I don’t know. I want flying as much as the next guy, but for reasons beyond me, once I bang out a few dailies I jump on one of my alts and level them. Got a DK and a Warlock to 110 this past weekend from 100.
Going to do a mage and priest next.
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You mean ‘leveled the playing field’, right? Being corpse camped by a mob of (enter opposite faction here) is not fun. Having the ability to remove yourself from a situation and continue on your journey is far better game experience.
Also, on a separate note, they should bring back honorless kills. I love WPVP, but there needs to be changes.
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Getting rid of something we’ve have for a decade+ is not a philosophy anyone should be promoting.
Don’t get rid of flying - make it more relevant.
We had plenty of flying content in TBC and even MoP and it was available right away at the level cap.
Having to wait until the second-to-last content drop every expansion to get a Rep Grind to unlock flight is not fun. And when we DO get flight, it’s primarily just to make it easier to level ALTS. Our Mains have no real reason to use it by time we do all the Pathfinder stuff, because everything is mostly finished already.
They need to do it like they did in TBC - unlocking flight unlocks a new flight-required zone for further progression.
I can’t understand why Blizzard is so afraid to create and lock content behind flying mounts, which you could get as soon as you hit the level cap and immediately have end-game content to jump into. It’s as if they don’t want any content that you can’t just walk right up to anymore.
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couldn’t agree more. I have not had flying in any of the expansions where Pathfinder was a requirement. questing and grinding excessively does not appeal to me. it sucks because I feel like I’m basically accepting that I will not be able to compete with herbalism or other gathering professions. but I don’t have the time or the patience for Pathfinder.
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the best solution is to lock flight through the first raid. Once it is fully out they should unlock it but without the rep grinds. Having flight in day one of expansion is bad, but setting it behind grinds is also bad.
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Ok but it has to be AoTC then.
Pathfinder made sense 2, 3 years ago. The problem now is the same problem BfA has in general - just because it worked last time doesn’t mean it will again. Distinctive specs made sense in Legion because of the artifacts - they don’t now. The WQ loop is their way of keeping sustainable gameplay but having it for two expacs straight suggests stagnation.
Pathfinder isn’t as bad as phasing, especially since the numbers are a lot better tuned, and you don’t have enemies swooping in to three shot people. But it’s another case where the game identity is defined by player concessions and not a real vision for what WoW should feel like, look like, play like. Everything in modern WoW’s design seems like the product of a feedback loop without any fresh bold vision for what could be exciting. Island Expeditions and Warfronts were the X factor this time and they are really minor parts of the gameplay.
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Agree that the X factors for this Xpac were DoA. Which bascially left us with the same rudimentary bones as every Xpac: WQ, Pathfinder, RNG raids and PvP. When people ask me what did BfA introduce, what was the theme I’ll just say meh. It was so meh.
What does this even mean? Warlords was when Pathfinder happened. That was nearly 5 years ago. We’ve had 3 expansions in that time (WoD included) headed by 2 different game directors; WoD and Legion shipped by Chilton, BfA shipped by Ion.
Dev team leadership is even full of old timers. To quote a previous post of mine.
We need to face it. There isn’t some “new dev team” mucking up the game, just new design opinions.
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Pathfinder makes this game less immersive because it just makes everyone rush through all the content to unlock it. If I had flying already I’d just take my time and enjoy the content. Suramar was a beautiful amazing zone, but I never got to experience any of that until AFTER I got flying, everyone hated it until then.
Why do you think this is good game design, Blizzard?
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What about sharding destroying world PVP? I never see anyone complaining about that, but it’s infinitely worse than flying. Do you really think going up to an enemy with war mode enabled and them just randomly disappearing while you get sharded into another instance of that zone is better? Because that’s what current “world PVP” consists of. World PVP is so messed up now because of it, just give us flying then.
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Bellular made a point that the current model is obviously geared towards people making purchases on a consistent basis and subbing for 6 month promos (and likely with the hope they likely forget to cancel their sub if they walk away).
If you have enough people making consistent purchases and representing 3 or 4 subs worth of people then sub loss is a lot less interesting for the bean counters.
