Gabryell spent half the day adding a raid target marking feature to the addon.
When they went back to MC that night to deal with the lava packs, having markers would make things a lot easier.
Addons changed the game.
Gabryell was using his advantage as a reincarnator to effectively nerf the raid ahead of schedule and accelerate the game's progression.
"Wanna run Strat for the mount?" Coldhands asked.
Ever since someone had gotten Rivendare's Deathcharger, everyone had become obsessed with farming Stratholme's undead side.
Mount runs were already becoming common. For efficiency, most groups went in with eight to ten players.
"Sure. Why not? We're not doing anything else."
Gabryell didn't want to get cursed with someone else's terrible loot luck, so he formed the group himself, invited Coldhands, then called for more people in guild chat.
As it turned out, if the mount wasn't meant to be yours, no amount of farming would change that.
He put together an eight-man raid and killed Baron Rivendare twice.
The Cape of the Black Baron dropped both times.
Not even a shadow of the Deathcharger.
"I'm done."
A mount like this wasn't something you could brute-force.
It was better to treat it as something you ran once in a while. If he had that much time to waste grinding, he might as well go farm those level-62 red dragons in the Wetlands.
"If you've got that much time, you might as well go to Winterspring and grind out the Winterspring Frostsaber."
You could grind Rivendare until you lost your mind and still never see his mount.
Hell, you could keep farming all the way through The Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King and still come up empty.
The Winterspring Frostsaber was different.
As long as you were willing to put in the time, you would get it eventually.
Ten days or two weeks of hard grinding, and it was yours.
Gabryell was finished with Strat for the day, but Coldhands wanted to keep going, so he handed him raid leader and left.
"Snowy, do you have class this afternoon?"
He had just noticed Danielly come online.
"No."
"Come with me to Winterspring."
"Okay, invite me."
Gabryell sent her a party invitation.
Danielly was already in Ironforge, so the two met up on one of the bridges and took a portal to Darnassus.
During the long flight from Rut'theran Village to Everlook, Gabryell found himself desperately missing Warlock summoning services.
Three to five gold and someone could summon you straight to Everlook.
Fast, easy, and no wasting half your life on a flight path.
Once they reached Everlook, he led Danielly north to Frostsaber Rock, where they found Rivern Frostwind, the Wintersaber trainer.
"Mentor, what are we doing here?" Danielly asked.
Gabryell traded her five stacks of water and a stack of conjured bread.
"We're grinding a level-60 epic mount. Pick up the quest."
Rivern was Alliance-only, so Horde players couldn't do the Wintersaber Trainers questline or obtain the Winterspring Frostsaber.
The Horde didn't have an equivalent reputation mount chain yet.
Gabryell knew Blizzard would eventually even things out with the Venomhide Ravasaur in Un'Goro, but that was still years away.
The moment Danielly heard "level-60 epic mount," she perked up.
She was still riding her basic level-40 mount.
"Is it one of the 100% speed mounts?"
"Yep. One hundred percent."
Right now was the perfect time to grind the Frostsaber.
Most of their pre-raid dungeon gear was already sorted out, so killing normal mobs was quick and easy.
More importantly, almost nobody knew what the questline ultimately rewarded.
Most players picked up the first quest, completed it once, saw the unimpressive immediate reward, and never bothered coming back.
With practically no one grinding Wintersaber Trainers reputation yet, there was almost no competition for mobs.
That made things much easier.
Rivern's first quest was Frostsaber Provisions.
They needed five Shardtooth Meat and five Chillwind Meat.
Shardtooth Bears and Chillwind Chimaeras were all over Winterspring, but according to Gabryell's memory, the quest items only dropped around ten percent of the time.
The drop rate was ugly, but there were plenty of mobs around.
As long as they killed quickly, progress wasn't too bad.
With two people farming together, they could head back for another turn-in roughly every ten minutes or so.
"Pick it up again."
Each turn-in gave 50 reputation.
Gabryell, being Human, got 55 thanks to Diplomacy.
To unlock Rivern's second repeatable quest, they needed to reach 1,500 reputation into Neutral.
That meant repeating Frostsaber Provisions thirty times.
"Let's get it to fifteen hundred."
The Winterspring Frostsaber wasn't something anyone finished in a day or two.
Even with no competition for mobs, Gabryell figured it would take them at least a week.
And if battlegrounds and Dire Maul opened tomorrow, they would have even less time to spend in Winterspring.
He had already planned it out.
About two weeks.
That was how long he was giving himself to grind out the mount.
And reaching Exalted with the Wintersaber Trainers wasn't the only grind.
He would also need to buy a mountain of cloth and use the turn-ins to push his Darnassus reputation all the way to Exalted.
Only then could he learn Tiger Riding and actually use the Winterspring Frostsaber.
So getting the mount didn't just take patience.
It took money too.
Gabryell and Danielly spent the entire afternoon repeating the quest.
Each round took more than ten minutes, and after several hours they had only managed to push their reputation to around 1,000.
"I'm exhausted."
Danielly had never dealt with a grind this brutal before.
The Winterspring Frostsaber questline wasn't actually difficult.
That was the problem.
There was nothing complicated about it.
It simply demanded an absurd amount of time.
A lot of players would rather Blizzard make the chain genuinely hard—kill a dozen bosses, organize a forty-man raid, whatever—as long as they could get the mount faster.
Instead, Blizzard had gone with a mind-numbing reputation grind.
The message was obvious.
You want a rare mount?
Keep paying for game time.
"Well, well. Gabryell, you having a little date with Snowy out here in Winterspring?"
Igor had noticed that Gabryell had been sitting in Winterspring all afternoon.
After finishing an UBRS run, he came over specifically to see what was going on.
Gabryell had already given his roommates their alts back, and the three of them were busy gearing those characters now.
"Grinding a mount."
"A mount?"
That immediately got Carlos and Hugo's attention too.
Gabryell explained how the Winterspring Frostsaber grind worked.
"Holy shit."
Carlos gave up before he had even started.
Ask him to fight bosses?
No problem.
Ask him to spend ten days or two weeks mindlessly killing the same mobs on the same map?
Absolutely not.
Igor wasn't exactly known for his patience either, so he immediately lost interest.
Hugo, on the other hand, seemed intrigued.
"Once I finish gearing my Druid, I'll bring Luna out here and grind it with her."
He was playing Feral.
More specifically, a big-ass bear who claimed his entire purpose in life was protecting Lunatori.
"You're a Night Elf. You really don't need this."
Gabryell badly wanted to point out that Night Elves already rode Nightsabers.
If Hugo was going to torture himself farming a rare mount, he might as well chase Rivendare's Deathcharger instead.
Then he thought about it again.
Maybe grinding out the Winterspring Frostsaber together was its own kind of romance.
Even if the two of them eventually quit the game and lost contact, someday they might still look back on the hours they had spent together in Winterspring and remember them fondly.
World of Warcraft gave people far too many memories like that.
That was why, no matter how many years passed or why people eventually stopped playing, they still found themselves thinking back on those old days.
"It's getting late. Snowy, let's head back. We'll come grind again when we have time."
Gabryell checked the clock.
It was already past five.
"We've been at this all afternoon. You've got to be tired. Don't leave the party. Go get something to eat first."
He converted the party into a raid so Danielly wouldn't have to leave the group.
At six sharp, he would start inviting people and get that night's progression raid going.
Garr was dead.
Now there was only one question.
Would Baron Geddon finally give him that flash of orange?
Too bad Gabryell didn't have a cigarette.
Otherwise, he could have taken a couple of fake drags and tried to look all brooding and profound.