Triumph of the Cash Cat

I'm not sure that I'd ever be inclined to spend $25 on a mount, even if, like EQ2's "cash cat", it offers an in-game advantage. As a player of four MMO's and counting, I'd much rather spend the money on more time with a second game than on an optional transaction in a single game. If I'm able to win the mount in a contest at Stargrace's place, however, all bets are off. As a result, I am now the owner of a very blue/purple giant glowing cat mount in EQ2.



As promised, the mount offers a 65% speed boost to level 1 characters. It also offers small amounts of skill bonuses to EITHER your casting or your melee skills (you have to pick one or the other, I opted for melee). Finally, the mount item is flagged heirloom, which means that it can be passed to other characters on both the same account and same server via the shared bank.

I didn't think of testing the heirloom feature before getting kicked out of Neriak (as promised in my contest entry), temporarily cutting off my access to the shared account bank. Though SOE appears to be hoping that some people will buy more than one to get the alternate colors and stats, I don't think it would be too difficult to pass the one mount off to multiple alts as they need it.

All that said, I'll concede that this mount isn't really all that game-changing. My alts that do not have inherent runspeed buffs can now travel at 75% speed (the mount plus the Shadows mount speed AA), which is almost as fast as Lyriana's Dirge buffs, only the mount suspends indoors. It's a huge step up from not having a mount, but I don't think the jump from, say, a relatively accessible 40% mount would be as impressive.

If nothing else, the big blue kitty has given me the inspiration for a character story/background, which I'll be working on and posting here in the near future, so that's a pretty big win in any case.