For me it was Xinlao, a mount that drops from Ahn-de the Loyal during the Mogu Invasion of the Vale.
It let me down both figuratively and literally, as it does not fly like my tried and true Imperial Quilen I’ve had since MoP.
I really like the low profile of the Imperial Quilen but wanted a little flavor with some palette swapping. Instead I got a tiny ground bound mount that I’ll probably never use.
Shout out to Ren’s Stalward Hound for being equally disappointing but dropping in far fewer kills!
So what mount has let you down? (interpret that question as you will )
Most of the really big mounts like infernals. They are awesome looking but are just way too big for any practical use. You can never fit through any door…
Red Proto-drake from back in WotLK. Those things looked sooooooo dang cool from the ground, so I worked my way through all the achieves necessary to unlock one, with tons of help from my guildies.
I finally get on the dang thing and- bam. Whole screen’s full of dragon butt. It’s like trying to drive an SUV through a tiny parking lot, can’t see a thing. I’ve grown to appreciate more sleek mounts ever since.
The Sky Golem. How anyone can enjoy seeing that thing sway all over the damn screen is beyond me. But leave it to Goblins to create an inferior mode of transportation.
This mount hasn’t even been released yet, but have you guys seen the Ardenweald Pod? I was so excited to get a mount that isn’t an animal or a flyer carpet. But the animation is terrible. It constantly bobs and rocks during flight. Its a headache to look at. Realistically anyone that uses that thing would be throwing up over the side from motion sickness.
Also, EVERY mount that uses the gryphon skeleton, including my priest class hall mount, looks AWFUL because of the fact that it leans to the side constantly.
I’d also like to add pretty much all “Drake” mounts, just due to the outdated graphic quality. I mean, EEESH, they look like they’re made of cardboard, to say nothing of their weird eyes-too-far-forward faces.
You see, there’s also a Quilen available from island expeditions; Qinsho’s Eternal Hound. I don’t mind that it doesn’t fly, and it’s a nice golden color. Look at him!
Now, what does Xinlao look like? Well…
…the armor’s a different color, at least. Why didn’t Blizz any of the other colors? Any of these would’ve been wonderful:
Or they could’ve gone saddle-free:
Point is, it’s hard to get excited about a new mount when it’s almost identical to another one introduced in the same expansion.
The Swift Windsteed store mount. It looks cool, basically an asian Kirin which is a sort of dragon horse thing. But it only looks cool standing still. For whatever reason they used a modified stag rigging for it so it runs like it belongs in the special olympics for mounts. So I wasted 25$ on what I generally refer to as the derp goat.
Sadly they also use this rigging for the new unicorn mounts so they look just as bad running. For the life of me I don’t know why they can’t just use the horse rigging for these horse like mounts.
The Mechagnome race mount. It’s so simple and disappointing. I mounted up when I made the character and ran around SW for a few minutes. “Nope.” I went back to my tried and true mounts.
Yeah, they really seem to like to use that rig and animation set for new mounts that should run like a horse, not a deer. The only reason I can think of is the horses in the game are bulkier so it wouldn’t work for the slimmer models and they just took the easy route and used the stag one instead.
They do sort of the same thing with Invincible and the Sparkle Pony, instead of trying to put wings on the horse rigging they forced the hippogryph rigging into a horse shape.
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