The 5,000,000 gold mount from 12.1.5

The Sporebearer Fungal Strider, arriving with patch 12.1.5 in about a month, is already the most argued-about item in the update. At 5,000,000 gold it is customisable, letting you station useful NPCs on it: a mailbox attendant, a repair vendor, an auctioneer or a transmogrifier.

What it costs in full

The mount is sold by a vendor in Harandar and comes with a mailbox attendant and a repair merchant by default. Two more NPCs unlock for gold:

• Auctioneer – 1,500,000 gold
• Transmogrifier – 500,000 gold

Only two NPCs can ride along at once, so you are picking a loadout rather than collecting all four. Swapping them is handled by a separate NPC standing beside the vendor.

The deadline is the bigger complaint

Reaction to the mount itself has been largely positive. The reaction to Blizzard removing it from sale at the end of Midnight has not been. Plenty of players said they would accept the price if the mount stayed available indefinitely and they could save toward it without rushing.

The combination of an extreme price and a hard cutoff is what irritates people. It stacks artificial urgency on top of a cost most players cannot reach anyway.

Is it worth it?

Depends entirely on what you already own. Anyone holding the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur or the Trader's Gilded Brutosaur already has auction and mail on a mount, and the Grand Expedition Yak covers transmog and repair. Between them, every service the Strider offers is already available, which leaves nothing to buy except the model.

Players raised the obvious question of what comes next. Suggestions that keep recurring: a personal and warband bank, a barber, crafting services, and a way to teleport to your house. How interesting this mount stays probably depends on what Blizzard adds to it later.

Where the gold would come from

This is a gold sink, designed to pull a large amount of currency out of the economy, and mounts in this bracket have never been aimed at everyone. Several players noted with some amusement that the usual advice for raising five to seven million is to work a few hours in real life and buy tokens rather than farm it in game.

That advice got picked apart fast. One player ran the numbers: at roughly 370,000 gold per token, the Strider works out at fourteen to nineteen tokens depending on whether you buy the NPCs, which is a long way past "a few hours" in most of Europe.

If you want the mount before Midnight closes, the realistic route is a serious gold plan starting now. Our WoW gold services cover that side of it.