Endwalker released a number of no-trade minions from the last three dungeons of the MSQ. In the past, most (all?) dungeon minions have been tradeable, which means you can gift them, put them up on the marketboard, or buy them off the marketboard if you’re so inclined.

These three particular minions have somewhat spoilery descriptions, so I can understand the want to prevent them from being posted all over the place. But it still makes it a lot harder to get them due to being untradable. Friends can’t even help you with it (aside from helping you farm). The only thing you can do is run the dungeon over and over hoping for a drop.

Thankfully, these dungeons can be done with a Trust. This means that you don’t have to worry about pulling together a party and other people rolling on the goods. It just drops in your inventory after the final boss.

However, it’s also completely RNG. I have no idea what the odds in getting one of these minions to drop – I’ve heard folks get it on their first run, and I’ve heard folks needing over 80 runs to get theirs.

Usually, I wouldn’t go after one of these minions, but Caduceus in particular is directly connected to my RP character of Amon. The moment I was made aware of that, I knew that I would have to make every effort to get this minion.

I called them “Snake Runs” and they started somewhere early December. At first, I was doing just one run of the level 87 dungeon a day to pace myself. Some days, I’d get impatient and run more. I remember one day, I ran it 6 times.

I had a note pad where I kept track of the stats just for kicks. But some times, I didn’t feel so cheerful about it, especially after the number of runs reached above 20.

My poor Free Company were such good sports, even though they had to endure days of me exclaiming, “No snek.” And as the holidays neared (and passed), I took to Tumblr to joke about it and make myself feel better.

In the end, the snake finally dropped on the first run of 2022 after 25 tries. That bodes well for this new year, right?