Blog Azeroth Shared Topic: most and least favorite mounts

Dragonray’s been wondering,

What are your top 5 mounts – or just the ones you go to all the time because you like the way they ride? What are the ones you really dislike and can never bring yourself to use – does it rub against your collecting nature (if you have one) to buy all the mounts even though you know you will never use them?

At the moment, my favorite-favorite mount is certainly the Swift Zhevra.

I’ve wanted this mount for a long time, and now I finally have it — thanks, Navimie!!

Wanting the Pandaren Kite is what finally motivated me to finish getting all the Pandaria reputations to Exalted.

(Well, that and Wrathion’s 6000 valor points quest. :P)
I really like the Red Flying Cloud too!

I wrote an in-character story about how Kaelinda got the Celestial Steed. Kaelinda was also the lucky one who won the gorgeous Ashes of Al’ar for me. During BC, I had thought that I would never, ever be able to acquire that mount.

I’m quite fond of hippogryphs. I’ve collected all the ones that I can obtain purely in-game. I’m not going to seek out the ones from TCG loot cards, but I do I need to either find someone else to RAF-swap with or just RAF myself to get the Emerald Hippogryph. I rather like gryphons, too.

Well, those are the first five that came to mind, so I guess they’re my current Top Five.

Mostly, the mounts I prefer depend on the character I’m playing. Each character has a different selection of mounts in her randomcast “ride” and “fly” macros. Most types of mounts are used by at least one character in this fashion. It does bother me to have mounts that I don’t like well enough to use, so I try to use even the mounts I don’t particularly like — such as the Skeletal Horses and Wolves — with the characters who have those types as their racial mounts. This still doesn’t mean that all my mounts get used, however. I generally prefer un-armored mounts to armored mounts, and though I usually try to obtain all the colors of any given type of mount, I only use the colors I like best.

I’m quite happy with the Celestial Steed, Winged Guardian, and Enchanted Fey Dragon, but I can’t bring myself to spend the money for the Heart of the Aspects, Armored Bloodwing, or Swift Windsteed, even to add to my mount total, because I know that I’d never use them. I will probably never make the Sky Golem or the Jeweled Panthers because they just don’t interest me. I only have one mammoth, just for the sake of having one. It’s not even the Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth, because I couldn’t afford that mount back in the day. I almost never use my mammoth because it is too big and I don’t like its gait. The Grand Expedition Yak, if I had it, would be too big for me to use regularly, too, and I don’t much like the gait of the yaks, either — but the little ones make up for it by being oh-so-cute and having a small footprint/profile. I acquired the Kor’kron Annihilator and the Sunreaver Dragonhawk purely so that account-wide mount magic could allow my Alliance characters to ride the Golden King and the Silver Covenant Hippogryph — I never use the Horde versions of those mounts.

One mount deserves a special mention here. In general, I absolutely love kodos. They’re like the Jeeps of Azeroth, moving steadily over all kinds of terrain. Kamalia has as many of them as she could manage to find. I love the way the Sunwalker Kodo looks, better even than the Great Sunwalker Kodo–

–when it’s standing still. When it is moving, the Sunwalker Kodo sways wildly from side-to-side.

Watching it gives me a headache. No other kodo has this problem. The Sunwalker Kodo hasn’t always had this problem, either. It broke a few patches ago, and Blizz hasn’t gotten around to fixing it yet.

I would like to get to 150 mounts eventually so I can get that pretty Jade Pandaren Kite… but there will surely be at least a few mounts that I’ll like on Draenor.