Last night, after a nice 2 hour queue to log in (damn carebear tourists got through!), I had an experience I was not exactly expecting from DarkFall; I had fun doing a PvE dungeon run. Don’t get too excited yet carebears, the dungeon is not an instance and allows the same open PvP/looting that the rest of DF allows. Actually it encourages it a bit more, since people deep in a dungeon are likely to have better loot on them.

For starters, getting to the dungeon portal is an interesting adventure itself. The portal is located in the middle of a large creator-like area inaccessible from all sides. The only way in is to jump down a large waterfall, swim underwater to a cave below the mountain, catch your breath in an air pocket, and again swim under another underwater passage to finally immerge inside the creator. This is all made a bit more difficult because in DarkFall dungeons (or mob camps for that matter) are not marked in any way other than when you are looking at the portal, so without some exploration one would never think to actually jump down and swim.

The area just outside the dungeon has a good collection of mid-level mobs, including some giant skeletons and bone lords. Once inside, you fight some vampire-like mobs and more skeletons. The dungeon itself is huge, and like the rest of DarkFall, not every room is packed with mobs. The mobs have a chance to drop some nice loot, along with the regular assortment of regents and vendor junk (vendors pay you next to nothing for it though, cheap bastards). Of real interest is the one chest located in the dungeon, which if someone has a key (low chance random drop), can open it for 2000 gold and some nice gear. Also found in the dungeon is a ‘public’ chest that everyone can open to get some minor loot. I believe the chest works on a personal timer, but not 100% on that.

Our guild went in 10 strong, which meant everyone else avoided us when we were making our way over and we had an easy 30 minute trip. Once inside, we found 3 players farming some of the mobs, but when seeing our group they quickly picked up and left (we did not actually attack them as they were blue to us). Even blue, I’m guessing they picked leaving with their current loot rather than risking getting dropped. Smart move, considering we were discussing ganking them if they did not leave since they were messing with ‘our’ mobs. The mobs were overall rather easy since we had 10 players, but we still had to be careful since mobs have a chance to insta-kill you (normally you drop to the ground and bleed, giving others a chance to revive you), and no one wanted a 30 minute run back. As one of our members had a key, we popped the chest and collected the 2000 gold to put towards our guild town. Loot when to anyone who needed any, with all crafting/regents going to the guild bank. No need for a DKP system here. We ended the trip by killing a random player inside, who we thought had also come in to open the 2000g chest.

We were wrong, sorry bud. Thanks for the armor set though.