FAQ / Troubleshooting

FAQ

Troubleshooting

I have frequent crashes or rendering issues
I feel motion sickness when I play
Everything is too small, I can’t read
I can’t see the loot in dark places
Game is frozen
Framerate is too low

Answers

Is there a manual or a tutorial ?

There’s no manual, but there’s an in-game tutorial that triggers step by step during the first 30 minutes of the game, explaining all the basics.

You can read it again by consulting the Dialog Log (L shortcut by default) at any time later in your adventure.

The basics of the combat mechanisms are also explained in the About page.

Moreover, almost everything in the game has a tooltip explaining its role. And the FAQ here will answer the more evolved questions you may have about the game..!

Lastly, you’ll find a good guide here, explaining many things in details, giving a lot of tips, as well as a walktrough : http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1119258123 .

Are there any secrets ? Are they hard to find ?

Usually, there are between 2 and 5 secrets per level.

To find them, you won’t need to scan every wall.
Almost all secrets are in logical places : if you reach a dead-end without any loot, or notice anything suspicious, then you can look a couple of cells around for an hidden switch or anything else to activate.

You can also check on the map, in a few cases it’ll help you to locate the secrets.

A lot of secret passages also have dirt under the wall (instead of on the wall for a normal wall).

There’s also a couple of secrets without location hint, but these ones always have a big strange stone on their wall, so they are easy to spot.

I noticed some places I can’t reach

A few places will become accessible once you’ll have reached the next levels.

But often, the places you will notice but can’t reach are part of the Treasure Hunt : this is a chained series of riddles, more or less easy, designed mostly to test your memory and your observation skill.

Its starting point is in the High Security zone of the prison at the beginning of the game.

Can I play with a Steam Controller ?

Yes, you can find a configuration made by an user here : http://steamcommunity.com/app/409450/discussions/0/496881136910319016/ .

It’s tedious to pick up the loot

If you don’t like to look down, pick up the loot, then look up, you can instead press the Backspace key to loot all the items in the current cell.

Do my Party members get experience at the same rate ?

There’s a 500XP gap between each character so they don’t level up all at the same time when you start to play the game, so you don’t have to go through 12 Talent Trees at once.

After that, all characters receive the same XP all the time, wether they end the combat conscious or not.

Why the Party creation has so little options ?

At party creation you choose the following traits for each party member :

Gender
Name
Race
Class
Specialization
Voice (for screams only, dialogues are text only)

After that, it works like World of Warcraft (and a bit like Diablo 3) : during the whole adventure, you shape your characters using their talent tree and all enchantments from the gear, choosing what skills and stats you want to favor. Thus you don’t need a lot of customization on start, when you don’t know anything about the game and thus can’t make choices without knowing if they are good or not.

What should I know when creating my Party ?

Roles :

There’s no real wrong choice at party creation, except if you don’t pick 1 tank, 1 healer and 2 damage dealers. If you do, or put them in the wrong party slot, the game will warn you.

Note: you can play without a real tank, but then some bosses will be very hard while some others will still be ok. So if you want to try something different, it’s recommended to pick a tank specialization, then use your Talent points in a damage dealer tree and turn on the custom difficulty to lower a bit the damage of the enemies and raise a bit their health, to get a balanced experience.

It is (almost) impossible to play without a healer, but you can pick the Necromancer whose healing is based on damaging the enemies and thus plays somewhat like a damage dealer.

Exploration :

There’s no exploration bonus nor handicap from any specialization, except for the Ranger who comes with an optional tracking smoke, that may help you in small mazes. There’s no picklock nor disarm trap skills, all secrets are yours to find and all riddles & puzzles are yours to solve without the help of your characters. So whatever your Party choices are, you’ll be able to explore the whole dungeon in the same way.

In that fashion, and like Dungeon Master, Dungeon Guardians is more an adventure game based on your own skills, than an RPG based on skills of your characters.

