3 ways to motivate your mount to speed up in WoW Classic

We talked about it a little when we discussed trinkets in WoW Classic, but some players really want to know how speed up that mount they’re going to pick up at level 40. It’s something that can be hard to understand in the modern game, when your starting mount is at level 20 and costs 4 gold to learn. That’s not the way it works in WoW Classic — you don’t get your first mount until level 40 and it’s 80 gold — a staggering amount in the days of vanilla WoW.

You will likely get a discount on your first mount because you’ll get it from the faction your character most strongly identifies with and quested for, so it’ll be more like 60 gold, but trust me — 60 gold is going to feel like a lot of money. Many of us didn’t get that mount until closer to 50 because scraping up 60g meant doing things like not training our skills for 10 levels. There were so many ways to spend money in the original game, so that first mount ended up lasting people well into endgame.

Why not just buy an epic mount once you hit 60, I can hear you asking, and the answer is because epic mounts cost 1000g. That may only sound a touch pricey in an economy 15  years down the road, but a lot of players didn’t get their epic mount until they were well into the endgame. I didn’t get mine until after Ahn’qiraj had been out for a while, and I got lucky with an epic staff drop that I managed to auction off for 800g. Note, that even with that staff, I still had to scrape up 200 gold to buy the thing, which meant I was broke for weeks.

When you realize just how pricey mounts were back in the day, and how tough it was to generate the silver to just keep your basic needs in check, you start to understand why players went out of their way to come up with ways to increase their mounted speed and make that first mount go faster.

How to buff your ride with enchants

There’s good news and bad news here. There are only three means to buff mounted speed in WoW Classic beyond buying a faster mount, but those means stack with one another. That means if you have all three, you can add their mount speed increase percentage together for a flat additional 9% buff to your mount speed.

The first was a fairly simple enchant, Enchant Gloves – Riding Skill. It requires Large Radiant Shards, which are disenchanted from mid 40’s and up gear, so it’s an enchant that players get right around the time they’d need it. It adds +2% to your mount speed, which makes it the least powerful of these options, but since they all stack it’s still worth getting.

Second and slightly more difficult to acquire are the Mithril Spurs — these add +4% to your mount speed, making them the strongest of the three options. If you can only get one of these for whatever reason, get the Spurs, as they’ll give you the most bang for your buck. But remember, they stack with the other two options. So if you only got the Riding Skill enchant and the Mithril Spurs, you’d be looking at 6% increase to your mounted speed.

Mithril Spurs required 4 Mithril Bars and a Blacksmith with the pattern to make them, though the Spurs themselves can be traded. A friendly Blacksmith with at least 215 skill can to apply them to boots via the trade window, and they’re similar to the Riding Skill enchant in that most Blacksmiths would be getting them at or around level 40. Instead of a specified speed boost, these just make your mount “slightly” faster.

Tantalizing Carrots held out on Sticks

Finally there’s the Carrot on a Stick. We talked about this trinket last time — at 3% mounted speed increase, it’s the middle of the road of these options, and certainly the most labor intensive. The quest seems straightforward — kill Gahz’rilla in Zul’Farrak — but in practice that means going through the lengthy process of getting the mallet to summon it. Only one person per party needs the mallet to summon the boss, but if no one had it… well, you were stuck getting it yourself.

It should be pointed out that Zul’Farrak is also a decent source of Large Radiant Shards for that Riding Skill enchant you’re going to want, and the Hinterlands — where you get a piece of the summoning mallet — has stocks of Mithril Ore waiting for you to mine it up. Doing the rounds here for this trinket can help you with the mats for the enchants.

Again, the Carrot on a Stick adds its 3% bonus to the other two. Carrot plus Riding Skill equals 5%, Carrot plus Mithril Spurs equals 7%, and all three together gives you a 9% mount speed buff. While this won’t exceed an epic mount, it will make the time you spend riding that 80g mount trying to farm up the 1000g for the epic less painful.

Remember, this is a world with no flying. Epic mounts are only available to the wealthiest of max level players, and even that first mount is a sizable gold outlay. Anything players could do to buff that first mount’s speed was worth it, and these three methods were basically it for players looking to wring all the value they could out of that first ride. These were it for those of us who needed that Pinto to last us a while.