The OverAchiever: Mountain O' Mounts from professions
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. Today, we are convinced that archaeology's RNG won't apply to us.
There are a number of interesting (and by interesting, perhaps I mean "occasionally very expensive and likely to drive you insane via RNG-laden accessibility") mounts available from professions, though for some of them, you'll have to be a practitioner in good standing before you'll ever be able to learn them.
Regrettably, I am the bearer of some very bad news this week concerning the Vial of the Sands for all those of you who like circumventing the highest costs in the game.
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Alchemy
There's one mount available from alchemy, but you're if the alchemist in question, you'll have to spend a fairish amount of time involved with high-level (450+) archaeology as well. If you're not an alchemist, you can buy it off a player because the Vial of the Sands is BoE, albeit a very expensive BoE.
Sandstone Drake You're going to spend an awful lot of time digging up tol'vir artifacts for a shot at the recipe for this bad boy, but I have to admit that I really liked the implementation of the Vial of the Sands all the same. Granted, we started off with an absolutely atrocious amount of RNG involved in getting this, which has been ameliorated somewhat, but how can you not love the idea of digging up a thousand-year-old alchemical recipe from a jar buried in an ancient desert city? Anyway, the recipe's available as a random drop from Canopic Jars, which you'll find alongside tol'vir artifact fragments. Most of the time, the jars will contain Mummified Organs (oh, eww), but eventually you'll hit pay dirt and the get the Vial recipe. However, creating an actual Vial is a hugely expensive undertaking. Even if you're an herbalist/fisherman and can easily afford to create the eight Flask of the Winds, Flask of Titanic Strength, and Deepstone Oil necessary, you'll still have to blow your daily Truegold transmute 12 times (or buy it off others) and shell out for the non-negotiable, 5,000-gold Pyrium-Laced Crystalline Vial and the 3,000-gold Sands of Time (eight of them!). It used to be possible to save yourself something like 8,000 gold by running a goblin character out to Yasmin (the seller) in Uldum to take advantage of Best Deals Anywhere and the guild perk Bartering, but Blizzard seems to have hotfixed that happy little trick out of existence just a few days ago. Sorry, folks.
Archaeology
There are two mounts available from archaeology (three if you count the Vial of the Sands required for the Sandstone Drake above):
Fossilized Raptor This one's relatively easy to get and will probably pop up before too long if you consistently work on fossil artifacts. Judging from comments on both Wowhead and the forums, most people seem to get it around 200-250 archaeology skill, but as with just about everything else concerning archaeology, don't bank on it. You might get it as early as 100, but you also might find yourself putting multiple copies of gray artifacts together at 525 before it finally pops up. That's rare, but it can happen. Console yourself by saying that everyone has at least one nightmare artifact eluding their grasp in archaeology.
Ultramarine Qiraji Battle Tank This one's statistically more likely to be that nightmare. Like the Vial of the Sands, the Qiraji Battle Tank -- or, more accurately, the Scepter of Azj'Aqir that summons it -- is a tol'vir archaeology item, which means you're not going to get a shot at it until 450 skill at the earliest. You'll find some people on Wowhead with horror stories about having thousands upon thousands of useless night elf and fossil artifact fragments by the time they work their way through the tol'vir rares, but as far as I recall, the situation was improved by Blizzard's hotfixing an increase to the number of tol'vir spawns in Kalimdor. Is it worth it? This is the only qiraji bug mount available outside of the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj raid unless you're one of the extraordinarily few players with the Black Qiraji Resonating Crystal, so my answer is yes.
Blacksmithing
There are no mounts available from blacksmithing.
Enchanting
There are no mounts available from enchanting, but there are faction-specific pets as of Cataclysm. We'll cover this in a later guide to the new pet achievements we talked about in The OverAchiever: New achievements in patch 4.2.
Engineering
There are three mounts available from engineering, but beware: Neither of the two flying machines can be learned by non-engineers, and the motorbikes are both very expensive (though less so than the Vial, above).
Flying Machine (engineers only) The Flying Machine is actually pretty easy to build for an engineer fresh to Hellfire Peninsula, provided you've been keeping up on your profession leveling. You'll have to mine up a ton of Fel Iron for the various materials, but nodes are plentiful in Hellfire and Zangarmarsh. Assuming you can get your hands on enough, this is an absurdly cheap mount to build, and hey! If you're Horde, this also means never having to fly an ugly-ass wyvern! Reason enough for me to level engineering on my tauren warrior.
