WoW Vicious Saddle: Every Vicious Mount and How to Earn One

What the Vicious line is, and why it is not the hard one

Every PvP season since Cataclysm has shipped a mount called Vicious something, and every season players confuse it with the Gladiator mount. They are not close. The Gladiator mount asks for 50 wins at Elite rank in 3v3 and is gone forever when the season ends. The Vicious mount asks you to win rated matches at 1000 rating, which is the lowest rank in the game, and if you miss it you can buy it in the next expansion.

So the Vicious line is a participation reward with a small skill floor attached, and it is the most reliably collectable mount in PvP. This season's is the Vicious Lightbloom Boar.

How to earn this season's mount

The achievement is Venomous Combatant, and its criterion is one line: win rated PvP matches during Midnight Season 2 while at 1000 rating or higher. Its reward is the mount itself.

Two details in the achievement matter more than the criterion does.

• Progress is account-wide. The achievement tooltip says so outright, so wins on an alt at 1000 rating count toward the same bar rather than starting a second one.
• 1000 rating is Combatant I, the first rank in the game. You are not being asked to be good at arena; you are being asked to be rated at all and then to keep playing.

The reward comes in an Alliance and a Horde version with faction-coloured armour. Both halves carry the same name.

It is a ground mount, and the mount journal describes motes of energy that occasionally throw a ray of light across your vision:

The Vicious Saddle itself

The Vicious Saddle is not the mount and not a currency you spend at a PvP vendor. It is an item that binds when picked up, requires level 35, stacks to 250, and carries one instruction: deliver it to a Combatant Mount Quartermaster.

You get one by filling the season's reward progress again after the mount is already yours. In other words, the first completion hands you this season's mount, and continued play in the same season converts into saddles that buy older mounts. That is the whole economy: the current season pays in a mount, the overtime pays in currency.

Where to spend a saddle

Two vendors, one per faction, both titled Combatant Mount Quartermaster:

• Alliance: Necrolord Sipe, in Old Town, Stormwind City.
• Horde: Deathguard Netharian, in the Valley of Strength, Orgrimmar.

A saddle buys one mount, and one purchase has historically covered both faction versions. When the Dragonflight mounts went on sale, buying one faction's version also granted the counterpart, so four saddles produced all eight of that expansion's mounts. Buy one and check your collection before you spend the rest on the assumption.

Vicious mounts themselves have been account-wide since patch 7.2.0, so a mount earned or bought on one character is available to every character on the account. The saddle is the exception: it binds when picked up, so it sits on whichever character earned it and has to be spent there.

The two quartermasters have a history that is not in any patch note. Necrolord Sipe, Deathguard Netharian and two other characters sharing those names were added to the game as a memorial, arranged with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, for a player named Kyle Sipe.

Which mounts a saddle can buy

The rule is a one expansion delay. A season's Vicious mount is earnable only during its own season; once that season ends it is unobtainable, and it returns to the quartermasters near the start of the next expansion, not the next season.

What that means in practice today:

The War Within group is the one to check on the vendor yourself before you commit a saddle. Midnight is the expansion after The War Within, so Vicious Skyflayer, Vicious Electro Eel and Vicious Void Creeper are due under the rule, and Blizzard made no announcement when Midnight launched of the kind it made when the Dragonflight mounts went on sale.

Every Vicious mount, by expansion

Twenty-seven pairs exist, one mount per row below. The ten oldest pairs give each faction a genuinely different creature. From Legion onwards a pair almost always shares a single name across two records, one per faction, and those rows are marked Both.

The first four rows carry the item name rather than the mount name, because for those four they differ: Reins of the Vicious War Steed teaches Vicious War Steed, and the wolf, the warsaber and the skeletal warhorse split the same way. The item name is what appears on the vendor and in your bags.

Which older mount to buy first

With one saddle in hand and twenty-odd mounts on the vendor, the useful question is not which is rarest, because none of them is rare in the usual sense. Every mount on that vendor is permanently available to anyone with a saddle, so scarcity is not the axis. Three things are.

• Whether you can already fly on it. The Vicious line is almost entirely ground mounts. If your collection is thin on ground models you actually like looking at, that is where a saddle goes furthest.
• Whether the pair has two different models. The ten oldest pairs give each faction a genuinely different creature, and buying one grants the other, so those purchases have historically returned two distinct models for one saddle. The shared-name pairs return the same creature in different colours.
• Whether it is a creature type the game rarely gives you. The Vicious line is where the game put a war turtle, a war snail, a gorm, a basilisk and a clefthoof. Those have few substitutes; another armoured horse has many.

What does not belong in the decision is fear of missing out. The vendor stock only ever grows, and it grows by one expansion's worth at a time.

Vicious against Gladiator, in one table

This is the comparison that decides how a collector spends a season, and getting it backwards costs a whole season rather than a week.

The Gladiator mount is the one with a deadline. Below is the Season 2 version, awarded by Gladiator: Midnight Season 2:

What every rating between those two poles unlocks is laid out in our rewards by rating guide, and where the Elite cutoff actually sits this season is in the cutoffs guide.

What to do this season

Get to 1000 rating in whichever rated bracket you are willing to queue, then keep queueing. The mount lands on its own, and the Honor and Conquest you collect on the way are the same currency the rest of your gear needs, which our gearing guide covers. If you are only in it for the mount, Solo Shuffle and Battleground Blitz need no team to queue.

Then decide about saddles before the season ends rather than after. Extra completions are the only source of them, so if there is an older Vicious mount you want, the time to earn its currency is while this season is still running.

One more thing before you spend a saddle: the Timelost Saddle is a different currency for a different system, traded to Lindormi for Mythic+ mounts, and it expires when the season ends. The Vicious Saddle does not, so a saddle banked now is still a saddle next expansion.

And keep the two deadlines straight. The boar's deadline is the end of Season 2, after which it disappears until the next expansion. The Goredrake's deadline is the same date and it does not come back at all. If you are within reach of Elite in 3v3, that is the one to prioritise; if you are not, the boar costs you nothing but queue time and the saddles are the better use of the season.