Races :

The race selection brings small bonuses and handicaps to your characters. Except if you play in a very challenging difficulty level, they won’t matter much because they are balanced so they are always a bit useful for all specializations, with one exception : the dwarf has a strength bonus which is not useful to the mage and healer.

So the main point of the races is to have different portraits…

Armors & weapons :

The different classes can use different armors and weapons, but again, except if you play in a very challenging difficulty level, you don’t have to worry too much about this, because the game will always generate loot that matches your characters’ needs. (see below The loot is targeted-random ? )

However, in high difficulty levels (ie: Strategist & Crusader), it might be interesting to build a team with a better loot synergy ; eg: all characters wearing leather will make it easier to gear the tank in the 1st levels, even if it’s to give him dps gear, as it’s better than nothing. But it’s not required to beat the game.

Ease of use of the specializations :

The default Party (Protector as tank, Druid as healer, Man at Arms & Elementalist as damage dealers) offers one the most straightforward setup, with the exception of the Druid : the Priest is easier to handle, although the Druid is a bit more powerful if handled perfectly (which isn’t easy ).

If you’d enjoy a more technical setup, pick the Duelist as tank, the Necromancer as healer ; for damage dealers, pick 2 among the Paladin, the Assassin and the Mage Arcanist.

More advanced cons & pros of each specialization and Party synergy :

A good part of the game fun is to figure out all of this by yourself. Also know that each character can change of specialization within his own class several times during the adventure, if you want to try new things without starting a new game.

However, here one important thing to know. In high difficulty levels, you’ll have an easier time if you have an efficient off-tank. The best 2 specializations for this are the Paladin and the Ranger. In late game, the Necromancer can also do some off-tanking ; the Assassin and the Warlock can do a little bit as well.

The loot is targeted-random ?

Loot dropped by enemies is targeted random with cycle : 1 cycle takes about 3 levels to complete in which you’ll get loot for all your party member slots exactly once ( + a special hand drop).
Loot of Superior quality is always dropped every 2 normal mob groups ; Elite & Boss always drop Rare quality loot.

Targeted-random means that each piece of loot will always be at least a bit useful for one of your Party members.

In addition to the loot dropped by the enemies, you will find hand-placed items of higher quality in each level, usually as a reward for puzzles, but also in secrets and in special places. This loot is specially tailored for a specific slot of one of your Party members.

Why the Bonus difference on items of different qualities and levels is so small ?

The difference in enchantment bonus is small for 2 reasons :

the small difference between qualities allows to limit the luck importance of finding a good or not-so-good Epic item (or other high qualities)
the small difference between items of different levels allows to more easily choose the skills you want to favor for your characters ; if the difference was big, you’d be forced to always pick the new item ; there, for example, if you think Haste is better for your character, you’ll have a good chance to specialize in Haste with items of different levels

And this difference, even if small, still matters, especially in high difficulty levels where each extra point can be the difference between life and death.

Are some attributes way better than others ? A lot of loot seems useless !

If you think that most of the loot is useless, it might mean you underestimate the efficiency of some skills and/or overestimate 1 or 2 skills ; to help you figure out the role of each skill, you can check the dps for auto-attacks displayed in the character sheet of a melee fighter or your tank ; it’s a good 1st step, but depending of your characters’ specialization, it can be incomplete (ie: some specializations will benefit from Crit rate, Haste rate, Weapon characteristics, etc., in a much bigger manner than the auto-attacks).

For spell-casters, you’ll have to figure out by yourself what are the skills to favor, as the dps for auto-attacks is not a good indication of spell efficiency.

For more details, read the following section : How to correctly gear my Party ?

How to correctly gear my Party ?

Gearing is the most important and delicate task of the game. If you don’t correctly gear your Party, its survivability will be significantly less good, and thus the difficulty will ramp up very quickly, especially in long fights (ie: toughest bosses), as well as in short intense fights (ie: high dps elite enemies).

