So when will the Underworld be fixed?

[ColdwaveKid]

With ANET's policy of anti-farming, when will the Underworld get fixed up? It annoys me to no end when I want to get XP and form a group for questing in the Underworld, that half my party drops as soon as the first quest is done if we wish to do other stuff before going through the smite field.

Is anyone else getting sick of this or am I the only one?

Maybe if the smites dropped good it would be one thing, but I get far better stuff clearing the larger mixture of stuff that comes from going through the Underworld, rather than cows, then demons, then smites and coldfires.

[a j n i N]

Not sure when the UW will be fixed but if your ever interested, I have this Guild, in the works at least that does countless runs and we look for people, experienced to tag along.

~When I get back from florida and msg some pals, maybe we can work some runs going, maybe this will help, our runs are usually fun :)

[CanadianBacon]

it is true that everyone seems to be interested in smite runs, and if all you are really interested in is the XP, why not try FoW, theres a bunch of quests ranging from 5-10k down there, and i find it to have better drops.

[Diab]

What are these "smite runs"? I've always assumed it's when a group of smite monks gather and annihilate all the undead monsters in the UW, but now it seems I am mistaken.

[baddawg]

Lets see four nights in a row 6 hours each night and not a single good drop what the hecks the point of even going?

[Celois]

What are these "smite runs"? I've always assumed it's when a group of smite monks gather and annihilate all the undead monsters in the UW, but now it seems I am mistaken.

"Smite runs" are basically runs that are just to kill Smite Crawlers.

Smite Crawlers are litteraly a smite monk spider and they usualy drop good stuff, infact they're the ONLY things that drop good stuff in Underworld which is why people just kill these.

Smite crawlers(and terrorwebs) drop Storm Bows and Eternal shields quite often and are pretty much the only thing that drop them often, this is why people hunt them as the drops can be worth 40k-100k+. (I've seen a gold stormbow drop from one as well).


Anyways, if you REALLY want exp i'd recommend Fissure, you can easily get 50k exp per run.

[Corka]

The only item that is really farmed from smites is Stormbows. Thats because people are silly and willing to pay heaps of money for a bow thats not actually any better, it just looks neato. UW is actually somewhat lacking on the drops besides them really, you won't get that many runes hunting down there.

[Fire Childe]

you can get exp just as fast in underworld as fissure if thats what you intend to do

first quest from the lost soul = 5k exp

go to the forgotten vale, clear a path to the shrine. back to the labyrinth reaper and accept 'restore monuments of grenth' quest.

go back to the vale. do the 'wrathful spirits' quest for 10k exp

teleport to the labyrinth. accept escort of souls. back to the forgotten vale killing the 2 mindblade mobs along the way. another 10k exp.

teleport back to the labyrinth. clear the centre hub of mind blades. accept 'unwanted guests.'

pull the first dryder mob out from the pack of invincible bulls and the keeper. dont aggro any of the bulls at any point during this quest. bulls die when the keeper dies. kill the first one in this way. teleport to the vale and take the next keeper from behind. back to the monument. clear out the centre hub and the antechamber (you can kill the rest of the keepers from behind the bulls so its easy after this). quest done. another 10k exp.

you can even do a smite run after this so you not only get 35k exp (not including exp from creeps), you also get to kill a whole bunc hof smite crawlers and terrorweb dryders which net you some nice loot.

if you want to do questing then you should join one of our underworld groups - typically organised between FYAD, LLJK and GoP with 1 or 2 pickups when we cant fill out a full team. some of us do smite runs occasionally but we also like to try to finish the high level instances. we used to clear out most of fissure but havent done it in a while owing to the fact that most of my guildies hate it. ToA however is usually just full of people that do these areas for the loot and just clear off after that.

just now we finished a 6 hour run where we did all the labyrinth quests, the vale shrine missions, the serpent mountains mission and cleared all the shrines. except for the bone pits. we teleported to the chaos planes after clearing the spawning pools and left for the bone pits (which we have cleared before. its not very hard). however half way there the chaos reaper got killed by one of the dream riders that roamed close by. we very nearly completed monuments to grenth quest which we are all very curious about. we hope it opens the sealed door in the ice castle. we also did just under half of this run with 7 people and we did the whole of the spawning pools with 6. even guildies get tired and have to go to bed ^^

http://img151.echo.cx/img151/8538/uw4wl.th.jpg (http://img151.echo.cx/my.php?image=uw4wl.jpg)

[stilted]

it is true that everyone seems to be interested in smite runs, and if all you are really interested in is the XP, why not try FoW, theres a bunch of quests ranging from 5-10k down there, and i find it to have better drops.

