Red red roses, not roses of purest black

It appears that the Bouquet of Ebon Roses showers the target with black roses, so you cannot use it to complete Fistful of Love or Flirt With Disaster. However, you can still grab the 11 petals from doing two Gift Giving and completing Zinge's Assessment/Morgan's Discovery. This news makes the Valentine's meta-achievement that little bit more tricky.

Kam's guide to being a Fool For Love

I pity the fool who tries for this achievement. According to the in-game calendar the Love is in the Air event is from Wednesday February 11th to Monday the 16th (at 6am so probably not Monday). Let's check it out:

Heartmender
20 people need to have their hearts broken and you need to mend them first. Finding such people is not difficult - they will tend to congregate around the inn waiting to be mended. You may get 2-4 bracelets per box, thus will need to grind 5 adoration boxes min.

Flirt With Disaster
The petals are from adoration boxes so you need 1 box minimum. However it is claimed on Wowhead that the bouquet also works. If you have one from last year, good good. Otherwise they are no longer available.

Nearest and Dearest
Just follow the quest starting Dangerous Love. It is worth noting the reward for the quest Zinge's Assessment on the chain is a Box of Chocolates, which will therefore complete Sweet Tooth. The quest also gives 1 rose petal which is very useful.

Nation of Adoration
Buy perfume and a love token, wander round till a citizen has a heart above their head. Hand them the love token, hope for a Gift of Adoration. Get one for each city to do this. So you need to grind 3 adoration boxes for this. It is worth noting these only come from vendors and the like, NOT guards. Don't chat up city guards hoping to do this achievement!

Perma-Peddle
Thank the earthmother this is no longer part of the achievement. Basically you need to grind for adoration boxes each hour and hope this rare drop is in one. One for serious pet collectors only.

Be Mine!
Candy comes from a bag with 10 charges in the Adoration box again. You use it and it has a chance to turn into one of the sweets. So you will need 1 adoration box minimum.

I Pitied The Fool
Use /pity on a Love Fool in 5 locations, all ok apart from maybe AB but a macro will help to do it quickly. Love Fools come from adoration boxes in stacks of 3-5. Grind 1 adoration box minimum. You may only need 2, for the instances, and get lucky with the rest if you can /pity someone elses Fool, which it should work.

Shafted!
You need 10 silver shafted arrows, contained in Gifts and Pledges of Adoration in stacks of 5. So you will need 2 adoration boxes minimum.

Lonely?
Camp Dalaran for someone with a basket out, or maybe hope to get one in a Gift of Adoration from citizens.

The Rocket's Pink Glare
The rockets are contained in Gifts and Pledges of Adoration - in stacks of 5 so you will need 2 minimum.

Fistful of Love
You need 10 rose petals needed, so thats 2 adoration boxes. Or you can use the red bouquet, only if you got it last year.

Sweet Tooth
You need chocolates from box of chocs from adoration. However if you do the seasonal quest, you get a box of chocolates along the way. So do the quest!

My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose
You need a bouquet during the festival, which drops from various bosses. Unfortunately blizzard have said they have removed the old red bouquet which used to drop from old world bosses in Strat, Scholo, DM etc. You actually need to go kill a boss in a Northrend instance, the easiest of which is the Prince in Utguard Keep. He drops the bouquet 100% of the time on normal difficulty. The Elder Brethren achievements task force hitting UK on the opening day and all were able to get their bouquet.

Minimizing Adoration boxes
I think I worked out you need quite a few adoration boxes at a minimum, but if you had the red bouquet from last year, grats, you need 2 less boxes (as you don't need 10 petals in 2 boxes). 1 box may also contain more than one sort of item, so we may get lucky and get say a Petal and Arrow in one box.

But we can get some items from the Horde gift collection quest, handed in next to the faction leaders. The quest reward is a choice of 5 arrows, 5 love rockets or 5 rose petals. I won't repeat the contents of Wowhead so go read that for a good summary of what you need.

The totals are 15 gifts of friendship and 30 pledges of friendship minimum for a collection (assuming no duplicates). This is just gold cost because you can get friendship boxes while adored. If you get heartbroken you need to be friendshipped by someone which should be ok. So there is no time limit to getting these city gifts apart from a lot of gold and travelling. And maybe being heartbroken.

So how many items do we need from the quest? 10 arrows, 10 rockets, 10 petals. Thats then 6 horde gift collections = 90 gifts of friendship min (citizens) and 180 pledges of friendship min (guards).

Costs
10 love tokens cost 10 copper. 10 perfume bottle charges cost 1 silver, with a 2 min cooldown but the buff lasts 60 minutes. The costs involved are basically trivial, not even 1 gold maximum.

Worse case scenario
We are up against the Random Number Generator, so the worst case scenario is you never get any of a certain item and just get all Love Rockets, for instance. The more boxes of adoration you can get the better basically.

Tips
If you have the red rose bouquet from last year, use it to do Fistful of Love.

Doing the Horde Gift giving is advisable to get arrows and love rockets to cut down on the amount of real time needed to wait for adoration boxes. However I would advise you get the Horde Gift Collection, don't hand it in, then save it until you know which items you are short of.