Overall, this is the part of the game that gives issues to the most players, so here a few rules that will greatly help you to avoid the biggest mistakes.

The overall philosophy of the gearing is that you have to make the best of what you get, not that you can aim to get the most perfect loot.

Basics in 1st Levels

Your Party survivability depends of 3 things :

Your Healer’s healing power & sustainability, because healing well and for a long time is the base
Your Tank’s damage mitigation, because your Healer will have an easier time if your Tank takes less damage
Your damage output, because higher damage will shorten the fight ; although this point is very far behind the first 2 points

So at start of the game, give all the best gear to your Healer and your Tank, till they are fully geared. The damage dealers will be fine with the rest.

When you get a new better gear replacing an old one, don’t forget to check if the old one is an upgrade for another of your Party members.

Best attributes and skills for each role

Here the list of what is best for each role, from most important to least important

Tank : Parry, Dodge, Armor, Agility & Strength, Stamina

Healer : Awareness, Willpower, Haste, Stamina

Weapon based damage dealers (ie: all melee dps + Ranger) : Strength and/or Agility, Hit Rating, Critical Strikes

Spell based damage dealers (ie: mages) : Awareness, Hit Rating, Willpower, Haste, Stamina

Basics Rules (for Adventurer and easier difficulty levels)

If you’re not 100% sure how to manage your gear, follow this simple rule when you compare 2 pieces of same quality : always equip the new piece of gear found if it’s of a superior level, even if you think it’s not really an upgrade. Sometimes, you may lose a bit of efficiency in the short term, but in the long term, it’ll be a winning strategy.

For 2 pieces of different qualities, compare the main attribute changes, and the secondary skill changes, and pick the ones with the most bonuses. If comparison isn’t obvious, then count a bonus of +1 level for rare, +2 for epic, +3 for legendary vs the superior gear, and follow the 1st rule by comparing the new level+bonus versus the current gear level+bonus.

Advanced Rules (for Soldier & Warrior)

Tank : you need to favor dps when your tank doesn’t keep aggro easily enough, and avoidance otherwise ; favor Stamina only when you can’t take enough magic damage without dying.
If you get too much damage gear or too much avoidance gear, you can counter-balance that by not using or using the Improved Thunderclap talent for the Protector ; the Duelist has a lot of choices in his Talents to balance between avoidance and damage.

Healer : Awareness is the most important attribute, but count it at most as a 50% bonus ; eg: 2 Awareness points are worth 3 Stamina or Willpower points ; for secondary skills, check the change of auto-attack dps or haste % to get an idea of the increased healing you’ll get and ponder it vs increase brought by Awareness (that you can estimate by checking the change in healing to your most used healing spell when equipping/removing each piece of gear).

Weapon Based Damage dealers : just check the change of the auto-attack dps in your Character Sheet

Spell based Damage dealers : same than healer, but hit rating might be more important than Awareness if not capped and if you rely on chaining abilities (eg: Arcanist)

Super Hardcore Rules (for Mercenary and above)

You’ll have to ponder the gear bonuses with all the talents and their consequences ; eg; special effects on critical strikes, or on auto-attacks, etc.

Tank : parry & dodge have diminished returns, so you need to compare the actual result in your Defensive stats, not only the gear bonus, and thus you need to keep your old gear in case the future gear is always parry or always dodge.

The Warlock, once he gets Lethal Empowerment, and the Necromancer have very little need for Willpower and thus you’ll have a harder time to maximize their gear efficiency. To a lesser extend, it is same for the Priest using the Shield build as he almost doesn’t need Critical strike, because the Shield protection cannot crit.

Depending of the loot you get, you might be forced to reroll all your talents to create a new build that works better with your current set of attributes and skills.

Talents aren’t strong enough

A few players complain that some Talents bring only 1/2/3% bonuses and thus are too weak. Same for the gear bonuses.

