Noblegarden 2009, or "Bunnies, Bunnies Everywhere"

Every morning as the dawn breaks, my cat insists on burrowing under the blankets so he doesn't have to see it.

Good dawn, and welcome to Noblegarden 2009.

Start Here

Alliance: Azure Watch, Dolanaar, Goldshire, Kharanos
Horde: Bloodhoof Village, Brill, Falconwing Square, Razor Hill

I recommend starting somewhere not-so-popular for your grinding, though eggs will always be spawned no matter the crowd. Worst case scenario, you have to share.

You also must stay in the town itself. The eggs aren't zonewide anymore, they're townwide, usually inside a bush or in a nook or cranny on the ground. Follow the runners and note where they pause to check for eggs.

Quests

• Great Egg Hunt - 20 shell fragments
• Tisket, Tasket - 10 chocolates

Just loot eggs.

Egg Strategies

Zoom around using your basket and take every egg you find or camp a spawn point.

The trick is that campers rely on runners to respawn their eggs by getting the excess, so if there aren't a lot of people in the area you're better off being a runner and picking up the slack.

Statistics

I got 146 eggs by camping a 3-spawn point for almost two hours. Each egg drops ONE thing at a time, so you either get chocolate or loot but never both. My haul:

• 135 Chocolates
• 5 Blossoming Branch
• 2 Elegant Dress
• 1 Bunny Ears
  
• 1 Tux Pants
• 1 Tux Shirt
• 1 Rabbit Pet
• 1 Spring Bouquet

That gives me plenty of chocolate left to buy the robe that plants flowers and the reusable egg, and I can grind out just a few more later for the 100 I need to eat (the 25 for the first achievement counts toward the 100).

I also want to note that I clicked off every bunny buff so I could say with authority that I got all of these as a humanoid and the bunny buff doesn't affect your droprates (for the RNG mystics).

[edit] Going back to get my last 20-30 chocolates I got a Spring Robe, a second Bouquet, and a third Elegant Dress. Moral of the Story: Definitely don't buy anything until you have all your edible chocolates. :)

New Goodies

I went over what you could get and what it did in a previous post. Two new things/changes.

The Tisket, Tasket quest awards a permanent egg basket. You can't use it to run fast except during the holiday in the egg-spawn areas, but it's a cute item to have all the same.

The Polymorph: Rabbit tome is definitely available for 100 chocolates. It's BOP and only mages can see it. This means mages have another 100 chocolates to grind out, but the good news is that you'll get most of (if not all) the other necessary drops while you're grinding. You also need level 60 to use it, but that's no reason not to get it now.

So if going for the tome and achievements, you need a minimum of 200 chocolates if you get everything else as a drop.

Tour d'Azeroth

These are the places you need to go to get things done. At this point, you should have all the materials for the trek -- pretty much one of everything.


The green dots are where you plant flowers with your robe (just step into the zone and use it, don't have to be any more specific than that) and Un'goro Crater, where you have to go to the hot spring in the west and beg someone to trade rabbit costume uses with you. The goal in Un'goro is to lay an egg near the springs (doesn't have to be in the water). I strongly suggest not just trading but sticking around for a few minutes and giving a few of your extras away.

The pink and blue dots are for mating your bunny with other bunnies in the egg spawn areas (the level 5 towns linked at the top of this post) plus the city where you have to spawn an egg of your own (this time not out of your fluffy little butt) with your 5-chocolate egg. This egg is one you can put down and loot just like the starter zone eggs.

Tips and Annoyances

These are minor by anyone's standards, but.

When you get rabbit eared, click it off right away so others can toss theirs on you, particularly if there's a crowd and/or you're a rare race. It is frustrating enough to have to sit for 5 minutes waiting for the item cooldown, but it's ten times worse when an extra 2 minutes gets tacked on to the wait because of a clueless ear-ee.

When you camp an egg, camp it. Don't sit there for half a minute tabbed out thinking I won't take it if you dawdle. My egg respawn relies on you picking up your egg, so for the love of all that is pixelated, KEEP THINGS MOVING.

Conclusion

Noblegarden is actually a lot milder than the other holidays we've been having. I completed all the objectives in a day with more than one long break for church, food, and shredding 3 years of documents with our new ULTRA POWERFUL shredder.

There is nothing anyone can have to complain about with this event, unless it's something about other players, which is an eternal subject of strife. But even though people in General Chat talked about "egg ninjas" and "level 70 campers," I'll be happy if that's the worst we're going to get for this pleasant little holiday.