Unfortunately I’m not on the community council, so I can’t post it there and have a civil discussion about it, but I hope I can here.
This is an idea i’ve had for a while now, and I talked about it a little on the forums last year, but was hit with little constructive criticism or support. My friend however heard the idea and has been bugging me to bring it here once more in hopes it actually gets somewhere.
Anyways there’s a couple different reasons why I thought about this, one being that flying mounts, especially when they were allowed in Azeroth, greatly destroy world pvp, one of the most unique qualities of WoW and personally what I find more fun than anything else.
The other reason being that mounts are very special to people, but they are confined to a “book” where they are just summoned in and out of existence from.
So the first part of the idea is making mounts part of the game world and not some tool only for travel that pops in and out of existence at a moments notice. I would love to see mounts act a little bit like hunters pets, in that they can follow you around, be put on stay and be whistled for like your horse in Zelda Breath of the Wild. Not just that but they can be attacked and die, being able to be revived of course at a veterinarian in certain towns or in capitols. This way players have to look out for their mounts and protect them, or possibly leave them in a safe spot while they enter a dangerous area.
The other part of the idea is making mounts similar to what they did with pet battles in that they all have unique abilities and they can fight each other, well maybe not a horse, they could just have a dash. This solves the pvp situation so people can’t mount up on their flying mount to escape combat anytime they want out in the open world, only cities will be safe(unless it gets raided of course). I would imagine when a player is mounted they share a health pool with the mount. I would also imagine the mount does not engage in combat for you unless you are mounted because they are not trained like a pet is trained, they require you to be in control of them. They would however need to not do as much damage as a player can, despite probably having a very large health pool, because you don’t want a player to be able to engage in combat with some other non mounted player and be able to defeat him in a fight as this would also ruin pvp.
I cannot stress how upset I was when I played a mage on TBC launch and found out I could not PoM poly someone off their flying mount, this guy just hovered out of reach above the ground and it felt so… it felt like they just bubble hearthed, which I am okay with bubble hearthing because only a Paladin gets that ability so it’s very unique and specific to one class.
Now there is no way to have players abilities be used on these mounts because some things just don’t translate to flying mount combat like stealth, charge, entangling roots, ect and it would be very unbalanced. We are okay with mounts popping in and out of existence, I think it’s pretty reasonable to accept that your character cannot do anything but focus on just staying on the mount, holding it’s reins and using it to engage in combat.
A few mounted abilities I think would be fitting are a dive with certain dragons where they fold their wings and dive downward really fast in the direction you are pointed, as long as its downard, even at a slant. Another ability would be a shell shield for a turtle mount where it goes inside of it’s shell and cast a bubble shell around it and the player for as long as you want, preventing damage significantly. A dash for the horse of course. Fire, frost, lightning breath that can be channeled while moving.
I’ve heard before they had mounted combat mentioned originally in TBC and they scrapped it because it wasn’t fun enough. Thing is it’s not going to necessarily be boring either, but the main purpose it serves is to allow flying mounts into the open world without destroying pvp, this is World of Warcraft, not Final Fantasy 14.