I have been playing since mid Wrath (around Easter 2009) and have been a pretty regular visitor to the forums during those years, and although my memory is not what it was, flight was always one of my favorite game aspects. From the early times of being limited to taking the game’s flightpaths up to get my first flying mounts and beyond, Ive always paid attention to the game system and to what people said about it.
I think one of my earliest memories was the promise of inflight combat during Wrath (which of course never happened). That is the only major change to the flight system that I have any memory of prior to DF, and I don’t recall any posts or offsite discussions of it ‘needing a face lift in mechanics’. That’s not to say there were none - I don’t see every single post as it ‘flies by’ and I don’t deny there may have been some. But there were no significant ones that made a splash that caught my attention. People (including me) asked for some QoL changes (like the ability to dismount on a flight path before the original one set). In Legion. Blizz gave us the option of having some of our favorited mounts used as flightmaster mounts (a neat idea which they never repeated).
But, as I say, if there were any major discussions on things like speed or “can we have flight like it happens in Guild Wars” I truly have no memory of reading them.
Literally playing every old zone with this character with nothing but Dragon Riding. I have literally never ran into an instance of needing old style flying.
It may be a preference thing, and I’m not knocking preferences. I’m just saying you don’t “need” to switch.
Here is the funny thing about WoW. Almost 75% of WoW is pretty much borrowed idea’s from other games from the very beginning. The whole cool factor in WoW when it 1st came out was the fact that all the MMO-RPG style games in the past was pretty much rolled into one game. So the idea they took a popular idea from another game such as Guild Wars to expand WoW’s style of flight, doesn’t surprise me in the least little bit.
But no matter what concept that have taken from what game and used it in WoW and no matter how they may have twisted it, there are always people who do not like it. They always come to the forums and yell murder over it.
I know I myself have agreed that WoW’s flight system has needed to be spiced up since back in MoP days. I felt it had become dry and boring. I also seen a lot of ways to basically just simply cheese a lot of encounters be it PvP or PvE. I felt so much more could be done with it than just static flying that I myself considered more like flying a helicopter than anything else.
Am I a fan of having no fly zones in the game period, nope, don’t think they are the answer to adding magic of the old days of classic back to the feeling of danger to the game either. Did it bother me really when we had to hoof it on ground mounts for half and xpac because designers felt for one reason or another that this extended the playability life of an xpac. Nope I just rolled with it, which is how I deal pretty much with every change that is ever rolled out in the game. I do not see WoW as static, I see it at fluid and forever changing.
When people bring up ideas or in general just ask for things to be changed if its subtle or not so subtle what is done at that point may not be actually done the way some expected it to be dealt with. No one had to say ohhh we think Guild Wars has it right. Just by years of people saying hey we like things spruced up some, is enough for Divs to be looking at ways of doing that, then they say hey we think these people have it somewhat where we want it.
We are where we are at, and that is just the way it is.
They need to get rid of the 5-second cast time. There’s absolutely no reason that it should take 5 seconds to transfer between static and dynamic flight.
I was there knee shooter, 10,000 years ago when BC came out and yes, I remember many discussions on the forums about how infinitely floating in the air without need for user input was wrong and bad.
I dunno. I still see all this as part of the master plan from the start. There are a small number of things I don’t understand from Blizzard, but on the whole, I understand where they are coming from and understand (as a devil’s advocate for the devs, not necessarily as a player) why they made decisions they did.
First, where we are now is where we were supposed to be long ago. Blizzard learned how to do something hard across two expansions. We were always supposed to have animated mounts to use with Dragonriding.
So now that we have all the mounts animated and using the 3D flying (riding term du jour), they never said or planned for us to switch seamlessly. There is supposed to be a penalty so you can’t stay aloft forever, avoid content, easily target a single mob in questing, grow pvp and game integration of flight mechanics.
I understand in Dragonflight, why we got Dragonriding. But I don’t understand why they don’t make us ALL do Pathfinder to get both flight methods now that they are fairly split, with accessibility options in the user settings menu and game world for flight around some key encounters.
I suppose if I have TLDR it’s “We all knew Blizzard’s plan, bring back Pathfinder to make everyone groan equally and finish this feature off for good.”
Dragonflight was designed with dragonriding in mind. Its a core feature of the expansion. Not once did I ever have an issue with any of the things youre talking about.
Edit: I should expand and say that I wouldnt expect it to be an issue moving forward, and I havent had an issue with anything moving backward either. Probably not clear from my initial post.
I actually like dragonriding when I’m just trying to get somewhere quickly. But at the same time, it’s absolutely infuriating not being able to do very very basic things like hover, and the way you can use up all of your vigor just doing simple things like trying to fly from the bottom to the top of a cliff or steep hill.
Currently, with access to both, I think it’s a pretty good compromise. I basically start out on my dragonriding mount. When I run out of vigor, want to hover, or any other reason, I can just drop off my dragonriding mount and cast flight-form mid-air. If I can’t still do that in TWW, I’ll be …disappointed.
I only enjoy the new flight for long distance travel its a pita for anything else, I have a family member with a disability that struggles hard with the new flight mode its just to fast for her to react to and she ends up landing in some unfortunate locations like in the boss or pulling the entire area I for one am glad they are keeping the old way of flying in and have also added in allowing your friends to just ride with you because some folks simply cant visually/mechanically handle the new flight.
I like having choices. I prefer old flying, I should have that choice, others like the new Dragonflying style, and thats cool. Choice is something we need more of.