There’s a flying dragon on Stormrage that I see maybe twice a week. Reddish-black, void-touched wings, a silhouette that’s unmistakable once you know what it is. Every time I see it I feel something that takes a second to identify — not quite jealousy, not quite regret. Something in between.
It’s Awakened from the Depths. The Mythic last boss mount from Nerub’ar Palace in The War Within. My name’s Talvyn, I’ve been playing WoW since Wrath, and I have 487 mounts. That dragon is not one of them. And because I didn’t get it when the drop rate was 100%, it never will be — not without running the raid on every alt I own, week after week, hoping 1% finally lands.
How the Math Works, and Why I Got It Wrong
Mythic final boss mounts in WoW follow a specific lifecycle. While the raid is current and the expansion is active, the mount drops at 100% — guaranteed, for everyone in the raid group who needs it. When the next expansion launches, that rate drops to 1%. Not 10%. Not 5%. One percent.
At 1%, with one character and one attempt per week, you’re looking at an average of two years of weekly farming to see the mount drop. Two years. For most collectors that means recruiting a small army of alts — level them, gear them minimally, run each one through the old raid every Tuesday, collect lockouts, repeat indefinitely.
I knew this going into The War Within. I watched the clock on Nerub’ar Palace. I told myself I’d get the boost before the expansion ended, before Midnight launched, before that 100% became 1%.
Then Midnight came out on March 2nd. I hadn’t gotten the boost. I’d been hesitating on the price for three months while the window was open, and I watched it close.
What That Decision Actually Costs
I have eleven characters at max level. Running each one through a legacy Mythic raid takes around forty minutes if you know the route. Eleven characters, forty minutes each, every week — that’s over seven hours of farming every single Tuesday, no breaks, no missed weeks.
At 1% per attempt with eleven characters, the expected time to see the mount drop is roughly three to four months. That sounds manageable until you do the other part of the math: three to four months of seven-hour weekly farm sessions, on content you’ve cleared hundreds of times, with zero flexibility in your schedule. Miss a week and you’ve pushed the expected date back. Take a break and the calendar extends. The mount becomes a second job with terrible pay.
And that’s the optimistic scenario — the one where you actually have eleven alts ready to run, where you don’t burn out by week six, and where the RNG cooperates somewhere near the average. If you’re farming solo with a single character, the expected completion date is somewhere around late 2028.
I did the math about a week after Midnight launched. It sat in my stomach for a few days.
Why Midnight Season 1 Changed How I Think About This
The current season has its own version of this problem, and this time I’m not making the same mistake.
Ashes of Belo’ren is the Mythic mount from Midnight Falls — the final encounter in March on Quel’Danas, the tier-closing boss of Season 1. While the current expansion is active, every Mythic kill drops three of them. Three guaranteed mounts per kill, every week, for every group that clears it.
When The Last Titan launches — the next expansion after Midnight — that drops to 1%.
The window is open right now. Midnight Season 2 is likely coming in late 2026, and The Last Titan sometime after that. Nobody knows the exact date, but the pattern is consistent: when the next expansion hits, the mount becomes a legacy farm.
I looked up the LepreStore mount carry page when I was thinking through this. The way they handle Mythic boss kills for mounts is straightforward — you join the group, the boss dies, and because drops are currently at 100% you walk away with the mount guaranteed. No competing with other collectors for a single drop, no waiting on RNG, no building an alt roster to improve your odds. One run, one evening, guaranteed.
That’s the opposite of where I am with Awakened from the Depths. I’m farming that one for months. Ashes of Belo’ren I’m not going to farm at all — I got it in week six of the season while the math still made sense.
What Collecting Actually Costs Over Time
I want to be honest about the psychology here, because I think a lot of collectors avoid thinking about it directly.
The reluctance to spend on a boost usually comes from a feeling that it should be earned, that a mount means more if you cleared the content yourself. I understand that feeling. I’ve had it. But the Mythic final boss mount isn’t really a measure of personal skill for most people — it’s a measure of whether you were in the right place at the right time with access to a coordinated group. Most collectors don’t have a Mythic prog guild. Most of us are trying to get the mount through a combination of PUG attempts and patience, and PUGs don’t clear Mythic last bosses reliably.
What I know for certain is that the three months I spent hesitating on Nerub’ar Palace cost me either a solo farm stretching to late 2028, or four months of seven-hour weekly sessions running eleven characters through old content every Tuesday without fail. Neither of those is a good trade for the money I saved by not buying the boost.
If you’re a collector who’s been watching the Ashes of Belo’ren window — their WoW mount carry over at LepreStore covers it while the 100% drop rate is still active. Don’t do the math I did, after the fact.
