Bring Back the Black & Plagued Proto-Drakes as Glory of the Raider Rewards

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
1

I think it’s time Blizzard restored the Black Proto-Drake and Plagued Proto-Drake to their original achievements:

Glory of the Raider (10 Player) — Plagued Proto-Drake
Glory of the Raider (25 Player) — Black Proto-Drake

These were the original Glory raid mounts. Blizzard removed them with Patch 3.1 in 2009 because, with Ulduar arriving and players becoming more powerful, completing the Naxxramas achievements would become increasingly trivial.

Fair enough — except Blizzard immediately stopped doing that.

The Rusted and Ironbound Proto-Drakes from Ulduar remained available. So did the Icecrown Glory mounts. And the Glory mounts from essentially every raid tier that followed.

Today we can go back and massively outlevel old raids, complete their Glory achievements, and collect their mounts. That’s been the established system for well over a decade.

Black and Plagued aren’t following some continuing Blizzard policy of preserving Glory mounts as limited-time prestige rewards. They’re leftovers from a policy Blizzard tried once at the beginning of Wrath and then abandoned.

And since then, Blizzard has actually gone in the opposite direction.

Patch 10.1.5 specifically revisited this era of the game. Blizzard created the Old Scholomance/Naxxramas secrets, restored access to old appearances and recipes, made Tier 3 obtainable again, added the Eastern Plaguelands entrance to Naxxramas, and even gave us a way to obtain Valiance as a mount.

So why are the original Naxxramas Glory rewards still the exception?

I’m not suggesting putting them on the Trading Post or making them vendor mounts. I’m not asking for a new acquisition method at all.

Just put them back where they originally belonged:

Glory of the Raider (10 Player) → Plagued Proto-Drake
Glory of the Raider (25 Player) → Black Proto-Drake

The achievements are still there. The rewards should be too.

And yes, people who earned them while Naxx was current accomplished something that someone steamrolling Naxx today obviously isn’t accomplishing. But that’s equally true of someone who earned an Ironbound Proto-Drake during current Ulduar versus someone earning one today. We don’t need to permanently remove the reward to recognize that difference.

The Plagued Proto-Drake has even been obtainable again through the Black Market Auction House, while the Black Proto-Drake remains unobtainable. At this point the original removal doesn’t even consistently preserve the exclusivity of the two rewards.

The achievements never went away. Their rewards shouldn’t have either.

It’s been 17 years. Blizzard has long since established how legacy Glory achievements work.

Put the Black and Plagued Proto-Drakes back on Glory of the Raider.

3 Likes
2

what would that accomplish? would there be more than 5 players using those mounts a lot?

3

It would unify a reward type.

It’s not about “how many people will be using it” it’s about “this is a weird vestigial outlier removal caused by abandoned policy changes”

4

How about no. They’re just ugly proto-drakes lmao

1 Like
5

Technically you can get the plagued protodrake from the BMAH, but it would be nice to be able to get the black protodrake from either the BMAH or the old glory achieve.

Maybe Bliz will do a remix of Wrath and let us somehow obtain those old mounts for a limited time.

1 Like
6

I’m fine not having something I didn’t earn while it was available.

I view the “policy change” as a gift rather than a standardto be upheld. I wish they’d have more things which were time-exclusive.

7

There are already prestige rewards for seasonal activities.

This is the only “Glory” achievement that doesn’t keep its rewards. Even the other raids from the same expansion still have their glory mounts (Rusted/Ironbound Protodrakes, and Icebound and Blood Bathed frostwyrms)

It’s a weird outlier.

If they had maintained the policy, every Glory mount would have been removed at the end of its “difficulty” window.

Besides, the mount isn’t the real indicator of “did it while it was hard” it’s the achievement date.

8

yah and its only b/c they double-backed after everyone complained about it.
The problem is that they’d already said it wans’t going to stick around and they would have looked like morons if they’d went back on their word.
Same with mage tower–aint gonna happen.
I am happy that they made it possible to get the ulduar ones and all the others after that point. I’m also happy that I finished Ulduar hard mode like literally the WEEK before ToC came out and earned my free 350% mount speed before they started just letting people buy it.

9

But the Plague Proto-Drake did come back via the Black Market Auction House, so its weird that the Black Proto-Drake didnt but that one did

10

I got my 350% flying from “What a long strange trip it’s been” from all the holiday events, like 2 weeks before they patched that out.

I agree, that at the time going back and adding it after removing it would have looked silly, but all these years later it’d look like correcting an oversight.

11

Lmao no they’re hideous proto-drakes

12

oh totally agree there, I don’t think it should have gone away to begin with as the timestamp on people’s achievement IMO is always good enough as is the “AOTC” and “CE” feats of strength but some people are never satisified unless they can have stuff no one else can have.

1 Like