is, and the binds people have. With a huge portion of the dungeon left, yes, you should move the GGS right away and get everyone to help out (and have somebody gate the boss of course). With a medium-sized path, maybe one or two people could stay behind at the boss (one or two people can deal a significant amount of damage to the boss alone). With this, you need to keep in mind people's combat stats as well as their skill stats and their binds. With hexable bosses, you definitely want your hexes at the boss, and you ideally want higher combat stats at the boss (unless there are high monster level guardian rooms). In addition, you want your best skillers on the path to open skill doors that may show up. Sometimes, these all conflict, and it's up to you to think about the situation and figure out the best plan to go forward with.
The next idea I'm going to talk about is personal gatestone placement. I'm only going to provide one map image for this, as this is a pretty general and simple idea. People, unfortunately, still mess it up all the time. With the map, you are bound to have many branching doors, and as a result, it is very likely that several unopenable key doors will be near each other at any given time. When you gate in dungeoneering, you gate areas, not doors. This is very important. Even if there is only one door, you are gating an area, not a single room or a single door. Therefore, if you are gating an area, you should be placing your gatestone at the central point of the area, from where you can access all nearby key doors and undone rooms the quickest. With this comes the idea of placing personal gatestones at forks. In the map below, how many areas can you identify? I spot four. Hence, a person should have each area gated. For the person gating the northwest area, it's probably best to place a gatestone in the room in between the two rooms with unopened doors (the idea behind central gating). The same goes for the southwest area. What about the person gating the southeast area? Well, count up the rooms and how far they are from each other. I would put a gatestone right at base.
Another thing you should keep in mind is filling in gaps in the map. Think about a complete dungeon map. You don't tend to see that many empty spaces where rooms could have been. The map is generally pretty full. You should keep this in mind when pathing to help you determine how large paths are going to be or how much longer they might go for. In the map below, there are already a lot of gaps in the map, such as the awkward 3-space gap in the east area of the map. These will happen, but keep in mind that they can't occur everywhere, or you'll be down to something along the lines of a 50-room dungeon, which simply never happens. Therefore, you can pretty safely say that one of the south paths is going to wrap west to fill in the gaps there. Using gaps to help you map read is very helpful for determining whether or not a section of the map is probably soloable or not as well.
The final topic I'm going to touch base upon is one-way maps and one-way dungeons. This isn't really a technique as much as it is an occurrence in a floor that you will encounter every now and then. One-way maps or dungeons are those in which there is only one active path on the map that can be traversed. This means there can be unopenable doors, but the activity is restricted to one room at a time. In some more uncommon instances, a map will be entirely one-way, in which case there is literally only one room available to do in the entire map. I personally hate one-ways with a burning passion, and you should too. They're time killers and overload killers. Below is an example of a pretty bad one-way. The base door was a pot door, and the map went only west at first. After that, it went east, but stopped at the fork and we were forced to go north, which you can see developed into a very nasty one-way by itself. And after finishing all that… we have a one-way to the southeast. One-ways unfortunately can be killer maps sometimes because a pot door can hold a large portion of the map like in this instance. In cases like these, make the pot during the dungeon and open up that path, or experience will be significantly decreased. If pot doors only hold a few rooms leftover at the end, it is advised to simply skip them (although herbs should be collected and grown throughout the dungeon so that it doesn't take extra time at the end to do those doors). So what can you do when you get a one-way? Well, unfortunately, not that much at all. You just have to tough it out and get your team to focus and blast through rooms quickly until you can get the map to open up more. Do your best.
