At Map Night yesterday (10/13 — Friday the 13th!) one of our two map groups was extremely lucky and managed not only to gain access to the new bonus area, “Hidden Canals of Uznair”, but also to make it all the way to the end! Here’s a report on the experience with tips for other folks who might be fortunate enough to make it through!
- We obtained three “Timeworn Thief’s Maps” from the late chambers of a regular Timeworn Gazelleskin Map portal to the Hidden Canals. They drop from the main chest and are rolled on (that is, they do not drop directly into inventory.) You may hold more than one at a time.
- The Thief’s Maps create underwater portals that allow access to the Hidden Canals. This seems to be 100% chance; there is no treasure to dig up at the site of the Thief’s Map, just a small portal to the Hidden Canals of Uznair that instantly appears when the right location is found.
- Each chamber in the Hidden Canals has three doors to choose from instead of the two found in the regular Canals. However, judging from our success rate with the three Thief’s Maps we used, I would estimate that two of the doors are correct and one is incorrect. (If only one door is correct then our luck was insanely good.)
- The mobs in the chambers of the Hidden Canals work pretty much the same as the ones in the regular Canals, although they do appear to have a bit more HP. For example, we had one room where two Stickywhiskers showed up, but we were not able to burn them both down in time despite having a full group. One of them escaped. The gear item level sync in the Hidden Canals is 340 to give groups a bit more power to handle the increased mob toughness.
- We also ran into a new kind of bonus critter, the “Canal Crew.” These are the five Royal Mandragoras (King, Queen, Knight, Prince, Jester) that pop up and run around. Each one has a number over its head. If you burn them down in a random order you get a “plain leather sack” with 100 gil in it. Yay. If you burn them down in the order 1-2-3-4-5 you get a “promising treasure chest” with a piece of loot. We got a housing item that was some kind of flower vase we’d never seen before.
- There were seven chambers total and as usual the mobs got tougher and more numerous as more chambers were opened.
- In the sixth chamber, when the treasure chest was opened, we got a new game to play: Abrahamu’s Lure!
Here is the text of the game:
Here’s the loot increase we were offered for the first attempt:
The map owner choose to take this risk and we won, but we decided not to try pushing our luck any further than this for the night and settled for this reward.
- When we arrived at the final chamber, we were met by this big golden elephant guy, named Airavata:
We fought him and a bunch of his pals, including Abrahamu, and it was a pretty tough fight, but we prevailed, and were rewarded with a bunch of loot including a pot of 500,000 gil each!
Our victorious group!
