This just in: In the upcoming expansion Wrath of the Lich King, all mounts will be summoned by spells, not items — which means that they will no longer take up any space in our inventory. Good news for mount collectors!

Blizzard poster Wryxian posted about this change on the EU General Discussion forum:

We’re pleased to announce a convenient upgrade to the way that mounts and vanity pets are handled in Wrath of the Lich King.

Players will be able to “learn” a mount or non-combat pet much like learning a spell, recipe, or new ability, and these creatures will then show up on a new Pet tab within the Character Info section of the interface. Players will be able to access and preview their learned mounts and vanity pets through this tab.

Once learned, the pet icon or mount icon will no longer appear in bag spaces or bank spaces. This inventory space will be made available once again for other adventuring needs. Pets can still be set to hotkeys by dragging them to the hotkey bar, much like any other spell or ability.

This is very exciting! Personally I think that this makes collecting mounts much more attractive. Not only does it solve the bag space issue, but it also means that you can have all your mounts available at any time and you have a handy list of the mounts you’ve gotten in your UI.

This change isn’t yet available on the current WotLK beta build, but as soon as it is I’ll have some pictures of the new interface for you.

Patch 2.4.3 goes live today, and that means that (as soon as the servers come up) we’ll be able to buy our first mounts 10 levels earlier and for about half the cost we paid previously!

Here’s the details:

• All of the mounts that previously had a level 40 requirement now have a level 30 requirement.
• The base price of the mounts is still 10 gold (minus any reputation discounts).
• They still require the Apprentice (75) level riding skill.
• Apprentice (75) Riding now costs 35 gold (base) instead of 90 gold (base). And you can still subtract reputation discounts when appropriate, of course.
• The first class mounts for the paladin and warlock are still bought from the class trainer, but now they can be purchased at level 30 instead of 40.
• Level 60+ mounts are unchanged.

So we get our first mounts sooner and cheaper! With a 20% Exalted discount, learning to ride and buying your first mount could cost as little as 36 gold (28 gold for the skill + 8 gold for the mount).

Of course, you now have 10 fewer levels to get to exalted, either to buy a cross-race mount or to get the best reputation discount. But even in the worse case the cost is cut in half. This is great news for all mount collectors! (And normal players too.)

You can find the current patch notes on the official WoW site, although as I write this they haven’t been updated yet. Mania’s Arcania has a copy of the notes from the patch download, however.

Update: Warcraft Mounts is now updated with Patch 2.4.3 data. Enjoy!

As I type this, the Public Test Realm is currently down for another update. But I was able to get on briefly earlier this evening and found that Hallow’s End, the Halloween event, has been activated on the PTR.

And why is that exciting, you ask? Because apparently the Headless Horseman now drops the Headless Horseman’s Reins, which summons the Headless Horseman’s Mount. And yes, it’s a fast flying mount. And yet it only required Apprentice (75) Riding and level 60.

Yup — a level 60 mount that flies! That’s new! Of course, it may well change before Patch 2.4.3 makes it to the live realms. But we’ll definitely have to keep an eye on this one regardless.