Good points. Doesn’t really apply to me as I generally only sub for a couple months per expansion now. Typically I sub a month before launch, stay subbed for a month or two after, then unsub until flight is added, where I return to unlock it and then quit again. I might play ~5 months per expansion but I doubt I am the target demo where they make their $$$
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No we want flying back to how it was, it was never a problem until Blizzard made it one. It’s just insanity that you think we have to negotiate and use kid gloves with Blizzard just to get something back in the game that was there for the vast majority of its existence. We’ve had flying a lot longer than we’ve had no flying/Pathfinder, and it was never a problem.
In other games, even other Blizzard games, customer feedback actually matters. In Overwatch, Jeff Kaplan is constantly saying “We’ve seen lots of complaints about suchandsuch lately, and here’s what we’re working on to possibly try to fix it, let us know what you think”. What is the WoW team’s response to customer feedback? “We’ve seen lots of complaints about suchandsuch and we think it’s fine as it is, deal with it”. That is just ridiculous, and people are sick of it.
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It’s always so amusing that people attribute all of WoW’s current issues, if not just most of them, to flying. “Pathfinder alone is killing WoW!” No. There are so many factors that go into this game that make various parts of it good and bad, that even if I agreed with the idea that Pathfinder was bad that this singular focus would still be painfully shortsighted.
Flying does a lot to disengage players from the world, and trivialize certain aspects of it, that it makes absolute perfect sense that they time gate it so that we do actually have to play around the new parts of the world that are made every expansion and not just fly ourselves from A to B with little other world interaction. With flying there are almost no hidden paths, no wading through a fortress of enemies to get to the commander, and there is less player to player contact. Instead, you just fly to the top of the mountain, sit on your mount above a spawn point, and you largely only see other players when doing this hover to avoid anything but the one mob at the back of an encampment. This was Cataclysm in a nutshell, and even Mists to an extent after they tried to design around this behavior; you stop interacting with the world and actively avoid a substantial part of it.
And the game offers so much nowadays in terms of travel speed and options without letting you completely avoid everything by just flying over it. We should not be advocating that they completely trivialize the majority of outdoor world content right from the get go. That point should only come once that content itself is trivial/irrelevant to the current story/power of the game.
Those who are opposed to Pathfinder vastly inflate the requirements as some monumental, and time consuming task. Yes, it takes time and it’s not instantaneous. But more than half of it ends up being passively done by the time you need it if you even casually play the game just a few hours a week. Players have had almost a year to complete Part I, and Part II is incredibly minimal to just play in the new zones and see the new content for a while. None of the requirements go above and beyond what you should reasonably expect a player who wants to play the game to do. I understand that not every single aspect of the game is enjoyable for every single player, but if you really don’t want to participate in the majority, or the core of the game’s content then perhaps the game is not one you really enjoy. Or if your interest is really hyper-specific within the game, then you may just have to accept doing other content at times.
Pathfinder was already the compromise to removing flying from future expansions entirely because it does hinder game design, and actual interaction with the world. Asking for the compromise to be removed would necessitate completely changing the devs minds about the data they already have on flying and its effects. Perhaps having a zone/rep or two focused on utilizing flying per expansion could be a solution, but they would still need to be added end game pieces of content.
Then guess what? If gives them an incentive to play. Once they complete that goal, they feel rewarded and have advantage over others that they themselves earned.
It seems like players nowadays want everything handed to them in this game.
They are 100% doing it intentionally. Look at how hard Part 2 is promoted. They use the reintroduction of flying as a carrot to get people to resub.
Hell, in Legion it even coincided with the class mounts.
Devs, in fact, want and love flying in WoW. They just want it carefully timegated to get people subbed at key intervals throughout the xpac. They know people love flying, so what better way to keep them playing than by taking it away every single xpac and slowly teasing it back?
It’s diabolical.
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Vanilla was fun with no flying because the zones were designed for no flying. This funhouse of twigs, trees, mobs, hills, paths is a nightmare without it and nothing more then a time sink.
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It’s not a goal. It’s nothing more then a gimmick to keep you trying to find the cheese at the end of the maze. Something must be bad about it that 10 million people quit because of it and FF14 has it and numbers are growing
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The first part of pathfinder was fine, you got most of by leveling, just playing the game. That’s great, that is how it should be.
The second part is just bad, grinding dailies all the way to revered, come on. It was bad last expac why would any one think it wouldn’t be bad this expac?
These achievements should be locked behind quest chains not dailies. Please go back to making story driven content.
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