The Thunder-Ridged Elekk is back in circulation, at least a little. According to MMO-Champion, the mount is now being offered again through community giveaways tied to the upcoming 12.0.5 content update, which means Blizzard has moved from one tiny, awkward promo to a broader creator-driven distribution push. That does make the mount more available than it was a few weeks ago. It does not magically erase why players were annoyed in the first place.
This mount was already a mess the first time around
That is why this is a story at all.
As Warcraft Secrets documented when the promo first appeared, the original Thunder-Ridged Elekk campaign was aimed at the German market, used Pringles-branded pillars in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin, Leipzig, and Munich, and rewarded the mount through a QR-code quiz flow. The code could be redeemed in NA and EU, but the promo itself was region-targeted from the start. More importantly, the official terms reportedly capped the whole thing at just 3,000 total mount codes, with the campaign running until March 26 and the quiz site staying available through April 5, 2026.
The real issue was never just the mount
The issue was the setup.
When you take a collectible mount, lock the promo to one region, cap it at 3,000 codes, and then let the wider playerbase discover it all at once, you are not really creating excitement. You are creating panic with a fantasy animal attached to it. That was obvious almost immediately, and it fits the same broader pattern we have been seeing across our recent Midnight coverage: Blizzard keeps making smart moves in some parts of the expansion while still tripping over avoidable friction in others.
Players saw the scarcity angle right away
The reaction on Reddit was not subtle.
In a widely shared Reddit thread, players zeroed in on the 3,000-code limit, the Germany-only nature of the activation, and the way scarcity immediately turned the whole thing into a collector frenzy. Some comments argued that “artificial scarcity” was doing all the work here, while others noted that the promo seemed to disappear almost as soon as it became widely known. That is the kind of response Blizzard really should be able to predict by now.
The giveaway version is better, but it still feels like cleanup
To be fair, the new giveaway route is better.
Community distributions are a lot less absurd than telling players they needed to be in the right country, at the right promo stand, before a tiny code pool evaporated. But this still feels less like a clean second chance and more like Blizzard quietly trying to soften the backlash after the first rollout landed with all the elegance of a dropped anvil. It is the same kind of “smooth it out after the fact” energy we have already seen in Blizzard’s broader latest hotfix roundup, where small fixes keep arriving because the original player friction was a little too obvious to ignore.
Blizzard still has a promo problem when rarity becomes the whole story
That is the bigger takeaway here.
The Thunder-Ridged Elekk itself is fine. The mount is not the issue. The issue is that Blizzard keeps drifting into promotions where the method of getting the reward becomes more talked about than the reward itself. Once that happens, the conversation stops being “cool mount” and becomes “who exactly was this even for?” And when the answer sounds like “a tiny number of lucky people in one market before everyone else found out,” players are going to treat it like manufactured FOMO every single time.
So yes, the Elekk is back — but so is the same old argument
If you missed the original promo, the giveaway version is obviously better than nothing.
But it also underlines the real point: Blizzard did not fix the underlying perception problem. It just widened the funnel a bit after players had already spent weeks complaining that the first funnel was ridiculous. The Thunder-Ridged Elekk may be back, but the bigger story is that WoW players are still extremely good at spotting when a mount promo feels less like a celebration and more like a stress test.
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