And They’re Off!!!

It’s not the Kentucky Derby, but it does depict the flood of alts and levelling one can likely expect come “the next major content” patch. I want to call it patch 3.2, but for some reason Blizzard isn’t…so I’ll conform in this case. My reporter instincts suggest it’s because there may be a different content patch before 3.2 and Blizzard is just being sneaky.

Speculation aside, what does this mean? Well, for starters your first mount will now come at 20 instead of 30, instead of 40. I remember last year when it was dropped to 30 and thought that was a big deal. It was, and as expected it helped speed the process up a bit. I don’t know yet how I feel about 20, but you can’t argue questing in Duskwood just got a whole lot easier.

The domino effect of this, is that epic land mounts can now be obtained at 40. It’ll help, but it isn’t make or break for me. What is a big deal, is flying mounts at 60. Quite frankly, this was a must for Blizzard. Implementing the “Cold Weather Flying” was a junkshot to getting a mount before 77 if you didn’t already have one when LK came out. Think about it: you’ve hit 70 and can get a flying mount, but if you want to go to Northrend you can’t use it for seven more levels. Rather defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? This way, you can actually use the air mount to whip around Outland. This of course speeds up levelling even further, without hammering XP requirements down even further.

The biggest question most people have is in regards to class mounts, such as Druids and Paladins. To my understanding, this is being tweaked to fall in line as well. Now, how they’ll do that I don’t know. I haven’t played any of them high enough to know, but don’t mount quests involve a dungeon of a certain level?

Oh, the other final note on mounts. The prices are dropping as well. Except for Artisan. That’s still 5k. The only tweak, is that you’ll be able to get rep discounts. As much as I’d moderately like to see it dropped, there aren’t that many money sinks in the game anymore, so I actually tip my hat to Blizzard for maintaining this one.