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SiteSo Many Mounts and Nothing to Ride!
Patch 3.0.2 — also known as “Echoes of Doom” — brings about many changes in preparation of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. We see the new level 80 talent trees, changes to player UI, the introduction of player achievements, and much, much more. However, even with all of those changes, there’s one aspect of the patch that has really intrigued me: allowing players to summon mounts as opposed to carrying them in their bags!
I’ve always enjoyed trying to acquire many of the special mounts available within the game. The Deathcharger’s Reins, the Amani War Bear, the Swift Razzashi Raptor, Swift Zulian Tiger, and Reins of the Winterspring Frostsaber. I envied my friends who pursued their love of in-game mounts while struggling with a single limitation: bag space. I felt that it was silly to waste otherwise valuable bag space with mounts that I would rarely use when that space would be best applied to carrying farming materials or quest items.
Being able to summon mounts as opposed to carrying them has given me the flexibility to pursue a mount collection of my own. However, I didn’t think it fair to have so many mounts and not use them so I wanted to have a macro that would randomly select a mount for me. Since mounts are no longer used but summoned, my ability to create a macro to randomly use a mount became significantly difficult. Two constraints existed:
- Mounts are no longer items, which meant that
- Item numbers could no longer be used in macros in order to shorten their length.
I ran into that problem this afternoon when I made a random macro for my mounts. I typed:
/castrandom Amani War Bear, Black War Elekk, Cobalt Riding Talbukk,..
And so on, until 255 characters later when I ran out of space. While this would normally work if I had only a handful of mounts, my new found collection made this difficult — the names wouldn’t suffice because I had more mounts that I did macro characters! Fortunately, player Recompense of Uldum US posted on the official UI & Macros Forum with a solution. In “Random pet / mount solutions in 3.0,” he writes:
I have too many mounts so I used item:xxxxx instead!
I’ve got bad news - this won’t work anymore. You can’t refer to mounts as items anymore because once you learn them, they stop being items. There is a solution, though, which lets you pack many mounts into one macro. Do the following:
First, go through your mounts and figure out which number (or “index”) each one is. If you’re at the first page, the top-left mount is number 1, going to number 12. On the second page, it starts at 13 and goes to 24, etc. Note the numbers for the land mounts you want to use (probably your epic ones, if you have a mix of slow and epic ones) and note the numbers for the flying mounts you want to use.
Then, copy this code down into a macro:
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/run if IsMounted() then Dismount() return end local t if IsFlyableArea() then t={a,b,c,d} else t={e,f,g,h} end CallCompanion(”MOUNT”,t[random(#t)])
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Replace the letters a, b, c, and d with the numbers of the flying mounts you want to summon, making sure each number is separated by a comma. (For example, {1, 4, 5, 7, 9}) Replace the letters e, f, g, and h with the mount numbers you want to summon in a non-flyable area.The macro will summon one of the flying mounts you indicated in a flying area, and a land mount in a non-flying area.
The advantage to this technique is that you can easily add new mounts with just a number and a comma. It does work the same way as the [flyable] and [noflyable] conditions.
The disadvantage to this technique is that any time you learn a new mount, you will have to go through and readjust the numbers.
Following this example, I was able to successfully create a macro that let me randomly use any of my over thirty mounts at whim!
