And the lesson Blizzard will take away from your departure will be “Huh. I guess they didn’t want old flight that bad after all…” rather than “Huh. Maybe we did something unnecessary and dumb…”
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Oh noes. We lost 2000 (and thats being extremely generous) subs out of 5 million, quick lets completely change the entire game so they come back!!!
Roflmao.
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Always has been so us old timers know what the core fantasy of WoW truly is from the start.
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If you want to argue “originally”: The original flight form was trained for 8g. There’s nothing special there. Epic flight was a sidequest to obtain flight without having to buy flight. The intention was to provide Druid with a gold-catch up mechanic through TBC for having to maintain 4 different specs of enchanted gear, and having to maintain training on all of the class abilities equally that other classes did not have to do costing Druid specifically excess gold compared to anyone else. Namely, they mathed out that Druids by having to maintain gear/enchants/training over everyone else was roughly a thousand gold (at content) - so 68-Flight was an 800g catch-up - and was advertised as such.
If you want to argue “muh lore”: The original version was a trained ability at 68. There was nothing special about it. For epic flight the sidequest was a joke, required very very little effort. There is no meaningful Druid related lore in the quest, at all. The quest was a total push-over, and required no raid content or even meaningful end-game dungeons to complete. Sethekk is a zone spell-cleave grinded generically by mages for free badges on heroic, and exp on normal. There’s no meaningful involvement at all beyond rose-colored glasses.
If you want to argue “core mechanic” 20 years later: It does not influence, nor interact with any capacity of druid rotation, class specializations, combat form, utility, or otherwise. It has not ever any any point in time directly influenced any aspect of Druid gameplay other than generic non-combat mobility, and having the capacity to mount 1.5s faster than anyone else. That is not a core class mechanic, at all. Going “WELL I THINK IT IS” doesn’t change any of this.
Personally, with as much continued unending baby-sitting Druid lore gets shoved down the player’s throat who en-large don’t care about Druid lore… I would say given the overwhelming amount of free customization reworks you’re getting in 10.2 while entire classes remain fundamentally unplayable… I would count it as a total victory. We have entire classes that are unable to participate in meaningful gameplay due to poor balance, and you’re getting a handful new ways to dress up your poke-bear cosplay… Maybe Pathfinder flight form (lol) isn’t a battle worth picking.
Oh look another person on a WotLK character with their profile hidden. I wonder which alt of who you are.
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Something that I never thought I would see players say.
Let me ask you this: would you have the same feeling if there had been no dragonriding at the start? Would you feel the same if you had to use ground mounts through at least 2 patches before they handed out the first stage of Pathfinder and then another patch to get the second part before you could fly? Because that’s how its been for the last couple of expansions.
Nobody, absolutely nobody that I ever saw when PF was first introduced, liked it. The only reason its said now is because of gimmick flight. The fact that there is a form of flying available does not alter the basic crappy nature of PF. I will not be at all surprised if we see it again in whatever expansion comes next.
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Honestly PF feels like a bigger slap in the face now that they gave out for free a faster form of flying that allowed players who could use it the ability to bypass Blizzard’s oh so precious ground content.
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Pathfinder really didn’t bother me in WoD or any xpac since.
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Good for you. Bothered the hell out of a lot of other people.
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Fixed it for ya
For context, my neighbors 2 year old was crying all day today too.
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There is a great sense of accomplishment when you complete the Pathfinder.
It means that you play the game, and you get to enjoy the reward.
Enough of participation trophies.
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Agreed! Pathfinder is an egregious insult to all players who want and NEED to use regular flight.
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So does that mean someone who doesn’t get pathfinder isn’t playing the game? If they get all but a single requirement, they didn’t play it the right way?
The main gripe I have is how the value of the reward changes based on whether the person is dragon riding. If you are and like it, the reward is likely worth very little. If you can’t or don’t like dragon riding, the reward is worth a lot. But the second group is also likely going to struggle to unlock the reward compared to the first group that might unlock it by happenstance.
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Old flight is coming in the next big patch. There is no great change required with its implementation other than to make access to old flight have the same restrictions that dragonriding had, which is “none.” All they have ever done with Pathfinder is make more work for themselves that they never had to do in the first place.
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Not trying to be mean, but if your disabilities are preventing you from basic dragonflying, how in the heck are you even playing the game?
Seriously, once you have most of the dragon riding skills unlocked, all you need to do is fly almost straight up into the air by hitting your key 3 or 4 times and then you glide to wherever you want.
I think the ones complaining about “disabilities” are really keyboard turners who don’t use their mouse very well for movement and that’s why dragon riding is hard for them. They refuse to adapt to mouse turning. This isn’t the 1990’s anymore. If you want to keyboard turn, then go back to games like Ultima Online.
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You asked and answered.
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There are numerous detailed accounts of how dragon riding is different from literally anything else in WoW. Feel free to look up my posts to see such examples, I’m honestly over typing it out every day from people continuing to perpetuate this same rhetoric. Suffice to say, being able to perform a rotation is not the same as being able to dragon ride.
Then that is a very arrogant thing to say. Players define how they want to engage with a game; you don’t really have any ground to tell them it doesn’t count because what they’re doing doesn’t conform to your view of how they should play.
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I can time a 20 key but I can’t really DR because the particular movement pattern makes me nauseous. If it’s a really short flight I can manage it, but I can’t do it for any real length of time because I get sick really quickly. I can tolerate it at a slow glide but can’t stay in the air that way so it just doesn’t work for me. But the zones are designed for flight, so I wanted normal flight so I could work on the content I have had to avoid due to inability to use DR. The only workaround I have had suggested for the Renown is to afk hunts for the weekly rep quest, but I dont think that would give sufficient rep in 5 weeks. Plus that doesn’t give rep for the mole people, and realistically the only rep I can get for them is from Researchers Under Fire, and that also won’t give enough in 5 weeks.
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The great sense of accomplishment the comes from checking off a list of activities as fast as you can, realizing the campaign and all the exploration can all be done in less than a week but the renown grinding will take months. There might be a sense of relief at the end of the process, but not accomplishment.
A game should make you want to play it for its own sake, not hold a feature hostage behind a wall of content in order to twist players’ arms into doing it. Pathfinder never addresses why players aren’t doing the content in the first place.
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Pathfinder is not a feature, its an optional addition that is now added at this point in every xpac since WoD.
Dragon Riding is not only a feature, it is the main feature of this expansion.
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