It is very symbolic that my original main vanilla char, paladin Mikerelder, created initially on US server Dunemaul in 2004 and then re-created as my alt on EU server Ghostlands in 2011, got 299th mount. It was the last step to the "Lord of the Reins" achievement. I've been farming a few of those, solo-ing different bossess here and there, but he got it from the 2nd Throne of Thunder boss, Horridon. It is a nice blue-colored ground mount, Spawn of Horridon:

To get the 300th mount was just a matter of gold (I described it in my previous post) - I bought the alliance byke, Champion's Treadblade, for 100k and:

Well, the rewarded mount doesn't have unique model but blue color and I hate how it shakes during the flight (perhaps Blizzard will change it in Legion, at least there are some flying models change). Nevertheless, it is quite The Achievement! It took me 9 years of endless mount farming and permanent fight with RNG but I won, finally! :)

A few funny things:
- the day before 299th mount dropped for me there was one I was missing on Black Market AH, Wooly White Rhino. You definitely know that BMAH doesn't have a buy out option, so to get a guaranteed win you need to bid the max allowed sum of gold, which is 999999,99. I have enough gold but as this mount is ugly I didn't bid... and saved a lot of gold :)
- the day after 299th mount dropped for me there was another missing mount on Black Market AH, the one I was farming on all of my chars - Reins of the Thundering Cobalt Cloud Serpent, but the hunt was already over...

What mounts did I miss but wanted to have? Seems like I got all of them... I was farming Time-Lost Proto-Drake for some time, during WotLK and after. Saw it only once but wasn't the first who tagged it, so I didn't get it. It is ugly but really rare. Phosphorescent Stone Drake - was farming Aeonaxx on different alts but never seen it. It is nice and rare but not unique. Never interested in real (arena-like) PvP mounts. Could get some from challenge modes but do not want to rush anywhere anymore :)

What's next? I need a break, a kind of... I want to be fresh for Legion :)) Will log from time to time to get some free gold in garrison and will see what the Overwatch game would be.

P.S. Getting 300 mounts woudn't be possible without help of my old in-game friend, who invited my alt to his high level guild with all guild achievement, so I was able to buy the missing guild mounts from guild vendor. That is what we call "careful use of game mechanics" :)

Efforts finally paid off - all Throne of Thunder achievements are done and my Armored Skyscreamer (298 mount) shows off:

One more to go to achieve my mount collector's goal. No, there is no mistake in math - I will buy my 300's mount (alliance byke for 100k) as soon as I get 299 mount. 299's one could be: one of 2 from Dragon Soul final boss, one from ToT 2nd boss, timewalking dungeon one OR I'm ready to buy one from black market AH for 999999.99 gold :)

We'll see what it would be soon enough.

Thundering Ruby Cloud Serpent (mount) is a 100% drop from Alani. Lots of info and video on wowhead and youtube, so just a few comments.

While MoP was fresh I was able to collect only 5 Skyshards out of 10, the drop rate was extremely low. Due to that getting this mount had low priority. 5 days ago I went to Vale of Eternal Blossoms and, to my greatest surprise, I got 1 shard in like 35 mins just killing all mobs in the area. I visited Vale once a day since then and farmed the shard the same way. In 35-40 mins (average) I was getting one so in 4 days I got 10 in total... Meaning drop rate has been quietly increased by Blizzard.

Mount itself is beautiful but I'm not a fan of dragon's riding :)

These are practically self-explanatory pictures - on my way to 300 I got Clutch of Ji-Kun mount - a rare drop from the 6th boss in Throne of Thunder. Well, it wasn't "so rare" for me as I got it on my 5th kill... 9 more to 300...

Mount collection became my major activity since Blizzard stopped content patching WoD (probably hard working to release Legion... but this "nothing to do" gap is terribly huge).

So every now and then (in fact at least once a week) I was flying between all spawnpoints on my hunter alt. It took me about 4 months to find Edge of Reality, mine was in Shadowmoon Valley at 48.7 69.9. In a short slideshow below you will see what is that all about (red arrow on the first slide shows how this "Edge" looks from the distance).

