Spring Festival 2012 Is Here! – A Guide Of Sorts

The Spring Festival Is Live In Lotro

Already? I know, it feels like a week since the anniversary festival, but we arrive at yet another lotro festival, outfitted with repeatable dailies and many prizes.

What To Do?

The three main areas of this year’s festival are Bree Festival Grounds (The Hedge Maze included), The Festival Arena in Duillond, and the Shire Party Tree. As well as these festival areas, Thorin’s Hall has some Ale Association quests, so it is a great place to get drunk…I mean have fun.

Bree Land Festival and Hedge Maze To-Do list

Below is my recommended to-do list for the Bree-Land Festival Grounds and the Hedge Maze.

1. The Green Challenge – Get to the center of the Maze, find the keg, and get to the exit in three minutes.

This is a favorite of mine because it rewards an interactive house item (see What You Can Get) and gives you the drunk effect. Note that this quest is only available to members of the Inn League.

2. Disorientation – Find and drink 6 Dire Brews in the span of ten minutes.

This one can be either really easy, or really difficult, depending on your knowledge of the maze and luck. The gist of it is that when you drink beers scattered throughout the maze, you teleport to a random location in the maze and continue from there.

3. A Fool’s Errand – Work your way through the maze in three minutes.

Although at first it might seem impossible, with practice it actually becomes very easy and doable. This is the last in a quest chain and the only quest in the chain to be repeatable daily.

4. Misplaced Companions, A Laugh at the Lost – These are both quests that require you to find and use a number of items or NPCs in the maze.

Both of these quests are untimed, and very easy to complete, so it is nice to have them in the back of your mind while wandering the maze. Also, the Laugh at the Lost quest does not become available until you have completed the Misplaced Companions Quest.

5. Terrible Tweens – Find and apprehend misbehaving hobbits in the maze

This quest is at the bottom of my to-do list because of its level of agonization. First, the tweens you have to find are marked by a quest ring on your minimap, but they move, and the layout of the maze is such that you are very close to one of the rings, yet it is behind a wall or in another section of the maze entirely. Second, the tweens teleport around the maze, which is very annoying if you are chasing one of them. Thirdly, The tweens utter completely annoyingly terrible puns such as “This place is a-maze-ing” UGH!!!

What I do not recommend for the Bree-Land Festival Grounds

1. The Dance Quest. Reasons: Extremely long cooldown, difficulty, not great rewards.

2. The Chicken Dash. Reasons: Every time I get the notification that the quest is available, I am in the middle of a timed quest, and by the time it ends, the chickens have escaped. Also, 45 minute cooldown.

No Comment – Bree-Land Festival Grounds

The Horse Races

Duillond Stomp-A-Shrew To-Do List

This List is kind of short just because I do not enjoy the quests in this area of the festival.

1. Duillond Stomp-A-Shrew variety quests – A set of quests that you can choose from that vary in objective.

Most comparable to the Beer Battles of the Anniversary, this quest set challenges you to stomp shrews running around in the Festival Garden. I personally do not enjoy these quests, but put them first due to overall popularity. Proish Tip: Turn off floaty names (N key), this makes it easier to select the shrews and use the tab key to select the nearest shrew

2. A Shortage of Boots – Gather materials for the Festival Boot-Maker from around Falathorn and Celondim.

This is probably my favorite quest in the Duillond Festival Area. The initial quest is an arc with three subquests, but once that is completed, there is a daily without the subquests. Overall, an easy 2 spring leaves.

3. A Proper Festival – Gather Spring Flowers and plant them in the Festival Garden

A very easy gathering quest that is repeatable daily. The flowers are just outside the Festival Garden, so it is very easy to complete.

4. How The Shire Shoos Shrews – Talk two three farmers throughout the Shire and report back to Duillond

This one is at the bottom because it takes you to another zone entirely. I recommend only doing this quest if you are passing through the Shire.

What I Do Not Recommend For The Duillond Stomp-A-Shrew Event

Stomp-A-Shrew — An Enormous Shrew. There is only one enormous shrew per event and the chances of you getting it are very small, also, it requires an entirely different set of boots to stomp with, not worth the five spring leaves.

The Shire Bullroarer Celebrations

This is only one quest chain concluding in a two repeatable dailies.

I wholeheartedly recommend this quest chain to be completed because the resulting dailies are my favorite quests in the whole festival.

1. Bullroarer’s Challenge – Drink a beer and don’t fall off of the fence

This is my favorite of all of the quests for this year’s festival, and it yields some great prizes. There are two repeatable dailies for this event. One is simple, the other is more advanced. The gist of it is that you have to cross a gap only walking on a fence, while drunk. It might seem hard, but look below for some proish tips. The basic difficulty gives you plenty of time, while the advanced difficulty challenges you to cross it in under 20 seconds!

Pro-ish tips for the Shire Bullroarer’s Celebration

1. Don’t sweat it. If you fail a quest, the retry is available every 20 seconds or so. Use that cooldown time to practice crossing the fence.

2. Hurry Up. Don’t overthink it. I have found that the best way to accomplish this is if you treat even the simple difficulty as if you only had 20 seconds. Having that momentum definitely helps.

3. Drunk = Harder. If you are finding it hard to accomplish due to the drunken effects, turn them off by disabling Post-Processing effects in the advanced graphics panel of the options menu.

4. No Leaves. Neither of the difficulties give you spring leaves as a reward, so don’t do these if you want to farm the leaves, no pun intended.

Flower Quests

This is a series of quests much like the Bullroarer’s Brew quests. Once you complete them, there is a daily quest that unlocks much like the envelope quest from the anniversary festival.

I recommend this quest only if you are very bored, or want a beautiful horse. Basically, the quest gives you an hour to run around middle-earth and collect patches of flowers, Marigold near Michel-Delving, Violet near Breetown, and Primroses near Celondim. When the timer expires, take your collected flowers to Gredlan Mugwort in Bree to trade in for Gift Boxes. Reminder that these gift boxes cost six of each type of flower, so collect somewhat near to an equal amount of each flower. In these gift boxes drop random items, such as cook and farmer recipies, misc. Main-hand items, and a new horse. (For more details, see below)

Pro-ish tip

These flowers remain in your inventory even after the quest timer expires. I recommend holding onto all of them until the end of the festival, when you can get a whoppingly large amount of giftboxes

Also, there are three colors of Gift Boxes, Blue, Red, and Green. The colors of dyes dropped from these boxes seem to correspond with the color of the box, but the new horse dropped from each color box.

What You Can Get

Horsies

There is a new horse for this year’s festival, as well as a horse that drops randomly in the flower quests.