I’ve been encountering this more and more in recent expacs.
Scenario: You enter an area where you receive a buff that allows you travel faster than even a DR flying mount. Wouldn’t you then simply ditch your flying mount and just zoom around with it? I mean, it is faster. And the playerbase is fairly widely known to all gravitate to whatever is objectively superior and more efficient.
But wouldn’t that suck? Wouldn’t it kinda make all your DR flying mounts redundant and pointless to a certain degree? I know it would for me. Going through the effort of e.g. acquiring the mythic only amirdrassil mount off Fyrakk but…then just getting a buff that made it inferior to just zooming around without one?
But wait. Wasn’t this post meant to be about underwater mounts? Yes, it is. Because the above is exactly what is happening to underwater mounts. I’m noticing more and more that whenever there’s anything to do with underwater gameplay, blizz is now implementing automatic buffs that increase you swim speed to a greater speed than what any underwater mount can achieve. This includes druid swim form. Take the underwater world quest in the ED for example. It automatically gives you 120% (20% more than a underwater mount) swimming speed and underwater breathing. So not only does this buff completely nullify the point of even having an underwater mount, but it also nullifies being a warlock or DK in terms of employing their intrinsic abilities.
Now look. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for convenience in modern wow. But at what point do we start to ask ourselves, at what cost? Why have flight paths? Why even have flying mounts? Just teleport everywhere like they do in ESO. Do you see what I’m saying? At what point does it go from convenience to rendering our accomplishments (in this case getting an underwater mount that might be super hard or grindy to get) moot?
I’m just gonna ride my foxes slow or fast they’re foxes and that’s all that matters.
Though I do miss when you NEEDED a warlock for certain content (like, I recall there being a dungeon with a lot of underwater sections and if you wanted to survive it back in the day you really needed a warlock to give everyone water breathing, or at least water breathing potions if not a warlock).
I mean i just bought my seahorse off the ah its not necessarily impressive or grindy. There really arent a lot of them though so i wouldnt be surprised if a lot of ppl dont have one. It would suck to do an underwater world quest without any kind of speed buff. And even with a mount it would probably be constant mounting/dismounting.
They have uses in old content. I did that legion secret with the orbs yesterday, having a seahorse was really nice.
Wowpedia does say they move at 160% speed, which is 60% more than normal swimming, so you’re say the buff makes you go 120% more than normal swimming? Or is the buff 20% more than normal swimming?
I think I just hurt my head.
All underwater mounts go like super sonic speed in Vashj’ir.
The buff says it gives you 120% swim speed and underwater breathing. It also feels faster than using an underwater mount. When getting on one of the Ottuks for example, the buff from the Ottuk says it only gives you 100% swim speed. So the buff is giving you 20% more swim speed than the mount is. Also the buff doesn’t stack. So if you get on an underwater mount, you will move slower.
Yes, I agree. We go through all this effort for our precious mount collections, and then the proverbial rug gets pulled out from under us at the moment we actually get an opportunity to employ one of them. Seems dumb to me.
prolly cause underwater is the pits. I don’t think you understand the effort it takes an undead to remain underwater. Why do you think we got the breathing racial? So we could actually get where we are trying to go!
I think it’s more of a case of Blizzard acknowledging that water levels just aren’t very popular, so when they want the aesthetic, it’s either entirely optional, has buffs to make it essentially not a water level, or both.
I actually got it pretty quick compared to others. Since Legion I would swing by Argus and throw a few casts in but I didn’t get serious about it until a few weeks ago and I got it within 2800 cast. So maybe… 3000 to 3500? Some where around there?
Which is a hell of a lot better than the 10-20k I was reading about on Wowhead.
Video game developers in general have been becoming increasingly averse to having anything to do with underwater stuff.
I’d be shocked if Elder Scrolls 6 has underwater swimming since Starfield doesn’t have it and it’s probably been hardcoded out of the Creation engine.
War Within is certainly going to lack much in the way of underwater anything, though I’m sure it’ll still have more underwater than Shadowlands. Shadowlands has no deep bodies of water anywhere IIRC, other than the water you can’t dive into in Zereth Mortis.
