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.

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