Guide:New player guide/Instanced dungeons

Group Encounters
Instanced Dungeons (or "Instances", "dungeons") are where the fun really begins. These are not the sort of places you'll want to go alone. Unlike many random areas of the game where you may easily get by as a solo player, instances and dungeons are designed to challenge whole groups of players. Most instances and dungeons will require five people to complete successfully. They always contain many elite monsters.

Instances are great for groups to go get experience and loot, though they present quite a challenge. It is ideal to construct well-balanced groups that include members which fill all party roles: typically a tank, a healer and three damage dealers.

There are two classes that can resurrect: Mystic and Priest. In addition, all members of the party can obtain. Generally, these scrolls should be saved to resurrect the healer if they die.

See the class article for a table of roles that usually need to be played, and the rating of each class' ability to fulfill that role.

Instances are both sources of excitement, and of dread.

A place for you and your group only
In the regular world, monsters exist and walk around doing whatever it is monsters do when the players aren't there. Anybody can come along, kill them, get the loot or whatever, and move on. If one player kills a monster, obviously it can't be killed twice. That means other players have to wait until that monster respawns, which occurs regularly (usually within 5-15 minutes). Some monsters are quest targets which need to be killed by any player attempting to complete that quest (a simple example is in ). You may find yourself waiting for Vekas to respawn before you can kill him again. You may even be able to kill the same monster any number of times, as long as you wish to wait around.

In instances, it doesn't quite work the same way. Each group that goes into an instanced dungeon gets their own version of it – their own instance of it, hence the name. This means you will never be inconvenienced by another group going in and killing all of the monsters and getting the loot before you do, but you will also never have the possibility of having another group or player come along and saving your hides from an ugly battle! Each group gets to go through the whole place on their own.

This can result in good loot and experience as a group progresses through an instance. Furthermore, the monsters in the area tend not to respawn until after the instance reset timer is completed.

Death and Resurrection in Instances
If you die in an instance, you will have the default resurrection pop-up, this however is not ideal to use as it will put you back in the nearest town. However this can mean that you may have a long way to run before you catch up to the rest of your group, or lead to general irritation of your party members. Generally you want to wait for a resurrection from either your group's healer or someone using a, in doing this you will resurrect at the spot you died.

If it has taken your group some time to get to a point in an instance you want to avoid having to run all the way back in again. It's smart to try to allow characters with resurrection abilities, such as mystics or priests to survive a difficult fight even if other characters must sacrifice themselves in the process. If these particular classes survive a disaster that kills the rest of the party, they can eventually resurrect everyone else – preventing a long way back in.