I sure as hell am not gonna put MORE time into WoW just to be able to fly.
I remember folks flying around me in BfA, and it annoyed me I couldn’t because I wasn’t ‘playing the game enough’ (I’m a PvP player predominantly) so I just quit during that time.
SL, I was around but always in Oribos, so I couldn’t care less about flying then.
If they force me to do renowns/reps, again, I just won’t renew lol. I don’t play WoW for dailies anymore, nor PvE, just PvP.
Tbh, it’s not really normal pathfinder though. We can still dragon-ride, just won’t be able to use our older mounts without it. Still sucks, just not as bad as before.
Shadowlands did Pathfinder much better from what I remember. These were the requirements (someone correct me if I missed one):
reach renown 44
complete the new Korthia campaign/storyline
…that’s it, fairly simple
Oh and “catching up” renown was super-easy too if you happened to be a new/returning player, you got like 2-3 “freebie” weekly renowns from the Covenant hall and then you could also get them from “spammable” content such as Normal/Heroic dungeons and Mythic+
“Catching up” renown in Dragonflight is a boring, slow slog in comparison, with most rep being effectively time-gated behind finite WQs (with each individual WQ only paying out around ~150 rep… when a single renown needs 2500 rep)
There is good coverage of flight masters, but I wouldn’t say “absolutely riddled”. (I’m reading a negative connotation here; but maybe you were being hyperbolic?) Getting to a location is also only half the problem. You also need to get around once there. That’s easy in some areas and really difficult in others.
I avoided dragon riding as much as possible through the main storylines when questing. [This was mostly because I think any type of flying is bad for me personally experiencing the game to the fullest. I also dislike the mechanics of dragon riding, which probably made me stricter on not using it.] Waking Shores and especially Thaldraszus have inaccessible content via foot. For example, Tarjin’s Tales is inaccessible; almost the entirety of the floating islands near Algath’ar Academy are inaccessible. Additionally, The Nokhud Offensive dungeon is practically inaccessible, because no group is going to wait for someone to ride on horseback. I’m pretty sure even something like the Little Scales Daycare quests become inaccessible, because the pet you need to battle at the end of each whelp’s questline is on a bluff in Waking Shores that has no ramp.
When there are ways to access a location by foot, it’s not always obvious and sometimes requires a lot of travel to go around an obstacle. That’s not a particular sticking point for me, because I rather like that kind of exploration, but it certainly requires a bit of effort to fight your way through that circuitous route.
This expansion is undeniably centered around flying (that’s really cool), and not being able to fly is a major impediment to playing. Since it locks disabled players out of a lot of content, I wouldn’t have disallowed regular flying at the beginning. Certainly a year into the expansion they shouldn’t still make regular flying inaccessible to the disabled (who cannot reasonably complete the activities needed for pathfinder).
In the absence of an endless resource grind like in the previous three expansions, open world progression has been stone dead since level scaling of open world content went live. That’s why I treat it like largely worthless content at the one-year mark. Unless you want to do it for its own sake, there are much better uses of your time, like Dreamsurge currency gathering on your speedy dragon mount, if your focus is getting yourself geared up ASAP at level cap.
And Blizzard does little to stop them. If PVPers want to fly, they might have to do more PVE content than they’d prefer, but Blizzard is more scared of pissing off the raiding community at large than it is of pissing off anyone else.
I suspect the percentage of players who went out of their way to treasure hunt in WoD, with its flightless environment and hundreds of find-the-right-cliff-to-jump-off puzzles and janky tightropes, was probably in the single digits before it was turned into a requirement for Pathfinder.
At the time, it really was designed to be far more rewarding to AFK at the mission table and have raid gear dropped in your lap than to engage in open world content in WoD, so that’s what players did. It was dumb and perhaps created an unhealthy expectation for the delivery of such rewards in the future, which leads to Blizzard coming up with other things that aren’t so overwhelmingly dumb for the health of the game.
BlizZard has put themselves in a bind and right now they do not need more bad publicity but I guess they are going for more before this year is over lol.
Looked up the requirements and they’re pretty simple. Also you’ve got dragonriding so why would unlocking slower flying even matter if you think it’s an onerous task to do so
If people really just grasped how little the rest of the gaming world right now cares about the world of warcraft. If you don’t play it, you don’t care about it anymore. They sure do not care about if people fly or not in the game or what hoops they need to go through to do so. I have yet to see one content creator to pick up on this and say one word about it. It is that little of an issue.
“a screw you to” players WHO ARENT PLAYING THE GAME.
I’ve been renown 15 for months on my main.
All you have to do for these requirements, every expansion, is like play. THat’s it. Even when this came out in WOD I was only missing a handful of the hidden treasures that were required, and I had it once the requirements came out.
Its really simple to do but problem here is there lot of people just don’t want to do them. they don’t like doing work and its been like that since WOD.
There’s a thread up today asking whether we should keep levelling in retail. While I see a purity to removing it to keep retail streamlined, most people want to keep this level of resistance present.
Some friction is required or you don’t have enough gameplay remaining.
If you do want this to be a lobby game or mobile duel and M+ system, that’s a lovely opinion, but I doubt you will see the community come through with the requisite clarity to ask for this.
So, yes, renown. Renown wasn’t so troublesome to get in January when we all had to grind it for some gear; however it has except for crafters, not kept its usefulness. I’m not averse to adding to quartermaster inventories in later expansions to keep a relevance to renown.
When is the next expansion coming? This expac is a dumpster fire. This forced DR sucks and punishing players for not engaging is a bad move.
