[See Master post]

I never intended to farm mounts as I do today; it just kind of… happened.

That said, I do remember how I started to farm mounts.

Back in the day, @Ottahz was a mount collector. As for myself, mounts were just a way to from A to B.

Then in Wrath of the Lich King, I saw the mount you were rewarded for getting the achievement Leading the Cavalry.

Isn’t it pretty? However getting it would mean getting 50 mounts

So I went to work, getting what mounts I could. I’d already gotten a number of mounts since Vanilla, so worked on getting the 50. Mostly this meant grinding alliance faction rep – there are a gaggle of mounts from that.

Over time, I’ve gotten more mounts and often it was the “Get X number of mount” achievements and the mounts which they rewarded which spured me on.

Thus I continued on, getting 100 mounts and Mountain o’ Mounts – which rewarded the blue dragonhawk

Then it was 150 mounts for We’re going to need more Saddles with its Jade Pandaren Kite.

Further on, it was 200 mounts for Mount Parade for the armored blue dragonhawk.

Finally, I got the 250 mounts for Mountacular, giving me the very pretty Felfire hawk.

Over time I’ve ended up doing battlegrounds for honor to buy the PvP mounts, I’ve run a very very very large number of raid instances and dungeons for the rare drop mounts they have. I’ve done dungeon & raid achievements for the mounts their meta-achievements reward. I’ve made lots of gold in game to turn around and spend around 1,000,000 of it on mounts – mostly paid to vendors for the mounts or the parts to make some of them. But a good chunk of that was for a mythic Garrosh carry to guarentee me the Kor’kron Juggernaut as after over a year in Seige of Orgrimmar, I really didn’t want to add it to my circle of disappointment in a couple of years!

But in writing this, I’ve realized that one of the reasons I like chasing mounts is that most of them are very pretty to look at and it turns out that is matters to me. Thus I happily ran spent a lot of time around spawn points for the Void talon mount as that mounts is not only awesome to look at, but it also matches my warlock’s transmog and is a very suitable mount for a shadowpriest to have.

However I don’t really like the idea of camping for the Time-Lost protodrake; not only is it a right pain to farm, especially now that leveling zones are cross-realm enabled, but it is also a rather ugly mount!

This is also one of the reasons why I don’t mind paying for mounts from the store – they’re often rather pretty! The latest one very much so!

So why farm mounts?

Because they look pretty!

I also took a certain amount of satisfaction of being able to match up the mounts my bodyguards were using with my own.

I should also note that some mounts don’t just look pretty – the Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth has been incredibly useful whilst leveling and in farming. I was also most surprised at how much use the reforger on the Grand Expedition Yak got during Mists of Pandaria – people would often have new items drop, oft a major upgrade and ask if anyone had the reforge mount.

Another mount which has proven awesome over the years has been the Azure Water Strider which has proved its worth on numerous occasions by letting me run across water whilst using it.