Do the quest Dangerous Love, the reward has a box of chocolates and a rose petal so you can do Sweet Tooth and Flirt With Disaster easily.

The Overachiever mod will add a tooltip for the petals achievement when you hover a player, showing red when you need to petal them. But you may need to enable the tooltip in the options.

The first 3 adoration boxes you get should be from citizens or vendor NPCs of TB, UC and Org, for Nation of Adoration. After that it doesn't matter, although guards are far more numerous than citizens.

Shamans should hearth in Dalaran or Shattrath, then you can Astral Recall every 15 minutes and take a portal to whichever city you need gifts from. Of course Mages have it really easy here...

The faction of an NPC determines which sort of gift you get. You can give a love token to a tauren NPC in Orgrimmar and receive a Thunder Bluff box.

Once they have given a gift, an NPC won't have a floating heart for around 1-2 minutes, then it reappears. This means you can camp a specific NPC and keep on getting gifts from them. This is especially handy for non-guards, who are far less numerous than guards.

Gifts, petals and love rockets are not Bind on Pickup. So you can try to get adoration boxes with all your alts, then trade them with a guildie who can trade them back to your main.

Start early!

Other guides
/hug
WoW Vault
WoW Insider
WoW forums

Get your loving over with fast

Ah so many other, more sleazy, titles I could have chosen. The Love Is In The Air festival starts Wednesday 11th at 6am according to the in-game calendar, but only lasts until Monday at 6am, ie Sunday night for non-night owls.

From my brief look at what's involved, this one will be a major grindfest and no mistake. I've worked out I need 8 gifts or pledges of adoration minimum, if each box serves up a different gift, which will take 8 hourly flirting attempts. Of course the chances of each box having a different item in it are pretty damn small, so I fully expect 3 or 4 times that many boxes will be needed. The short timescale won't help either. Come Wednesday, The Grind Is Truly In The Air.

Totems: Raid wide or party wide?

Updated for 3.2

With all the changes in patch 3, there is confusion among our raid leadership as to which totems are raid wide, and which ones are party wide. As the shaman laying said totems, I thought it would be wise to investigate.

The totem tooltips are quite deceptive, only talking about party-wide effects and not mentioning raids at all. So after some verifying last night in a 10 man raid, here is the list:

Party
Cleansing Totem
Healing Stream Totem
Mana Tide Totem
Grounding Totem
Tremor Totem

Raid
Mana Spring Totem
Fire Resistance Totem
Frost Resistance Totem
Nature Resistance Totem
Totem of Wrath
Flametongue Totem
Strength of Earth Totem
Wrath of Air Totem
Windfury Totem
Stoneskin Totem

Non buffing
Earthbind Totem
Fire Nova Totem
Magma Totem
Searing Totem
Sentry Totem
Stoneclaw Totem

In conclusion, all of the buffing and resistance totems are raid-wide, mana spring is also raid wide now, but the rest (healing, tremor and cleansing ones) are party only.

This is quite important because if you are doing a fight which needs cleansing or fear breaks on tanks, you will need to be in the tank's party (for example on Maexxna). On the other hand, you don't need to party with the melee because they will always get Strength of Earth and Windfury, and Mages and Warlocks will always get Flametongue. Range permitting of course.

Gearing up for some resto dual-spec action

Slowly and not surely the healing gear is starting to trickle in. A few nights ago Kam got the Facade Shield of Glyphs from Heroic Azjol-Nerub, which beats his old level 70 shield into the ground (baby). A lot of crit heavy spell damage gear has come Kam's way recently, the Legguards of Nature's Power from Culling of Stratholme (fantastic instance) was a particular highlight.

It used to be that resto needed MP5, Int and some more MP5, but now I'm reading that some crit and haste is beneficial, so Kam is collecting resto and elemental gear equally. Luckily, there are only three active shamans in the guild at the moment, so most mail spell power drops are going spare.

I would advise anyone of any class to get glyphs for your second spec right now. Many of the gold-making blogs are advising glyph sellers to stock up for the inevitable boom in demand when dual-specs appear, because a lot of people won't plan for it and will go off to the AH to buy their glyphs on patch day. This will inevitably mean that the prices will be very high as inscribers attempt to make a killing on the high demand.

I'm planning on getting Glyph of Chain Heal, Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave, Glyph of Water Mastery, Glyph of Water Shield, plus Glyph of Water Walking for fun. Kam already has Water Shield, but as I understand it, the second spec will start with an empty glyph tab.

He asks, we read, we respond

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PS Kam just got a Titansteel Bonecrusher made and put Mongoose on it. Very yummy.

Time to being kicked off the PC: 10 minutes and counting

All because I foolishly logged into Dalaran with mods enabled, I got kicked when the PC chugged under the immense load. Now I get to watch a pretty queue. Always queues on a sunday. Maybe I should give up... but I can't... I neeeed more Dalaran Cooking Awards! Mutter mutter.

Kids - don't log into Dalaran if you can possibly avoid it, and if you do, remember to disable all those mods. Stay smart!