Highmountain Tauren

Details

Playable RaceHorde

Honoring the spirits of earth, river, and sky, the Highmountain tauren embody nobility and strength.

PlayableYes

Starting level10

FactionHorde

Model keyHighmountainTauren

Read from ChrRaces in the current retail client build. The name forms, starting level and model key are the client's own fields; the portraits and body model are the client's own art; the racials come from the client's "Racial" skill line.

Racial Abilities (6)

Each one is a real spell in the current build. The client groups them as Racial - Highmountain Tauren, where every rank and its tooltip lives.

What Each Racial Does

Bull Rush
Charge forward for 1 sec, knocking enemies down for 1.5 sec.
Mountaineer
Increases your Versatility by 1%.
Pride of Ironhorn
Increases your Mining Skill by 5 and Deftness by 25%. Deftness allows you to mine more quickly.
Rugged Tenacity
Reduces damage taken.
Waste Not, Want Not
You have a chance to loot additional meat and fish.

5 of the 6 racial abilities the client teaches this race carry tooltip text in the current build. The rest are passive hooks with no description of their own.

In the Character Creator

The client's own ChrRaces row names Hunter as this race's default class, which is the specialization the character creator lands on before you touch anything.
Azeroth's bestiary files Highmountain Tauren under the Humanoid creature type, the same classification the game uses on every NPC that shares the body.

Appearance Options

The character creator ships 24 distinct appearance options for Highmountain Tauren, 21 on Body Type 1 and 23 on Body Type 2, worth 251 individual settings between them.
Body Type 1 alone carries 130 of those settings.
Body Type 2 alone carries 121 of those settings.
Eye Color is the widest single slider at 27 settings.
Body Type 1 is the only one with Beard.
Body Type 2 is the only one with Earrings, Hair Decoration and Necklace.
Both bodies share Face, Skin Color, Horn Style, Horn Markings, Hair, Eye Color, Body Paint, Body Paint Color, Foremane, Nose Piercing, Headdress and Horn Wraps.

Face5
Skin Color10
Horn Style10
Horn Markings3
Beard9
Hair9
Eye Color27
Body Paint4
Body Paint Color3
Foremane8
Nose Piercing5
Headdress3
Horn Wraps4
Horn Decoration8
Tail Decoration4
Tail3
Jewelry Color1
Feather3

Counted from the client's own ChrCustomizationOption and ChrCustomizationChoice records for this race's models. Blizzard labels the two records Body Type 1 and Body Type 2 in the creator itself.

Unlocking Highmountain Tauren

Highmountain Tauren is one of the client's allied races, which means the race is earned on an existing account rather than offered at the start.
The achievement that opens it is Allied Races: Highmountain Tauren: Earn the allegiance of the Highmountain tauren and welcome them into the Horde. It is worth 10 achievement points.
Blizzard's own recruitment line reads: Then visit the Orgrimmar Embassy to recruit this Allied Race.

Who Is Playing Highmountain Tauren

Our rated PvP crawl currently holds 6,514 Highmountain Tauren characters, the 11th largest of the 26 races it has seen.
The classes they play most are Druid (1,358, 21%), Shaman (1,254, 19%), Death Knight (1,000, 15%), Warrior (733, 11%) and Hunter (708, 11%).
10 different classes appear on Highmountain Tauren characters in that sample.
The body split across those characters is 85% male and 15% female.
In the Mythic Plus crawl, 507 ranked runs were set by Highmountain Tauren characters, the deepest key among them a plus 15 and the best Mythic Plus rating 3,190.

These are counts from our own rated PvP and Mythic Plus crawls, last refreshed 2026-09-21. They say who is playing the race right now. They are not the character creator's list of allowed classes: the client keeps that in CharBaseInfo, which this datamine does not carry, so a class missing from the list above only means nobody in the sample is playing it.