So its easter time again…no wait, that already happened. Ok, so its delayed Noble garden time! We can’t be mad about the delay since it brought with it this wonderful new (occasionally buggy) patch. Of course like all holidays, blizzard has blessed us with yet another title to wear proudly over our heads, “The Noble”, and this time they have given us seven days to do it instead of one!  I got it an hour ago so join me after the break for a breakdown of what you need to do.

Quests:

There are only three quests available for this holiday and they are both pretty easy. Head on over to your favorite level five starting zone and pick up A Tisket, a Tasket, a Noblegarden Basket (A/H) and The Great Egg Hunt (A/H) – from the Noblegarden npcs in the area.

The Great Egg Hunt:

This quest is easy provided you can find the eggs before someone else grabs them. You need to turn in 20x Brightly Colored Shell Fragment, which is a 100% drop rate from Brightly Colored Eggs. Simple enough if you can manage to get to the eggs.

The eggs also have a pretty constant droprate of Noblegarden Chocolates
which are used for

• Buying Noblegarden items (see table at bottom)
• 25% of your level stamina/spirit buff.
• Chocolate Lover and Chocoholic achievements (see achievements section)

The eggs also have a chance to drop any of the items that you can buy from the Noblegarden vendor (including the Spring Rabbit’s Foot pet).

So just go out and start collecting those eggs to complete both quests and possibly get the items you need for other achievements.

Note: Eggs are being heavily camped the first few days, so you may not have much luck getting to them. Keep trying and don’t get discouraged when you get spit on and slapped by campers. There is no such thing as “their spot” and “their eggs”, so don’t let them stop you from trying to get eggs.

The Achievements:

The following are required for the Noble Gardener meta-achievement (which is now required for What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been.

I Found One!

Very, very easy. Just loot an egg from the ground.

Noble Garden

Buy a Noblegarden Egg from the Noblegarden vendor and place it anywhere in stormwind – another easy achievement thats only going to set you back five pieces of chocolate.

Chocolate Lover

Eat 25 pieces of chocolate. Piece of cake. (I think 1 piece of cake is equal to 25 chocolates?)

Chocoholic

Eat 100 pieces of chocolate. This just became a child’s fantasy. Easy enough, provided you can find enough eggs to get 100 pieces of chocolate to eat.

Blushing Bride

Hopefully you have been lucky in your egg looting and have yourself a White Tuxedo Shirt and Black Tuxedo Pants, maybe even a Elegant Dress. (if you haven’t you can always buy the tuxedo pieces at 25 chocolates each and the dress at 50 (or pay the insane auction house fees if your really unlucky)).

But anyway, put on your tuxedo, kiss someone wearing a dress and there you go! None of these cloth pieces are Bind-on-pickup so you may want to trade them around with your friends to easily get the achievement.

Desert Rose

Again, maybe you have been lucky and got the Spring Robes from an egg. Or maybe you did what I did and bought them for 50 chocolates. Either way – Put your

Spring Robes on and head out to anywhere in the following locations and use them to plant a flower in:

• Badlands
• Desolace
• Silithus
• Tanaris
• Thousand Needles

Easy, but slightly time consuming flying around.

Hard Boiled

If you completed The Great Egg Hunt you should have a Blossoming Branch in your bags. The best way to do this is with a partner, once you both have your Blossoming Branch. Head out to UnGoro Crater (You can take the portal to Caverns of Time from Dalaran or Shattrath if you are a high enough level.)

and ride down to the hot springs. Once there – transform each other into a rabbit and sit in the water (not swimming) for a minute until you lay an egg.

Note: If you dont have a friend to do this with, you can simply portal to CoT and run over. Mounting and flying will break the shapeshift but portals and hearths will not.