FoW sucks and the mobs there are just HARD.

UW is an easy and swift 25k exp ( 5k for first, 10k for carrying ghost, 10k for protecting ghosts in village) with almost no effort. FoW? too much mobs :(

[ColdwaveKid]

I ran fissure for a while, but the protect the forge quest thing I never got completed as the last mob never runs in when in my groups, then we try to lure it in and a mob keeps respawning and we die. That is assuming the group itself is good enough to even get that far.

:(

I could always grind a new character through PvE, but I would rather just do 60 or so runs through the underworld to get at least 25k each to get all the skills for my new secondary.

I am trying to unlock all skills for PvP the legit way, instead of begging for a change to get me everything fast or looking for exploits.

If anyone needs a healer / protector for a good underworld questing group, please message me in game as Engel the Fallen. I really want to try to clear everything there, but groups are so hard to find.

[carasage]

you can get exp just as fast in underworld as fissure if thats what you intend to do

first quest from the lost soul = 5k exp

go to the forgotten vale, clear a path to the shrine. back to the labyrinth reaper and accept 'restore monuments of grenth' quest.

go back to the vale. do the 'wrathful spirits' quest for 10k exp

teleport to the labyrinth. accept escort of souls. back to the forgotten vale killing the 2 mindblade mobs along the way. another 10k exp.

teleport back to the labyrinth. clear the centre hub of mind blades. accept 'unwanted guests.'

pull the first dryder mob out from the pack of invincible bulls and the keeper. dont aggro any of the bulls at any point during this quest. bulls die when the keeper dies. kill the first one in this way. teleport to the vale and take the next keeper from behind. back to the monument. clear out the centre hub and the antechamber (you can kill the rest of the keepers from behind the bulls so its easy after this). quest done. another 10k exp.

you can even do a smite run after this so you not only get 35k exp (not including exp from creeps), you also get to kill a whole bunc hof smite crawlers and terrorweb dryders which net you some nice loot.

if you want to do questing then you should join one of our underworld groups - typically organised between FYAD, LLJK and GoP with 1 or 2 pickups when we cant fill out a full team. some of us do smite runs occasionally but we also like to try to finish the high level instances. we used to clear out most of fissure but havent done it in a while owing to the fact that most of my guildies hate it. ToA however is usually just full of people that do these areas for the loot and just clear off after that.

just now we finished a 6 hour run where we did all the labyrinth quests, the vale shrine missions, the serpent mountains mission and cleared all the shrines. except for the bone pits. we teleported to the chaos planes after clearing the spawning pools and left for the bone pits (which we have cleared before. its not very hard). however half way there the chaos reaper got killed by one of the dream riders that roamed close by. we very nearly completed monuments to grenth quest which we are all very curious about. we hope it opens the sealed door in the ice castle. we also did just under half of this run with 7 people and we did the whole of the spawning pools with 6. even guildies get tired and have to go to bed ^^

http://img151.echo.cx/img151/8538/uw4wl.th.jpg (http://img151.echo.cx/my.php?image=uw4wl.jpg)

Awesome... I hope to play with your group some day.

[DragonsFury]

Sorry newb question:
In which area are these Smite Crawlers?
and FoW stands for what?

[Mo Baddass]

FoW = Fissure of Woe

You'll get to it when you reach the ToA ;) (Temple of Ages)

[Bruiser of Minoc]

you can get exp just as fast in underworld as fissure if thats what you intend to do

first quest from the lost soul = 5k exp

go to the forgotten vale, clear a path to the shrine. back to the labyrinth reaper and accept 'restore monuments of grenth' quest.

go back to the vale. do the 'wrathful spirits' quest for 10k exp

teleport to the labyrinth. accept escort of souls. back to the forgotten vale killing the 2 mindblade mobs along the way. another 10k exp.

teleport back to the labyrinth. clear the centre hub of mind blades. accept 'unwanted guests.'

pull the first dryder mob out from the pack of invincible bulls and the keeper. dont aggro any of the bulls at any point during this quest. bulls die when the keeper dies. kill the first one in this way. teleport to the vale and take the next keeper from behind. back to the monument. clear out the centre hub and the antechamber (you can kill the rest of the keepers from behind the bulls so its easy after this). quest done. another 10k exp.

you can even do a smite run after this so you not only get 35k exp (not including exp from creeps), you also get to kill a whole bunc hof smite crawlers and terrorweb dryders which net you some nice loot.

if you want to do questing then you should join one of our underworld groups - typically organised between FYAD, LLJK and GoP with 1 or 2 pickups when we cant fill out a full team. some of us do smite runs occasionally but we also like to try to finish the high level instances. we used to clear out most of fissure but havent done it in a while owing to the fact that most of my guildies hate it. ToA however is usually just full of people that do these areas for the loot and just clear off after that.