Turbo-Charged Flying Machine (engineers only) The epic version requires a hell of a lot more time, if for no other reason than the need for eight Khorium Power Cores. The problem with Khorium Power Cores is that they need -- wait for it -- Khorium, and this is a rare spawn that can pop up on any given Outland mining node. With Outland depopulated since the end of The Burning Crusade, you'll often find yourself alone in a zone flying from one node to the next hoping against hope that some damn Khorium will spawn. While you can check the auction house and occasionally Qiff in Netherstorm's Area 52, you may not have much luck on a small to medium server, and the little Khorium you'll find there tends to be expensive as hell.
Mechano-Hog (Horde)/Mekgineer's Chopper (Alliance) WoW's own motorbikes! I still remember when these were introduced in the Wrath of the Lich King beta. But you know how the Vial's so expensive because of a non-negotiable materials cost? Well, the motorbikes are what that was patterned on. Titansteel's cheaper than it used to be (then again, how could it not be compared to the opening days of Wrath?), but the Salvaged Iron Golem Parts are 3,000 gold, the Goblin-Machined Pistons (eight of them!) are 1,000 gold each, and the Elementium-Plated Exhaust Pipe is 1,500 gold. Oh, and they're also only available from a vendor in the Storm Peaks' K3, unless your engineer gets lucky and "skins" them off mobs in Ulduar. Yes folks, it's a gold sink, but judging from the number of them infesting the average server, it's an effective one. Also the subject of the achievement Get to the Choppa!
Fishing
There is one mount theoretically available from fishing, although you couldn't prove it by me:
Sea Turtle Ye gods. Yet another horribly random fishing drop that eludes yours truly. Oh well, it's not like Blizzard hasn't given me another crack at it. Once available only as a very random drop (El's Extreme Anglin' pegs it as 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000) from any Northrend pool, its availability has been expanded to all pools in Azeroth's Cataclysm zones as well, including Tol Barad. Getting this is often best combined with One That Didn't Get Away so that you're making yourself miserable for the purpose of multiple achievements rather than just one. However, as someone who fished up umpteen million Fangtooth Herring in Wrath without once seeing either a Dark Herring or a turtle, it's also possible that you'll make yourself miserable for the purpose of no achievements. Bitch, bitch. Moan, moan. Also the subject of the achievement Turtles All the Way Down.
Inscription
There are no mounts available from inscription.
Jewelcrafting
There are no mounts available from jewelcrafting.
Leatherworking
There are no mounts available from leatherworking.
Tailoring
There are three mounts available from tailoring and, like their flying engineering counterparts, they're tailors-only:
Flying Carpet (tailors only) Like the standard-issue Flying Machine for engineers, this is a fairly easy starter flying mount to make if you've been keeping up with your professions when you reach Outland. The flying carpet mounts were famous for a period in Wrath for situating character models right in the middle of them -- by which I mean half on top and half below -- leading to a rash of people who appeared to have been eaten by ambulatory rugs. Curiously enough, this also wound up being an issue with the stone drake models when Cataclysm went live. I wonder if the issue was caused by the same errant bit of code.
Magnificent Flying Carpet (tailors only) Like the Frosty Carpet below, this was originally intended as the epic flying counterpart to the Flying Carpet, but it's trainable and has a much cheaper materials cost.
Frosty Flying Carpet (tailors only) Whenever I see one of these (well, the carpet mounts more generally), I'm immediately transported to that memorable night in Sunwell when our raid leader was chewing us out over our abysmal performance on what was supposed to be farm content. After a particularly appalling series of wipes on the Twins, he paused to catch his breath between (accurate) denunciations of our performance when we all heard a tinny little voice over Vent. Turns out our DPS warrior had leaned back from his computer and was quietly singing A Whole New World to himself. The raid never really recovered that evening. What does this have to do with the Frosty Flying Carpet? Absolutely nothing.
Working on achievements? The Overachiever is here to help! Count on us for advice on Azeroth's holidays and special events, including new achievements, how to get 310% flight speed with achievement mounts, and Cataclysm reputation factions and achievements.
