This is mentioned in the forums in the general topic area. It’s a new bug where if you are angled down just slightly off 0.0 (up or down) your dragon/mount/flight form will recalibrate and snap back to 0.0 making it very difficult to do dragon races and just basic riding. It only seems to happen when using the right mouse button.
It’s not just Sky Riding having the issue, it is also happening with Steady Flight. Apparently there are many posts about this issue. Dismounting and remounting usually fixes it but not always. It tries to lock you into a certain angle.
This just happened to me randomly with my druid in flight form using steady flight. I noticed it while leveling gathering professions after flying up and downwards a lot between nodes. Pitch keeps snapping back to horizon. It’s pretty abrupt and jarring.
I’ve run into this bug a couple of times now myself. I first noticed it while doing a skyriding race. I noticed it again later while questing with steady flight enabled.
I can only confirm these three things:
The pitch only snaps when using the right mouse button.
Both skyriding and steady flight are affected.
Dismounting then remounting can temporarily relieve the issue.
I also have been unable to replicate the bug intentionally. It seems to just happen randomly.
An easy way to replicate it is by mounting while near the surface of water. Don’t even have to be swimming, just have to have your baby toe in the water. Using water walking it works all the time, but I’ve done it while swimming. The prepatch event mini boss Gahz’rilla has been a great showcase for the bug.
It acts like it is saving the surface of water under your character or something. If you’ve ever dragonrided close to water it sorta auto levels you at shallow angles so you can skim across the surface. I believe it’s doing that. I’ve seen a lot of people say it happens during races though so this doesn’t explain that.
I’ve been reporting this bug since pre-patch went live, and we haven’t had any comments from Blizzard at all. Can we please get a fix for this? It’s actually rendering skyriding races completely unplayable.
I’ve unsubscribed and will stay that way til this issue is fixed. All they had to do was increase normal flight base speed, instead they wanted to re-invent the wheel and they broke it. 2 forms of flight!? a waste of time. Having to land and use an ability with a cast timer to change between forms, ridiculous, it should have been instant cast. Now this pitch ‘snap’ issue. Flying up is fine, when flying down the game force-snaps the camera to the horizontal level position, which has caused all kinds of problems, flying into walls, dragon racing fails, etc …
I mean, it worked fine for two years. Having a cast time to switch flight mode is important so that you don’t run into situations that require you to constantly swap between one and the ohter which can be a clunky experience. Sometimes restrictions are put in place to prevent situations where you’d be more effiscient at the expense of your gaming experience.
To take an extreme example, it would be very practical to have a super long-range, instant teleport ability with no cooldown. But that would completely ruin the exploration and discovery aspect of what’s meant to be an MMO. Which we kind of ran into that issue ever since they’ve introduced flight anyway, big mistake which they’ve realised way too late to go back on it (they’ve tried around Warlords of Draenor), and now they have to run with it.
Back on topic, the pitch issue is still in the game.
I don’t get to decide it, it’s just true. Players will inevitably use the most efficient way to achieve a goal regardless of whether it makes the game less fun. Every game where you don’t have access to all of the content right away (which is 99.99% of games) by definition has these restrictions in some form, and for good reason. Overcoming challenges is the point of most games, navigating terrain is part of that more often than not.
You don’t get to decide what is unimportant for everybody else. What even is that line of argument.