P.S. To my surprise Voidtalon of the Dark Star is, in fact, non-flying mount, the same as Flametalon of Alysrazor...

I'm farming Dragon Soul to get 3 mounts from there as a part of my goal to collect 300 of those. The easy one drops off Ultraxion so I was killing it weekly with all of my alts.

Interesting enough: I just made a new alt - tiny little female warrior gnome - and instantly boost her to lvl 100 (this is a service that comes with your Legion expansion pre-order) AND, on her 1st ever run into Dragon Soul, she got this mount - Experiment 12-B!

The other one is 100% drop from Archimonde defeated on Heroic difficulty - Grove Warden. It is actually not a mount itself but a quest item. I thought this quest would be a bit of a challenge but, instead, it is just a travel to Moonglade and listening to a boring NPC speech. As I'm not hard-core raiding anymore, it has been done with assistance of my old-ingame friend, Eamari, and his guild.

I should admit it is rather strange to see flying moose, though we used to see flying horses already. So I wonder - what animal will be the next flying mount? :)

I said it rather long time ago - WoW is a great gambling game. Instead of loo-table, roulette or one-armed bandit (slot machine) you get some nice graphics and animation and an illusion of some actions (in fact you just click mouse buttons and press some keyboard keys).

But in the end it is just gambing - whatever you do your loot depends purely on RNG... So if you like gambling WoW is your game.

However I've noticed that from the previous expansion, MoP, and introduction of black market, collecting mounts became additional attraction for WoW players.

At vanilla time epic gear was the major player's goal, especially for those who liked to show off. But gear and tiers come and go and become obsolete as soon as the next expansion shows up, while mounts are valuable through the entire game.

So to me rare mounts became vanilla "epics" - not available to everyone, hard to get but the best "item" to show off. That is why the highest black market prices belong to the mounts (I saw 999k gold for some).

I'm not an exception - I do like collecting things (mounts included), so I found myself farming them again to collect 300 mounts in total and get blue dragon for achievement. In the end it is not bad to spend some time farming them at the end of expansion life cycle. I'm at 279 at the moment, there is no way I could get 300 before Legion goes live but I may get it soon after... :)

As a side effect of farming Mimiron's Head (see the previuos post) all my chars were getting legendary token, but only my paly could use it. It took me 2 more weeks to collect the rest of them and get 30 of those. Then paly completed the quest and got another Legendary weapon:

That ends my endeavor in Ulduar the same way I am done with Molten Core. Seems like I'm done with all end bosses in WoW (some - soloing instances in the old contnets, some - via LFR). There are 2 more achievable Legendary weapons (from Black Temple and Firelands raids) but until Blizzard allows players to transmog into such weapons I have no intentions to farm those.

One more thing I should say about Ulduar - too bad our old guidmates from around the world (including Sweden, Ireland and some arabic world countries) were not patient enough and left OSG in summer 2009. Whatever reasons they had (I could agree they were valid ones) it is sad to see them gone entirely or playing with other guilds from time to time.

Ulduar was unconquered by OSG team, but I've completed the task alone. Farewell, Ulduar!

My last "must have" mount dropped today. It is rather symbolic it dropped for my reincarnated paly, with the same name as my first WoW char created 10 years ago on US server.

Farming this one was a bit boring but with 4 chars @ lvl 100 killing Ulduar's boss once a week it wasn't that bad.

After like 6 month of farming (3 chars once a week each and so my hunter was lucky 3 days ago) I've got this mount and so completed the collection of all "wind" dragons. This one is the best, imho :)

Mount farming-wise: working on copter one from 25-man no helpers Ulduar last boss. It will drop sooner or later :))
Hit the wall on last but one boss in Dragon Soul, need to down that flying thingy on heroic to farm last boss on 10H... but simply can't dualbox it... Soloing it is rather complicated due to encounter's mechanics. Will see how it goes with better healing gear on Dun's shamy.

Farming-wise: after like 20 tries got this "Outrider's Bridle Chain" toy from Warleader Tome in WoD Nagrand. Dunno about other classes but for DK the only way to solo it was to be in tanking spec and gear and pull this guy to Teelari Station where NPCs help alot dpsing his adds. The best way to kill him is to kill those adds first...

