Well, them Skyguard have been tellin’ me for a while that mah riding ability is gettin’ pretty good so ah decided tae try one of the flat, ugly buggers they ride. Since we’re aw pals they even gave me a discount!

Epic flying mount! Finally! The biggest ’setback’ I felt when I changed back to my rogue wasn’t the ten levels and gearing up I had to do but the lack of an epic flying mount. I know a lot of people see it as a waste of time to get an epic flyer, not to mention a waste of gold, but I feel it’s well worth it.At the most basic level it opens up some new soloable daily quests - until now I had about 7 or 8 I could reliably do daily by myself - Two at the Skyguard Outpost in Terrokkar, two in the Blade’s Edge Mountain base, two at Ogri’la, the cooking daily and, sometimes, the pvp daily.
I could keep doing these dailies but I’ve been exalted with the Sha’tari Skyguard and Ogri’la for a while now and I don’t know about most people but personally I like to feel like I’m working towards something with my dailies. The pvp daily, too, could be a problem in that, on Bloodhoof, the Alliance rarely win anything but AV so the honor you get with the daily is hardly worth the time spent in pvp - you’d get more running AV twice. Unless of course the daily is AV - then.. whoohoo!

So, now I have a new ‘goal’ - Netherwing rep. Now, my favourite flying mount happens to be the Nether Rays (ok, so really it’s druid epic flight form but my rogue can’t have that unfortunately… /cry) but having a goal at the end of the daily grind makes them much more palatable. So, commence the slaughter of Dragonmaw Orcs!

The second thing which makes having an epic flying mount more worthwhile? Gathering! Of course, if you don’t have a gathering profession then this point is moot but I’m a miner and, suddenly, I can mine a lot more ore. I wouldn’t care to give a percentage as I just get into the mindset of “1, 2, lots, many!” once the ore starts piling up - but I know for sure that I never had an (18 slot) bag full of ore before from one ‘trip’. This, probably, was because on my old, slow flying mount I could maybe fly around one area before getting bored. Now I can zoom around Nagrand, Blades Edge Mountain and Shadowmoon Valley reasonably quickly and I spend more time doing this as I’m hopping from vein to vein instead of on an endless, boring, fruitless search.

Thirdly - I now have ’spare’ gold. Ok, so this isn’t entirely fair as anyone who decided not to get a mount would have had this too but, in essence, I have what I feel I ‘need’ to enjoy the game comfortably and everything else is now for extras and fun. In my case fun means I can buy a tonne of herbs and let my alchemist make some elixirs in the hope of learning some new recipes / generating more gold. I was lucky this week and discovered the recipe for Flask of Relentless Assault - no more worrying if an elixir spec alchemist will be on before the raid for me!Now I also need to decide on what to work towards next - Darnassus Rep, Winterspring Frostsaber Rep, or Mag’har Kurenai Rep (I still keep almost typing into trade “opening lockboxes in Org” damn this switching sides nonsense!).Of course, there are a lot of other things I need for character progress but this is for my ‘downtime’. Hrm. Spacegoat, purple kitty or making friends with elfsies for a green kitty? Tough choice for a ‘collector’.

This post was brought to you by a broken glass who decided that it was better for me not to do the dishes, at the moment, and go do something else - like writing. That should have stopped bleeding by now… Heal plz!?