But actually, all these “small” bonuses put together make :

the tank mitigate 3 times more damage than the other party members
the damage dealers produce 2 or 3 times more damage than the tank
the healer power double or triple

Each “small” step lets you build your character as you want and/or see the best fit for his performance.

Moreover, considering the boss fights can get quite long, 2% of increased damage will accumulate over time and will often be the difference between life & death (if you play in a challenging difficulty level).

Is this game turn-based ?

No, but you can pause the game any time you want and queue up to 3 commands for each of your party member.

Moreover, you have several optional auto-pauses that give a nearly turn based feeling to the game, but still with the advantage of the real time rules.

Finally, you can even slowdown the time during the combat, down to 5% of the normal speed.

As an example among several turn-based fans, this player asked this question in the Steam forum, stating “real time is a NO-GO for me” then he tried the game anyway, using the auto-pauses and the slowdown and then wrote a positive recommendation for the game here : http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198006431116/recommended/409450/ .

Do you have advices & tips for newcomers ?

Yes, plenty, read them here (they are written by the Beta tester & composer of the game) : http://steamcommunity.com/app/409450/discussions/0/496880503071053270/ .

The combat is too simple

Your Party members start with 2 abilities each, but they’ll get new abilities during your adventure, to end with about 10 abilities each (or even more if you talent them cross-trees, but in this case, not all abilities will be useful).

This means the combat starts pretty simply, to give you time to learn the new concepts in Dungeon Guardians which are usually not in other games : heavy tanking, intense healing, threat & aggro management.

If you think the combat is too easy and repetitive, then try to raise the difficulty level ; this will force you to think more and thus make the combat more interesting. At least, set the difficulty to Soldier if you want a real tactical challenge.

Also please note that the 1st dungeon level is much easier than the next ones, to give you time to learn the game’s base mechanisms.

Combat is too difficult to understand

Dungeon Guardians brings new stuff on the table, so its combat system needs a bit of time to be understood. If you have read too quickly the tutorial, you can re-read it at any time by checking the Dialog Log (L shortcut by default).

You should be mostly up to speed once you will have reached the Level 4 or 5.

Before that, if you need additional help, you can read these tips linked here, or just directly ask questions in the Forum.

Enemies are too hard or unbalanced

If you think the game is too hard, don’t hesitate to change the difficulty in the Game Options ; you can do that at any time, even in the middle of a fight !

It’s even possible to set the Difficulty to Custom and change it precisely.

If you think it’s unbalanced, either that the normal mobs are too easy, or that the Elite and Boss are too hard, you can turn on the Advanced Tuning and then set the strength of Normal, Elite and Boss enemies separately.

However, here’s the idea behind the different types of enemies :

Normal enemies are there to learn all your abilities, how everything works together and try to improve everything all the time ; there’s almost no danger as long as you don’t do any big mistake nor attack more than 1 group of enemy at once
Elite enemies are very dangerous and offer a big but relatively short challenge ; some Elite enemies will test particular aspects of your Party, like for example the healing capacity of your healer, or the damage output of your damage dealers, and often require special strategies to be beaten
Boss enemies are dangerous and offer long fights ; they’ll mainly test the survivability of your Party, but also require advanced special strategies to be beaten, each Boss being unique in term of abilities and setup

Moreover, usually people think the game is unbalanced because they didn’t understand how to correctly gear their Party, so it is very recommended to read the following entry : How to correctly gear my Party ?

Lastly, don’t forget to explore everything, solve all the puzzles and find all the secrets, as it’s the way to get the best gear in the game, and thus get the most powerful Party..!

Bosses seem to be much harder than other enemies, even Elite ones !

You might need to read the next entry, Why Bosses have so much HP while my Party has so little ?, but before that, it’s possible you have missed the extra zone in the Level 1.

