Ah, good old dungeon crawling. Where would entire genres of computer games (roguelikes, RPGs, MUDs, and MMOs, to name a few) be without the pen 'n paper staple that rose from the roots of Chainmail and an intrepid GM hurriedly scribbling corridors and rooms on a simple piece of paper?
I've been thinking deeply about dungeons and my relationship with them and other such tightly-bound small group content (fer example, task forces) ever since finishing Rift's first dungeon on the Defiant side, The Iron Tomb.
Or colloquially in WoWspeak, IT. As an aside, I have no idea where this habit of giving all dungeons acronyms came from, and it rather annoys me. Perhaps it speaks to my lack of familiarity with them as a whole, but I can't tell BD from BC or BRD or what-have-you. Perhaps I am subconsciously picking up on the separation, the speaker is purposefully (if unconsciously) using the jargon as a means of in-group out-group speak, the teammates they want are the folk who know what they're talking about. Objectively, this isn't limited to WoW's dungeons, CoH's TFs/SFs are also full of katie/ITF/LGTF gobblespeak. And the entire genre of MMOs has strange jargon and abbreviations like mob, tank, dps and so on.
Anyhow, back to the Iron Tombs. I finally manned up in beta #5 and took the leap into the dungeon, but it took some doing. For all the reduction in group starting effort that the system of public, open groups have created while doing overworld quest and rift content, it is still old-school LFG spamming and tell sending for dungeon crawling. I assure you, this was a tremendous mental hurdle to cross. And I certainly didn't form my own group but waited for an opportunity to arise.
Making things more difficult for me (in my brain, anyhow) were two things.
1) Lack of a proper role to 'fit' into a team.
My solo build for Rift is an interesting hybrid, a melee cleric who can tank a bit, heal a bit, and dps a bit. Try telling that to team leaders who may be WoW-trained or at least focused on having more pure-specs, even if their pure healer is a mage and they are ok with a cleric being pure dps. To take a City of Heroes analogy, my character is built more like a villain, a hybrid, or more accurately a peacebringer - with one toggle on, I become kinda tanky, with another toggle on, I can scrap a bit and heal around me. Personally, I think I fill into teams well as a kind of offtank/offheal/utility/dps with more readiness to step into a tank position. But again, try explaining that to teams.
2) Not knowing the dungeon.
I've always found this a bit of a catch-22. You don't know it until you've run it once, or twice, or a few times. But everyone expects every run to go without a hitch or else it's a fail, and often, if you're the tank, you're labeled as the failtank, or the failhealer, or whatever, failPUG. Everyone's dream seems to be to be taken around by at least one or two people who know what's going on, and are preferably tank/heals so that the bulk of the work is on them.
Anyhow, despite my readiness to tank (as in survive and hopefully, hold aggro, though I actually hadn't -tested- any of my new Rift skills in relation to 5-man teams), not knowing the dungeon kind of puts a crimp in me knowing how to set a pace and where to freaking go and what the trouble spots are.
Caught in a paradox that just wasn't going to give way, I decided to spoil my surprise and go watch a youtube video of Iron Tomb. Fortunately, I found a rather entertaining one, Jesse Plays! - Rift Iron Tomb Dungeon Part 1.
It occurred to me that I might actually sate my curiosity of what the inside of the dungeon looked like...without having to set a single foot in it at all. Especially since this was like a Let's Play video, going through practically everything.
A couple things created some inspiration. The guy tanking was a cleric. Yeah, he looked like a Justicar, a similar spec as to myself. He didn't seem to be getting hurt that bad, albeit he was about 6+ levels over the dungeon. And in certain places, he wasn't tanking that well either, and a rogue had to step into spots and so on, but hey, nobody died until they ran into a gimmick of spawning too many mobs for them to handle. I watched Part 1 and Part 2, and generally it didn't look that horrific, though I was still not very confident of my own ability to withstand the bosses.
Long story short, I went through Iron Tombs twice. The first time, I offered because the group had been begging away in chat for a tank for about half an hour, so I figured they would have to be pretty desperate already. Ironically, though the guy accepted me into the team, he still wanted a tank, and after some questions, suggested I switch over to my cabalist soul to do dps or something. Hell no, it's beta, I was going to test my tankiness. His warrior tank finally joined, at about level 18 or 19, whereas I was 22 so I figured it would be an interesting test all the same.