This is one of the best disguises in the game! :)

P.S. I've started to write down some notes on what do I think about WoD in general, working headline is "WoD - 6th expansion or WoW v.II?!"... But seems like I need more time to make it much shorter and informative. Stay tuned :)

I made my paly some time ago as a memory of my original and first char on US server that has been made more 10 years ago. As I wrote his future was unclear to me (his professions are useless in WoD, but that is a separate subject). He was a part of my mount farming squadron and seems like he is a lucky bastard :)

You might recall he has got Fire Hawk just a week ago and today... Today there will be lots of screencaps as my paly is extremely lucky and got 2 more rare mounts drops from 2 raid bosses and the 3rd mount for the achievement.

The first one is VERY rare "Invincible", drop from Lich King on 25H (seems like this is the most rare mount between the players):

Here is how it looks "wings up":

Indeed, I was so excited that when I went into Dragon Soul in about 10 minutes I forgot to change raid size from 25 to 10 man. To my surprise my 98 level paly had no problem dealing with Madness of Deathwing and... :

This is really glorious mount:

That drake was the last one I was missing for "Drake Collector" achievement, so I got it right away. Too bad its name has been changed to "Awake The Drakes":

Emerald Drake has arrived in unusual manner - via post. I found this mail very confusing (and since it is account wide achievement, all my chars got this mail with mount, which is useless) - how could I lose item I never had?! :))

Mount itself isn't great. It probably has a cool color but to me the same model in dark blue is much better (Azure Drake):

In the end... there is no end :) I'm still farming helicopter, the second rare mount as I could see. Plus a few more I'd like to get (rare spawns do not count :). Thanks for reading and sorry for too many pictures today.

I do not call myself "farmer", I'm rather collector :) But the way collecting works in Warcraft is, in fact, farming (or grinding if you like this word more). What do you need for success? Well, stamina, persistence and stubbornness, outstanding patience and some luck. I should add one more property now - attention - and here is why...

There is a weekly routine I am performing - visiting certain raid instances and killing certain bosses in there, the ones that drop mounts. With raid lockout reset I do not need to clear all of the raid content, just restore it on Dun's account, invite one of my chars in a group and viola! - you are in front of a boss in need. To speed up the process and to increase my chances against RNG I do it with several chars. Meaning I should remember where I was and what bosses were killed on what char (today I do it on 3 chars). Btw, the best addon for it is "SavedInstances".

Now, here is the story that happened the day before yesterday. I went into 10N Firelands Raid, straight to Ragnaros, on my Paly (he is lvl 98 atm). In like 3 mins I looted it hoping for the mount. Usually there are like 5-6 items in the loot - gold, tokens and alike. I saw nothing new there, no mount.

Yesterday I went into 25N Ulduar raid to kill Yogg-Saron dreaming of helicopter mount. Same story - looted it, nothing, no mount. I ported back to the entrance (as I do ICC 25H after it on weekly basis). I do repair here and sell unnecessary loot to the goblin, sitting on the neck of ogre.

Click, click, click and then an error message, something like "vendor doesn't want this item". The item he doesn't want to had a simple icon - red'ish glowing globe... And then I finally read the description of that item - "Smoldering Egg of Millagazor"

OH MY GOD!!! That was actually the item that teaches me how to summon Pureblood Fire Hawk which I got yesterday from Ragnaros but didn't notice it. The reason is obvious - I was looking for something that has an icon like a mount, but it is, in fact, an egg... That is why I've missed it. Check the screencap below - that is how this icon looks like when you get that egg. Do not know why I haven't noticed that when repaired after Firelands but, anyway, I was LMAO at myself :)))) That is why you still need attention to the loot gring fro something...

Here is the story of getting my 250th mount.

