World of Warcraft player gets rare mount after four years of grinding

After more than four years of grinding, a World of Warcraft player has finally got the rare mount they were looking for.

Twitch streamer Bingo1 caught the moment they snagged Invincible's Reins - the item required to summon the iconic Invincible mount - from the heroic version of the Icecrown Citadel raid on stream, and it’s just as loud as you might expect. As you’ll see in the clip below, the WoW fan slowly creeps toward the reward chest in relative silence before leaping from their chair and gleefully shouting in celebration – if you’re a headphone user, take that as a sound warning if you watch the clip. 

Mounts are already some of the most desirable items you can find in World of Warcraft, but Invincible is a particularly sought-after example. The flying mount - once the steed of Lich King Arthas himself - was an early example of a particularly exclusive mount. During WoW's Wrath of the Lich King era, acquiring it meant having taken on one of its toughest raids and come out on top, labelling you among the best players in the game.

Bingo1 explains further into the stream that they made their first attempt at getting the mount around the Mists of Pandaria expansion in 2013. However, it wasn’t until the Battle For Azeroth expansion in 2018 that they “consistently” started going for it. That’s technically around nine years of going for the mount, though things really picked up over the past four years. 

If you fancy getting this one, you’ll need to complete a 25-player raid called the Icecrown Citadel, one of the final encounters of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, on Heroic difficulty. While level creep means that's no longer the ordeal it might have been in 2009, the raid can only be completed once per week per character, and Invincible's Reins is not an account-wide item, meaning it'll only be available for the character it drops for. Add to that a 1% drop rate, and we're talking incredibly low odds.

It's also worth noting that Bingo1 has been pretty unlucky. It's been around 200 weeks since Battle for Azeroth launched in August 2018, so assuming they've hit the majority of those weekly raiding opportunities, they should still have expected to find Invincible's Reins around two years ago. That probably goes some way to explaining their reaction.

While Wrath of the Lich King was released in 2008, you’ll likely see more of it soon if you’re into World of Warcraft. WoW Classic is getting Lich King servers later this year, though Blizzard has admitted that the "no changes" philosophy is out the window for this one, so expect some changes. 

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