Dominant Strategy for Dungeons

With this guide you'll beat all the Main Dungeons with ease.

Preface

I won't get into detail with the sidequests here, but you'll have to do some of them to farm gold in order to make these strategies work. If you need help there, you'll find a few threads in the forums with tips for the trickier ones. Apart from that this guide will let you beat the four main dungeons with ease (to the point of actual boredom).

First Dungeon

To beat the first dungeon easily you will first need the rogue class as well as the sage pet. Do sidequests until you have sufficient funds. Getting the shops can be a help, too, but is not mandatory.

Start the dungeon and make sure you have the setup of rogue, priest and an offensive class. Warrior is great, Mage can work although quite fragile and Bard can actually be amazing due to her great dodge stat and her high luck netting you great drops early on. Buy everything off the shop if you have it and start the fight.

The fight (as many fights in this game due to balance issues) will depend a bit on luck within the first few rounds, but if you manage to setup it will get easy fast. Distribute the bought items and give the rest to the sage. You'll want to get your rogue as defensive as possible (get him a shield, high health and defenses). Level the priests special, health and defenses/dodge as soon as possible. For your fighter, do whatever suits him best: strength on the fighter, magic for mage, whatever suits you for the bard with obligatory defense, health and dodge boosts in between. Whenever you can afford it level your luck and just don't level charisma (I personally found it rarely useful except in that one sidequest where there were events every round).

With this plan in mind always set your rogue against the most enduring enemy on field, instantly using his special when possible and give the item to the sage (unless useful, which will be rarely) to give your team exp boosts. Take the defense or health totem at the beginning and immediately activate the priests alternative stance. Try to drag on each round as long as possible to beef up your party fast and you should be able to get through this dungeon with ease.

As I said, you'll need a little luck in the beginning (which is just the way with this game sadly) but you should be able to beat this in a few tries.

All the other dungeons!

The next thing you want to do is get the apprentice as he will be your juggernaut, your fallen angel, your Galactus destroyer (and Galactus eats worlds, so... you get the picture, right?).
To do that, you have two options:

A) Do the first dungeon again to get another one of those blue crystals
B) Try the second dungeon with the same strategy as the first which is more than doable with a bit of luck

Besides that the highest level shop is really useful for the rest of the dungeons, as having a Level 3 Shield in the beginning makes things a lot easier to setup.

Now, first of all you'll want a party consisting of your apprentice, a priest or paladin and something really defensive like a paladin/warrior/tank. Any of those setup options will work, I personally did it with apprentice, priest and tank. If you don't get a shield in your shop options restart. Once again, buy everything off the shop and start the fight.

So, what you'll want to do is basically the same as you did with the rogue, except that you will level up with your apprentice each time he uses his skill instead of just getting one Exp Point through item trading. Take the defense totem (I find it the most useful especially to get past the first rounds which will decide if your run is successful), turn on the priests alternative stance, give the apprentice the shield and let him stall against the most enduring enemies.

So, first you'll want to boost the apprentice's defenses and dodge so he'll still endure everything later in the dungeon. Next, decide if you'll make him a mage or a fighter and give him the exact opposite weapon (a sword if you want to make him a mage and vice versa) to drag on the battles longer. If his defenses, health and dodge are high enough (with 15+ you'll be on the very safe side) you can start leveling strength/magic and speed. In between level your luck, because you'll have horrible luck with the suggested setup but since you'll be getting an awful lot of level ups you'll reach a luck stat of 30+ easily later in the run and get the good drops.

Your other two party members are basically there for healing and stalling while the apprentice racks up levels. It's important to keep these two alive early on so boost their defenses, health, dodge and - if it's a healer - special.

If you feel confident enough with your apprentice, got a nice weapon and maybe have some useful runes (the 2x EXP and 2x special runes will make you level ridiculously fast btw) you can basically start sweeping the rest of the dungeon with him alone, occasionally healing with your priest and leveling them up to not get them killed although I'm quite sure you can just let them die at some point as nothing will be able to touch your godlike herpderp baloon boy. In the second half of the desert dungeon I basically killed everything with 1-2 hits without them having a chance to attack or hit me.

My screenshots will show you how it looked at the end of my desert dungeon run and I have to say: I really overdid it with the leveling. You'll easily beat it without grinding to level 250.

Have fun! <3

A few things to look out for

1) Neglecting your magic defense

There are far fewer mages than there are melee battling enemies but you should still look after your magic defence. Otherwise certain powerful mages can quickly rip through your party. Level it up to at least 10-15 with your rogue/apprentice.

2) Early on level ups

One thing that's pretty important is to get good level ups early on. Especially health level ups are important in the beginning as your rogue/apprentice/priest will all start with only 10 health. If you didn't get a health boost in your first few level ups you should consider restarting.

3) Death

There is one enemy appearing in the Hell and Desert Dungeon called Death (maybe Grim Reaper, maybe he's called Martha, you'll know him when you see him) who can screw your whole run up if you're not careful. He has a special ability he'll always use first which will instantly kill the party member he's facing. Either have your apprentice be fast and strong enough to kill him, before he can strike or have a potion ready and sacrifice one of your other party members to take the hit.

[Riscas]

Thanks man, I saved 2 hours of gameplay because of your last tip.

[Gamechamp]

There's a way to make it even easier when using the Apprentice and Priest: on the very first round, just have the priest use Alt Stance for defense up, get rid of two of the enemies, and then, with the remaining enemy, just make sure he is NEVER attacked by quickly swapping your Apprentice and Priest out. Whenever you swap positions, those characters lose any progress on their attack guage. Special Guage charges whenever the opponent attacks, so if you just keep using the Priest to heal while Apprentice's special charges you can get infinite level ups provided the enemy is weak enough that the Priest can heal more of her own HP than she loses (hence why her Alt Stance is important). Doing this you can eventually make the Apprentice God Mode, with stats so high he can solo the entire Just make sure you upgrade his speed last since that makes it quite a bit harder to swap out in time.

[Зав. Хоз.]

Thx

[FRAGGIACAPRA[s]]

With lineup rogue-priest-warrior for the first dungeon, is tank also good or is warrior better? I already completed it once though but going in for a second time.

[Headhoncho Burnside]

Have only read through and successfully used your "First Dungeon" info -- great setup. Thanks for the ideas on the "Rogue" (thief) and the Sage pet. It worked really well -- Priest, Rogue and Paladin(?) but dang... the first dungeon took forever and the payout really wasn't anything special. In any case -- thanks for taking the time to write this up. Will be reading over the rest of the guide as I progress into the rest of the Quest Run world/dungeons.