This zone brings enough extra XP to level up your 1st damage dealer (and possibly your healer in some levels) before reaching the Boss at the end of each level. So exploring it is very important to avoid a noticeable difficulty spike when meeting the Boss.

Its entrance is in the corridor just before the Boss room at end of the Level 1, on North-West of the map. To open it, you have to put an item (eg: a stone) on the plate on the other side of the portcullis. Check the PP3 label on this map.

Why Bosses have so much HP while my Party has so little ?

This is a recurring question amongst players not used to play games featuring a real tank and healer setup.

Beforehand, if you really don’t like long Boss fights, go to Options -> Game Options -> Difficulty, turn on the Custom Difficulty then the Advanced Tuning and lower the HP of the Bosses as much as you want.

So in games featuring the triptych of tank/healer/damage dealer, the HP of your Party is nearly irrelevant, especially when compared to the Bosses’ HP.

The important questions are :

Is my healer able to heal the damage inflicted by the Boss ?
Does my tank mitigate enough damage ?
Does my healer has enough Mana to last till the end of the fight ?
If I answered “no” to one of the previous questions, is there any particular thing I can do in this fight to lower the Boss’ damage ?

Answers to 1) 2) & 3) are about survivability of your Party during a long fight. To achieve that, you need to maximize the healing done by your healer, while minimizing the damage taken by your tank, and managing your Healer’s Mana to be able to heal for a long time.

These things are firstly achieved by correctly gearing your Tank & Healer : Awareness is required to make your Healer’s spells more potent, Willpower is required so his Mana will regenerate fast enough, and Armor & Avoidance are needed by your Tank to lower the incoming damage.

To read more about this, check this entry : How to correctly gear my Party ?

Once your Party is correctly geared up, it’s important to know how to use best your Tank & Healer’s abilities so they’ll do their job in the best way possible. Read each ability description and characteristics to understand how to use them at their maximal potential.

And at last, having efficient damage dealers will make the fight end a bit faster.

Don’t forget that if things get tense, you can use some Healing & Mana potions to avoid the Party wipe.

So having a lot of HP on your Tank will count for a little bit of extra survivability, but it’s really secondary in the grand scheme of things. It’s only mandatory to have enough HP so your Tank will not die right on start before your Healer can get on the roll.

And if it’s still not enough, then you’ll have to find the answer to 4) ; usually, you need to interrupt the most dangerous ability, and often you’ll also have to do a few special moves or tactics to survive. Listen to your companions before most Boss Fights to get good tips to prevail !

Important note : if you play in a challenging difficulty level for you, you’re supposed to die a couple of times against the Bosses, till you figure out your battle plan.

I like classic Dungeon Crawlers with square-dancing

In Dungeon Guardians, you can’t do square-dancing (ie: strafe-turn-hit strafe-turn-hit non-stop), it’s not useful as enemies follow you nearly instantly.

Moreover, all spell casts & ranged attacks are reset when moving.

You can however lower the difficulty and stop to use the active pause and so always play in real time : this will make the game more arcade and action based, while still being challenging.

From Level 5, I can’t keep aggro anymore on my Tank

The threat rules are explained at beginning of the game ; basically : more damage & more healing = more threat.

So if you get a great 1H Dps weapon, give it to your tank (if you don’t have a better tank one), it’ll help not to lose aggro to your Dps Toon every couple of seconds.

Moreover, Imperial Knights & Guards start the fight with their shield bash which interrupts your tank ( = red cross on his portrait) ; if you keep starting the fights with your Thunder Clap, it means it gets interrupted and thus you have zero aggro on the enemies. To avoid that, start to attack with your whole party but only with the auto-attacks, and queue Thunder Clap right when you get interrupted for the 1st time ; this will save you 75% of your aggro issue.