Got very nice pug and completed the only achievement from Glory of the Pandaria Hero that requires full group of 5 players (School's Out Forever). The rest was just a matter of time. Glory gives a mount, which would be my 250th one. It happened that the last achievement to complete Glory was "Run With the Wind" in Siege of Niuzao Temple. Below is 3 mins video that completes my 7+ years of mounts hunting. It is not over yet since I want a few more (see my previous note) but I'm "Mountacular" now :)

I was so eager to get my 250th mount as a gift to my birthday. Indeed, fighting with RNG is fun, you never know when a mount could drop from the instance boss, but this time I decided to get it from reliable source. No, not a mount from a vendor just for gold (I could buy at least 3 now, for 140k, 100k or 50k). I wanted the one which is a reward for some efforts ;) That is mounts from reputation vendors at Exalted...

If you play WoD (I assume you do) you've noticed that some WoD factions' reputations are relatively easy (like Council of Exarchs or goblin's Steamwheedle Preservation). Arakkoa is more or less in the same boat - questing brings you relatively high plus reputation boost item from garrison "quests" which is account bound, but still it requires killing a lot of mobs in the end.

[As a side comment - repping up with Sha'tari Defense or even Wrynn's Vanguards, the factions that also allow you to buy a mount at Exalted, is much worse than many from "Insane" achievement... trust me, I got this title :)). There is no quests to increase those reputations, only killing the mobs and each gives very low rep... Still thinking of doing it some time in the future.]

Anyway, I've spent like an hour and a half killing mobs, got Arakkoa Exalted reputation, bought a mount, started to record FRAPS video, "learned" this mount... but nothing happened...

I was so frustrated at that moment. Getting 250 mounts was like 7 years efforts and, in the end, something went wrong...

The reason became obvious in 5 seconds when I've opened Achievement tab. And while mount tab clearly shows 250 mounts collected, achievenet one shows 249/250...:

 

To me this is just another evidence that game is not properly tested. (I promise to sum up all my thoughts about WoW development and quality of the game soon). I've opened a ticket but I know the answer...

Seems like I will be fighting with RNG again to get my 250th mount. Unfortunately it could be any of my chars, not my main DK, since I'm farming old raid bosses using 3 chars. The farming mounts are from Lich King (25H), Yogg-Saron (25 w/o helpers), Al'Akir, Ultraxion and Madness of Deathwing...

Volcanic Stone Drake is a reward for meta achievement "Glory of the Cataclysm Hero". Very easy to get with one exception - "Crushing Bones and Cracking Skulls" one was broken like a year or even more ago. Blizzard promised to fix it at launch of WoD but somehow it wasn't fixed.

I've tried it like 3 month ago, found it doesn't work and opened a ticket. The problem was that 1st boss, Rom'ogg, in Blackrock Caverns didn't summon elementals at all during his Quake ability. In response GMs confirmed it is a known problem and will be fixed via hotfix.

It was fixed later on but it was not fixed :) Boss did summon elementals but his another ability, skullcracker, didn't do any damage to spawned elementals.

3 days ago I went there to check if it is still bugged and after positive confirmation added my comments to eu forum.

Yesterday I read hotfix notes and found out that they said it is fixed. I went into the dungeon dualboxing with Dun's shammy (it is necessary since achievement requires 10 elementals to be killed by skullcracker ability but buss summons max 3 elementals per player 2 times during the fight, so you need at least 2 player to get it). The result is on screenshot :) I wonder was my post a last drop (it was rather nasty one) or it is simply a coincidence? ;)

Yes!

For those who (like myself) never seen it before and was LMAO on this title - this is only a temporary one. When you kill Maloriak on heroic in Blackwing Descent raid Lord Nefarian shows up and puts Master Adventurer Award debuff on you which grants you this title. Unfortunately debuff lasts only 30 mins and title goes away together with debuff disappearance...

You wonder why the hell I went there? Well there is mount reward for Glory of the Cataclysm Raider achievement I'm missing. I'm 243 mounts atm :).

As you might know I'm hunting for 250 mount achievement. There are several places I'm visiting on weekly basis to get a rare mount drop (plus some nice gold income).