just now we finished a 6 hour run where we did all the labyrinth quests, the vale shrine missions, the serpent mountains mission and cleared all the shrines. except for the bone pits. we teleported to the chaos planes after clearing the spawning pools and left for the bone pits (which we have cleared before. its not very hard). however half way there the chaos reaper got killed by one of the dream riders that roamed close by. we very nearly completed monuments to grenth quest which we are all very curious about. we hope it opens the sealed door in the ice castle. we also did just under half of this run with 7 people and we did the whole of the spawning pools with 6. even guildies get tired and have to go to bed ^^

http://img151.echo.cx/img151/8538/uw4wl.th.jpg (http://img151.echo.cx/my.php?image=uw4wl.jpg)

Man, I am looking for a guild that does exactly this. I'd be very interested if I could talk to you ingame.

[Fire Childe]

we are always looking for other players to fill out underworld/fissure groups.

for underworld we have a pretty solid build that works for the purposes of completing all of labyrinth reaper quests (including monuments of grenth). this involves clearing out all the shrines.

currently this is something like:

1 warrior primary
2 AoE elementalists
1 air spike elementalist
1 ranger with choking gas and the means to spread it
1 healer
1 protection monk
last slot is typically open

we typically run protective bond on the warrior and heal seed to negate most of the damage the warrior takes. as a secondary mesmer i maxed illusion magic and spam distortion for additional evasion. i detailed a method of pulling targets in this forum in another thread. combined with this, warrior takes all aggro, elementalists deal most of the damage. we dont really use traps for this build. nor do we need multiple warriors to block choke points. all elementalists benefit from bringing glyph of concentration because by far the most problematic enemy encounters are the mindblade mobs in the chaos planes. however, we have cleared the chaos planes very quickly by exploiting the enemy AI. ill detail it because im extremel chuffed at the ingenuity behind it ^^ we clear a path to the serpent mountain monument but only the path that leads to the monument. we accept the mission. the slayer in the mission always gets stuck on a pair of obsidian behemoths blocking a bridge. we can therefore fulfill the mountain mission and never have to go back there again. for the chaos plains we aggro the dream riders and lead them into the serpent mountains. we have a few runners going straight for the monument and few taking it slower and keeping the dream riders back. we then use the monument as a group to teleport back to the labyrinth and run back to the chaos shrine. we repeat this however many times is necessary to clear a path to the chaos monument and the spawning pools. this is quick and means we have to fight zero mindblades in the chaos planes.

if we are doing the monument missions as well we need to modify our current team build because currently its not adequate for the purposes of doing the ice wastes mission and the chaos planes mission. for the ice wastes mission we have had the most success by running a build with 2 rangers spreading choking gas, me with melee interrupts and 1 water ele specced for maelstrom. we kill most of the first dryder mob that spawns in before splitting into 2 groups. currently we use the reaper as a decoy. that is we have our protection monk stick protective bond on the reaper. healer heals the reaper. let the reaper take full aggro from the dryders and let the elementalists AoE the dryders. we always run into problems on the ice king side simply because we lack the means to kill all the dryders before we run out of interrupts. we also have no healer/protection on this side. the ice king's bodyguards do too little damage to the dryders to make it a viable strategy. however, we have gotten down from 25 dryders to 6. so we are close.

we are open to any suggestions or modifications to our team builds if you play with us. we listen to the advice of others and are open to trying new builds and new ideas - especially for quests that we consistantly fail (these are currently the four horsemen mission in the chaos planes and the ice king mission in the icy wastes). we dont really care how much or how little experience you have had in underworld or fissure and we are pretty anti elitist. we spread the cost of entry between all members (125g each) and we can guarantee you will make that money back. we often take a long time to recruit - as much as 45 minutes so we hope you are patient. we'd rather lose favour and do underworld another time than rush a pickup group together and have it degenerate into a mess - thats just a waste of everybody's time. the only prerequisite is that you are not an idiot and you have a good 4 to 6 hours to throw away! ^^

i.e.

1) you dont accept any quests without consulting the group first! we have a specific order in which we do underworld quests to make them more manageable.

2) you stay out of aggro range of the warrior! this is necessary in order to keep things clean and to make sure nobody gets hit other than the warrior.

3) you dont aggro a million creatures! number one cause of death and so easily preventable by watching your radar!

oh yeah and i hope you like somethingawful brand humour because we like poluting team chat with twisted irony and sick comedy ^^ keeps spirits high.

