Jackals. You get them in the regular course of play in Path of Fire, once you have advanced either your rabbit or stingray to their third ability. They’re not a skin (though some of the new skins apply to them).
No, no, what I saw today was a wolf. A bona-fide blue-eyed black-and-white furry wolf, howling and everything. Although it could have been a husky dog. But it definitely wasn’t a jackal and I’d never seen it before, which was why I was surprised. It was obviously one of the new skins.
-Tom
To be honest I think the Black Lion chests are worse. It certainly isn’t the first time ANet has put RNG into the gem store. I suppose it is telling that my defense here is that they have actually always been this bad, but I thought that was the agreed compromise for having a MMO with no monthly sub. It isn’t the same as buying a AAA game and then getting prodded to buy loot boxes on top of that. This mount skin lottery is a way to suck up money from the whales to fund Living World Season 4, which afaik will be a series of free updates.
Someone please ping this thread whenever they introduce a giraffe mount, just in case I miss it in-game. Giraffes would have the best running animation:
All this pale in comparison to me to WTH happened with those jumping puzzle areas. Those are what people should have been yelling about for years!
The standard “jackal” mounts howl, too.
Regular jackal mount:
New “Twin Sands” jackal skin:
Ah, you’re right! I’ve so thoroughly put those out of my mind that it didn’t even occur to me. Which is one of the reason I guess I don’t mind them so much. They’re easy to ignore. But now that everyone is going to be parading around fancy jackals with wolf skins, Lassie skins, and various sparkly whatnots, it’s all up in everyone’s face.
-Tom
That’s true, its much more obvious. Maybe that’s a nice side benefit of the current expensive rng system. Most people will only get 0-5 of these things, so you’ll see a nice variety when running around. If you could buy them separately everyone would pick stardust and ignore the others. Then every group will be a mess of sparkle effects, instead of currently when only whales and the very lucky will have it.
But unlike Black Lion Chest rewards and dyes (another RNG system), the mount skins are not tradeable. I think that’s what really puts people off. If you don’t like the idea of gambling for a Black Lion weapon skin, you always have the option of accumulating gold until you can buy it risk-free.
Yep. Random, Expensive, No-Trade. I think a developer can probably pick two of those three without causing much uproar, but going for the trifecta is pushing it.
You can always buy them with ingame gold instead. To get one mount skin costs roughly 100 gold from memory, that’s not bad for a mount skin! To get all 30 costs around the same amount of gold as buying one legendary weapon, again not bad.
You say that, but I’ve seen about 40 gold in the entire life of my account.
You can buy a random mount skin for about 100 gold (after converting gold to gems), just like you can buy a Black Lion key for about 20 gold.
But there is still no way to buy only the mount skin you want, which makes them fundamentally different from dyes and Black Lion skins.
That’s true, but picking a Black Lion skin from scraps will take an awful lot of gold, and it’s only a skin for one item. I think ANet are trying to make mount skins more of a luxury item. Since all 30 are equal to the price of one legendary weapon, all else being equal I think that’s pretty fair particularly considering how impressive some of the skins are.
Like I said before, I probably won’t be buying any myself but I think the controversy is significantly overblown. If said controversy results in a price revision by ANet or compromises on RNG (e.g. pick a license for a specific mount instead of any mount) then it’s fine with me!
Well, that’s entirely reasonable if you’re levelling or playing the story, but it gets alot easier to make gold when you’re running some of the high-level end game stuff. One piece of ascended armor or weapons costs about 60-80g to craft, to put it in perspective. If you’re that poor in gold, there’s probably much cheaper things you could be working towards that will give you a nice stat boost or cosmetic upgrade before thinking about mount skins. I wouldn’t recommend any anyway since you might get a skin for the griffon which I am assuming you don’t yet have. Keep going it gets easier!
Something else to keep in mind is that many hardcore players have thousands of gold in their account. When ANet release mount skins they have to expect that quite a few people will be buying them all without spending any real $.
But the point is that you can buy the same Black Lion skin for much less gold on the TP.
So if you have your heart set on the new War God’s sword, you only need to spend 50 gold. Or maybe you like the Bloody Prince Staff from Halloween? That’s 90 gold. Even a high end skin like a Sclerite Sword will only set you back about 160 gold.
Or instead of that Sclerite Sword, you can buy one adoption license. Which has only a 3% probability of giving you the mount that you actually want.
Oh yeah I forgot they are tradable. So if you had to pick, which scheme is better:
- as it is now
- you can get duplicates from licenses, there’s a scheme of common/rare/mythic skins, but skins are tradable on the TP.
Oh, I have no interest in spending money on mount skins. I’m just saying, you talk about that like it’s not an absolutely insane amount of gold and it totally is.
Tradeable (choice 2) is far preferable, because if you don’t get something you want then you can sell what you have, and if you don’t want to gamble then you can buy what you want.
That’s exactly how dyes work (including duplicates and rarity schemes), and there aren’t too many complaints.
Dev response:
tl:dr; The mount licenses aren’t changing but the next skin release will be a single or bundled set. The mount license won’t expand from 30 skins,
Warning: spoilers on HoT and PoF.