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Dungeons and Raids
May 11, 2026 at 06:30 AM
Added May 2026 dev framing on dungeon boss design
Instanced group content in Lord of Mysteries comes in three sizes: 6-player Dungeons, 12-player Raids, and large-scale Faction Sieges (covered separately under Faction Warfare and PvP). Each instance type uses the holy-trinity composition (tank / healer / DPS) and supports AI companion fill so groups can launch even outside peak hours.
Pathway-to-role mapping for all six Crimson Test Pathways is covered under Pathway Roles: Bard tanks, Spectator heals, and Warrior / Apprentice / Seer / Hermit cover damage.
A dungeon is a short-to-medium-length instance with a linear or semi-branching path through three to five mini-encounters and a final boss. Mini-encounters typically involve one of three patterns: a kill-room (clear all spawns in a confined arena), a ritual room (interact with a multi-step ritual while waves attack), or a chase / puzzle (avoid a hunter or solve a Sequence-themed puzzle).
The final boss is the dungeon's signature encounter. It scales mechanically with difficulty: every difficulty step adds at least one new mechanic or meaningfully changes how an existing mechanic plays.
Each instanced encounter has multiple difficulty tiers. The tier ladder progresses from Easy to Nightmare, with the highest difficulty hard-favouring full human parties:
Easy: solo or duo accessible with AI companion fill. Loot is daily currency and gear-fragment material.
Normal: balanced for a six-person party. The standard reward target.
Hard: gear-checked. Adds a mechanic and tightens DPS / healing pace. Drops mid-tier ritual ingredients and rare cosmetics.
Nightmare: the apex tier. Multiple new mechanics and a strict DPS / healing race. Drops top-tier ritual ingredients and the rarest dungeon cosmetics. Recommends a full human party; AI companions can complete it but at meaningfully lower clear rates.
Raids are 12-player instances pitched longer than dungeons. Raid roster: 1 main tank, 1 off-tank, 2 healers, 8 DPS-or-hybrid roles. Raid bosses scale with the dungeon-difficulty ladder (Normal, Hard, Nightmare) and add raid-specific mechanics (concurrent two-team objectives, mechanic split-handling, sanity pressure during multi-phase fights).
Raid loot is locked once per week per character per difficulty bracket. The lockout rolls back to free at the weekly maintenance reset. This keeps nightly raid-running of the same content has diminishing returns.
Boss-tier encounters apply flat sanity hits during cosmic-horror set-pieces. Standing through a high-Sequence ritual cutscene, taking the gaze of a high-Sequence boss, or surviving an ultimate phase all cost sanity. Successful raid groups budget sanity tinctures and tea consumables before the pull and pace pulls so the bar can recover between attempts.
AI companions are competent stand-ins. They follow simple priority rules per role: tanks hold aggro and rotate cooldowns on telegraphed hits; healers triage by missing-HP percentage and apply major heals on damage spikes; DPS rotate baseline ability priority. They do not improvise around new mechanics, so high-difficulty content increasingly leans on human players. Players can summon AI companions in any combination (six AI for solo, three AI for half-fill, etc.).
Each clear awards instance-specific currency: dungeon coins, raid tokens, and Nightmare seals. These trade at NPCs in Backlund and the player's home base for gear, gear-upgrade material, ritual-ingredient bundles, and cosmetics. Long-tail progression is tied to weekly soft-cap currency, not raw farm hours.
The Crimson Test surfaces a small dungeon roster targeted at Sequence 9-7 progression. Raid-tier content is built but gated; full raid testing is reserved for a later beta phase.
Public dev framing in May 2026 placed instance bosses in the 'indescribable and incomprehensible' register: explicit cosmic-horror set-pieces designed to read as eldritch encounters rather than reskinned MMO health-bar tanks. The studio's note tied dungeon bosses, arena opponents, and world bosses into a single category of high-stakes Beyonder content, all of which carry the Sanity cost framing described below.
The same framing carries into the world-boss tier. Open-world world bosses are positioned as cosmic-horror cap-tier encounters, sitting at the top of the combat ladder for full pickup-party clears and rewarding the highest-tier ritual ingredients and cosmetics for the participating server. The fact that arenas (instanced, smaller-scale) and dungeons (instanced, 6-player) and world bosses (open-world, mass-party) all share the same 'incomprehensible Boss' identity is intentional in the dev framing.
