Drake of the North Wind
Find a character at the top of the page to see whether your account has this mount, and where that character stands on what it asks for.
Look it up on WowheadHow to get it
Rare drop from Altairus, the second boss of The Vortex Pinnacle, on any difficulty. On Normal the dungeon can be reset and run again at once, so the kills are not held to one a day.
Chance 0.87% per try, so about 115 tries on average — Wowhead: 1,514 mounts in 175,024 recorded Normal loots of Altairus (read 2026-10-11). On Heroic it has 1,073 in 139,155, 0.77%. The tooltip's 0.68% is every loot pooled, 2,708 in 395,464, which takes in 81,285 loots under neither heading with 121 mounts among them
Inside The Vortex Pinnacle, a dungeon
Time there about 4 min a visit
Before you go
Nothing to unlock first: go there and take your chance.
Getting there
/way Uldum 76.8 84.6 - Take the portal from Wizard's Sanctum to Caverns of Time*
- Fly the rest of the way
- Take the portal from Pathfinder's Den to Caverns of Time*
- Fly the rest of the way
/way is for the TomTom addon. Travel times are estimates: flying at 55 yards a second in a straight
line and 30 seconds for a portal. A star marks a portal that needs a quest or other unlock done first.
Notes and sources
About 116 Normal kills expected at 0.87%. The split by difficulty comes from the data behind Wowhead's dropped-by list, taking its mode 1 as Normal and mode 2 as Heroic (the game's difficulty ids), not from labels on the page.
Normal has no daily lockout: Wowhead comments of 2025 describe repeating Normal runs on one character. Players time a run to Altairus at about 1 minute 45 seconds to 2 minutes 15 (comments of 2025 and 2026). After the kill, jumping off the edge of the platform puts the character back at the start (a 2025 comment). The game's cap on new instances in an hour still applies; its size was not looked up. Heroic is once a day for each character (a 2025 comment speaks of adding a daily Heroic), so a Heroic kill can be added to the Normal ones.
A 2025 comment has the run as the bosses only, with every creature between them left alone, which reads as Grand Vizier Ertan first and then Altairus; that Ertan has to die first was not confirmed elsewhere. The entrance, from the game's table, hangs in the sky off Uldum's south-east coast, so it is flown to; the wiki has 77, 84. The time on the spot is an estimate for one run to Altairus and back out.
Players' own counts run from the first kill to 171 runs, and to 270 without it (comments of 2025 and 2026), which is what a chance under 1% looks like.
The wiki says any difficulty and lists the reins under Normal and Heroic on Altairus's page. Comments of 2024 and 2025 report the drake from Timewalking runs, so the weeks of Cataclysm Timewalking add a third way in. Wowhead shows no separate count for those: the 81,285 loots outside Normal and Heroic (0.15%) may be Timewalking and the keystone runs of Dragonflight's second season, when the chest at the dungeon's end (Challenger's Cache) could hold the reins as well (Wowhead: 67 in 5,637).
Comments of 2025 report drops during Collector's Bounty, a limited-time event that raised the chance; whether one is running now was not looked up. The wiki names the Black Market as another place the reins turn up, and Wowhead lists the Reins of the Quantum Courser; neither is the route described.
Confidence in this entry: high. Looked up in 2026.
Sources