Not tired of Pathfinder as I think the idea is fine.
What I am tired of is rep grinding. I’m so tired of grinding reps for just crap rep rewards and overpriced mounts and pets for obscene amounts of charms.
Can we get a differently designed Pathfinder?
My problem has always been the Part II. I don’t care if it requires twice the time and effort. It should be something we can achieve on release at level cap. Not something gated behind the next content patch. Make Part II be required to unlock flying for that area of content if it is a new one.
With the leveling revamp making the world feel smaller so more players can reach level cap ASAP all the reasons to gate flying by having four separate patchfinders have dwindled to zero.
The sloppy design and thinking of patchfinder has finally come home to roost with shadowlands. Bye bye patchfinders as we know it!
I share your exact same sentiments. First time since 2008 I will not be purchasing an expansion. I simply love flying in new content, and if I cannot, then there’s no need for me to make the purchase.
Aoespammage, read much?
Spicy, I doubt very much you’ll do that.
Except that doesn’t work.
I held off on buying WoD because of no flight, I got it 75% off and well after it had bled out over five million subs, after the Memorial Day polygon debacle. Blizzard won the war on flight with Pathfinder. Let me tell you how.
SL is due to release on or before December 31st of 2020, that means it has a projected Q4 2020 release date. I’d put money on October or November. If we assumed this hateful company is planning another ten to twelve month timegate for Pathfinder, then nobody will be flying in relevant content again until autumn of 2021. That’s about two years away. And I don’t say that with any sense of satisfaction, that is the worst news about SL that can be logically extrapolated from this Blizzcon.
Yes, I could unsub right now, for about two years, get SL when its discounted and inevitably cost them even more long term players, but what will that prove to the bean counters? It will tell them to put even less investment back into WoW, which means further scaled back expansions. If we’re talking cheap and easy content to develop, then which feature is going to the first to be cut?
Flying.
Blizzard hates flying and wants it gone. These developers hate flying because it demands more creative and interesting world design, the likes of which they have neither the funding nor the skill to create. I didn’t personally see the Q&A, but they were reported to have been booed upon confirming that they are indeed too cheap and stubborn to walk back one of the worst decisions they’ve ever made.
No amount of protesting through withheld subs will save flying, even though it’s absolutely the correct course of action. This scumbag company has already decided flying doesn’t deserve to exist within WoW and with Pathfinder, it essentially doesn’t.
For the record, I had Part One done on 9/11/2018 and Part Two done on 7/5/2019. Where is the justification for a TEN MONTH WAIT? What was added to the game in that span of time that I or anybody else shouldn’t be allowed to fly over? The answer is a big fat nothing, because this game had eff all for content until 8.2. There was no reason for Part One to not award flight. This company is incompetent, full stop.
SL is going to be garbage on the level of WoD and BFA, nothing I’ve seen at Blizzcon suggests otherwise, and Pathfinder’s continued existence is easily within the top three reasons why.
Complaining while giving them money works even less.
This really should not be a difficult concept to grasp.
Asana,
Read the OP’s post. They are not rebelling - they are simply stating what they feel and the action they’re taking. Can’t say I blame them. I too will keep playing, but I won’t purchase this xpac.
I like how they were boo’d when they said patchfinder was returning in shadowlands. Shows even the hardcore at blizzcon don’t like patchfinder.
I find that very, very interesting! 
Why the hate? Flying from the jump would make the game useless. At least you’re in at the ground floor and you can get the rep at a normal pace.
I returned in August and spent most days doing dailies until I had to log.
It doesn’t make the world feel bigger to me. My server is still pretty empty even with cross realm and I wish I could soar above the ground and avoid over eager mobs with big aggro radius; however I see no reason to continue to advocate for gold for flying at max level at this point. It’s pretty clear Blizzard isn’t going to budge. My energy is better spent grinding whatever I need to grind 
Amen! I wasn’t exactly thrilled with Shadowlands, not alot of meat there, but I was willing to overlook it cuz I know how the team always nails the questing, art and music every expansion.
But if theres one thing I can’t excuse, its the no flying.
I think MOP had the forumula perfectly, level to max one time, then you earn it that way.
Or hell, I would even compromise with waiting until completing Pathfinder Part 1 but thats it, no longer of a wait past then.
I will never forget how I felt a few months ago when I unlocked BFA flying. I felt like a disgruntled slave, just playing the game to get something I felt I should have had way long ago.
The funny thing is, once I got it, I stopped logging in. Like my desire just went away. This is not ok.
Blizzard, we are not saying it has to be our way or highway but please, work with us.
A one year wait is just way too much. You have all these awesome flying mounts in your game, many of them I purchased outright with real money and yet I can’t use them in the air as designed when a new expansion rolls around.
Does FFXIV do this? No. I had flying in Shadowbringers within a week or two of the expansion coming out and guess what, it was actually fun hunting down all those aether currents.
Get with the program guys, your players want this bad, the length of this thread easily proves that.
Ion I met you at Blizzcon and I remember asking you about this in the Hilton lobby and you pretty much brushed off the idea.
Look at all the boos you guys got this weekend after the host brought up the question?
All the signs are there but you’re ignoring them.
