Tuesday, February 17, 2009

The Heartmender Meta-Game

Yes, Love is no longer in the air. If you tried to get the "Fool for Love" meta-achievement you will probably remember the Heartmender part:



You basically had to use your Unbestowed Friendship Bracelets on other people who had their heart broken during a token of love turn-in. If you did this early on in the 5-day event, you'd probably have good success as many people were turning in their tokens. It was a target-rich environment for the menders. Near the end of the event, however, the game changed. Not as many people were turning their tokens in, but lots still had to get this achivement.

One strategy was to camp the guards near heavily populated areas like Ironforge bank/auction house. If you click on the picture to the right you can see that's exactly what people started to do. These aren't people turning in their tokens, they're waiting for a chance to mend someone's heart. This quickly turned somewhat ugly as many competed to get the "mend" in before the others who were camping. Chances to do so were becoming more and more rare.

Another strategy people started to employ was to have a friend help them. They'd both ride around on fast mounts, turning in massive amounts of tokens just to try and get heartbroken so their friend could do the mending. Fair enough, but I was going to try and get a piece of this as well. I started following around, weither I knew them or not, and started to mend them. When it came to someone helping out a friend, they didn't want me to be mending them, so once I did mend them they'd just stop for a bit, wait for me to leave, then continue on.

Time was running out on the event. 6AM on Monday was when things turned off, and if I didn't have the achivement done by then, I wasn't going to be able to complete it for another year. It became kind of a cat & mouse game. I ended up having to hide behind pillars and walls etc, then dashing in to mend before their friend could. I was at a disadvantage near the end, as they could usually get their mend in first. Once they ran into the King's chambers where there were many guards available, I was on equal footing. Spamming the friendship ring to mend was fine since we were already dismounted. (+15% run speed from Failsauce's unholy aura didn't hurt either) I got my last couple mends, thanked the person and went on my way.

I'm sure there was a little "hate" in the air, but hey I needed my achievements!!

5 days was not nearly enough time for this event. Besides a couple naxx's and work, I was basically humping this thing all weekend and was just barely able to get it done for my 3 level 80's. There was too much randomness., too much stress trying to get it done in time. At least there's a couple months before the next holiday event.

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