Wen Lo, the River's Edge

Wen Lo is the newest mount given to players who purchase a 6- or 12-month resubscription. Once the resub is purchased, the mount appears in the player's mount collection tab upon the next time that they log into the game.

Wen Lo is interesting in that as opposed to the universal mount-summoning animation which show the player fiddling with their hands, the summoning of this mount has been given its own unique animation: The player stands side-face and conjures a teal ball of what looks like water energy between their hands, and then Wen Lo is summoned, with added little droplets of water coming off of the player. These little droplets of water also radiate off the player when they dismount from this mount. Wen Lo has a standing animation of constantly dripping water off itself, making it visually obvious that the mount is actually made of water (presumably river water). Wen Lo continues dripping water while it's flying as well, but it does not drip while it's running on the ground. Some mounts have an idle animation or two that happens when the player is standing in one place for a minute or two; surprisingly, for all the other unique aspects, this mount doesn't seem to have an idle animation at all.

The /mountspecial is lovely, and I'm pretty sure it's another animation that's unique to this mount. You have to see a video to really understand how cool it is, but the gist of it is this: Wen Lo bursts its watery wings open with a deep roar, spewing water all around it, then flaps itself up into the air where it flies in a small circle twice, flaps its wings a couple more times, and then dips back down to land on the ground again, where it lands in a big splash of water and gives a last little head shake. The entire sequence takes about 10 seconds. For reference, the mounts with simpler mount specials such as of bucking or rearing its head take about 2-4 seconds for the entire animation.

The way this mount is connected to the game world is actually a very interesting story.

You see, one fine day, the adventurer was bored and had been driven insane by farming mounts. Weary of their hefty pockets filled with gold. they decided the only reasonable choice was to lighten their heavy burden, put their gold in a pouch and send it to the Alterac Mountains. Their intelligence was rewarded, and for unknown reasons a watery figure appeared to them, it was Wen Lo, The River's Edge. Wen Lo looked up at the player with his big cute eyes and purred. and from that day forward the adventurer lightened their burden routinely, sending a pouch of gold to the Alterac Mountains whenever they could. Today, some say that for each 1,000 pouches of gold sent to the Alterac Mountains a new creature is spontaneously formed from the heart of an icy Blizzard. Marvelous!

Someone got REALLY creative at Blizzard one day. Years later and this is till BY FAR my favorite mount. The animations and detail in this thing are just remarkable. I can only hope that similar level of animations are seen in the future beyond Dragonflight.