How To: Love is in the Air

The Valentines event, Love is in the Air, started last night at midnight. I just so happened to be in Ironforge at the time to realise that it had begun and immediately flew to Shadowfang Keep to check the new boss out. Seeing as how most event bosses are generally really easy to kill, we tried it out as a trio. Turns out they were pretty easy! As for the loot:


Times thrice.

After the event boss we did a daily heroic - which was Azjol Nerub - and found we were randomly getting Lovely Charms. It was only when the warrior thunderclapped the small adds just before the drop after Hadronox did I realise that: 1) Killing blows were required and 2) They had to be a non-grey level. So knowing this, the best places to farm would be instances where there were quick kill quick respawn mobs like the Stratholme zombies or areas where you control a vehicle or use bombs to mow down hordes of enemies like the bombing run quests in TBC. I opted to farm the Lovely Charms in Ulduar:


This technique may end up being hotfixed, but it's doubtful, due to the many ways of exploiting it. Some people do bombing run quests in Icecrown, or even running over the bone guards in the Battle Before the Citadel daily. But the fastest is just spamming fireballs in Ulduar. These Lovely Charms convert into Lovely Charm Bracelets, which are then traded for the Love Token currency. In order to complete the meta achievement, you will need:

My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose: Solo either Old Kingdom or Utgarde Keep normal until the San'layn.
Dangerous Love: Just complete the questline, gain 5 Love Tokens as well.
Nation of Adoration: 4 Lovely Charm Bracelets (Also gain 20 Love Tokens in the process)
Shafted!: 10 Silver Shafted Arrow: 10 Love Tokens
The Rocket's Pink Glare: 10 Love Rockets: 10 Love Tokens
Be Mine!: 1-3 Bag of Heart Candies: 2-6 Love Tokens
Sweet Tooth, Lonely?: 1-2 Box of Chocolates: 10-20 Love Tokens
Flirt With Disaster, Fistful of Love: 15 Handful of Rose Petals: 6 Love Tokens
I Pitied The Fool: 5 Love Fool: 50 Love Tokens
Lonely?: 1 Romantic Picnic Basket: 10 Love Tokens
Flirt With Disaster: 1 Perfume: 1 Love Token

In total, 113 Love Tokens. Considering Nation of Adoration and Dangerous Love, thats 92 extra Lovely Charm Bracelets that are needed to be converted to Love Tokens to complete everything. It's not hard, just time consuming! I did it all within a few hours:

Hallow's End 2009

Hallow's End started at 01:00 server time and a lot of people had the same idea of getting there early and get a run in before the daily reset. The loots have been updated but the item levels are still Heroic Dungeon/Naxx10 quality epics which isn't what was to expected considering the gear resets Blizzard keeps doing so much of. Maybe we'll see another Direbrew Mug before next week, who knows.

How To: Ram Race

I made this video yesterday for brewfest.



Here is the optimal route for both the Alliance and the Horde, with the apple barrels marked. Despite minor changes to the positioning this year, Horde still have the other end of the stick when it comes to maximizing token gain. However it should be simple enough to get tokens for everything you want so it's not a game breaking concern.


UPDATE: It turns out you can just jump over the barrels. The removal of fatigue isn't detected through collision, so jumping over them will reduce chance of getting stuck in an apple barrel, and will improve your time as a result.

Also it turns out I helped a guild member through the video, he didn't know about the apple barrels at all. I'm really glad to get feedback like this.

UPDATE (2): I managed 18 laps now, probably room for one more. I've changed my route slightly, and ignored barrel 3 on the return trip and just make a beeline over the hill to barrel 2. Fastest lap was around 40 seconds.



UPDATE (3): How To: Ram Racing v2.0!