---------------------------------------

we used to run fissure frequently but havent done so in about 2 weeks. id like to get back into fissure groups but most of my guild absolutely hates fissure ^^ for fissure we run much more hex strips. in underworld hex stripping is not especially viable since most enemies either dont use hexes at all and the ones that do hex you so much its not feisible to strip the 2 to 3 hexes per player that that the mindblades like to inflict.

we typically group around storage in temple of ages district 2. if you see us there give us a tell and we'll try to accomodate you if possible. although it may be variable depending on what character classes we have available to us at time of recruiting.

[SnyperP]

I was thinking the same thing myself about the monument quests and the locked door awhile back. After enduring what seemed like an eon of killing and having one cleric leaving (Star Wars premiered that night), we finished the statue quest. Unfortunately, nothing happened. We ran to every locked door we could have possibly seen and nothing was open. One of the cleric told me that they heard you needed to complete the three main quests to unlock the crafter.

http://img226.echo.cx/img226/5695/gw0051fo.jpg (http://www.imageshack.us)

[Fire Childe]

we should at some point consolidate groups if any of you would like to go for completion of underworld.

we have completed the following quests:

escort of souls
unwanted guests
wrathful spirits
the slayer mission in the serpent mountains

additionally we have cleared all the shrines and summoned all the reapers, although never all in 1 game.

we have come close to completing the ice wastes mission where you protect the ice king.

but the big brick wall we always run into is the four horsemen quest from the chaos reaper.

the most we have completed in any single game is:

escort,
unwanted,
wrathful,
slayer,
and cleared 5/6 shrines for the monuments mission. then the AI came around to kick us in the teeth T___T

congratulations by the way on completing the most long *** quest in guild wars by far ^^

what a shame you only get 10k exp for 5 hours worth of play

[SnyperP]

Unfortunately most of that group has long since retired. Zeb, Czar and i are probably the only ones left playing. To be honest, my ranger was probably the weakest link in that whole group. All i brought to the table was ward of melee and Fertile. Our answer to the mindwracks was spellbreaker'ing the elemantlist and using Fertile to stay alive alone enough for them to cast it. Monk stay quite a ways back and healed with heal party. I think we beat that quest more with determination than tactics. =p I remember quite a few near wipes.

I don't remember us trying any of the secondary statue quests other than Wraithful Spirits, which is fairly easy and the Ice king which we promptly lost before we knew what was happening ;).

Atm i'm currently revamping my Ranger. I had to see what the all the craze was about in trapping groups. Although they are amusing to watch, they're very slow. Maybe once i find a suitable build for underworld I'll join you. It would be fun to see what the other quests look like!

[Anarchist Duck]

we should at some point consolidate groups if any of you would like to go for completion of underworld.



We are definitely going to have to do a massive run just for the sake of completing everything. After that run the other night... blarg.

Yea there had better damn well be some sort of magnificent reward, cause doing everything down there could easily take 7-10 hours.

[Fire Childe]

we did the ice king mission just now:

http://img300.echo.cx/img300/1575/iceking22ks.th.jpg (http://img300.echo.cx/my.php?image=iceking22ks.jpg)

strategy in order to do so is provided below - we used a pretty weird build for it though. the trick i guess would be to get all the useful stuff from our build specifically tailored for this mission and somehow fit them into our regular build.

snyper, any of your group that is active should consider joining us if you still want to blow 6 hours some time to finally get underworld beat ^^ none of us are especially skilled players, none of us a very good at pvp. but we are organised, and when we screw up, we like to figure out why we screwed up and try something different. actually i think thats all that is required for underworld - you just need to be willing to learn from your mistakes and try to correct them. we cleared alot of underworld through trial and error. anyone could do it if they spent us much time on it as we have and were willing to cooperate with your teammates and strategise. ^^

finally beating the ice king mission is just the result of numerous failed attempts and taking on board a number of observations about how the dryders move, how they attack and where to hold ground, where to run to if things go wrong.

-------------------------------------------------

strategy to beating the servents of grenth mission:

our regular build is something like this:

1 warrior primary (evasion, hp boosts etc)
2 elementalist primaries (AoE dmg like firestorm/maelstrom/meteor shower)
1 air elementalist (air spike dmg)
1 ranger primary (for blinding, dust/barbed traps)
1 healer (seeding the tank, the usual healing stuff)
1 protection monk (protective bond on the warrior, aegis, guardian, usual protection stuff etc)

for this we modified so that we had:

