The Pathfinder concept is an okay compromise (though I disagree with the general idea of not having flight), but the implementation is kind of brutal. It’s just too long, too much.
I love flying, and quit WoD over it. I never played Legion, and only came back a few months ago. I’ve enjoyed BfA, but I miss my flying and my flying mounts. I spent a lot of time and energy collecting mounts and that kind of got kicked in the teeth.
It’s good there’s a way to get back to flying, but the process is just too much. Make people do the story line quests and all the zone exploration, fine. Maybe even one rep. But it’s just too much.
Every other combat system in the game is based around being no more than about 40 yards away from your opponent. Aggro radiuses top out at maybe 15-20 yards (estimated). Most enemies are melee attackers.
Flying lets you go at more than quadruple the normal running speed. You can easily fly over any aggro radiuses. If you accidentally pull more than needed, two seconds flying over the ground causes them all to be far out of range.
Flying is essentially invisibility + quadruple speed with the ability to ignore all terrain tossed in as an extra bonus.
How do you balance the game around that without ruining it for everyone without flying?
Please explain to me how this is worse than outrunning everything on my ground mount now. Because unless you’re advocating making the entire terrain into an obstacle course, or perhaps putting box canyons everywhere, there isn’t a single group of mobs I can think of which could be escaped on a flying mount but not on a ground mount.
Ok, forced situation. I’m a herb collecter. The zone I’ve been in has usually horde that runs around and gathers the herbs up. In this situation he gathers the herbs an possibly gets hit by a mob making it easy pickings or i can cc him an pvp. now throw in flying mounts, he flies away an mobs auto reset.
You can’t fly when you’re in combat, FYI. I had zero problems with PvP in Icecrown, it’s no different there. You’re assuming that PvP just completely died with flying, which is completely factually untrue. Should rogues not be allowed to stealth? Because they can just turn invisible and walk away from you. Should Mages not get portals? Oh hey, sorry that you want to gank someone, but they used their little flight whistle and are nowhere to be seen again, guess you can’t corpse farm anymore. Such riveting gameplay, I can see why you would want to preserve it.
And again, like MANY people have recommended: disable flying in war mode if it makes you so butthurt about the thought of people being able to fly away from you, despite there being things like nets to ground them. Flying was never a problem until Blizzard decided they wanted to make smaller zones.
Could make Pathfinder slightly easier of a grind to get and have it at the Expac launch. Make it to where each character needs to get the achievement to get flying.
That is because its easier to grind out in the first place. So it would be a fair middle ground.
For starters, there’s a difference between being able to outrun the enemies - not always the case if they catch you - and simply flying over them as if they don’t exist.
Second, on ground mounts on a not-irregular basis you get dazed and knocked off your mount. If you accidentally pull too many enemies, the odds are you’re going to be knocked off the mount before you can break free of them.
On a ground mount, you often have to decide which enemies do fight in pursuit of a goal. On a flying mount, you often can avoid combat completely.
Barding means you will never get knocked off your mount. And even slowed, you can still outdistance the mobs. Heck, on foot most classes have a speed boost to outdistance mobs. I can’t think of a single time where I’ve had no choice but to stand and fight, as opposed to “these mobs are annoying me, I guess I’ll kill them and take their stuff.”
You create reasons for players to stop and kill all those things you’d otherwise fly away from because they don’t engage with worthless garbage. This means creating rewards that are valuable to players at level cap who aren’t hiding out in raids all the time.
What kind of rewards? Rep, for one thing. Every Ashvane mob could award Proudmoore rep, every Sethrak could award Vol’dun rep, etc. Better rep gains = faster paragon cache-ing = an incentive to not skip garbage.
Argus had “kill X number of non-trivial demon” achievements to keep players grinding garbage. Kill enough, you got a mount. We know Blizzard can re-skin mounts until the cows come home, so this kind of reward could keep going in perpetuity, as well as being relevant to new players even when that expansion content is old and gray.
The fill-the-meter model could also reward tokens that could be exchanged for some kind of transmog reward or something.
Point is, if you think flying players not engaging in the mindless slaughter of garbage mobs is ruining the game for everyone else, it’s really not that hard to come up with ideas to keep players engaged in the mindless slaughter of garbage mobs.
