Love is in the Air

Love is in the Air is World of Warcraft's Valentine's Day holiday, held for a few days around February 14. It was added in patch 1.9.3 for February 2006. In Classic, the guards and citizens of the six capitals came down with a strange case of love: players bought love tokens and perfume from innkeepers, traded them for gifts, assembled gift collections for a winged goblin, and followed a trail of suspicious fragrances to a hidden apothecary in the hills.

Background

The official description spoke of something in the air of the major cities: some called it love, others friendship, but many guards and townsfolk spent their days giving and receiving tokens and gifts. More skeptical citizens suspected a "love sickness" with a sinister cause, and the holiday's quest chain lets players find out who was behind it.

Love tokens, perfume and gifts

Innkeepers in every capital sold three things for the holiday: the [[forever:item:21815]], the [[forever:item:21829]] and the [[forever:item:21833]]. A player wearing perfume could give tokens to men, and one wearing cologne could give them to women; city guards and citizens with a heart over their heads accepted them. Since every guard in Darnassus is a woman and every guard in Ironforge a man, careful lovers carried both.

Each token brought a gift back:

• Guards gave a pledge, such as [[forever:item:21975]], and citizens gave a gift, such as [[forever:item:21981]]. The first one each hour was a pledge or gift "of adoration"; after that, the character was Adored and received the plainer "friendship" version until the hour ran out.
• Adoration gifts held the holiday's prizes: a [[forever:item:21812]] of buff-giving chocolates, a [[forever:item:21813]] that made heart candies stamped with the owner's name, a [[forever:item:22218]], a [[forever:item:22261]] dummy that monsters attacked, a [[forever:item:22259]], arrows such as [[forever:item:22200]] that sent a little [[forever:npc:16085]] to follow another player, and the rare [[forever:item:22235]] that summoned one for good. Now and then, one held a [[forever:item:22279]] or one of its red, blue and purple sisters.
• Every so often, a recipient turned the player down instead, and the character became Heartbroken for an hour and could give no more tokens.

Gift collections for Peddlefeet

The friendship gifts were collectibles. Guards handed out cards and pledges of loyalty, such as the [[forever:item:22143]] and the [[forever:item:22117]], and citizens gave small presents. Five each of the right three items combined into a city's gift collection, such as the [[forever:item:22131]], which also gave a buff, and the three collections of a faction combined into an [[forever:item:22262]] or a [[forever:item:22263]].

A faction collection was the goal of [[forever:quest:8993]] (Alliance) and [[forever:quest:8981]] (Horde), turned in to [[forever:npc:16075]], a winged goblin cupid who stood beside each capital's leader. He paid with a Box of Chocolates and a choice of five arrows or five handfuls of rose petals, and every collection counted as a vote for the leader he stood next to. When the holiday ended, Peddlefeet stayed another week beside the most popular leader to hand out buffs.

It took dozens of tokens to finish a faction collection, and a wrong guess about which items still lacked could send a player back to the innkeeper again and again.

Dangerous Love

The holiday's story was told through a chain of quests on each side, open to characters of any level.

For the Alliance, [[forever:npc:16105]] in Stormwind found the epidemic of love unnatural and a danger to the guard in [[forever:quest:8903]]. Bottles of the new perfume and cologne went to the alchemist Morgan Pestle in [[forever:quest:9024]], who found that they were laced with something. The trail ran through Innkeeper Allison and the merchant [[forever:npc:16106]] in [[forever:quest:9026]] and [[forever:quest:9027]], who admitted in [[forever:quest:9028]] that the goods came from an apothecary working in the hills past Ravenholdt Manor.

The Horde version began with [[forever:npc:16108]] in the Undercity in [[forever:quest:8904]], went through Apothecary Zinge of the Royal Apothecary Society, Innkeeper Norman and [[forever:npc:16109]] in [[forever:quest:8982]], [[forever:quest:8983]] and [[forever:quest:8984]], and ended in the same place. The source was [[forever:npc:16107]], a member of the Royal Apothecary Society working alone in Alterac Mountains.

Smaller quests carried letters between couples kept apart by duty. In [[forever:quest:8897]], a Stormwind guard asks a player to carry a note to his sweetheart [[forever:npc:16002]], and in [[forever:quest:8900]] a letter from Orgrimmar finds its way to [[forever:npc:16004]] in the Undercity.

Later history

• Patch 3.3 rebuilt the holiday for 2010 around daily quests, the Lovely Charm and the Crown Chemical Co. of Apothecary Hummel, a boss in Shadowfang Keep, turning the old hint of a Forsaken plot into a full story.
• World of Warcraft Classic brought back the original 2006 version, with love tokens, pledges and Peddlefeet's vote.

Sources

• Love is in the Air (Classic), Warcraft Wiki
• Alliance Gift Collection, Warcraft Wiki
• Love is in the Air, Warcraft Wiki
• All the in-game holidays that are part of WoW Classic, Blizzard Watch