Vyragosa is an elite rare blue dragon that flies around Storm Peaks in Northrend. It’s part of the Frostbitten achievement which can be found in the Exploration tab under Northrend section.
She has a very rare spawn rate. From the lots of reading on WoWhead, she might spawn a couple times per week. No one can predict exactly to be honest. I have hunted her a few times in the past three years without success, following the routes shown in WoWhead, and spamming a macro.
Cataclysm came about, and I completely abandoned the hunt. Just recently, with the long wait on Diablo III beta, I decided to give Frostbitten (Northrend) and Bloody Rare (Outland) a shot.
It has never been so easy to track rare mobs now with a UI addon that has been around for a while: NPCSCAN.
I had installed it a long time ago, but it never picked up any rare mobs. Likely, because I wasn’t exploring and hunting the whole continent actively searching for any rare mobs. Suddenly, while flying from Coilfang Reseirvoir toward Sporeggar to turn in my Sanguine Hibiscus out of the blue a loud horn sound stunned me. I had no clue what it was all about. A 3D image of a mob started rotating onscreen. I clicked the image and my character automatically clicked the mob, and thanks to Blizzard’s recent feature, the mob was highlighted on the mini-map telling me which direction to go to find the mob. It was a rare mob for the Bloody Rare achievement. My first impression was: “how nice!”. NPCscan is a very handy addon.
Ever since, I have been hunting rare mobs to complete both achievements. Those aren’t properly rewarded with a title or a mount, but for the sake of completeness I heed Nesingwary’s call for hunting.
Vyragosa and the Time-Lost Proto-drake are among the most elusive to find. I had abandoned hunting long ago, but now that I had NPCscan, I felt encouraged to give it a shot. It still took me a while to find Vyragosa. Some three to four days at different times of the day.
I analyzed her trajectories as seen in the wowhead map, and I decided today to stop wasting time flying all over Storm Peaks following its four possible spawn-point routes.
By flying through all those routes, there’s many chances to actually miss finding Vyragosa. Worse yet, someone else could find her first.
I decided today to change drastically my strategy and picked the closest proximity point shared by Vyragosa’s four random routes. I simply hovered in that sweet spot as an experiment. Stood there motionless except for pressing the space bar to remove “/away”. While other people might have been flying all around the place, I hovered in that same place. Motionless. Guess who got Vyragosa? Those flying around aimlessly, or the sitting duck? You guessed right.
She appeared out of the blue at 6:23am EST. She dropped 23 gold-30silver-17copper, and an Abandoned Adventurer’s Satchel. Clicking the Satchel offered this random loot: Azure Dragonleather Helm of the Thief, and Frostweave Cloth x 20.
Somewhere around coordinates [40.8, 55.4] and roughly around 80 yards high is the sweet spot to wait and let the prey come to you. There are better chances for you to catch her standing still than to fly around aimlessly trying to guess which of the four routes she is on.
If you are surfing the internet for a while, park your character at that spot with Npcscan addon. Make sure background sound is turned on at (Menu –> Options –>Sound). The loud horn sound will let you know Vyragosa or the Time-Lost Proto-drake is within range. Click the portrait that pops up onscreen at the bottom to click the npc, and look at your mini-map quick to move in that direction.
Just make sure to have some way to mitigate the fall damage because it’s a long fall down. I suggest the Skyguard Drape (back). Priests and Mages can use levitate. Paladins can use divine shield. Druids can moonfire and shift into cat form maybe. Hunters can disengage before hitting the ground to avoid fall damage.
