There’s also an achievement for killing all the quest mobs with some kind of choker or necklace in your inventory. I assume that shows up after you’ve done all the Claw kills.
Yes. It’s actually part of the Stables building progression.
You can’t start capturing and training the six mounts until you build a Level 1 Stables.
The Black Claw of Sethe becomes available after your Stable is built up to Level 2. This is the item you keep in your inventory while killing the same (final) tamer bosses as you do in the normal training sequence, except that it imposes a movement and defense penalty to your mount-in-training. It’s like a challenge mode. I guess you can do this at the same time as the daily normal quests for training, but I didn’t try (or even upgrade my Stables) until after I’d finished training all six mounts.
You can’t learn the Level 3 Stables blueprint until at least one toon on your account unlocks it by completing the first taming “challenge” achievement, which is defeating six Nagrand taming bosses with all six tamable mounts-in-training (36 fights) while carrying the Black Claw.
Once you do, and you buy the blueprint and upgrade the Stables, a Garn-Tooth Necklace becomes available to try the last mount taming challenge achievement, The Stable Master. Carrying this object in inventory while fighting the same taming bosses with the same mounts-in-training (36 fights again). But more challenging because this item imposes a heavier movement and defense debuff than the Black Claw. So the likelihood of winning the fight is reduced. (Movement is important in some of the boss fights for damage avoidance, and taking 150% damage is always serious business.)
On some level, it seems this last achievement is still a DPS gear check, since these fights are over when you kill the boss or it kills your mount; you just have to kill faster if your mount is in the process of dying faster. I guess the mount may be healable (according to a comment at Wowhead, A hunter Mend Pet heals the mount, since a normal pet is dismissed by mounting the trainee animal. I’ll have to remember that.)
That doesn’t seem right or fair, especially to non-DPS or pet-dependent classes (demonologist locks and beastmaster hunters, for instance), but I seem to recall Blizz coming up with challenges and achievements designed to screw certain classes and specs, so maybe it’s really that way.
Well, it would seem that my destro warlock is my most “powerful” toon, relatively-speaking for her level. At level 90 and iLvl 500, she managed to solo one of those level 92 elite rock giants on the Timeless Isle. I couldn’t do that on any of my other toons at level 90 (ret pally, spriest, sub rogue, BM hunter), all with higher iLvls and much more play experience on my part, even post-nerf.
It took 3 years, but I FINALLY got the Scepter of Azj’Aqir Archaeology mount.
Grats! That’s pretty cool. How much concentrated effort was that over 3 years?
I mean, getting a rare solve is pretty much a crapshoot, right? Getting one is either “the harder I work, the luckier I get” or “the RNG gods smiled on me tonight”!
I personally don’t grind archaeology, or even take shots at it at opportunity lately. Archaeology in Draenor is pretty much “approach digsite, fight mobs, survey, fight mobs, survey…” I got spoiled in Wrath/Cat/MoP with “fly in, survey, maybe oneshot some mob in the way, survey…” It’s just a lot more effort.
And I feel like I still have so much to do in Draenor I can’t make myself take time out to do archaeology (or anything else) in any of the earlier zones.
Anyway, grats. Given all the complications and competing priorities, scoring a cool archaeology epic is quite an accomplishment.
Thanks!
Hard to say exactly how much work this was. Archy puts me at over 300 Tol’vir solves, but I didn’t have it installed for the entire time. Since Pandaria (or whenever you could crate your solves), I’ve been trading all my solves for Tol’vir artifact crates from Bronzebeard. It’s been at least 400 of those crates.
A while back, my paladin ran through Black Temple and picked up all three tier pieces (Lightbringer set) available there, on the first run, so no reason to go back.
I finally took her into the Battle for Mount Hyjal raid yesterday, to try for the last two pieces (helm and gloves). First, I’m trying to comprehend Blizzard’s decision to switch from “the actual gear drops” in BT, to “let’s drop tokens” in BfMH. Second, let me say, “what an effin’ tedious raid”, at least solo. Wave after wave of mobs before each boss. Especially tedious in the Horde Encampment, where I had to run all over creation to kill everything.
But the second boss in the Horde area dropped three glove tokens … all of them labeled “Rogue, mage, druid”. So, dammit, I’m going to have to do it again. Thankfully, Archimonde dropped a helm token for my paladin.
But, dammit, is there any way out of there while still in the vicinity of Archimonde/Night Elf Village? I couldn’t find an exit anywhere around there. So I rode all the way back to the Alliance camp (dodging the swarms of undead and demons), and could not find where I came in. So I hearthed out, which means now I have to do the whole “go to Dalaran, take the portal to the Caverns of Time, reenter the BfMH raid”, just so I can talk to the NPC who will trade me an actual helmet for this stupid token.