Also, don’t queue all your tank different abilities just because you can !
Against a group, you have to do Thunder Clap as often as possible as it’s the only AoE threat ability ; thus you can rotate between Thunder Clap & Rend, or Thunder Clap & Devastate, but not Thunder Clap & Red & Devastate, else you’ll get less AoE threat and a dead healer…

Note: if you have picked a Rogue Duelist instead of a Warrior Protector, do Sweeping Blow instead of Thunder Clap.

How Threat works exactly ?

Here all the bases for Threat :

1 damage point = 1 threat point against the damaged enemy
1 healed point or 1 absorbed damage = 0.4 threat points against all surrounding enemies
the tank has abilities that multiply the threat generated by each damage point (eg: Thunder Clap)
threat levels of each enemy constantly goes down slowly
each enemy attacks the character with the highest threat against him
enemies can’t change of target while they are preparing their attack, except if the tank taunt them
enemies can’t willingly change of target less than 2 seconds after their last target assignation

Is there a combat log ? What are all the numbers on the screen ?

No, there’s no combat log as text lines in a separate little window.

However, all damaging and healing abilities produce little numbers visible on the screen ; you can mouse over each one to see who and what ability produced them.

Moreover, on the enemies, these numbers are organized in 4 rows : the full left one is for your back left member (usually the healer), the middle left one is for your front left member (usually the tank), the middle right one is for your front right member (usually your melee dps) and the full right one is for your back right member (usually your ranged dps).

The numbers on the enemies are color-coded : white is for your member’s auto-attacks, yellow is for your member’s abilities and green is for healing.

The numbers on your Party members are also color-coded : green for healing and red for damage.

Plus all the numbers have additional typo codes :

Bigger and with a exclamation dot for critical strikes
Between parenthesis for damage & healing over time
Between angle brackets for damage diminished by a block

I have frequent crashes or rendering issues

If you’re having Crashes or Visual Glitches, you could try to launch the game in DirectX9 mode.

To do so in Steam :

Right-click the game in your Steam library
Select “Property -> Set Launch Options”
Enter “-force-d3d9″ (without the quotes)
Launch the game

To do so with Mana Games version :

create a shortcut and add this parameter :
<PathToTheGame>\DungeonGuardians.exe -force-d3d9

Visually, it shouldn’t change anything, but the game will take exclusive access to your desktop, which makes switching between apps slower but it might fix your issues.

Alternatively, you can use “-window-mode exclusive”, to play with DirectX 11 in exclusive fullscreen mode, which gives a ~5% framerate speed increase, but can lead to crash or glitch on alt-tab and exit.

If this doesn’t help, then check for the usual issues a PC could have : overheating (especially if the VSync doesn’t work and your FPS go above 60), faulty RAM, etc.

I feel motion sickness when I play

You can turn off the head bobbing in Options -> Controls -> View Bobbing, this should solve your issue.

Everything is too small, I can’t read

You can adjust the size of each GUI part in Options -> Interface.

You can also fine tune the position and size of each GUI element by pressing the F10 key (by default) which will display green buttons. You can click any of these buttons to configure their corresponding element :

left-click and drag to change its position
double left-click to reset to its default position
right-click and drag to change its size
double right-click to reset to its default size
left-click, maintain the button pressed, and then right-click to toggle the display on/off

This is especially useful for the Dps History Graph which can get a bit in the way.

I can’t see the loot in dark places

You can either turn on the Item Highlighting in Game Options -> Helpers, or boost the Gamma & Ambient settings in the Video options ; for a visual hint, do that from the Main Menu right after have launched the game.

Game is frozen

If you have activated the Auto-pauses, press ‘Space’ (by default) to resume the game.

Else, look at bottom left of the screen for dialog, read them and then click “ok” or “next” till the game resumes.

Framerate is too low

Check the power energy mode didn’t trigger on your PC (on Windows, check Control Panel -> Power Options), then lower the display settings in Options -> Video.

To enjoy the game in good conditions, you need a GPU which has a score of at least 900 points in these charts :

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Jan
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

FAQ

General

Gear & Party Management

Combat