We love this game. I LOVE this game. Don’t let us down. You say this is a game for us and that we help shape it but it doesn’t feel that way.
Then don’t wait until months after they add it. I had flying way before a year.
This is my issue with Pathfinder as it exists now. By the time I’ve grinded out the same WQs with little variety for the millionth time I’m totally burnt out and have no desire to work on gearing. I haven’t touched any kind of dungeons or raids because of it. I’m burnt out. It’s so bad I unsubbed like a year ago and didn’t come back until this month to wrap up PF. Now I’m doing stuff Hordeside and getting those reps up for allied races and I still won’t be doing any real gearing because, again, I’m spending all my time with these WQs.
The time factor if it is the problem. I have to do them, now, or they go away tomorrow and I lose progress. I can’t just throw on a tabard, or run some dungeons (which would actually give me decent gear) and just do it on my own time. If I don’t do the WQs, I’m missing out and losing progress. This is the heart of the issue. Ion loves to tout the word “compromise” when it really isn’t. He acts like giving paying customers a feature they want is some kind of affront to him and this garbage system that no one likes except for the most dedicated white knights who would defend Blizz no matter what they did.
Cool strawman. The issue is zones like Naz are designed to be as frustrating as possible to navigate with insane mob density where you constantly get dazed/dismounted, and mobs are totally pointless. They don’t give you XP anymore, they don’t give you rep because lol WQs and they never drop anything decent - they literally only exist to pad out the time it takes you to actually do the stuff that gives you real progress. With flying, you skip over the padding and stop wasting time and can actually complete things that matter… as in, actually progress. In a RPG. Wow, what a concept!
It is only a “strawman argument” if it’s something I made up to attack. But other players have LITERALLY said they don’t like playing much of the content.
So, you don’t care about the world. Would you prefer a flat plain that only had “important” NPCs? Would you prefer Azshara’s home base to be a place you can hold a picnic without anything bothering you?
Almost every post I ever made here was followed by insults and ridicule. It’s just part of the fun.
Okay Blizz developers pay attention. You already said an iteration of Pathfinder. Okay cool we get it but how about more then one way to complete it? We will have 4 Covenants. How about just having us reach a certain point with each 1 on 4 different characters as another way to complete Pathfinder I and unlock flying.
The waiting until a patch time gated system you have now is just horrible. The best solution is to make it achievable on release just harder to complete. In many ways part 1 isn’t even worth doing or trying for because it simply happens naturally and it will happen naturally in Shadowlands if you keep with this same horrible system.
What’s hilarious about this is that it still didn’t work. I was grinding my Naz rep to unlock PF2 and one of the dailies is to kill a rare. The problem is that Naz is probably one of, if not, the worst zone in the entire game and navigating it is a nightmare. But not if you have flying! I would spend hours trying to catch rares before they died to complete the daily because people with flying would just swoop in and burst the rare down before I even got a chance to tag it.
Remember when Blizz designed zones to be beautiful and immersive and not intentionally frustrating to navigate for the purpose of padding out sub times?
This is wrong on so many levels. FFXIV already does this perfectly. You play through the story quests in the zone, find 15 objects in the zone and you unlock flying. They don’t gate you for 6 months-a year, Blizz only does this as a means of padding out sub times. And Blizz intentionally designs zones to make them as frustrating as possible to navigate. Tons of rivers and bodies of water to slow you down, insane mob density so you constantly get dazed/dismounted, areas that are only accessible through specific hills that take forever to get to…
Compromise implies both parties walk away on even footing. It’s 90/10 in Blizz’s favor.
Yepp, that’s right. That’s why sub numbers flourished in WoD and the game was more popular than ever!
Ah geeze, that’s not actually what happened. Darn, reality interrupts anti-flying zealot’s delusional fantasies once again! 
You are a paying customer. This is the wrong attitude to have entirely. You pay Ion’s salary, you keep the lights on at Blizz, they should be capitulating to what you want, not the other way around.
The ability for Blizz to listen to feedback and admit they made a mistake? They’re doing it with Azerite, the Heart of Azeroth, class design…
When did grinding the same handful of WQs over and over and over again become the “core part of the game”?
FFXIV already does this perfectly.
Why do we need to “compromise” with a service we pay for?
Yes, because of the gated nature of it. You can only gain so much rep in a given day. You can’t do it on your time. If you walk away from grinding WQs for a day to do literally any other activity in the game, you’ve lost progress. You must grind WQs. There is no other way to progress. Even if you’ve already outgeared WQs, even if you’ve decided that you don’t want to do WQs and would rather do PvP or run dungeons, there is no alternative progression path.
Weird how you had to invent a quote out of thin air and couldn’t quote one of these “other players”. Almost like… it’s a strawman!
LMAO. Bruh you get called out on strawmanning, insist you aren’t strawmanning AND LITERALLY STRAWMAN ME NOT 5 SECONDS LATER!
Here’s a hint: I don’t think the zones in vanilla, BC, Wrath, Cata and MOP are bad, but Naz is. Why is that? I’ll let you stew over that while you try to invent another strawman because you are incapable of discussing this in good fiath.
am with you OP. tiered of the waiting for flying. don’t really want level squish and not getting excited for things they took away and bringing back.
ill pay monthly because I do enjoy classic.