I think it remains to be seen. The last time anyone saw underfoot, on Fippy, Citizen and EoE both struggled quite a bit to get through it. But, neither guild was really healthy numbers wise by that point, and many of those raids are tough with 30-40 mains and boxes making up the difference. And there were also several broken encounters that made it even more challenging. I think if a guild makes it to Underfoot intact on Fippy with solid #'s, able to put forth 54 well geared raider mains every night, and you add in the big DPS boosts from the last couple of years (and the ones yet to come--necro dot revamp...) Underfoot will be maybe a bit challenging but it will be beaten at a speed that is probably inconceivable right now. Especially if either AOS or OGC can continue to split raid to the extent that they both have been doing, since that would drastically speed up flagging. It could well be days or weeks, rather than months. That's all a pretty big if though, because we have some tough times ahead of us to reach that point. The competition is strong, currently, but it was pretty strong at this point on Fippy too.
No, I didn't. These guilds are 5 splitting Plane of Time each week. They will be able to get a ton of flags at each tier very rapidly if they can continue to split that aggressively.
Just to follow up, I did some napkin math. If a guild came into Underfoot able to: * triple split all tier 1 raids on day 1 (~100-120 total decently geared toons and ~9-12 well geared war), * pull off masked invaders with ~20 toons/split (both Fippy guilds did this so shouldn't be hard), * handle the rest of the tier 2/3 content with ~40 toons (and 40 toon splits once they had enough flags) * Never fail a raid (this would be the tough one). They could have 54 toons into Convorteum by the 6th cycle, maybe even the 5th (#'s for audience would be pretty dicey on 5th cycle.) Expansion could be defeated in less than a month: Cycle 1 (Day 1)- 3xsplit tier 1, 1x masked invaders - 28 coins, 2 emblems Cycle 2 - 3xsplit tier 1, 2x masked invaders, 1xBrath + Arthicrex, 60 coins / 13 emblems Cycle 3 - 3split tier1, 2xsplit tier 2 with 4xmasked invaders, brell trials+ff - 97 coin, 38 emblem, 6 amulet Cycle 4 - 3xtier 1, 3xtier 2 (5 masked invaders), all tier 3 - 140+ coins, 65 emblem, 16 amulet Cycle 5 - repeat above with 2xtier 3 except no split of LC - 94 emblem, 34 amulet. 39 toons for audience attempt. Cycle 6 (Day 26) - repeat above with split LC, + Audience, 54 amulets+54 convorteum flags. On into Convorteum for the expansion win. This, I believe, would be the pinnacle "Speed Run" achievement in Everquest's history. Hope to see AoS and OGC both going for this in ~2 years.
Alternately, a coalition of all current Phinny guilds working together at it, with massive server wide coordination and planning could get it all done in ~15 days. Which would be even more cool! The server working together could kill some of the tier 3 raids on day 1.
On Vulak Aerr we only had two guilds even really raiding at this point in the server's history. Exciting to have so many and still a high level of competition. Bodes well for the server's future.