One of such places is Firelands raid. I've got Flametalon some time ago after like 4 month of farming and... it dropped for me again this week (I'd better trade it for a drop from Ragnaros mount :) ):

A reward from dailies during Xmas week (from Stolen Present) - Scroll of Storytelling. It just changes the look of WoW screen for a few moments. Looks like sepia to me, the way to make a picture looks old. As a coincidence - my 1st char (mage) on EU server got this AND this is a picture of Ironforge which was a capital de facto in vanilla.

In fact, this is a very nice gift from Christmas daily, Gaudy Winter Veil Sweater... More pictures and game comments to follow during New Year Holidays, stay tuned.

I CANNOT believe I'm playin' WoW for 10 years :))

In fact, more than 10 years, but let's not count closed beta this time... I've started one day in December 2004 and my 1st char was... dwarf hunter. Too bad I've deleted it as soon as we got 2 more copies so my both sons could start to play as well. It was on US server Dunemaul with 11 hours time zone difference. Why we were there? Well, this is another story I may tell you some day in the future.

10 years is a lot of time and subscription money. I took a break for like 9 month but then understood I can't live without wow (/shy)... And I do not regret I'm playing this game for 10 years in a row!

Anyway, it took me about 2 weeks to reach lvl 100 gear up specifically to run Molten Core raid for a mount and old good memories (there is a link to my 1st Ragnaros kill in 2005 in "Video" section). It was also kind of sadness to see how players base deteriorates. People do not want to listen and follow simple rules of raiding. After a few wipes at the entrance (that was quite normal in vanilla until we have learned how to deal with MC trash) most dumb people left and I took the lead. We wiped only once on Baron Geddon cause a puller brought Lava pack together with the boss.

Unfortunately the original vanilla MC has gone - it has been nerfed/changed at Cataclysm expansion since Blizzard removed Waterlords boss, so the NPC to get Aqual Quintessence from to douse the runes has gone (getting that essence was a part of very hard MC run preparation every week). "After Cata" MC is different and so 100 lvl version to celebrate 10th WoW Anniversay is easier than original "vanilla" MC for lvl 60 was. However it still requires to follow encounters' mechanics which players do not want to. Again, this is really very sad. It is also sad because, whatever younger raiders say, vanilla raiding was much harder than any raid after...

Enough said, I'm happy to successfuly lead LFR PuG to the end and down Ragnaros, and get this letter, title and this memorable mount. Gratz to me! :)

It's been like a week since 5th expansion went live and the most feelings I have is disappointment. As Molten Core veteran I could tell you what was the initial, vanilla, WoW start. There were often client and server crashes, Windows BSODs because of errors in WoW code, enormous queues but all of above were understandable since it was the initial release of the game AND it was the first really massive on-line game. Nobody knew what are requirements to the computers running WoW, Internet speed, servers workload and infrastructure requirements.

But for WoD all those things are not allowed - game is 10 (actually even more) years old and so development MUST be aware of what they are doing including workloads and servers limits. I do not buy the explanation garrison/instances troubles were DDoS related. It is practically impossible to prove but gives Blizzard a chance to say that they cannot be responsible for their network crashes as this is hackers attack. I'm in IT industry for more than 20 years already. Even I do not know what is backbone structure behind WoW I can say right away that new graphic handling and much more detailed models demand for much more powerful servers while network traffic goes much higher comparing to, say, MoP.

In addition, garrison is a player private instance, with unique ID. Meaning a server or virtual machine that generates these instances should be much more powerful than in MoP as each and every player now will spend much more time in there than in "normal" instance.

I cannot understand why that wasn't properly analyzed before WoD release and how comes Blizzard didn't update their hardware upfront?! It took them 48 hours to understand how cheap they were trying to run much more computer resources hungry game on outdated hardware... It took them another 48 hours to get new HW and install it but there were many other glitches that prevented players to enjoy new expansion. As for myself I stuck at garrison for 24 hours and didn't visit them for like 3 days before it was fixed (more or less since there are still issues during prime time). Also do not forget ANY instance wasn't available, not just garrison - you can't go farm your achievements in, say, Ulduar...

