Well guys, here we go. We recently warned you not to rush the Strider mount because it likely will be the first of a whole new line of mounts with passive abilities and over the weekend we got a first glance of what might come thanks to a post on the official forum. The origin of the posted picture is not entirely known, but the best guess is it’s from the first Strongholds PVP Alpha test. The mount gives a massive 35% AP on a daily use, which effectively simply reduces the span between dailies to 65% of your AP. It’s so powerful that you can’t believe your eyes and while this might not be a final product, it’s alarming.

If Cryptic continues to only give super-rare legendary mounts (based on my RNG test I’d set the drop chance no bigger than 0.05%, 1 out of 2000 boxes) those amazing stats, the game will be closer to pay-to-win than it has ever been. Sure, you don’t absolutely need a mount like this, much less in PVE, but the margin between the haves and have-nots gets bigger nonetheless and in PVP it can be the difference in winning and losing. The passive is so strong you probably want to get the mount before maxing out other areas of your character.

We can only hope this is just a sign of a bigger change in the mount gameplay. People have been asking for an inventory for mounts and the devs stated they won’t bother unless it makes sense collecting them. Passives that you can switch out depending on your build and the situation might warrant such a stable. It also wouldn’t be as bad if they updated all existing mounts and adopted a companion-like system where lower qualities grant the same ability with diminished efficiency. That would also make sense on the business side of things, because mount upgrades from the Wondrous Bazaar suddenly would become more attractive.

With mounts of such magnitude you could go as far as an universal change to BtA. Or maybe even an account stable in which you can unlock the mounts similar to the ZEN store and reclaim it with any character. It’s probably more likely that China will top the Press Freedom Index though, but one can always dream.

Although players ask to stop the insanity, history shows this will be pushed through. Right now you can only hope that this is just a glimpse of a much bigger change and that such powerful passives won’t be as exclusive as it currently appears to be.