I’m going to focus this post a bit on collections. Because an MMO is never over, sometimes you need to do stuff that side tracks you from the main game objectives. And this is nice, because it makes you either do content that you’re not doing most of the times.

Mounts

Most people collect mounts. Some do weekly raids and dungeons for a chance to get a mount with less than 1% drop chance. I rarely do that, as I focused most on grindy activities. I am more likely to do an activity 100 times to get something, rather than hope for a 1% drop, because you have a sense of progress and completion. And, by the way, some drops have 0.05% and even 0.01% chances.

Most people in WoW collect mounts. At the moment, there are 729 mounts, of which I seem to have collected about 496, but of these only 440 are usable on my main character, the other 56 are restricted to the other faction, or other classes. I’ve gotten all the achievements related to collecting mounts, and I’m pretty much at the ones that need a lot of luck, rather than farming, and I won’t go down that rabbit hole. Shadowlands 9.2 brought a ton of craft-able mounts, but there’s a lot of farming required for them, so I just hoard the materials I’m passively collecting. However, from time to time I like to wait for a mount to drop, and that’s when the “Cloud Serpent” serpent appears.

Toys

Toys are super funny, and I like to use a few when doing shenanigans in raids, battlegrounds, or when I’m bored in the capital city. I don’t seek them too much, unless they offer a functional feature, or if they’re from reputation vendors or passive random drops (paragon chests and stuff)

Pets

The pets and pet battle system is one of the best features in the game. Similar to a Pokemon collection, the pets can accompany you into any adventures you start. The battles are super fun, small turn-based strategy mini-games, where you need to obliterate (or capture) the enemy pets. By acquisition, the collection is divided into two main sections.

The first one, Battle Pets, is made of pets that can be battled and captured in the open world. Some are simple to find, while others appear only during specific times of the day or the year, others appear only as secondary pets, and some rares that have special triggers. Fortunately, they’re not hard to capture, only sometimes time consuming. These cannot be caged, therefore you need to capture them yourself, but I got pretty lucky with them and I managed to get them all.

The second category of pets are the Companions. These are earned by doing various content, like raids, dungeons, by opening Paragon chests, farming reputations, questing, killing rares, purchased from vendors using various currencies, from professions, achievements, and others. While most of the pets can be caged (so you can find them on the Auction House if you’re too lazy to do some of the content, or if you’re too unlucky while farming stuff – even though the drop rates is pretty high in all kinds of activities), some others are uncageable, so it means you need to earn them yourself (like the Will of Remornia).

What’s cool is that some pets have unique actions. Some cats jump in your lap, a sloth clings to your back, a mystery crate eats critters, some fly with you. There’s even a black cat with a witch hat on that flies next to you on a broom. How cool is that?

My current progress is very high with this, but I’m reaching the resistance point, where the pets I’m missing are either locked behind paywalls (Store purchases), have very low drop chances (like Papi with 0.4%), or are rewarded from long achievements related to pet battles Family Battler achievement which requires defeating 15 Master Tamers on Kul Tiras or Zandalar with teams of each pet family. This means 15 masters, multiplied by 10 families for a grand total of 150 battles. The Legion one, Family Familiar, requires 120 battles; the second Legion one (Family Fighter, the Argus one) needs 180 battles. The Shadowlands ones needs anoter 90 battles. So all in all, 540 hard and very hard battles to get 5 pets. I’m not that insane. However, the target is to get as close as possible to the maximum number, although I know I won’t be able to collect them all, as some of them are worth a few hundred euros on the Auction House, and I’m not paying for that.

PS: Numbers are accurate as of March 10, 2023 (Patch 10.0.5)