P.S. Up front:
I went overboard on the collection of pets and mounts, but forgot the most general achievement advice:
JOIN THE ACHIEVEMENTS DISCORD
The Achievements Discord Server has thousands of people looking to do achievemts. You will get lots of ideas and help and groups there!
Something you can start working on is to
- get ALL the achievements for ALL old dungeons and raids. Some require more than one person, but get cracking on the ones you can solo, and look to the Discord for groups. You will get a lot fast. Do them on highest difficulty available to get the lower difficulties at the same time.
- get ALL the Loremaster achievements. This will incidentally get you lots of rep, so that’s good.
- a LOT of Explorer and Expansion achievements are very easy. You will get a lot of numbers there. Then you get down to the harder ones …
Mounts
Well, I won’t prescribe a path, but I know that you need to have this bookmarked:
Having a bunch of alts helps A LOT. A aignificant number of mounts and pets drop from old raid bosses and Rares, so being able to farm them on multiple characters each week.
Also, rep. I think almost every faction in the game rewards a mount at Exalted, maybe Revered sometimes. So start planning how to get rep with all of them.
Other mounts are rewards from achievements, which works nicely.
So you will be looking at a list of mounts and asking: what do I need to do to get THAT one? An awful lot of it is raid farming and rep farming.
https://warcraftmounts.com/ is a great starting point for a list.
I suggest that you make a schedule or spreadsheet or get an addon reminder weekly activities, and schedule characters and raids and rares for the drop mounts and pets.
Then assign characters to earning rep with the factions that sell mounts you want. Wowhead has guides for earning rep with each faction.5.
Pets
Pets are a lot more complicated. Pets are their own minigame.
Pets can be roughly divided into wild pets, and cageable pets. Cageables can be divided by source into Drops, Profession, Vendor, and Achievement.
But unlike mounts, pets are used to get more pets.
Wild pets are captured in the world using other pets. And other pets are earned by using other pets in pet battles.
So unlike mounts, where an Invincible is an Invincible is an Invincible, a Qiraji Guardling comes in 10 Breeds, and you absolutely and specifically need an S/S Breed for use in battle.
A lot of cageable pets are basically too cheap and plentiful to auction, so they appear in droves at very cheap prices. Look at what is available on Silvermoon:
https://undermine.exchange/#eu-silvermoon/search/cat=17
You can also use Magpie
to list only the pets you don’t already have, which is handy when you start to have a lot.
You can easily buy pets on any EU realm now - find cheapest realm, put gold in Warbank. make an alt, withdraw gold, buy pet, learn it, delete alt. Since the pet market is very irrational, you should keep checking it a few times a week, since people often do sell of accidental drops very cheap.
Cageable pets are typically drops from rares and old raid bosses, so very much like mounts. With there, you might start with the Raiding with Leashes achievements https://www.wowhead.com/search?q=raiding+with+leashes#
Raiding with Leashes will ofc crossover with your mount farms, but the RWL drops are typically much faster to get. You can also buy a lot of the drop pets caged at the Auction House, and a lot of them are very cheap.
For pets, you really, really want to get at least one pet to 25 ASAP. Some pets you find on the AH will be level 25 already, and you can’t uncage a pet unless you already have a pet at that level, so having a pet at 25 means you can uncage anything.
Fastest way to do that isto pick up the quest https://www.wowhead.com/quest=70647/oh-where-oh-where-can-he-be in Valdrakken. Gets you 2 25s and a 23 in an hour or so.
So, dividing pets by source:
Drop pets
Same as mounts, plus using the AH as a resource.
Wild Pets
- Get the necessary addons.
- Decide if you need specific Breeds
- Get a good Taming Team at Level 25.
- Start capturing.
You will want to have got all your Taming team pets to 25 before you start, in theinterest of efficiency. Nothing worse than losing a capture battle because your pets weren’t strong enough. You already have Grumpy, who is an ideal capturer with Howl + Superbark.
Mostly, you follow the Safari achievements.
I have a whole post about this here:
Vendor Pets
While some pets come with rep, so you can double up on your Mount rep work, most of them come from buying with currency, called Polished Pet Charms. You earn Charms by doing Pet Battle World Quests in Legion and later. So this is another farming job for your alts. You can earn 100-150 Charms per day per character, so it adds up.
There is a lot in this.
My four part guide to getting started with battling is here:
Oof. Enough for now. Ask ifyou have any specific questions.