And, what, no effin’ boots and belt? Do matching boots and belt drop in Sunwell or something?
ETA" Geek Mecha. grats on the mount, and your persistence! My paladin got that one fairly early in Cataclysm, but never uses is. My paladin is also my alchemist, and I was more interested in that dragon mount. Which she has still not found. I’d even saved up enough gold to buy the parts, but … nothing.
Yes for the boots and belt. And bracers too.
Yeah, thank god I’m not an Alchemist on this toon or I’d be pining away for that one. Do you know how many Canopic Jars I’ve opened? If I see one more, I’m going to need one for myself. 
Wait what? What are you talking about? 
The last raid where actual tier pieces dropped was Blackwing Lair(Tier 2), every raid after that dropped tokens for tier pieces, including Black Temple. It is a bit messy in the TBC raids though, since the tier sets are spread out across several raids.
And yes, Hyjal is horrible, 90% trash. 
Yes, seriously, the shoulders, chest, and legs all dropped for me as actual gear, not tokens.
I’ve never done much with archeology, but I have a few solves in WoD, including two pieces now on display in my garrison. The fragments drop in minecarts, and apparently there is no minimum skill required to solve them…my Paladin had an archeology skill of about 2 which I did the solves.
Anyone been camping for Poundfist?
I did some server-hopping last week to get myself into a likely-looking group, and sure enough, after a couple of hours we had a spawn. I tagged it, but as soon as it died, the corpse (and all of the hundreds of players swarming into the area) disappeared, and I was punted back to my home server. No gronnling mount for me.
Despite two tickets opened, Blizz has declined to fix it for me, and I am not looking forward to camping again!
I’ve had better luck camping the less desirable rare drops, though. I’ve gotten Sapphire Riverbeast, Mottled Meadowstomper, and the Breezestrider talbuk this week. Plus I already had the Garn Nighthowl.
That brings my mount total up to 135.
Okay, not WoD-related, but I stumbled upon this WoW video that cracked me right up. It’s a massive crowd of level 1 mages taking out a level 86 death knight:
(NSFW, due to language)
Camping for the gronnling again last night…
With nothing else better to do, I spent the better part of yesterday fishing in Gorgrond, waiting around for Poundfist. Since his spawn is affected by today’s server resets, and there were still a very few servers that had no reported spawns yet, there were a lot of campers, probably several hundred at least, on the Frostwolf/Vashj server that I joined through Premades.
I figured I’d spend the time fishing up lunkers for Nat Pagle, but you can only have 5 of one kind in your inventory at once. So when I fished up the fifth one, about 11PM last night, I quickly hearthed back my garrison to turn them in, and no sooner than I was done putting my coins in the bank, raid warnings started going off like mad - of course it spawned while I was at the garrison! TWELVE HOURS of camping and it spawned during the 2 minutes I was in the garrison. LOL.
That was one really long, anxious flight path! Used Avianna’s Feather to get to the boss as quickly as I could, ditching mid-air and taking a 90% health hit. He was 99% dead when I got there, just in time for me to throw one Shruiken Toss at him, which appeared to be the killing blow.
Got the mount. And man, was that nerve-wracking!
Nice work. Congratulations!
Serious grats are in order. I have seen so much angst over camping that mount.
But looking at it from the outside, it must have looked skeevy as hell. Fly in, drop from the sky, ninja the KB with a weak ranged attack, win the mount.
People who think they deserve cool drops by “camping harder” than anyone else would be enraged by that. Which, to my mind, is a total bonus.
Everyone who tagged him got the mount.
I realize that. I guess I wasn’t clear that I know no one was denied a mount, but in my experience there are still a lot of prima donnas who don’t think YOU should have gotten a mount, even if they did. Because you weren’t hardcore enough. :rolleyes: (Neglecting the dedicated camping/fishing you mentioned earlier…which those same folks may not have seen.)
TBH, the QQ rage I see in the community amuses me.
Me? I’m just happy for you. I’ve seen a few of those gronnling mounts around; they’re pretty impressive. And there are always many forum-inches spent by people complaining about how hard it is to get that thing.
Funny thing is, as much as I thought I wanted that gronnling, I actually have barely ridden it since getting it the other night.
It’s still all about Invincible - that one’s been my favorite mount since I got it a few months back. And yes, I do get some QQ rage from people who have been farming for that mount for ages with no luck. A lot of the gronnling camping folks tend to be mount collectors, so Invincible did get a few comments.
I loved seeing all the rare mount throwdowns, as the people with the biggest mount collections would do - Oh, you’ve got a Magic Rooster mount? Well, check out my Black Proto Drake! And so on, until someone with the black AQ Scarab Lord bug mount showed up. Everyone was typing /grovel, because that one just couldn’t be topped.