Shake Your Bunny-Maker

Now this one is tough. You have to obtain some Spring Flowers and use them on a female of every race.  Keep in mind how often you see dwarf, tauren or orc females, as opposed to night elves, blood elves and humans. This probably took the longest time – partly because of the 5 minute cooldown on the flowers, and partly because of the rarity of orc, tauren and dwarf females on my server. What I did, being alliance, was mount up and ride over to Razorthorn Hill, where there were tons of horde looting eggs. Make sure if you do this you are careful not to flag as pvp and to appear as non-threatening as possible, I put on the tuxedo pants and shirt, removed all other armor, and equipped only my flowers, just to let them know I had no intentions of harming anyone. Well after about an hour of waiting and flowering and running, I had all the horde I needed. Ironforge is a good place to find dwarf women, stand by the mailbox and soon enough, one should come by. Oh and prepare to get spit upon and threatened while you stand outside razorthorn. A lot of getting spit on this holiday.

Spring Fling

At the steep price of 100 chocolates you had better hope you get lucky and find a Spring Rabbit’s Foot in one of those eggs. This will give you the Spring Rabbit pet which, when you summon, will proceed to get busy with the nearest Spring Rabbit it can find. Your goal is to let it do this in each of the areas that contain eggs (Kharanos, Dolanaar, Azure Watch & Elywnn Forest). Hooray for rabbit STDs.

Do all of these and you will have your new title!

The following are not required for the meta-achievement but are still nice to have:

(Note: Buying these items will not give you the achievement, you have to loot them from an egg.)

Dressed For The Occasion

Loot an Elegant Dress. You will get it if luck is on your side.

Sunday’s Finest

Loot White Tuxedo Shirt and Black Tuxedo Pants from an egg. Same as above – its all luck.

What you can buy from the vendor

• Noblegarden Egg – 5 chocolates and used for the Noble Garden achievement. (This you can place, then loot.)
• Blossoming Branch – 10 chocolates – Turns your party members into rabbits. (You get one for free by completing the daily quest The Great Egg Hunt.
• Spring Flowers – 50 chocolates – Used to give players bunny ears. Used for Shake Your Bunny-Maker.
• Spring Robes – 50 chocolates – Used to plant a rose for Desert Rose.
• White Tuxedo Shirt and Black Tuxedo Pants – 25 chocolates each – A nice tuxedo set to be used while getting the Blushing Bride achievement. Also great for RP.
• Elegant Dress – 50 chocolates – A very bright pink dress. Also used in the Blushing Bride achievement, and great for RP.
• Spring Circlet – 50 chocolates – Get your very own bunny ears! No use in the holiday, these are just for fun.
• Spring Rabbit’s Foot – 100 chocolates – Used in the Spring Fling achievement, it summons the Spring Rabbit pet.
• Tome of Polymorph: Rabbit – 100 chocolates – This is for mages only, so be nice to that mage near you desperately trying to get eggs, they have even more to save their chocolates for.

Well thats it! Enjoy your Noblegarden celebrations and check back later this week for an article on Children’s Week (which starts Sunday).

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Calanthia. Discipline Priest and pocket healer to Icecomet, Grim’s Fire Mage, and former male Blood Elf Korrax. That’s right, recently I spent a tenner of my hard earned money student loan, and completely reworked one of my characters. I then did it again for another one, but that’s not the focus of this article. That focus for this is more about the new lease of life you can give to your toons through the Character Recustomisation feature, and how to fit this in with your playing habits and the way you see your characters in the world of Azeroth.

I think one of the first things to address here is how you see your characters. People tend to take two different views on the characters they play in Warcraft. You have those who see the characters as an extension of themselves, and those who see them as entirely seperate entities. To help me out with this, I’ve enlisted Grim with giving me his views on his characters, and the way he sees them in the game.

Kiri: So Grim, thanks for helping me out! Here goes the interrogation. Do you see you most of your characters as an extension of yourself, in the game?

Grim: I think to some extent I see them as an extension of myself in Azeroth, maybe more of an extension of my wild side, given some of the things I do with them!

Kiri: I think I can attest to that hahaha. So when you speak to other people, do you speak as yourself, or give things a spin depending on the character you’re using? Is there any distinction between talking to Grimhammer the Orc Warrior, or Icecomet the Undead Mage?

Grim: No not really.  I tend to act the same on whatever character I play.  I’ve not really been one for the whole rp side of the game.

