tymarston wrote: »

Is it just the difference between version 1 and version 2 of a dungeon?

This is what it used to be. However, the old 8 veteran dungeons got renamed to "[version] 2". It is now the case that all 32 dungeons have both a normal and a veteran mode. That also means that, for example, an online guide to Fungal Grotto 2 (or example) might be so old that it says it's about "veteran mode" instead.

Getting into normal vs. veteran mode of a dungeon is always via the group area of your UI. If you queue for a dungeon via the group finder, there's an option to select normal vs. veteran mode. Harder to see is a pair of radio buttons that lets you toggle your group between normal and vet mode, assuming it's not in a dungeon at the time; that tells you which version you'll enter if you do enter on either via a wayshrine (the usual way if you didn't queue) or just by walking in from the landscape.

Finally, if a group is doing a dungeon in veteran mode, then there's also an option in the final boss fight to in fact do it in veteran hard mode. A majority of the time there's a "Scroll of Glorious Battle" to trigger hard mode, but sometimes hard mode has some other kind of requirement, for example that you refrain from killing certain trash mobs.

FrancisCrawford covered most of it. Aside from that...

A Veteran Dungeon is a much harder version of its Normal counterpart. Many dungeon and boss mechanics that you could ignore, take hits from, or DPS race through on Normal difficulty cannot be ignored on Veteran. If there is a DPS race mechanic, the DPS requirement is much higher. Bosses and trash mobs have more health as you might expect and also hit harder.

For example, the final boss of Selene's Web summons a bear that does a lunge attack. On Normal, this will knock down, stun, and damage the player hit if the attack is not blocked. On Veteran difficulty, this bear attack will one-shot a player, even a tank, if the attack is not blocked. There are plenty of other such telegraphed attack that become one-shots on Veteran difficulty if not blocked or mitigated by the tank.

Similarly, lower health DPS and healers will find that many boss mechanics hit much harder in Veteran. Many of the big ground-based AoEs now have to be roll-dodged out of or otherwise avoided. So I found that moving from Normal dungeons to Veteran difficulty involved a lot of trial-and-error to figure out which mechanics I had to roll out of, which ones I could block, which ones I had to block or I'd die, and so on.

One nice thing about soloing Normal dungeons is that you'll get to see ALL the mechanics. In a regular run of a Normal dungeon, the boss' attacks are spread out amongst 4 people so that even the tank doesn't have all the attacks focused on him/her. However, when soloing, you get every single one of the boss' attacks and it turns out that final bosses have a lot of stuns, fears, knockbacks, and other unpleasant moves to go with their main attacks. I found soloing to be a lot of fun, and I hope you also enjoy it.