World of Warcraft: How to Unlock The Sandstone Drake Mount

In addition to grinding current content in World of Warcraft, many players also choose to schedule time to run older content in search of rare cosmetics and mounts. By using the collections tab, individuals can browse and view what items and cosmetics, and mounts they have acquired over the years. World of Warcraft has some mounts with ridiculously low drop rates, but the rarity of certain mounts is tied to the rarity of items in the world one needs to find, things like Primal Eggs or Canopic Jars. It is worth mentioning that a number of mounts worth having are unlocked through various achievements. Consider also going after the Volcanic Stone Drake by completing Glory of the Cataclysm Hero or the Soultwisted Deathwalker by finishing Shadowlands Keystone Master: Season 2 of Mythic+.

The process for earning the Sandstone Drake requires several steps, but interestingly this mount has the unique characteristic of turning the user into a dragon. The spell literally turns the player into the mount. This has the added benefit of allowing other party members to fly on one’s back. The only other mount with this capability is the Heart of the Nightwing mount earned by using the Recruit-A-Friend system, but this no longer exists, which makes the Sandstone Drake even more valuable.

The Vial of the Sands and Canopic Jars

To unlock and secure this mount, one can pursue two different avenues. The first avenue depends on obtaining the Vial of the Sands recipe, which requires players either to find or grind out Canopic Jars using their Archeology profession at a skill rating of 600. Players can find Canopic Jars in Uldum dig sites or grind, for example, Pandaren Archeology Fragments that can be turned into Restored Artifacts and these can be traded for “crate of Tol’vir Archeology fragments,” which have a chance to be Canopic Jars. To exchange these crates, head over to Warspear in Ashran for Horde or go to Stormshield for the Alliance. The problem here is straightforward, the RNG of an artifact or a dig site yielding a Canopic Jars is compounded by the RNG of finding the Vial of the Sands inside these rare jars. However, if one of these jars can be secured, then it has a chance to drop the appropriate recipe.

There is another method for acquiring this mount, but it is considerably less interesting than the first method. Simply, save up around forty to sixty thousand gold and buy the Vial of the Sands recipe from the auction house. Players can now turn into the Sandstone Drake and carry allies on their backs while soaring around Azeroth.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is available on PC, Macintosh operating systems, and macOS.

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