The dungeon
A run is one hero's descent into a dungeon. You go down floor by floor, room by room, until you die. Floors never end. Every dungeon, its monsters and bosses, and the full list of room effects and colors are in Dungeons.
Picking rooms
Each step you choose between two rooms, left or right. The paths keep branching: every room leads to two more. After a number of rooms (it varies per floor, see each dungeon) all paths meet at the floor's boss. Beat it and you reach the next floor; entering the boss commits you to its fight. The waypoint (below the information icon) warps you back to any floor you've already reached in this dungeon, so farming a floor is always your own choice.
Before you step in you can see the rooms you can enter next: what's inside, its color and its effect. Anything further ahead stays dark unless something lets you see further: a Torch room, or scouting bonuses that show the two steps ahead (the 2 rooms you can enter, plus the 4 behind them). A Sealed Door hides its room until you open it.
What a room can hold:
| Room | What happens |
|---|---|
| Fight | A group of 1 to 4 monsters: common ones, a champion group, or an elite with its minions. |
| Event | A story, shrine, well or container. |
| Corpse | The remains of an adventurer, with whatever they carried. |
| Rest | A quiet spot: you recover part of your life. |
| Empty | Nothing. A safe step. |
| Roaming dead | A fallen hero, with their gear and skills, turned against you. |
| Boss | The floor's master. Every 5th floor holds a named boss of the story, from Sir Kay on floor 5 to Arthur on floor 100 (the journey); the rest end with a champion (first floors) or an elite, never immune. There is no fleeing a boss: once the fight starts, it's kill or die. |
Events
Many event rooms hold a story event: a scene and two or three choices. Read them: a choice may heal or hurt (an event can kill you; there is always a safe way out), pay or cost shared account gold, offer loot or a skill, teach you something (experience), bless or curse you for a few battles (shown on the map with the battles left), start a fight, bring the floor's boss closer, teach your account a Puzzle Box recipe (Merlin's Notes), or bring a mercenary along. Some events happen anywhere (the wounded traveler, the sealed chest, a shard of the Grail, Dagonet the fool...); others only in their region (Merlin's whispering oak and the charcoal burners in Broceliande, the ferryman of the dead in the Fens, the Grail Castle and the Dolorous Stroke in the Wasteland, the Siege Perilous in Camelot). Every event, with the chances of each outcome, is listed in Story events. Other event rooms hold shrines, holy wells and chests, which need no decision.
A quest meeting is an event room too, but it stands out with a gold frame and a "Quest" badge: it's a step of one of the account's quest chains (a hidden class's unlock story, for instance), not a one-off story beat, and only the quest it belongs to advances from it.
Healing on the way
Common fights are groups of 2 to 4 monsters. The first floors teach: no champion or elite packs in common rooms before floor 4. On Normal those early common groups have 1 or 2 monsters; on Nightmare and Hell they keep 2. Floor bosses still end each floor. Potions can be brewed and used between fights from the rooms screen. Every room you walk into heals you a little (8% of your max life, more with Rest on gear), rest rooms heal much more, and leveling up refills your life.
Thorned champions and elites reflect physical damage when hit in melee: 4 plus 0.17 per monster level directly from the attacker's life. Their level comes from the dungeon, depth and rank, never your hero. The affix is gentler early and remains dangerous later; spell hits do not trigger thorns.
Monsters grow as you walk
Monsters never scale to you. They scale to where you are and how far you've walked: every floor adds levels, and so does every room you enter, including rooms on a floor you warped back to with the waypoint. Item level follows monster level, as always, so deeper is also richer.
Lingering doesn't pay either. After 16 rooms on the same floor, experience from kills starts dropping with every extra room, so you can't farm a floor forever.
Room effects
About a third of the rooms carry an effect that bends the rules inside them. Some change the battle (no dodging, no healing, longer or shorter cooldowns, life lost or healed every turn, every blow a deadly strike). Others change the walk: a Junction lets you jump two rooms ahead, a Fresh Trail brings the boss closer, a Flooded Hall makes every monster after it a level stronger, and a Trial holds an elite worth fighting. You see the effect before you step in, except behind a Sealed Door.
Room colors
Battle rooms and events that can lead to fights have a color, visible from afar. Merchants, rest rooms, corpses and empty rooms have no combat color. Colors only affect your side of the battle in that room: more damage, more defense, shorter or longer cooldowns, better healing or blocking, or nothing at all (gray). When two rooms look equally risky, the color can decide.