Turns out, whatever soul the warrior specced into, it was pretty aggro-ific and he took his tank-y duties very seriously, stealing practically all aggro, and his health was yo-yoing up and down like anything. Fortunately for him, there was someone else who was dedicated to healing him, and I found another niche by switching off my tank/increased threat/more hp/lowered dps toggle and putting on the lowered threat/increase heal toggle. Mostly I did it to increase my dps, but I also noticed that the justicar spec had skills that healed in a low constant stream as I melee hit things, and my druid/sent heals provided short term burst heals when his health was really yo-yoing badly. There was one time when he died (my bad, I wasn't paying enough attention to save him with a burst heal), so I promptly toggled on tank toggle and tanked. Wasn't too bad. The dedicated healer switched to me and my health went down considerably less than the warrior's. Of course, I did happen to be about 3 levels higher than him and had about 800hp more, so not a terribly fair comparison. Anyhow, since he had done the dungeon before on other characters, we let him tank and yank us through it. After that, I spent some time mucking around in the cleared out instance to learn my way around and feel my way through a few gimmicks until I was fairly confident of the area.
Second time, I saw another group sitting around begging for a tank, and I sent a tell offering to tank as a lvl 23 justicar/druid spec. I'm not sure if they were ok with it, but I got the invite anyhow, and we were off and running. My aggro wasn't as great as the warrior's, but I held on to the main stuff fairly well. Some of the mobs in packs peeled off a bit, but there were pet tanks and cc and a rogue whom I suspect had a tank soul and wanted to offtank (or at least didn't want to or wasn't allowed to main tank). Besides one little hitch with two very hard hitting mobs in which we initially split up fine with me tanking one and the rogue tanking the other, and me getting greedy and aggro'ing the second one that the rogue had and promptly squishing as a result, the rest went by without a hitch and the bosses were all pretty do-able.
So yeah, Iron Tombs. Done. And done again. And I suspect I'm pretty much done with it as well.
How come? I dunno. Beyond the drive of -seeing- the place once or twice and trying it out to see if I can do it, I don't really have much motivation to continue. Yes, I could get greedy and hope for good loot drops, but end goal is not the issue here, I want to enjoy the journey. And the truth is, I don't really enjoy group work journeys.
That might be shading the truth a bit. I think I'd find dungeoneering fun if I had 5 friends to explore the place together. But a random group put together for the express purpose of going through it, I dunno. I'm not sure I like it. I can do it. It's a change from questing and rifting. But I don't really come out of a dungeon going WHOOOO, I gotta do it again, right now, yeah! Instead, I usually come out thinking, ok, time to crawl away in a corner and recharge my little introverted soul with some soloing now.
Yet, I like group work rifting. Especially now that public groups are working in Beta 5. It's absolutely easy to join a big massive raid group with one button press. We more or less coordinate our actions. And I've even done pulling and tanking of harder rifts by sheer virtue of not dying very quickly and knowing how to pull a mob I can survive at a distance the others don't follow. The moment I lock together with a mob, you can see the random opportunistic strangers crowd around to add damage and throw heals on me... Now that is a rush. And it's not that I want to be the only tank. There are some rift pulls in which I'm almost thinking/begging, when I pull these two, I HOPE someone in that big group of players knows to split the aggro and take the other one or I'm dead. Sure enough, they do. It's beauty in motion to see it in action, coordination in a large group with no one needing to yell instructions.
And I like solo dungeoneering. Or the idea of it anyhow. I've done solo instances for a challenge, and enjoyed placing my henchmen and heroes in different places in Guild Wars. I play roguelikes, and the whole idea of it is one dungeon after another. You set your own pace in a solo dungeon.
It's not that I think everyone in a group dungeon is no good. On the contrary, they may be even better than me, and I might be the weakest link (which is another kind of stress.) But the tension of teaming in a high stakes environment (and it's not even as high stakes as max level raiding or heroic dungeoneering) is always there somehow, and it makes it less fun than it could be. For me, anyhow.
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