Scarab Lord - no title, mounts from AQ usable outdoors

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

It feels something of a let down to discover that I missed a blue post saying that AQ mounts would be usable outdoors now. Anyone can miss something, but this was a huge change from 19 years of the game’s life that invalidates the most significant and iconic symbol of doing the Scarab Lord quest chain.

After doing the hardest, longest quest chain in WoW (albeit with reduced rep grind compared to classic), a whole bunch of us did it. That was fine! It’s SoD, it’s meant to be accessible, we know we’re not the original classic “one per server” kinda guys… But the chain was long and it was gruelling. So now, having rung the gong, it was cool, momentarily for me and other Scarab Lords to ride around on our cool bug mounts.

Oh. My guild member got one in AQ10 today.

By phase 7, everyone on the server will have a Qiraji Battle Tank mount, usable outdoors. Instead of seeing bug-riders and thinking “woah, he did the scarab lord chain too, respect!” they will come to flood the land.

There’s no titles in Classic, so we don’t even get “Scarab Lord” before our names. I think many of us expected this to be implemented. Really, it should have been.

Having seen that everyone will now have a bug mount, it very much feels like - on account of a single blue post counteracting history - that there was no real value to the still-immense grind, the thousands of gold, the countless hours spend killing chimaeroks and dragonkin, and all the extra raiding that we had to talk our friends into doing.

This was the single most epic achievement achievable in SoD, and not even the weapons from the quest are good enough to use over BWL or R14 weapons. It feels that the biggest, raid-filled quest line in WoW really has few, if any, rewards in the face of the mount change.

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You know what you signed up for, before doing it. - And all that you didn’t know, is self inflicted.

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You might have done the questline for the wrong reasons then. The achievement was worthy of respect back in the days before discord, social media existed. Back when half the battle was just to get to play the game: hardware issues, poor connections, managing big player rosters, barely any data mining to give you a nice clear list of what/how to do.

I didn’t bother myself to do the quest chain and I don’t really agree with the change to the mounts being usable outside either.

I think you might have overlooked probably the main reward that is left (nowadays) from engaging with such a questline (it might sound cliche but I think it’s nonetheless true) it’s the friends you made (hopefully) along the journey to become a scarab lord.

You got a taste, an idea of how crazy this feat was 18 years ago. In the times when a majority of people who played WoW never actually raided, a minority got to see only MC, and even fewer people went further to see BWL or AQ40.

And you couldn’t touch this questline without getting 40 people on board with you to do so much of it. Nowadays? Even casual guilds got to do it, which is fine in itself. More people got to see it, probably the whole point of this classic experiment.

4

The rewards were the friends we made along the way, you clearly went for the mount for the wrong reason.

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