Kiri: I know we’re not on an rp realm, so we don’t see a lot of it, but do you find yourself put off by people who behave differently when they play different characters?

Grim: I dont really know, the people I play with tend to act the same on whatever character they are playing.  It would be hard for me to judge people if they ‘acted’ in a different manner to what they actually are in rl.  I think for me I tend to want to get to know the person behind the character and not the character itself.

Kiri: Ok, thanks for that boss!

And there you have it. Grim is the kind of guy who plays as himself, and behaves in the game as he does in real life. Although I can tell you from personal experience that he doesn’t run into clearly fatal situations expecting me to keep him up when we’re wandering about the town, obviously. For Grim, switching to a female character isn’t unlikely, it’s just not going to happen.

I used to be in the same camp as Grim. My first character, an Orc Rogue named Carnival, was pretty much just me. I didn’t see him as a character, I saw him as me, in the game. Then as I started rolling alts, I got more detached from them as time went on. My second main, Kirioth (now Cthonica), was mostly me, but with some RP edges. He was a bit meaner than me. Not impolite, but confident in his abilities. He took risks as a healer where my personal preference would dictate that I stand back and watch. Then, I rolled a Shaman, who is still languishing at 54. I felt no attachment to this character whatsoever. There was no personality to it. That’s one of the main reasons he’s never been levelled any further.

It was only when I started playing my Priest again that I realised that I no longer really saw my characters as an extension of myself. Over the course of my many rerolls, I’d begun to see them as seperate entities. When I realised last week that I was utterly sick of looking at the back end of a male Blood Elf (and I’d had enough of the casting animation, or the “fondling an imaginary giraffe technique” as I call it), I was a bit stuck for ideas. Then it struck me. Recustomisation was the way forward. I paid my dues, and loaded up the game. Within minutes, I had a female Blood Elf Priest.

Already, it feels like my “new” character has developed her own personality. The reactions from other players when we run instances have changed slightly, making her less forward and sharp. I tend to take a few risks, and try different strategies more. I do things differently. Sorry, she does things differently. When I’m talking to Grim through Teamspeak, I talk as much rubbish as I always have, maybe more when I’m doing something I know won’t work but want to try it anyway! I still spew curses like there’s no tomorrow when someone dies, or splutter in indignation when a mob has the sheer nerve to slap me when I’m trying to heal the tank up. But Calanthia is a little more reserved, letting her actions do the talking, while the daft sod controlling her shouts obscenities.

All in all, the recustomisation feature has given this character in particular a new lease of life.

In the next part, I’ll be interviewing a die hard RP’er, and getting their thoughts on their characters and the idea of changing them.

Now, after the Blood Knights discovered this, there was some understandable guilt among the ranks. But the Blood Elf race is proud, arrogant, and vain generally speaking, so it struck me that the Blood Knights would be split into two camps upon discovering that the Naaru had gone out of their way to empower and turn them into a new race of people. There would be those who would turn away from the old ways, using their powers as a way to atone for their sins and the actions they had committed. Others would most likely carry on with their old ways…

With this in mind, I started thinking about which camp Kirioth would fall into. Would he repent, using his abilities to try and make up for past misdemeanors? Or would he simply shrug his shoulders, turn away and think “It was always meant to be ours anyway”?

Despite my planned role as a healer come 80, I think Kirioth would be one of those Blood Knights who simply wouldn’t care about the sacrifice that the Naaru made. His goals are to take down the enemy, the Scourge. He’ll use any means to achieve this, and torturing a being to gain power for it is just par for the course. On a game mechanics front, the new Judgements system works as a good support for this view. His aim in battle is to keep his allies in the line of fire, alive. That way, he can run in and drop some damage without risk of being targeted. He is a manipulator at heart, using others to help achieve his goals.

Now that probably sounds cold hearted, but fighting with the same people through Northrend, friendships and connections are bound to be made. Somewhere along the line Kirioth will most likely begin to realise that companionship is the way to go, and that healing to make others do the dirty work is not how to do it. Who knows, there might some sort of epic event which makes him rethink his attitude somewhere along the line.