The armory (US|EU) is a pretty good place to check out your mount situation and whilst the website can lag a bit after fresh content comes out, it does have a good view of your character’s status.

Find your character on the armory and select the “Pets & Mounts” option on the menu to the right of your character

This will bring up details of the pets and mounts you have, with the pets tab normally selected by default.

Click on the mounts tab.

Then click on the “Not collected” tab to show the mounts you’re currently missing. Then select “Show advanced filters”

The advanced filter looks like the below and allows you to easily narrow down which mounts you still need from raid drops, TCG cards, world events, etc.

I’ve used this a few times to see which mounts I’m missing – eg I found out that I was missing the Red Drake mount as I didn’t want to pay the 2,000g for the mount when I reached exalted with the Wyrmrest Accord back in Wraith.

The view of mounts and pets in the default interface has been much improved in recent years and can be used to do everything the Armory above would do.

First select the “Collections” tab in the game menu:

Select the Mounts tab and then click on Filter.

If you untick “Collected” and play with the Sources menu you can easily which mounts you’re missing. Has the added advantage of when you select a mount the mount journal will tell you where it comes from.

The tools Blizzard provides on the Armory and in game are already pretty good, but there some addons which can be useful.

At the moment I currently use:

• Rarity – track drop rates and see just how tries you’ve made for a mount or pet. Works out the cumulative chance given the drop rate for the item and tries so far
• SavedInstances – track raid lockouts, plus a lot more, across your characters

A couple of other addons I’ve come across, but haven’t tried myself:

• Collect Me – tracks mounts & pets you have and can show you where you can missing ones
• Mount Farm Helper – show which mounts can still be farmed this week

You now know the mounts you need to chase – which if you’ve not gotten any mounts from raids before could be 37 from drops alone before you consider rare spawns like the Time-Lost protodrake! [1]

So, just what is “The Circuit of disappointment“?

Its the name Alternative Chat gave to her routine circuit of farming raid instances for mounts. The “circuit” is easy – you do several raids one after the other and then go back home to count your loot!

The “disappointment” though? That’s mostly thanks to the low drop rate for the raid mounts. Back when the raids were current content, generally from Wrath onwards, the mounts would often be a guarenteed drop from a boss if you did the end boss in its hardest form. Thus Sartharion with 3 drakes up dropped a mount, as did Yogg-Saron with no keepers up and with a 25 player raid, etc. At the time this was effectively bragging rights – only one mount would drop and given the difficulty of the raid, few people would have the mount. This has continued on to this day, with Blackhand dropping the Ironhoof Destroyer when you defeat him on mythic difficulty.

However that was then.

Once the raids are no longer considered end game, the mounts generally change from having a guarenteed drop to having just a 1% drop rate.

So unless you’re incredibly lucky you’ll be farming the bosses for some time to get the mount – to give you an idea it took me 191 kills before Onyxia dropped the Reins of the Onyxian Drake – aka doing that with a single character would’ve taken ~3½ years assuming I tried every raid reset.

So we have both scale – 37 mounts – and a low drop rate to contend with.

You can speed things up by using multiple characters – I had fun finding which of my characters could kill Onyxia at 85 and then 90 before the stat squish and was farming with 8 characters a week towards the end.

You could take one character across all 20+ raid instances each week – which is doable, but I’d set aside most of a day to do that. Or you could pick a subset of mounts to farm and use multiple characters.

Personally I prefer to farm a small subset – mostly to keep myself sane – but to use several characters to do so. If nothing else this means that some of the awesome transmogs in older raids drop can be had across several characters!

Thus I was doing a loop of Karazhan -> Tempest Keep -> Onyxia on four characters every week until they dropped. As the mounts dropped I added others into the mix, like the Throne of the Four Winds.

My current farming for raid mounts each week is:

• 4x Dragonsoul 10HC
• 2x Mogu’shan Vaults
• 1x Throne of Thunder + some Mists world bosses

I’ve found that if I can dovetail my mount farming with other things as well it makes things easier – thus my paladin farmed the drops required for Shadowmourne and also gave me more tries for Invincible along the way.

In a similar vein, my priest made himself Val’anyr whilst farming Mimiron’s Head. Although in that case I managed to get the mount before finishing off the legendary!

[1] BTW, I’d not poke the TLPD myself – since the advent of cross-realm zones the Stormpeaks has a large number of people farming the TLPD, often just sitting at the known spawn sites. It was bad enough as it was to just compete with your server, but now you’re competing with a good number of other servers as well – meaning you’ll loose a lot more time chasing that mount!