Underfoot Ups The Ante

After hearing complaints about how easy raiding was in the last several expansions, and in Seeds of Destruction in particular, Sony promised to make Underfoot much harder.  We were somewhat skeptical after moving through Seeds of Destruction with very little resistance (other than a bugged Kithicor event and The Zek Brothers event).  But after we danced with the 20k hitting Beast Below and an 18k hitting Fippy Darkpaw, we were convinced that Underfoot would be challenging.  We were also convinced that we could meet this challenge and decided on a strategic shift in our loot farming to help prepare us.

Fippy’s Revenge

We decided to focus our initial efforts in Underfoot on the Fippy Darkpaw raid since we all fondly remembered killing the little barking gnoll from Qeynos with little effort.  I mean this is a mob that has never even been able to kill Orbus, let alone Orbus and 53 people that Orbus thinks like him.  We quickly discovered that this little dog has grown up and gotten bigger, hitting for 1,000 times more than he used to and getting bigger and badder as the event goes on.  However, we were undaunted, and we relished the task of learning a new event and all its mechanics by dying to it over and over and formulating strategies on the fly.  By our first week, we were well into phase 2 of the event.  By our second week, we had gotten to phase 3.  After our third week, we were able to complete phase 4, and we were very confident that Fippy would be dead soon.

On this, our fourth week of trying, our first attempt did not go very well at all which was a little disheartening.  Our second effort of the day, however, had nearly flawless healing, and we got him to 4% before wiping.  Though it was late in the day and though we lost a cleric, putting us at 4 for the entire raid, we decided to make one more attempt since we could smell victory (though to Fippy it smelled like our imminent defeat).

Oooh, and boom goes the dynamite… (by the way, that’s Zarax playing Jimmyvegas, just so you don’t think JV is a raving lunatic)

Of course most of you want to see the Drinal-first loot, so here it is…

We’re proud to be the first raid force on Drinal to defeat this event (or any event in Underfoot for that matter), and we’re also proud to be the 24th force serverwide to beat Fippy. 

As our raid lockout window will attest to, it was a very busy and eventful week for all of us with a couple server-first accomplishments to be proud of.  In honor of the effort and successes, Zarax is giving us all a couple days off to sit back and soak it all in calling for bonus raids tomorrow since many of us are off for Martin Luther King Day.

What’s Next?

Well, lots and lots of farming of Tower and Korafax Hard and normal and various other SoD targets as well as our new friend farm, Fippy Darkpaw.  We’ll be starting to learn the other T6 UF raids as well.

PS – Thanks to Hador for some screenshots for this update.

PPS – If anyone can tell me why my brand new PC takes screenshots in EQ with those pixellating streaks, please shoot me a tell any time.  Its driving me crazy.