My Buggy Valentine: Problems with Love is in the Air

If you've been following WRUP, you probably know by now that I am pretty big on achievements. They're a lot of fun for me, and a good way to set a goal and have a solid in-game marker of how I'm doing on reaching it. Plus, the titles and tabards and mounts and the like you can get from them are a good way to customize your character.

However, if there's one thing that'll get me down and make me reconsider my achievement love, it may just be Love Is In the Air. The whole silly thing is just so full of bugs and quirks and annoyances and so based on random chance that there were a couple points along the way that made me feel like throwing up my hands and quitting.

Buyer Beware

To start with, there's the gifts. To get the adoration gifts, you have to head to the old world every hour on the hour, assuring that your hearthstone will be on cooldown pretty regularly. That means no doing stuff in Northrend that would tie you up for more than an hour if you're really serious about gift collecting. I don't mind going back to the old world for achievements, but forcing you to burn your hearthstone for something that only takes a couple minutes is just annoying. And that's only the tip of the iceberg, problem wise.

If you're after "Nation of Adoration," that's 3 different cities, but be careful - Gifts from guards apparently don't count. Also, the gifts are named after cities, but they really should be named after races -- a Night Elf in Stormwind will still give you a Darnassus gift, and a Gnome in Stormwind will give you an Ironforge gift. Finally, check your inventory. Unlike quests, where they just don't let you finish the quest if you have no room for the rewards, if you try to get a gift of adoration with a full inventory, you'll get the debuff and nothing to show for it. With only 5 days to get enough gifts for all the achievements, even 1 hour of lost time can be pretty crucial.

Now, let's assume you got all this figured out and you're getting gifts pretty regularly. If the RNG is unkind to you and gives you five picnic baskets in a row (if they can't keep it to one basket per a character, they could at least give it a sell value for your trouble), you can create a gift collection and turn it in for some extra petals or arrows or rockets, but you have to run between 3 cities constantly. It's made a little easier with the portals in Dalaran, but unless you're a Mage, Druid, or Death Knight, getting between the two contents requires either a long boat ride or a hearth.

Why I Hate Candy

Of course, even the gift collections can't help you get Bags of Candies or Love Fools. Those, you have to pray you'll get in a gift of adoration. To make matters worse, the bag of candy - which was actually even rarer than it is now before Blizzard relented and hotfixed things -brings up an extra layer of randomness, since you have to pray you pull out all 8 unique candy pieces. Needless to say, most people will need at least 2 or 3 bags.

Then there's the problem where Love Rockets don't always count for the speed achievement, or at least it seems like the actual time limit is closer to 10 seconds than 20 seconds. That meant more rocket gathering for me after I wasted my first batch of 10. It seems like you can get them out fast enough if you hotkey the rockets and do some quick hotkey pressing and clicking to target, but even then, you have to be fast.

Now, all of this random stuff wouldn't be so bad if more of it was more easily tradable. Unfortunately, the arrows and the candy bags themselves aren't tradable at all. Love Fools, Rockets, and Petals are tradable, but they're also summoned, so you have to meet face to face to swap them. This is certainly a bit frustrating considering that I very specifically remember mailing snowflakes to guild members back during Winter Veil. Why Love is in the Air must make everything more complicated, I do not know.

My Love is a Like a... Wait, Which Color Was That Again?

Finally, there's the whole rose bouquet thing. The Bouquet of Red Roses wasn't going to drop this year. Except now they apparently do (but only off the Northrend bosses), as many members of my guild have seen them drop, as have many people writing in to our tip line. And while we're at it, while you can use the right-click on the red bouquet for the Fistful of Love achievement, the ebon bouquet's effect doesn't count.

But seriously, there's probably more than I could say (for example, about Troll Rogues), but time would fail me. I'm not going to call the holiday of a fiasco, but here's hoping Blizzard learns some lessons from it and gives it at least a little tweaking next year. In short, we need less RNG, less silly time consuming stuff that leaves us stranded on the old world, fewer bugs, and more fun.

Love is in the Air and on WoW Insider. Check out our continuing coverage of the event and our guide to earning the achievement. And you better hurry; the holiday only lasts five days!