Ah, Mulgore. The enormous, bright blue skies. The crunch of prairie grass under my hooves. The glorious sunrises and sunsets. The shimmer of Stonebull Lake and the awesome sight of Thunder Bluff’s great plateaus looming in the distance. It’s great to be a tauren!
Every race in World of Warcraft gets a couple of special abilities unique to their people. What these abilities are has varied over the years as the game was rebalanced in various ways. One racial ability that, for years, was never used, was called Plainsrunning. It was an ability unique to the tauren, a race of humanoids with cow-like features. In the original beta version of WoW, tauren were the one race that did not receive mounts to ride on at level 40, likely because they were kind of big and bulky characters that didn’t fit nicely on a horse. Instead, they received a quest to learn plainsrunning, which let them run real fast, equivalent to how fast a mount would move. At some point, it was decided that this wasn’t an amazing idea, the Plainsrunning racial was removed, and tauren were given sick-ass kodos to ride instead.
Plainsrunning was eventually forgotten, becoming nothing more than an interesting historical fragment of data, until very, very recently, when it was reintroduced in WoW: Forever‘s beta. This new version of Plainsrunning worked a little bit differently, and let tauren slowly build up running speed over time as they moved, as long as they didn’t stop or engage in combat. So while not making much difference over short distances, it could theoretically build up and eventually give tauren a real nice top speed for getting around the world, particularly at lower levels.
But then, after the beta shut down and in the weeks before the game actually launched, Blizzard changed something. It freakin’ buffed Plainsrunning, bringing it to a cap of 60-percent movement speed increase.
Guys, that’s so fast. That’s as fast as an apprentice-level mount, which you don’t get until level 40. This is available for tauren at level 1. Tauren right now are zooming across Mulgore. You just see one go by, wa-pow! There and gone in a flash.
Now, granted, it takes some time to build up to 60 percent. You get a stack of Plainsrunning every few seconds, and each stack is worth a 2-percent increase, to a cap of 30 stacks. So you gotta run for a while, unimpeded, without fighting or stopping to pick a Peacebloom, in order to get that sweet, sweet 60 percent. But let me tell you something. Classic WoW? Lotta running. Lotta running long, long distances, across entire zones and continents. In fact, one of the things people love about older versions of World of Warcraft is the slower pace. But Plainsrunning creeps up to max speed so gradually that it gives you the fun of moving quick without detracting from that in any way. Even with all the new fast-travel additions in Forever, you’re still going to be doing a lot of hoofing it, literally if you’re a tauren. So being able to slam that Num Lock down, kick back, and (eventually) go fast? What a dream.
It’s great to be a tauren in WoW: Forever! I’m going so fast right now. You’ll need a horse to catch this cow.
