This is a valid concern even as someone that has a druid as an occasional alt. Druid flying form, as it exists in mainline retail, is an instant cast into steady flight. To make that impossible without a cast time is detrimental to one of the core abilities of the class. Blizzard could solve this by any of these options:
- Switching is instant with a cooldown
- Separating the class ability from the global setting
- Giving us two flying buttons (don’t worry, Druid already has five forms. Adding a sixth isn’t a big deal)
You could even disable skyriding on Druid flight form and that’s still a better option than what’s available in Beta.
5 Likes
They can’t do this because of the way Skyriding is implemented. Under the hood, the mount is summoned as a vehicle we ride on and that’s how it knows to give us the ability bar and vigor display. It’s also the same reason why mount speed increases such as Mount Up and Crusader Aura don’t affect dragonriding mounts in DF right now.
The tech required to seamlessly change us from a vehicle back to an actual mount isn’t worth the dev time when it’s perfectly fine the way it is on DF right now, today.
I never got this impression at all.
Ultimately, I feel asking for switching in-flight is a bridge too far and noise around that could cause them to miss the main feedback here, which is that the 5-second cast is pointless.
5 Likes
I didn’t mean switch mid-flight but while on the ground.
The original sell was that we could easily switch between the 2 modes on the ground.
Ah, yeah I could see that. Still don’t think they have the tech for it but that makes the most sense.
A shame as it would be really neat to just use 1 mount and easily switch between styles.
Whatever they decide it’s sure to be better than what’s currently on beta.
2 Likes
This!
And to add a visual aspect: Mounts without wings shouldn’t be able to “skyride”. My legion WL mount is flying like a drunken butterfly 
1 Like
Blech.
I want to be able to use all of my mounts for dynamic flying, I’m sure people want to use DF mounts for static flying sometimes too.
2 Likes
We can. It’s just a 5 sec cast.
3 Likes
A 5 second cast that dismounts us is not what “easily” would imply.
5 Likes
Sir, 5 + 1.5 + 1.5 = 8.
Not sure where 10 - 15 came from.
I’m not a robot that can hit buttons right away. It’s gonna take you a second to realize you are in the wrong flight mode and land and hit the keybinds. That’s the extra 2+ seconds. The “land” part in my description.
4 Likes
So you mount up, notice that your action bar changed, hit skyward ascent then went “oh crap”? It takes that long for you to register all that?
And instead of just… Flying to where you wanted to go, you land and change then mount up again to fly where you wanted to go? You were already on a mount.
I’m very glad that you are excellent at the game and can recognize instantly something is wrong. I’m very glad you can comfortably get around a small questing zone on a dragon riding mount.
For everyone that isn’t, a 5s cast time is worse functionality than currently exists on live and a toggle would be preferred. Is it the end of the world if it doesn’t happen, of course not, but would still be great to see.
1 Like
I am so glad this topic exists and to see so much support advocating Blizzard to rethink their design. When I read this week that their dynamic flight implementation would be grounding all flying mounts that don’t support dynamic flight, I became very disheartened that Blizzard just does not understand the simple needs of the players.
The current in-game functionality is far superior over the War Within delayed-single-toggle-via-mount-screen. There are so many times in retail where I’ll be dragonriding through a zone and instantly shift to fightform because I want to do some quick quest/nodes/skinning/whatever (even just stop to hover so I don’t fly off the map as I have to go answer the door).
I would much prefer to have specific mounts that have dynamic flight over having the current toggle implementation.
5 Likes
LOL 5 seconds is nothing. How often are you swapping back and forth? Sounds like a first world problem to me.
I’d argue a better way to think about this is “What does the 5 second cast on the toggle ADD?”
If there isn’t any actual benefit or improvement to the player from having a 5 second cast time, it really just doesn’t belong there. I can’t think of any offhand. Even if there’s an actual benefit, the discussion should be whether that is significant enough to offset any negatives/inconvenience.
The arguments about how much of an inconvenience is too much inconvenience, and people getting into semantics to dismiss feedback, are pretty irrelevant.
4 Likes
Honestly? I agree with the majority of people here.
I think the way Skyriding works on Retail is more than good enough. Dedicating more man hours to fix a feature that isn’t broken wastes resources that could be spent on other troubleshooting issues.
I have 2 mounts on every one of my characters on Retail. A Dragonriding one, and a classic Riding one. Having easy access to both mounts creates a level of immersion that makes you feel like the interface is an extension of your natural body and takes no thought or effort to enter the skies. This ease of use is lost with a 5 second cast time in between different types of riding, which is why a lot of players on here are complaining about this breaking the ease of playing effortlessly.
This also brings me to my next point:
I think that having an assigned Mount for each type of riding also encourages mount purchases. Personally, I have a favorite mount for each of my characters from legacy content that I enjoy using on them. But when I’m faced with choosing a Dragonriding mount, I have no favorites so I’m always on the look for my next new favorite Dragonriding mount. This incentivizes me to spend money on the next cool Skyriding mount, a sentiment I’m sure is possible to be shared by other players.
I realize that Dragonriding mounts are customizable but I haven’t seen any customizations in mounts that jumped out at me as a new favorite. So I’m always on the prowl for new mounts!
So the TL:DR of my post? Make it so you can assign Skyriding to each mount individually (and a select all option as needed as recommended by other players on this forum), OR leave it how it is and keep your classic mounts classic flying while the newer mounts are all Skyriding.
Cheers everyone! Great feedback from the community and very good job on the Beta I’ve seen so far to the WoW Devs! <3 <3 <3
5 Likes
It’s not supposed to add anything. Blizz never does stuff without a reason and it seems the reason is they don’t want players to have the benefits of both Skyriding and Static Flying without some friction. It’s how Blizz rolls.
1 Like
Maybe that’s true and they won’t change it. But they won’t know a lot of us don’t like it if we don’t speak up. They can and have changed design philosophies numerous times over the years after listening to user feedback.
4 Likes
I whole-heartedly agree! I detest the new system. Blizz could just mark the Skyflying mounts in the notes of the mount journal. i.e. Sky Reaver and in notes add that this is also a skyriding mount. I think their original idea of making some mounts skyriding was great, until they got lazy and decided to just make us toggle the riding.