For your information.. there IS a way to get armored mounts in-game without having to pay. Throughout your many quests you're rewarded tokens called Bierdine/Phirius tokens, all of which you can later use to buy a permanent mount when you have gathered up enough. Granted, they cost a lot of tokens and you'd have to complete many quests before having enough.. although, you can always just RENT a mount for 3,000 in-game gold for 2 hours.. and believe me, gold in this game is SO not an issue. At level 20 I already had 200,000 all from quests/npc'ing items. So think before you speak..