Rewards
Every won fight, corpse and container offers up to 3 items: the best that dropped (rarity first, then item level). You keep one, or nothing. Plain white items that can't help you (no sockets, normal tier, for a slot you already fill) are sold on the spot for gold instead of crowding the offer. Named bosses (and any unique-rank kill, even outside a boss room) also offer three skills to choose one from, apart from the item: a boss gives you an item and a skill. An unnamed mini-boss (the elite a floor without a scheduled named boss still ends in) does not. The items come from the usual treasure classes: each monster you killed rolls its own, at its level, with its rank's class and your magic find, so an elite or a boss offers better than a common group, and a fight can offer nothing at all. A corpse rolls like a sarcophagus. A fallen hero offers pieces of the gear they wore.
- Gear goes straight to its slot, and what it replaces is gone. Pick a second ring or an off-hand weapon by choosing the slot. Only level (and class, for class items) limits what you can wear: what you can't wear stays on offer.
- Runes, gems, charms and jewels go to your bag. Charms work from the bag, and runes and gems wait there for a socket or transmutation.
- Gold that drops isn't an option: it's counted and paid to your account when the run ends.
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Everything you take enters the Grail.
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Skills are mostly from your class, following its tree: within your level, with their prerequisites learned. About one in ten is another class's skill: it works at its own level. A skill you already know gains a level. See Skills.
Rerolling rolls the same monsters (or container) again. The first reroll of every offer is free. After that each reroll costs account gold, twice the previous one and more at higher hero levels (like the merchant's gamble), or a fixed gem price. A skill choice has its own, separate reroll, with its own free first try and its own cost — it changes which skills are offered, never how many, and never touches the items (or vice versa). A fallen hero's gear can't be rerolled.
Transmute is always accessible from the room screen between encounters; it does not consume a room or advance the dungeon.
Running away
You can flee any fight, but escaping takes 5 of your turns, and the monsters keep acting meanwhile. In a Vast Hall you can slip away in a single turn, and Escape on gear is a chance, each of those turns, to get away at once.
Sight on gear lets you see more rooms ahead on the map. Room choices wrap into additional rows instead of squeezing more cards into one row. Below your life, the map shows your current total experience and the total needed for your next level.
Compact room selection
The map shows life inside the red bar and progress toward your next level as a yellow bar. Tap the information icon beside the hero to read the dungeon, floor, room progress, monster level and exact experience. Hold a room for half a second to read its color effect without entering; a short tap enters an available room. Dragging to scroll cancels the hold. Color descriptions remain available for revealed rooms further ahead.
Naming your hero
When starting a run, enter your hero's name or tap Randomize for a suggestion. Changing class preserves your name. Leaving it blank generates a name when you set out. Your name appears beside your class and level on the map and follows the character into combat, saved runs, run history and fallen-hero snapshots.
Characters and shared supplies
Return home from the rooms screen without ending your run. Create another character or select an existing one to continue its own dungeon, equipment and health. Gold, premium gems, stash and potion supplies belong to the account. Dungeon gold is deposited immediately; a death bonus does not pay that loot a second time. Gems are a separate balance; premium gem purchases are not integrated. Early potion completion costs 1/2/3 gems or 100/250/500 gold for 10%/25%/50% healing, with no automatic currency switch.
Floor bosses have a health floor of 2.5 times the strongest common monster's maximum health from their current or preceding region at the dungeon's level. This does not increase their damage or scale with your hero.
Choosing the next room
The main map gives priority to rooms you can enter now, with fixed hero information and Hero, Potions and Home actions. Extra sight adds an Upcoming rooms view instead of pushing current choices away. Forecast entries show room kinds and enemy counts; hold an entry to inspect its contents and rules. Forecast entries do not enter rooms.
The information icon shows dungeon/floor details, companions, blessings and recent outcomes; a dot marks recent notes or quest messages. When skill points are available, the Hero action opens Skills directly. Give up is inside the information view and requires an explicit confirmation: it ends the character permanently, losing equipped items and the bag. Shared-stash items remain. Closing the confirmation cancels it.
Right below the information icon, the waypoint opens a list of every floor reached so far in this dungeon; picking one warps you there between encounters. It is not available while exploring an Uber map (see Ubers).