Just my advice; getting ToD for Charybdis really isn't worthwhile. He's not a 21-24 hour respawn, but he's not something like a 2 hour respawn either. It's smack dab in the middle pretty much, I've heard it can be anywhere from 8-16 hours, and he's not always claimed/killed with consistency even when it does spawn, which can skew his expected respawn time even further. All of this combined makes the ToD sorta worthless information to have. It's very difficult to track down a ToD on this guy on your own and still manage to bring friends to kill it for the very next spawn, due to his irregular respawn times. Even if you can camp for the next spawn, there's no guarantee you'll be able to find it immediately, it can still take hours of camping before you'll pop it due to the huge respawn window.
It took me a weekend to get this sword (I sincerely feel for anyone that's taken over a month, let alone a year, trying to get this ; ; congrats Mor), and I spent all of Saturday trying to camp for a ToD. I got it, but turned out that any help that I could have brought for the next spawn would be asleep at that time. So on Sunday I just brought the THF that agreed to help for this to camp with me, at what was pretty much a random time, and it took 2-3 or so hours of camping for it to pop. My Saturday was pretty much wasted effort. I didn't spend much longer on Saturday waiting for a pop than I did on Sunday.
This guy is mostly a matter of luck, just a different kind of luck than with most NMs. Some NMs can spawn and be claimed regularly but have crappy drop rates. (I personally took way more time trying to get my Moldavite Earring than I did my Joyeuse.) On the other hand, this NM is tricky to spawn and get claim on, but you're assured of the drop if you win. In the end, aside from the fact that you can't solo this NM and that it requires certain help, it's not all too much different.
Hot tip: If you're having a hard time trying to convince a THF to help you with the camping, note that there is some Sahagin NM outside Charybdis's room, one that I think has a pretty nice potential drop (hell if I remember what it is though). RMTs tend to be camping the other NMs behind the gold coin door, but not this one; I didn't see any RMT when I was down there. Dunno how it is now, though. But it's worth checking out.
Hot tip #2: Just because you see other campers, don't get discouraged. One, they're usually unaware of when Charybdis will spawn or when it last died, so it's not like that just because there's people there it's about to spawn (I encountered many people who just "gave up" after a while of camping, while waiting for ToD on Saturday). Also, even if another party gets claim before you, don't give up hope just then, either. My Joyeuse actually came from a Charybdis that managed to defeat another alliance first... they had two PLDs split tanking, and they still got rocked before Charybdis dropped before 90%. Suffice it to say, if you have to fight this with shadow-less tanks, you are gonna need more than 3 dedicated healers.
Edited, Wed Mar 22 13:22:32 2006 by Fynlar