You only have to pay once per mount. In the current system, you have to pay every time you need a new effect.
After watching the WoD flight debacle and how the devs ALREADY tried to remove WW from the Water Strider before BFA released? It’s about as much a conspiracy theory as predicting Old Gods in BFA.
Also, see Findle’s Loot-a-Rang.
The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour.
Fall damage breaks WW. Larger mounts can’t actually WW from swimming. This is exacerbated for Tauren and other larger races.
The innate WW ability is going away. It will now cost ~1k per toon whenever you need it. The ability is no longer a mount ability, but an ability from a BFA crafted item. Expansion crafted items usually don’t stick around past the expansion. Daze is a MUCH bigger problem on the PTR, which will push most players towards choosing anti-daze.
Once anti-daze is the favoured equipment and WW is rarely used, the devs can justify removing it because it’s “not popular with the players”. Considering they just recently tried to remove it and couldn’t because it WAS popular with the players, and based on the constant slowing down of travel to increase DAUs and MAUs, what is about to happen to water walking is pretty obvious.
Anyway, this thread isn’t actually about complaining about the Strider nerf. There’s already a thread for that. This thread is for a pro-active suggestion to make the new mount equipment more user-friendly and adaptable.
Especially if they add more and more equipment, having just one item that spans ALL your mounts is going to cost players a LOT of money, see all but the best equipment go completely unused, and force players to take up more and more bag space.
My suggestion would actually free up space in players’ bags because barding, stirrups, etc. could all be made into equipment and stored on the mounts you want to use for that purpose.