Thursday, March 22, 2018

Paladin Rams and... Single-Headed Core Hounds!?

There were originally only two races who could be Paladins: Humans and Dwarves. In the early days of WoW, getting a mount was a pretty huge gold investment. Paladins and Warlocks were at a huge advantage: first off, their class mounts wouldn't take up inventory space, and second off, there was a far smaller gold cost to getting your mounts.

When Blood Elves were introduced, giving the Horde their first Paladins, they decided to give them something to distinguish their class features a bit. At the time, all Shamans used the model that Tauren currently use for totems, but Draenei got their distinctive crystal/stone totems. Similarly, Blood Elves got a recolor of the Warhorse and Charger, swapping out the gold/blue colors for bronze/red. At the time, though, Draenei, Dwarves, and Humans all used the standard, vanilla Warhorse/Charger.

When Cataclysm gave Tauren Paladins, they got a new pair of Paladin Kodo mounts, and at the same time, Draenei got their Paladin Elekk mounts. These were new models. But while Humans could rather naturally hold onto their Horse models (that being the standard human mount anyway,) Dwarves had to share.

There is some logic to this: Paladins of different races belong to different orders, with Blood Elves being Blood Knights, Draenei being Vindicators, and Tauren being Sunwalkers. Humans and Dwarves are both Knights of the Silver Hand, so you could imagine the standard charger is a Silver Hand mount.

But that's kind of broken down, especially given that all those orders unified into a new iteration of the Silver Hand in Legion. Now, with Dark Iron Dwarves being added, we're getting a special Paladin Ram mount - or rather, we're getting two.

It looks like standard Dwarves will get a gold/blue-barded ram while Dark Irons will get a black/red one.

What's interesting here is that Lightforged Draenei use the standard Exarch's Elekk and Grand Exarch's Elekk models, shared by the standard Draenei. But I suppose that as long as they were coming up with a new model for Dwarf Paladins, it wasn't that difficult to recolor them for Dark Irons.

But wait, there's more!

With the exception of the Highmountain Tauren, the allied races have had variants of their "base race" mounts - Void Elves get a Hawkstrider, Nightborne get a cat, Lightforged Draenei get an Elekk. Zandalari get a raptor, and Mag'har Orcs get a wolf. It appears, however, that Dark Irons Dwarves will instead get a Core Hound. However, unlike every other core hound we've seen, these look like they will be one-headed, which simultaneously looks weird for anyone who's played WoW in the last 14 years and maybe less weird for someone who wouldn't automatically assume that some kind of elemental beast ought to have two heads.

In terms of mounts, this leaves only Kul Tiran humans' racial mount unknown. There's of course a good chance it will just be a kind of horse, though there's a part of me that hopes it's some kind of weird sea creature. Granted, I'm probably going to make a KT Druid, in which case I'm more curious about its travel form (if it's anything like the bear form I'm pretty stoked.)


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