I’m not exactly what you’d call a mount collector. Oh sure, I picked up most of the easy faction mounts to grab a few achievement points back in the day. But these days, I’m not about to camp a rare mob for hours just for bragging rights. If I’m going out of my way to get a mount, it better be for more than just eye candy.

Take the Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth for example. It’s got vendors you can sell to, buy a Tome of the Clear Mind to change glyphs, and carry multiple players on (if you so choose). I still have it hotkeyed on my action bar. I don’t ride it, but if I need Tomes at least it’s handy.

Not that handy when you’re trying to find a parking spot at the mall.

I’d been hearing chatter from the Warlords of Draenor beta, regarding mounts. It’s common knowledge that there is no flying in WoD. This information comes as a complete shock to no one. Blizzard never allows flying for a patch or two, before eventually making it available at level cap.

However there is a mount that has been suggested as one of the better ones until flying becomes available. Since many of the questing hubs and zones are separated by water (or so I’m told since I’m kinda beta-light), having a mount that can cross water should help to speed up the leveling process.

That means it’s time to grab the Reins of the Azure Water Strider.

Bringing sexy back.

The catch (har har) is that you need to have Exalted reputation with MoP’s favorite fishermen, The Anglers. According to my math (and by match I mean I plugged in a name for the rep calculator in Wowjutsu) it would take approximately 21 days to go from zero to Exalted. This is assuming you only do the three daily quests available.

Fun fact: You need at least a single level in fishing to get this started.

There’s a questline in Dread Waste that can also get you started. If you are a freshly boosted 90, or didn’t bother starting quests there, you’ll have to unlock it to grab a few thousand rep.

Aside from the three daily quests (1500 rep a day), there’s three other things you can do to speed up the rep gathering.

1) Daily Dungeons – Set the Anglers as your bonus rep, and run the daily Dungeon and Scenario. That’s good for about 500 rep between the two.

2) Hozen Peace Pipe – Farm or buy this bad boy for a one-time buff of 1000 rep for every MoP reputation.

3) Magic Fish – Every day, you have the chance to fish up a, well, a fish. It’s marked as a quest, sending you to Nat Pagle to hand in. You get rep with him (but who cares because screw that guy) and 300 with the Anglers.

Bonus: Commendation with the Anglers – At Revered, you can buy a Bind on Account commendation for the Anglers from Nat Pagle. It gives every character on your account a 100% buff to Angler rep. That makes the final push from Revered to Exalted a little easier. Actually, 100% easier.

My Ambassador is currently sitting at Revered, and I’ve picked up the rep buff commendation. Hopefully I can knock out Exalted and grab the bug mount before Patch 6.0 hits sometime this month. The patch brings class changes, and I’ve got enough on my plate without having to worry about what does what with my class.