The Lunar Festival has wound down and, just when you’re starting to feel the post-event blues, the Love is in the Air event begins! Azerothian Valentines is no simple festival of love, but a mysterious series of events leading to sinister revelations about the nature of everyones sudden devotions!

Valentines in Azeroth is, for the most part, about the giving and recieving of gifts – to your loved ones, to your cities and even to strangers!

Blizzard’s own page on the festival can be found here.

Achievements

We can’t really fool anyone now – achievements are the bread and butter of ‘Holidays’ in WoW. As much as I enjoy the in game events for what they are, and the silliness they entail, I can’t also help but feel the replayability (my favourite word on this blog) is boosted by the rampant achievement hunting. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that boosting involvement in this way will boost ‘attendance’ at such events and that greater participation will make people feel there’s more things ‘going on’.

How will they keep that feeling up when everyones got one years worth of events achievements? Who knows, but I’ll be interested to see if they’re using it as a stop-gap until they have time to develop further content or whether they will expand upon achievements yearly as they once expanded upon the events themselves.  So, without further ado…

• Fool For Love (Alliance) // Fool For Love (Horde)

The sub-achievements for Fool For Love are almost identical for both factions:

• Heartmender
• Flirt With Disaster (A) // Flirt With Disaster (H)
• Nearest and Dearest
• Nation of Adoration (A) // Nation of Adoration (H)
• Sweet Tooth
• My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose
• Shafted!
• Lonely?
• The Rocket’s Pink Glare
• Fistful of Love
• Be Mine!
• I Pitied the Fool

A pretty standard list here, with the obligatory ‘pvp based’ achievement (which I will do in conjunction with setting out great feasts for double-achievementification!).  The ‘Fool For Love’ achievement page on wowhead contains some good tips for the various sub-achievements all listed together so I suggest you check it out before you begin!

There are also some achievements available which are not needed for the Fool for Love seasonal achievement:

• Lovely Luck Is On your Side
• Perma-Peddle

Quests

The Love is in the Air questline begins with Dangerous Love (A) // Dangerous Love (H) and spirals through the event, eventually leading you to Arathi Highlands and a discovery about the silly goings on!  Remember to click on the cauldron beside the quest NPC after talking to him to recieve one of several event outfits.

Gift Giving (A) // Gift Giving (H) – How to get gifts for these is explained below.  If you have terrible luck getting rockets, arrows or petals to use for your achievements this is a bonefide way of getting them – you also get an hour-long buff when you complete the quest which is different depending on the city where you hand it in.

But How Do I Do This Pledge Stuff?

It’s a pretty simple system, but it can be a bit confusing when you consider the amount of stuff you’re going to have in your inventory.

I created a visual guide to pledging for those who’ve never expressed their love to a cities worth of guards and shopkeepers before!

First stop is your local innkeep (or friendly barmaid) – any innkeeper with a heart icon above them will do.  From them, you need to buy the following:

OR

PLUS

Once you have the required items, use either perfume or cologne and go find a guard or citizen with a heart over their head – I’ll use one of Stormwind’s finest for this example – and tell them how much you really care for and apprecite them! Of course, they want to show their appreciation too, so they’ll return your gift with one of their own:

This ‘Gift / Pledge  of Adoration‘, a present which can contain all of the ‘big goodies‘* from the event, will give you a debuff called ‘Adored‘. This will last for one hour and whilst you have this you can only get ‘cheap‘ presents by giving your love tokens to NPCs – which you want to do as these still drop items you will need.

So do it again.  And again…. and… again...

Of course sometimes, if they catch on to your loose affections, they might not return your feelings in the way you had hoped.  In fact, they might break your callous, pledge collecting little heart!

This requires you to find a ‘friend’ with a bracelet, who’s willing to use it upon you to unbreak your broken heart with their friendship.

This shouldn’t be too hard, given that there’s an achievement to use the frienship bracelets – just remember to return this in kind if you can.  Friendship bracelets come from the bigger gifts / pledges of adoration.

Making City Pledges

So, you’ve gone the rounds in your city, chatted up guards and shopkeepers and you have a huge pile of random stuff.  What now? Using Stormwind as an example again:

Cologne versus Perfume!?

You might imagine the choice is simple here – just grab whatever and use it – but this simply isn’t true.  In many cities the guard balance is skewed and,  simply, you’ll be  able to ‘talk to’ more guards if you choose perfume – with the exception of Darnassus where the balance swings the other way!

*Big Goodies

So, what event-only items can we get our greedy hands on?

For the WoW fashionistas, theres the usual round of festival chic fashion.

• [Lovely Purple Dress]
• [Lovely Red Dress]
• [Lovely Blue Dress]

• [Purple Dinner Suit]
• [Red Dinner Suit]
• [Blue Dinner Suit]

All of the above come from the Cauldron near the quest NPC after you’ve completed the event questline.  Another, rarer dress drops from the gifts / pledges of adoration rather infrequently:

• [Lovely Black Dress]

This item does not bind to a character and thus sellable or tradeable to your other characters.

The other rare items available from the pledges / gifts are:

• [Romantic Picnic Basket]
• [Truesilver Shafted Arrow]
  

The first being a summonable picnic basket with parasol which creates a little heart buff over yourself and other people when they join you by clicking on the item.

Lastly, there are the bouquets:

• [Bouquet of Red Roses]
• [Bouquet of Ebon Roses]

These are needed for one of the sub-achievements and the Red Roses are easiest to get – soloable by most people level 70 and above.  Personally I found the Dire Maul boss which drops it to be the easiest to reach without killing things – as a resto shammy I like to avoid killing trash as it simply takes so much longer even when its low-level mobs.

These are so much fun to use in a raid but you have to actually equip them to use and wait for them to come off the ‘on use equip cooldown’ to come off before you can use them.  This, combined with a 5 minute cooldown makes them less randomly fun than the loose petals but you can use these bouquets throughout the year.

Take the time to enjoy the Love is in the Air Event – it’s the last for a couple of months in the Azerothian calendar!

<3

A lot of this information is gleaned from experience at previous Love is in the Air celebrations, so if there are any changes I’ll see about rectifying them asap as I actuall get around to doing them this year.  Any comments about such are welcomed!

Edit: Fixed the image from 4x item to 5x item :)

Edit2: Added the Lovely Luck Is On Your Side and perma-peddle achievements!