There’s a new champion in town when it comes to the most expensive World of Warcraft mounts. If you’ve ever been looking to splash your in-game cash on some impressive ways to traverse the MMORPG, the high point was Battle For Azeroth’s limited-time Mighty Caravan Brutosaur, which would set you back a cool 5,000,000 gold. Blizzard has just introduced a new contender, however, with the admittedly beautiful Sporebearer Fungal Strider, which starts at that same price point with the ability to spend even more – and you can only buy it until the end of the World of Warcraft Midnight expansion cycle.
World of Warcraft Community Manager Randy ‘Kaivax’ Jordan announces that this “magnificent new addition” to the roster is arriving in WoW patch 12.1.5. The Sporebearer Fungal Strider will go up for sale in Harandar, priced at the aforementioned 5,000,000 gold, and it comes with a unique feature that hasn’t been seen before – the ability to swap out the functional NPCs who will join you on the mount when it’s summoned.
To start with, the Sporebearer Fungal Strider will offer a mailbox and a repair vendor, but other alternatives will be on sale. The two Kaivax mentions are an auctioneer and a transmogrifier, but purchasing these will rack up the total price you’re paying. Wowhead reports that adding an auction house will set you back a further 1,500,000 gold, while the transmogrifier comes in at 500,000, bringing the total cost of the mount to 7,000,000 if you want both.
Kaivax notes that, should you collect additional NPCs beyond the mount’s seating limit, you can swap them in and out by talking to a character in Harandar. Personally, I would be more enticed by a mount at this price if it offered additional seats beyond the standard two, letting you have them all available at once, but the wording given here suggests that won’t be the case.
Additionally, the Sporebearer Fungal Strider mount “will only be available for purchase until the end of World of Warcraft Midnight.” Fortunately, we’ve still got quite some time before we’re talking about The Last Titan release date, so you’ve got a while to get your hands on enough gold. Kaivax also notes that “the purchase of an access to the interchangeable NPCs will remain indefinitely,” so you can worry about shelling out for extras later on.
That means you only need to find 5,000,000 spare gold before the end of Midnight if you want a Sporebearer Fungal Strider of your very own, but that’s still a lot of grinding. Alternatively, you could sell things on the auction house, including Blizzard’s real-money WoW Tokens. Currently, these cost $20 / £17, and at the time of writing are going for 251,503 / 351,642 gold on US and EU retail servers, respectively.
Doing the math, that’s 20 US tokens ($400) or 15 EU tokens (£255) just to reach that initial purchase price, before you start considering the potential of extras – reaching 7,000,000 gold in WoW Tokens alone would bring those numbers to a whopping $560 for US players and £340 in EU, barring any price fluctuations within the trading economy.
Before you drop that money, there’s always another consideration. Players responding to Kaivax’s post were quick to point out that Blizzard eventually offered an alternative variant to its Brutosaur, the Trader’s Gilded Brutosaur, as a $90 / £60 real-money mount. There’s no guarantee the same thing will happen for the Sporebearer Fungal Strider, of course, but once a precedent has been set it’s hard to convince people such a thing won’t happen again. Ultimately, how you spend your gold (or real-world cash) is up to you.