Now, back to the game itself. I'm used to the changes developers do for each and every expansion. I buy some, I hate some but all in all these changes are what keeps me playing. I hate how Blood DK tank was nerfed as it deprived me solo instancing. I do hope I could survive though :)

However there is much deeper frustration. Diversity of the classes is what made this game so enjoyable in a team. Some vanilla encounters were designed to have certain number of classes in raid. Some were great as pure DPS, some - CC, there always were better healers for certain situations (e.g. druid vs priest). I do not understand why all of that has gone. Simplification has started a few expansions ago and seems like it is now at its top. There is not much difference between melee classes or casters/ranged. There are different names for the abilities but they are not unique for a class. All have kind of DoTs, CC, interrupts, finishing (higher DPS) attack and so on. Same goes for healers...

Finally, garrison. I saw it first in Wildstar, dunno who has stolen the idea from whom. I saw "followers" as companion in SWTOR. Now we have both in WoW. It is not new and so Blizzard's hype about it as new in online gaming is pure bluff. Add inability to explore it for like a week since WoD launch and you probably understand the feeling of many game veterans - yes, we feel like we were cheated.

Gathering professions are ruined. Not only you do not need to "train" it by visiting old continents, your garrison will provide you with "something" you could get primal mats from w/o even knowing that profession. Why don't remove the limit of 2 professions then?! In addition, mining is even in a worse situation as you get mine right after you established your garrison while herbing and skinning require much more efforts.

Last but not least - crafting professions have so few new "recipes", why? All developers' resources were spent for garrison nonsense? New recipes will be added in the future content patches?

All in all, my conclusion about WoD is the following - this is the worst start of an expansion while garrison is the worst "new" feature of it.

LOL!
Really good disguise! I wish it has more than 50 charges and/or some transmog sets look like this one.

While waiting for WoD I've started my next challenge - the collection of WoW 250 mounts. I'm at 219 atm and since patch 6.0.2 I've got last 3 drops from the 5-man instances. It will be a real tough work since I've missed many mounts rewarded for guild achievements. Anyway, I'm working on many pre-MoP raid drops, will see how good I am fighting against RNG :)

P.S. Blood DK survivability has been nerfed much more than any other class ability I'm having alts of... I should admit though that with stats squish most of pre-MoP raids bosses could be facerolled now unless game mechanics requires more than 1 players. That includes many achievements that I wasn't able to complete solo before 6.0.2 patch.

I'm really disappointed with Blasted Land questline and 1/2 of new UBRS. It looks like it has been designed for the newcomers who have no gear and no experience... It is a real shame to Blizzard - it looks like they felt they need to do smth but had no idea and/or creativity to invent real good event. On top of that why the hell to change UBRS so much?! Why ignore MC veterans good memory of the place I was raiding as 15-man group 9 years ago?!

There were good times and there were pre-vanilla-Naxxramas event - Scourge Invasion - which was great and hard with good loot (even a set) for all classes. It was visible in many zones and, again, it was hard to beat those invaders. Today's Iron Horde invasion and "event" is a joke...

When I rejoined the game "Old Scholars" were like level 5 guild. Quite an achievement to bring it to almost level 23 during MoP. Interesting enough that I didn't do anything specific to level guild up, just questing with all my and Dun's alts.

Guild level will be obsolete tomorrow, I guess Blizzard had no time to add something new and valuable related to guild level so they decided to remove it from the game... I wanted to save this screencap as a memory of how much you can do in the game, even being alone :)

After reading almost final Patch 6.0.2 notes I have a feeling that Blizzard undertakes another step to simplify the game :(( Indeed as WoW is commercial product that should generate cash they are utilizing the approach that brings more money. Sadly it lies in the area of simplification. That also makes me feel that the major targeted audience for WoW is now kids (both literally and in terms of behavior the older population)...

On top of that and specifically for this audience MoP introduced one of the favorite kids' game - pokemon - as a part of expansion (battle pets). WoD is going to bring another popular kids' game - SimCity in a form of garrisons. Are we all growing back to our childhood and degrade?!

Site has been modified to represent WoD expansion theme. MoP blog has been moved to archive.

May take a break until patch 6.0 goes live.

Long live Old Scholars! :)