Nyzul Isle - Never No More

Nyzul Isle has been the bane of my end-game existence for as long as I can remember. Usually, it's one of two outcomes when I manage to reach floor 80:

We fight Cerberus and he drops something I don't need... OR

We fight Cerberus and he drops me.

That's usually it. It's a rare moment that the outcome differs from the above. Every now and then, I'll see Hydra appear. Of course, Hydra usually drops a weapon and that's it.

This morning was no different. It was prime time for the Japanese crowd, but I had time to burn and tags to waste, so I gave it another shot. Not to mention, I had capped exp for SAM since that horrid run in with a dragon not long ago. Off we go. I thought our party was pretty decent. We had SAM, SAM, DRG, THF, RDM, and BRD. I was happy with the setup and we went in.

First floor was chariots. At this point in my Nyzul career, I expect every floor to be chariots. We found the first one and stopped. I wasn't certain why we stopped, but we did. Everyone was just waiting for something to happen. I noticed our THF hadn't moved, so I took the initiative and tagged the chariot from a distance. Of course, I got aggro from a birdie but it was slept and we went on. For some reason, we were out of sync on that floor. Between no one sleeping, people not sticking together, or MP issues, I died twice and our DRG died right next to me. We also spent around 10 minutes on 76. Not happy.

I think we made it 78 when we got the 5 minute warning. Once again...not happy. We left the run and I asked who wanted to go for another round. Our DRG left and then our BRD decided to leave too. Cal saw me in the ruins and was hurt that I didn't invite him earlier, so I made sure to send a request his way this time. Few minutes later, I found a 6th and we were set. One tag gone, two to go. I changed jobs and we went in again.

I don't know if we were half-asleep before, but the next run was great. We ran through the floors like we were tearing through Valkurm Dunes. We got to the boss and it was none other than.... HYDRA! Fan-freaking-tastic. I just knew we weren't going to get anything. Everyone has a theory on the way drops work in this game. Let the THF get the last hit on an NM for best drops, or have a poor Taru die as a sacrifice. I have a new one: beat the shit out of the enemy so fast that it doesn't have a chance to hide the loot it was holding. Granted, I was an RDM and I didn't do squat to it outside of enfeebles, but Hydra dropped in mere seconds. When it was over, we still had 10 minutes to go, but I chose to exit instead. Mainly because I was too excited about what just happened. At an approximate cost of 54,250 tokens, say hello to this:

It was either the rock salt or the jacket. Obviously, the salt lost.

I couldn't freaking believe it. I am the master of making Askar or Goliard drop, but today, my luck changed. I think it's because I had Domie cheering me on and Cal in my party. Cal said Denali dropped because he had the power of funk music playing on his iPod. I dry humped his leg in thanks. Who says I'm ungrateful?

I am officially a sexy ass Corsair. Booyah.

Still, I had one tag left and I didn't want to be rude to my party for helping me out. So we went for one more run. This time, we ran into Khim. Cal's silly self decided to skip getting TP from the rampart and just rush in without buffs or the mages resting. Well, that's not entirely true. He did ask first and I told him to go play and have fun. He was giggling like a little kid. Khim fell with little issue and all we got was the Dancer dagger. The awesome part about it is that we had almost 15 minutes left in the run. I have never cleared a FL80 run that fast. So we laughed and decided to keep going. Turn it into a token farming run. Again, we tore through the floors. The force was strong with us today. When it was all said and done, we went from 76-84. We had about 3 minutes left, but decided to just exit and call it a day. We got a nice token reward though.

No drop on the boss, but it still ranks as the best run ever.

There are still items that are useful to me in that place, but I can now travel into Whitegate and honestly not give a damn about having enough tags to do a run when I see FL80 shouts. Time to focus on some real assaults and get that long overdue Captain rank. ^_^