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World of Warcraft

Collecting in retail WoW — what is still yours to farm

Updated 2026-09-22 · checked against Midnight 12.1

A mount added in 2008 drops the same way in 2026. That is the whole reason this hub exists. Almost everything else in a live game rots — the raid tier, the Mythic+ season, the gearing advice — but a collectible’s source is written once and changes rarely and loudly. Farm routes from ten years ago still work.

The lists are not the hard part. The in-game journal carries the full mount, pet and toy catalogue, and every reference site mirrors it. What a collector actually needs is the reading on top of the list: which of these can I still get, how, and how long will it take.

Three kinds of collectible

Every page in this hub sorts by the same three questions, in this order:

  1. Is it still obtainable? Some things are gone — promotions that ended, seasonal rewards that retired, items from content Blizzard removed. The journal hides many of these until you own one, which is a useful first hint and not proof: a hidden entry is not always unobtainable, and a visible one is not always available.
  2. Is it a click, a grind or a lockout? A vendor mount is gold and a walk. A reputation mount is weeks of dailies. A raid drop is a weekly lockout and a drop rate, which means it can take years.
  3. Can you do it alone? For anything from an old expansion, usually yes — and that is the part that changed most recently.

Old content is solo content now

Raids from two or more expansions ago run under legacy loot rules. Bosses drop from their whole loot table regardless of your class or specialisation, so one character can clear an old raid and walk out with appearances for every armour type.

Since patch 12.0.1 that window includes Dragonflight. Everything from Dragonflight back to the original game is now in the solo-farm pool; The War Within joins it when the next expansion ships, if the pattern holds.

What legacy loot does not change is the lockout. Old raid loot is still locked per boss, per character, per week:

Era Lockout
Original game and Burning Crusade One difficulty. Loot once a week
Wrath of the Lich King through most of Cataclysm Normal and Heroic share a lockout
Dragon Soul onward Each difficulty locks separately

Resetting the instance does not reset the loot. A mount with a 1% drop chance on one difficulty is one roll per character per week, and the only way to roll more often is more characters.

Why this hub does not stop at a list

A mount roster is a page the big reference sites already own, and they will always win it. A collector’s real problems are different:

  • Routes, not rosters. What a collector actually does is clear the same set of lockouts every week in one sitting. That has an order, an ending, and things you miss if you stop early — the same shape as a walkthrough.
  • What leaves. Anything tied to a season or an event has a window, and the window is the fact worth publishing.
  • What the journal gets wrong. “Hidden until collected” is the client’s own flag, and it is a starting point for a judgement rather than the judgement.

What nobody has settled yet

  • Drop rates and spawn points. The journal names the boss or the zone. It does not give the chance, the spawn timer or the route. Those come from play.
  • Whether The War Within moves into legacy loot at the next expansion or sooner. The two-expansion rule has held so far. Nothing guarantees it.
  • How Midnight’s own collectibles will be treated once 12.2 lands. Eclipse is announced, not live, and its rewards are not in the API yet.

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