If you are into the Path of Fire mounts at all, you’re going to want this mount. And especially if you are playing a Charr, you are going to want to ride this bad boy.
However, this is not the best mount in the game. As far as I know it does not move as fast or jump as far as Raptor. However, you may not need to have Path of Fire to get it and use it in the rest of the world. I do not have mine yet. But I know that you can ride it outside of WvW and I have seen no mention of requiring Path of Fire, which you obviously need for the other mounts. So if you only have the core game or only Heart of Thorns, you might go for this one. Have you noticed that the base skin for Warclaw looks dorky? I’m sure that’s on purpose. They saved the sweet skins for the Gem Store I’m sure. Anyway.
But… Getting this mount is confusing. The instructions are not clear unless you are completely familiar with WvW progression, as I was not. So here’s the skinny on getting your Warclaw, and you can avoid my mistakes and wasted grind.
Warclaw is not a long grind.
Getting Warclaw is only a day or two at most. As long as you set things up correctly, you can have your mount in only a few hours. I saw these in WvW running around about 3 hours after the patch that released them. The patch turned on at 9am PST on March 5 and by noon I was seeing these mounts in the WvW map. But those were hard core WvW players, which I assume you are not since you care about how to get the mount. If you are a long time WvW player, its obvious. It is only us noobs to WvW who are going to have trouble. Sure the Wiki and Dulfy has a guide, but they assume you know all the WvW terms and conditions, which like me, you don’t. So here’s what they left out.
First of all set things up.
First you have to set your WvW panel to engage your grind for Warclaw. There are two parts of the WvW panel that need to be set up. This is where I messed up.
First in the Rank tab. So open the WvW panel. It’s the Rook at the top left of your screen in the system menu. Then the bottom tab on the left side is Rank.
At the very bottom of this list there are two rank progressions: one for War Gliding and one for Warclaw. You need some points here, only 3 or 4 I think to start the progression for both. I am not sure if you must have Heart of Thorns for gliding and Path of Fire for Warclaw or not. I have both. But you need to turn both of these on. If you have no points, then do some grinding as below and you should get some points in no time. But set up everything else first so you don’t waste other points in the wrong place.
War gliding will allow you to glide in areas your side controls, which is way useful of course. And Warclaw will begin the progression to get your mount. Next there is the Achievement.
This starts the confusing part. the ones that I have checked are just drops from grinding in Wvw – more on that later. But Helmet is strange. It’s not a drop and if you don’t do the following setup, you’ll never get it. The Armor is a purchase for Skirmish Tickets, which you get from the grind too and are a currency in WvW. So as you salvage and clean up your bags while grinding you’ll see you are getting Skirmish Tickets, so don’t worry about those. At the end when you have the rest, you’ll stop by the vendor and purchase things and get the mount. Oddly, the Warclaw Armor does not show up for me in the vendor now, but I’m not sure if that’s a bug or intended since I don’t have the other part done. Next you need to enable the Reward Track. This is the part I missed.
The Reward Track is set on the Chest tab of the WvW panel. This is sort of like Mastery points but a different interface. You choose how you want to spend your progression in WvW. And if, like me, you are pointing to something random, then you are not making progress toward Warclaw. So go all the way to the bottom and “Activate” the Warclaw Reward Track right away. As you can see, I wasted a lot of grinding and only got the drops for the achievement and none of the reward track points.
Now you can go to the first tab of the WvW panel and queue up for a battle ground.
Choose the Top Tab of the WvW panel and choose any of the first four choices on the left. These are battlegrounds. Maybe you can play in the mists too, but I don’t know. That’s for hard core PvPers, which I am not. As you can see from the red numbers, the queue wait can be long. Last night I waited about 20 min when I was 42nd in the queue. But once you are in you can grind as long as you want. Just don’t leave. You can wait anywhere you like. You’ll be brought back to where you are when you enter. So go out in the world or stand around in Lion’s Arch. Either works fine.
Battlegrounds for Noobs
I’m assuming you are a noob to WvW and don’t want to learn to play this hard core. If you want to be hard core I’m sure there are video guides and posts for that. I just want my Warclaw and then never come back here. I did some WvW a few years ago and got some Cultural Armor for the Badges of Honor. Cool. But not that fun actually. The weapon skins are crap in my opinion. They are Bandit Weapons, which says it all. Trash looking skins. Powerful Exotics maybe, but trash for looks. Anyway, whatever you like. To stay a noob at WvW, look for a commander tag and keep up. Either run across areas your side controls to find them or wait until they die and meet up in the lobby area as they start out again. Here’s a few shots of what it looks like.
Stay with the group.
Hey, its fun. Like a zerg as long as you are in control of the battlefield in your area. But you are a noob, so as soon as the bad guys show up, you are their dead meat. So stay with the group.
The good news is that the depot at the start has a repair station – free of course – and most times you won’t even need that. Teleport costs nothing too. So just port back to the beginning and catch up with the commander as quickly as possible.
It won’t take long
In two or three hours – in my experience – you will have all the “Parts” for the achievement that are drops. Your commander probably is doing the things necessary to make that happen. Kill scouts, tower lords, take posts, etc etc.
Then all you need is to continue grinding to move that bar on the reward track across to the end, and then go to the vendor to buy the mount.
Good hunting. I’ll post my success when I get there. But at least you won’t waste time like I did. And if you are like me, once you get your Warclaw, you’ll never be back to WvW again. It’s not that I hate it, but a zerg in the Cursed Shore or an HP/MP run in the Crystal Desert are more fun IMHO.
Update: Yes it will. Take that long.
And Warclaw Armor and Warclaw Armor Bolts are the same thing. Notice this:
The acheivement says it wants Armor and the vendor sells Bolts – Fasteners or Ammunition? Well the Armor and Bolts are the same thing apparently. So go ahead and purchase them. Then you get the achievment and can move on.
But it’s going to take a while. A couple of hours gets me about 10% of the way along the “Reward Track” toward the helmet. But the good news is that I have everything else.
The Bad News is that this mount is nerfed in PvE So it’s really just a vanity pet. Not as fast or jumps as many times as the Jackal [2 in PvE vs 3 for Jackal], and no long jump like Raptor or jumps while jumping like Jackal. Apparently you have to land before jumping again with Warclaw and with jackal you can jump three times in a row without landing. The Warclaw only moves about as fast as the Gryphon on the ground in PvE and of course, can’t fly. So get it and dress it up if you like, but use your jackal or other Path of Fire pet for any serious PvE experience. But like all the other pets, it can be dyed, so you don’t have to look at Rusty Red all the time.
:ww
Windy Weather 