It’s exactly that, and it’s decisions like this that make players feel like Blizzard is just trying to stretch out the time played metric. Ground mobs offer absolutely nothing to you other than inconvenience. They exist solely to make the travelling more frustrating.
If Blizzard wants to make the ground content more engaging, I absolutely welcome that. Until then, they need to understand we ignore the mobs because they have nothing of value to us. They aren’t content, they are blockers from REACHING the content.
You know, I had a lot of fun grinding those demons. Put down an ox statue near a spawn point, and before long it’d be me and five or six other players killing everything that moved. No need for a formal group, just people wandering in and out. Good times.
Not being able to fly in one or two zones when flight wasn’t obnoxiously restricted and time gated to extreme amounts for the rest of the xpack is an entirely different experience than when flight is restricted for half a damn xpack to start. The old way it was tolerable. The new way, it’s like rubbing salt and lemon juice in a wound.
Still waiting on that engaging, persistent world full of players.
They restricted flight but forgot to follow through on the important part, making being on the ground exciting and engaging.
Every expansion that allowed flight to be purchased at or near max level was better than every expansion that featured pathfinder, imo.
TBC, WotLK and MoP>WoD, Legion, BfA
Yeah, but if you follow the “reason” of the anti-flyers and those who support Blizzard’s current stance, making you have to travel slowly between two points of the game somehow magically increases your game immersion, magically make the game more difficult and challenging, and magically also increases the size of the world.
So if we follow their stance to its logical conclusion, the game would be at its best if we removed all mounts ground included, removed portals, removed summons, removed hearthstones, removed flight paths, removed any ships or zepplins, and removed the run toggle so you had to RP walk everywhere, while simultaneously giving all aggressive mobs a 400 yrd aggro radius that doesn’t chain so you are forced to fight each and every single trash mob in between you and whatever your destination is.
It’d be perfect if you follow the things many of them have said in the past. And if you don’t support it, then you are lazy and just want to skip “everything” because that’s how they look at pro-flyers.
To try and get to a dungeon or raid, you’d have to start walking there and give yourself a good hour to get to it and hope your team mates have done the same so when you are ready they are there and you don’t have to just wait around on them. But, that’d be a big boost to Blizzard’s MAU.
It’d take multiple hours to cross a continent, and half a day or more to travel from continent to continent. And, you probably saw the blue post on that portal thread, doing that would instantly increase the actual size of the world, regardless of whether the distance itself expanded or more content was actually included into it.
Heck, they could remove content and whole sections of the game and just make it slower to get to everything and that alone would increase the size of the world according to Blizzard.
At this point, with all the horse dung they and a lot of the people who support these inane ideas have been peddling, nothing would really surprise me.
You might be right about zone length but what you are forgetting is how they’ve added mobs that daze you off your mount and intentionally make the zones really hard to traverse… It’s not just a craters with a plane in the middle anymore, its mountainous terrain and there’s usually only 1-2 paths you HAVE to take to get to the top, so turn a blind eye to the truth and keep your bias but you clearly have one.
They also give you Coarse Leather Barding to avoid being dazed entirely and have the mobs chain to their locations if you go too far so that you can ride and blow right past them and not have to fight them.
And there’s no reason, because we have seen the mechanic in use, that if we had flight enabled some mobs when and where they deemed it appropriate could throw a chain or some other spell at you to knock you off your flying mount or drag you to the ground to have to fight them.
It’s not like it takes a lot of creativity to see how that is an option.
And you are right anyway, just trying to make it take longer to get from one side or another does not increase the size of a zone or make it feel any bigger.
You know, Blizz complains that flying makes the world smaller but you know what DOES make the world smaller? Making the actual zones smaller. Go to quest hub 1, kill 10 mobs within 20 feet of quest hub 1 than travel 100 feet to quest hub 2.
The distance to quest hub 2 may be only 100 foot away but the only path a player can take is through a maze over 1000 feet long. This DOESNT make the world bigger. How about you get rid of the maze and z-axis BS and just let us go from one point to another? If you want varying terrain (and using vertial movement) give us flight. If you dont want us to have flight, make everything RELATIVELY flat with no "one true path"TM to the objective !