2 warrior primaries (me spamming evasion, interrupts, and spreading deepwound conditions using fevered dreams. vanessa was the other warrior who wasnt set up for evasion at all!)
1 elementalist primary (set up for AoE knockdown using meteor shower and mass interrupt using meteor shower)
3 ranger primaries (duck was converting all elemental damage to cold using spirit of winter and spreading choking gas for the mass interrupt. as was bottle mayor. i saw 1 with barrage. the other 2 were set up basically to lay down as much interruption as possible)
1 healer (elk sinker on heal duty)
1 protection monk (melil, who was running protective bond on me up until the ice shrine. then switched it to the reaper i think. the reaper is a ganster by the way. ill explain in a bit)

our usual tactic of buffing up 1 warrior with protective bond/heal seed, letting him take all the aggro then having 3 eles totally destroy doesnt really work with this build because we only had 1 ele. therefore we found the rest of the underworld harder to manage.

we experimented alot with splitting up into groups and holding ground zero. but we died every time. we found the best thing to do was to stay on the dias with the reaper.

http://img83.echo.cx/img83/8641/iceking7ve.jpg

the yellow dots represent us. we basically held here. the purple lines indicate where we engaged the dryders. the red dots are where the dryders spawn.

on the dias we could basically aggro all the dryders that went for the ice king. that way they all went for the reaper or us. and we were with the reaper. this way we only had to worry about protecting 1 npc.

the reaper is a hard nut but he cant take too many hits. keeping him healed up and protected, he ended up dropping maelstroms all over the last mob of 8 or so dryders which were bunched up on the stair well to the dias - i think the reaper won it for us because we were really starting to drop towards the end. we had winter up but the dryders always target the spirit. we did however have at least 90 seconds worth of uptime using this and it really helped. i could wade in with mantra of frost and 8 inspiration and take half damage for 66 seconds near enough.

after the 2nd mob of 8 dryders teleported in they started to overwhelm us and they nuked the spirit of winter every time duck set down a new one. other than that we spread choking gas like no tommorow and i was melee interrupting and spreading bleeding and deepwound and burning via fevered dreams to try and make up for the fact we only had 1 ele.

overall, winter made a vast difference if you run mantra of frost. choking gas and exploiting choke points also made a huge difference, as did the fact that we all stayed in one place, and set the situation up so that we only had to protect 1 npc.

if i were going to modify our original build i would drop out the traps, go with an extra ranger and have both spreading choking gas. 1 with winter for the dryders. awesome play by everyone involved and amazing job to vanessa for surviving in underworld despite having *no useful skills at all* ^^

therefore our all purpose UW group looks something like this:

1 warrior (tanking, pulling, taking all aggro)
1 healer (you know the drill for this one)
1 protection monk (you know the drill for this one too)
2 fire elementalists (nuking and mass interruption)
1 air elementalist (spike damage)
2 rangers (mass interruption, 1 with winter)

we also generally run with 2 or 3 mesmer secondaries at least which is nice for mantra of frost to be useful. and the occassional hex strip where it counts (i.e. migraine on one of your monks). but as a general rule the enemies in underworld either dont cast any hexes at all, or they cast so many hexes on you that its pretty pointless trying to remove a significant number of them to warrant the use of skill slots on hex strips.

[Tuor Son Of Huor]

I am by no means an expert in UW/FoW runs; but ive done enuff to understand the importance of :

1- NOT TALKING TO NPCS UNTIL YOURE READY
2- Protection Monks
3- NOT TALKING TO NPCS UNTIL YOURE READY
4- Trapper Groups
5- NOT TALKING TO NPCS UNTIL YOURE READY

After blazing thru the game for a second time in 6 days with my monk; i decided to join an all trapper group. OMG smite runs have never been so easy!

yeah it was slow, but with 5 rangers each laying 4 traps (and double layering them) we cleared out the smites without a single one of us taking DMG, let alone dying. we had a token monk and tank, and they served to speed bump the creeps if they passed our "ground nuke zone".

However, i have yet to try this in FoW; traps in UW work well because there are alot of choke points; but in FoW, there are some wide open areas..

PM me in game "Tuor Son of Huor" (r/mo) or "Ar Pharazon" (mo/W) if any experienced group needs someone who will stay for as long as it takes to clear out these areas.

[Fire Childe]

yea ive seen all trap groups enjoy alot of success in uw.

there isnt really a right or wrong way to go about it. there are just different ways you can go about it.

you could for example, use a build where the tank is a smite monk. stick protective bond on him. heal seed him. life barrier, life bond, essense bond and have the smite monk packing balth aura, zealots fire, retribution etc. pull as we normally do and spam divine boon for some massive AoE damage. 3 monks minimum are required for this method but it works very well.

the only thing thats important is that you and your party members choose skills that will help each other out. sounds really simple but it takes a little bit of thought.