I got underpin hard mode down four months ago in my VDH (after 500+ attempts). a few weeks ago I got him down with my guardian druid after maybe six attempts.
I wanted to try it out on my affliction warlock (657 ilevel). just didnt work. I wrote a long piece yesterday about it. I won’t rehash it here.
after failing last night for about two hours, I went to all my toon to see if I had any other 650+ ilevel toons (i havent geared very many this season). I found my prot warrior at 657 ilevel.
It took me three tries to get my talent build correct for the shield and on the 4th attempt, I got him down after maybe 5 or 6 crony drops. it wasn’t even a close fight.
the difference in game play mechanics and design between caster DPS and tank classes couldn’t be different.
the obvious difference:
two bomb hits instead of three. this makes a world of difference for obvious reasons.
the most important difference:
this is a positioning fight. as a tank, you can position him exactly where you want him. and if you still have a single crony up, you drag the boss to the crony and cleave away until another bomb shows up.
as a tank and melee damage dealer, you have the HP to stand in the pocket during shield time
this allows you 100% uptime on the shield, getting it down very quickly.
with my afflock, it was not infrequent that I spent a considerable amount of time not casting, but dodging crap.
well, i guess we are done with him at this point anyway.
my score:
3-1
all my wins with tanks (which are my main specs for these classes when I play them)
I think this partly means that a) i am better at tank rotations /playstyle, and 2) this fight was not well designed
It seems pretty clear to me that they wanted to make this fight easier for melee. On Zekvir, ranged classes had a marked advantage, since the position of the Egg didn’t really make any difference to them… but for melee classes, going to the Egg put you in harm’s way. For Underpin, making you move your character to the bombs forces ranged classes to get in harm’s way, and typically with less mobility than the melee classes which have to do it as well.
The 2 bombs vs. 3… I guess I’ve made peace with this. At higher ilvls, it’s easy enough to mostly kill the cronies with bombs and then finish any remaining HP off with cleave.
Edit: on your Lock, did you have Burning Rush? I bet this fight is really hard without that.
oh i had it, it was indeed necessary, but it felt bugged in the content.
i would hit the button and about half the time, it didn’t kick in right away, or it started out very slowly and then sped up (having nothing to do with being on oil slicks).
i would test it in the preparation room outside the dome and it would work fine. inside, it felt buggy and laggy, which meant my death of course.
i agree with your comment about zekvir being much easier for casters. few things killed an attempt faster than getting his fear circle onto an egg you were trying to nuke.
i got zek down on hard mode with a specialty mage build (ty tanks for watching) with an undergeared mage.
that fight could be gimmicked by mages - your shield dropped the spittle dot and you could save your kick for his self heal. use your burst on the egg, blink around the place, shield, kick, win.
nothing like that with underpin.
I think many of us like to be challenged, but when there is so much RNG and the longer the fight goes on, the more likely it is that something out of your control/influence WILL go wrong ending your run.
I’m not sure I’d call this a gimmick. Sure mages had probably the easiest time on that fight, but every class (except Rogue and Evoker, as I understand it) had reliable ways of dealing with spittle, whether they needed to spec into it or not. I did that fight with 8 classes, and I found mage to be the easiest, but I don’t think it’s gimmicky. Shadow priest had it just about as easy (and could do it at much lower ilvls). MM Hunter would probably have been just as easy, but I barely play hunter and I play mage a lot.