I have done roughly 200 Celestial Dungeons and want to share how my observations as to how satchels work for those who are interested. WoWHead already has an article about this but they didn’t get it exactly right. So, key points:
- Each satchel is guaranteed to yield some gold and lesser charms of fortune. Most satchels do not have anything beyond this.
- A satchel has a 7-15% chance to contain special prise, which is either a companion or a mount. You can see the full list of rewards on WoWHead.
- Which special prise you get is random, but some have substantially lower droprates than others. For example, Golden Water Strider has only a 1 in 1000 chance to drop according to WoWHead. The Celestial Riding Crane is so rare that none of the [at this moment] 3600 opened satchels contained it according to WoWHead. However, these numbers are very misleading, and you will see why.
- Once you have gotten a particular special prise, you cannot get it again. This means that after you got all the “common” drops, the satchels will be “forced” to start dropping rare stuff once per ~10 satchels. This includes the Sha mount, the Elegon mount, and most importantly the Celestial Crane mount.
- The reason why the droprates are so low on WoWhead is because it draws data from people who have not necessarily opened many satchels. In reality you can get them quite easily.
- The Celestial Crane actually gives you water walking just like any water strider.
- The Satchels do not seem to drop any celestial mount other than the crane. Perharps they will be dropping in later phases.
TL;DR:
If you buy around 200 satchels, which means roughly 200 dungeons, then you are pretty much guaranteed to get every single mount including the Celestial Crane. I hope mount collectors find this info useful