Warcrafting: A special riding tiger
Each WoW race has its characteristic mounts: horses for humans, rams for dwarves, wolves for orcs, and so on. Night elves get sabers, big tiger-ish cats. All the racial mounts come in a variety of colors, some available for purchase and use once a character's mastered the basics of riding, some others for more experienced riders, and a few only available as reputation rewards. One of the hardest to get is the wintersaber, a saber with very distinctive lavender markings.
There's only one way to get exalted reputation: repeated quest turn-ins for the Wintersaber Trainers. There's one starting quest, a second that opens up at friendly, and a third a bit later. Your character needs to gather meat from the zone's bears and chimeras, and kill specific kinds of furbolg giving the sabers trouble, and defeat giants down at the southern end of the zone. Originally these each gave 50 reputation points, and if you look at the thousands required, you can see that this was a long, long, long process. There's a reason wintersabers have always been a scarce sight, and it's simply that not all that many players have wanted to put in the required time. A few patches back, Blizzard improved rep rewards all around, and now two of the quests give 250 points each, the third 350. Even so it's not all that fast - it's 40 cycles of the three quests, once they're all unlocked, plus the earlier effort to get that far.
However, I really wanted a wintersaber for some one of my characters, and wasn't sure they'd still be in play come Cataclysm. (It turns out they will, but I only learned that thanks to Blizzcon reports of this week.) So...I put in the time.
Here's Lariko speaking to the quest-giver, high on a rock looking over the northwestern corner of Winterspring, one of my picks for most beautiful zone:
And here she is back home, riding her very own wintersaber:
I don't expect to ever do that again, but I'm really glad to have done it once, for a character who gives me such pleasure to play.
There's only one way to get exalted reputation: repeated quest turn-ins for the Wintersaber Trainers. There's one starting quest, a second that opens up at friendly, and a third a bit later. Your character needs to gather meat from the zone's bears and chimeras, and kill specific kinds of furbolg giving the sabers trouble, and defeat giants down at the southern end of the zone. Originally these each gave 50 reputation points, and if you look at the thousands required, you can see that this was a long, long, long process. There's a reason wintersabers have always been a scarce sight, and it's simply that not all that many players have wanted to put in the required time. A few patches back, Blizzard improved rep rewards all around, and now two of the quests give 250 points each, the third 350. Even so it's not all that fast - it's 40 cycles of the three quests, once they're all unlocked, plus the earlier effort to get that far.
However, I really wanted a wintersaber for some one of my characters, and wasn't sure they'd still be in play come Cataclysm. (It turns out they will, but I only learned that thanks to Blizzcon reports of this week.) So...I put in the time.
Here's Lariko speaking to the quest-giver, high on a rock looking over the northwestern corner of Winterspring, one of my picks for most beautiful zone:
And here she is back home, riding her very own wintersaber:
I don't expect to ever do that again, but I'm really glad to have done it once, for a character who gives me such pleasure to play.