Assault: Nyzul Isle Investigation

Early in March, Jarbit announced his intention to start a static for Nyzul Isle Assaults. These were added in the last update, and from the description SquareEnix provided, they sounded like an exciting challenge. Jarbit wanted to go in blind - learning as we go, reading only things provided by Square - no strategy guides, no threads from internet forums. Several of us thought this was a great approach, and we ended up with a team that would do 3 of the Nyzul Isle Investigation assaults on Friday nights, hoping to have a fun time, and perhaps get some neat gear while we're at it.

The team ended up being: Jarbit (as BLM), Frostwitch (RDM), Goto (WHM), Venn (DRG), Itera (MNK), and Tsakiki (PLD). Meshe originally wanted to join us as well, but he's in a twice-a-week assault static with Divinities and Fliggity, so he doesn't have any tags to use for Nyzul Isle.

I've been putting off writing about this until we actually accomplished something, but it's really been a frustrating experience. For this assault, there are 100 randomly generated levels that you tackle in groups of 5. Once you've completed the fifth level, you can save your progress. Using tokens that you've gotten from your successful runs, you can start out at a saved level. The levels each have an objective, which can be "eliminate all enemies" (our favorite), "eliminate specified enemies", "eliminate specified enemy", and "light all the lamps". There can be sub-objectives added, such as "do not destroy the archaic gears". You're also limited to 30 minutes to get through the five levels.

The gears seem to be true-sight though, and definitely aggro magic from a long distance, so it's tough to kill the specified enemies while the gears are bashing away at you. Another really annoying sub-objective is when the lamps are meant to be lit in a specific order. The last time we got that level, it took us 28 minutes to get the order right.

At first it was kind of exciting, running around in a new environment, confronting mobs we don't normally see, but then it just started getting really annoying with the lost experience when we'd wipe to a swarm of angry gears we were trying to not kill, or the "puzzle" game of the lamps (of course aggressive monsters surround most the lamp posts).

Our last two Fridays we've done one Nyzul Isle assault, and then switched over to normal assaults, since we all need the points for items and/or Salvage, and it's good to get rank increases for Sanction. Two weeks ago we did 2 runs of Lamia No. 13, but lost the second when we were all too close and got charmed. As we uncharmed one at a time, we'd each get killed in turn. It was fun though. Last week we did one run of the Orichalcum Survey, but didn't find the ore until 1 second before we timed out.

I'm not sure what the future holds for this static. We all fell in love with Salvage after our first run last Saturday, so assault points are needed, and you don't get any from Nyzul Isle Investigation. Perhaps we'll try one run of Nyzul Isle each week, followed by two runs of other assaults for our Salvage points. All I know is that Nyzul Isle just ceased being any fun at all. It's not a challenge so much as random luck at what type of floors you get for your runs.