Organizing your own Noblegarden Egg Hunt

This year’s Noblegarden holiday event introduced some new items that you may not have been aware of! In past years, Noblegarden chocolates could always be exchanged for a Noblegarden Egg that another player could loot. The cooldown on it was an hour, though. But now there’s an even better addition: placeable eggs that you purchase for gold. You can buy these and hide them out in the world just for fun. Or, if you want to get more organized about it, it’s now possible to have your very own Noblegarden Egg Hunt at home in your garrison!

If you want to have an egg hunt in your garrison, the first thing you need is a willing accomplice. It’s helpful if one of you is a mage; or you could have more than one person help you hide. The reason for this is because the eggs are unique and have a limited quantity. You’ll need to make several trips back and forth to keep hiding them. One of you will stay with the garrison while the other gets more eggs.

Collect your eggs

Any of your faction’s Noblegarden vendors sell the eggs. For the Alliance, Noblegarden Vendors sell their wares in Elwynn Forest, Dun Morogh, Azuremyst, and Teldrassil. Horde players can purchase them from Noblegarden Merchants in Durotar, Eversong Woods, Mulgore and Tirisfal Glades. You can purchase 20 of the Poorly Painted Egg, 5 of the Intricately-Painted Egg, and a single Magnificently-Painted Egg at one time.

The Poorly Painted eggs are 10 silver apiece, the Intricately-Painted cost 10 gold, and the extra fancy ones require a whopping 1000 gold. The great thing about the eggs is that once you place them, their vendor value corresponds to what you paid, with a little depreciation. The Magnificently-Painted Egg will vendor for 900 gold, the Intricately-Painted for 9 gold, and the others for a few silver. The valuable eggs are indistinguishable from the cheaper eggs once placed.

At this point, you have to decide what your budget is. My guild used bank funds to supply eggs for a lucrative hunt. We liked the idea of a major reward for a few lucky egg hunters. If this isn’t feasible for you, though, you can ignore the most expensive egg or maybe place only one of that type. Decide how much money you’d like to spend on your egg hunt and go from there.

Another option for a variant hunt would be to only use the Poorly Painted eggs and have other prizes for whoever finds the most eggs within the time limit. You could also find an area in the world to have your hunt rather than your garrison, I just liked the contained and instanced nature of arranging it for my guild. When you’re ready to get things started, form a raid group and have everyone choose “View leader’s garrison” from their portrait window.

Hide your eggs

Once you’ve told your friends when the hunt will be, you’ll be able to prepare. There are a few important things about egg hiding to know at the outset. First of all, all of the painted eggs will only last for a single hour. I’d suggest a half hour for your hunt, and a half hour to hide them. If no one has found an egg an hour after it’s placed, it will despawn.

Secondly, if you’re using your garrison for the hunt, you must also note that there’s another circumstance that will make your eggs despawn. The garrison is instanced. If you’re hiding more than the 26 eggs you can carry at any one time, one person will need to remain at the garrison while the other gets more eggs. If both of you leave at the same time, you’ll lose eggs. Possibly expensive eggs.

This is where a mage comes in handy. Have the mage make you a portal to Stormwind if you are Alliance or Orgrimmar if you are Horde. It’s a quick flight to the nearest Noblegarden Vendor or Merchant. You’ll need to move quickly to restock and keep hiding the eggs, but honestly it’s part of the fun! Your garrison hearthstone cooldown is a limiting factor, and in this case it’s helpful if someone is able to make a portal to Stormshield/Warspear and you can use the flightmaster to get back to your garrison from there.

As far as hiding the eggs goes, go wild with it! You get a small targeting reticule to place the eggs. Eggs can be easily placed anywhere on the ground, around buildings or shrubbery, and in many cases on top of other objects. They can also be maneuvered underneath some objects and even stuck to walls or buildings. This can lead to some odd floating egg situations. We opted for a mix of easier eggs along with some really tough ones that stumped egg hunters for a good long while. You can’t place an egg while swimming or anywhere that’s out of your line of sight.

I’d suggest making a note of where you’ve hidden your Magnificently-Painted Eggs, if using them. Also, consider placing these eggs last to allow for ample time to find or retrieve them before they despawn. You can use the stopwatch function (/stopwatch) to know when you started placing eggs. Try to roughly calculate how many eggs there will be to find based on the number of your participants.

Start your hunt!

I was surprised by how quickly my guildmates descended on my garrison and began furiously finding eggs. I’d say they found most of them in the first five or ten minutes. We weren’t using the entire area, though. We decided to make the mines a “no egg” zone because of the limited time frame. If you had a team of egg hiders, you could probably cover more ground.

The event was a resounding success and everyone had a blast! It’s just as fun to hide the eggs as it is to look for them. I’m glad that Blizzard is adding things like this that allow us to interact with the game world to “create” content that other players can enjoy. If you decide to organize an egg hunt, let us know how it went! You’ll have to hop to it, though, because Noblegarden ends on April 13th.