Thursday, April 29, 2010

All things celestial

All right all right I am sure you can judge by the title that I permitted myself the luxury of a celestial steed or 'sparkles' as I like to refer to it. I did a lot of research beforehand on wether or not I was going to buy one in the first place.

After all, spending money is one thing. Spending it on crap is a completely different (and substantially more annoying) thing.

So having used the celestial steed for a week or so now I decided to just list the most common facts:

1. Celestial steeds can be bought from the blizzard store (duh).
2. The mount will cost you about 20 euros, 17 pounds or $25
3. There's no delay in delivery after redeeming the item (or I got lucky)
4. Celestial steeds once redeemed are sent to each one of your characters on a single account a celestial steed via in-game mail
5. You cannot sell or trade your celestial (soulbound)
6. it is not an account bound item (once used it's gone)
7. According to blizzard all your future characters on the same account will also receive one (I've no gumption to test that one unless they give us another class)
8. count as both a land and an air mount
9. you will stay mounted when you go through portals
10. You will NOT be able to fly right away if you pass from a non-flying zone to a flying one (i.e. from dal city to the landing platform)
11. It scales with your riding skill BUT:
12. Take care to remember that if you do not having epic flying your celestial steed will be a REGULAR land mount (60%) if you are on land even if you have epic land mounts available
13. Will scale to 310 flying if you have a 310 flyer (each char separately)
14. Does count towards your mount achievements
15. produces little sparkly things (stars) that linger around the location you're standing and the steed has a small set of not so impressive but slightly different sound effects

It's not that the above points were never said but I'd figured I'd group them together before I trail off into my personal opinion on the matter.

That said I would've liked to see a few color options other than just... blizzard blue... and I am not very fond of the two very noticeable problems the sparkly steed has (being the facts that having epic land means squat and passing from non-flying into flying zones not allowing you to fly). I also could've done with a longer wing-span when in flight.
But beyond that it seems to make a decent levelling mount after purchasing epic flying at 70 and the steed then really shines in it's ability to go from running to flying seemlessly.

Interestingly enough I had expected some people hassling me for 'buying' a mount with cold hard cash but that never seemed to happen. People don't care one way or the other it seems so Its not one of those things you have to use in hidden places due to social pressures.

All in all I'd say if blizzard ironed out those two little problems the celestial would be a decent mount to consider for an altoholic with a loose wallet... in the meantime you're probably better off getting your mounts the old fashioned way unless you have a slew of lvl 70s with epic riding on an account.

Stranger things have happened...