Truly a horrendous requirement.
Meanwhile, Dragonflight let’s you fly in the first zone onward.
19 Likes
They’re trying to train new players away from flying mounts by keeping them grounded for 50 levels. All while seeing other players flying around them.
17 Likes
The FIRST THING I did when I came back to the game in late Shadowlands after being gone since Argus patch in Legion was do the entirety of BFA and rep grind. “Oh, you don’t need to do that, they’ll take Pathfinder out in the next expansion.”
Hmm…sure glad I ignored that. Granted, I still want exalted for mounts and stuff but that is a long-term plan, since I want to wait until it becomes legacy content instead of “starting experience”.
6 Likes
They haven’t taken it out because they’re treating BFA as the last expansion before DF. SL has been sidelined. They’d probably delete it if they could.
7 Likes
Considering they are two separate expansions.
Yeah.
If you want to fly in the areas where PF is a thing, you have to actually do it. And no, they shouldn’t remove the requirement just because it’s an older expansion.
3 Likes
As Shadowlands did the Ysera-Malfurion swap by going down to Chromie time, flying there should be unlocked regardless of renown or sanctum of domination achievement
2 Likes
As someone who got pathfinder every expansion, I fully agree they should remove pathfinder from the game. Flying shouldn’t be restricted by anything but levels.
22 Likes
Ehh let’s not remove the achievement. There’s 2? 3? mounts tied to them.
It would be better to just make it optional for people that like collecting mounts and/or achievements.
8 Likes
Honestly, Shadowlands was way worse than BFA. We didn’t know it then but when people said “It can’t be much worse than BFA”, hoo lord were we wrong.
13 Likes
Eh fair. Flying being restricted by that horrible achievement is definitely not a good thing.
7 Likes
You think they’re actually going to retcon SL entirely? I suppose that means they’d have to Retcon BfA.
Agreed. 
2 Likes
Started in Shadowlands and still never bothered with BfA flying.
It is on the list but it’s way down. 
3 Likes
While I don’t think they’ll retcon SL ( I mean, how?), I DO think they wish they’d never let a Slyviesimp writer give us a stupid story spanning two expansions (including a redemption arc for his oh so tragic wifu, after he convinced them to let her commit attempted genocide).
4 Likes
They made BfA pathfinder harder by increasing max level to 60 in that zone, because now you can’t even start the campaign until 60.
7 Likes
I actually agree, but I don’t agree that Pathfinder needs to be given away. I came back during Shadowlands from a long break, found that all my toons had been squished to 28. Basically had to restart everything since i couldn’t even do Chromie.
But the problem after doing that, was the execution was so poor. I levelled a character through BFA to level 50 so I could join my brother and friends in Shadowlands, and even was able to jump into Korthia just before ZM started, so I had a good gearing path.
But everything made the easy part easier (get to Shadowlands), and did nothing to letting me fly. It took two zones to finish the BFA quest - that’s too quick when PF will take so much longer and is rep grind based. Then I moved up to Shadowlands, blah blah. The levelling experience is like five times too fast for the content you are given to cover.
Nothing I did where I was supposed to be moved the Pathfinder needle for BFA.
I have zero problem not flying; but BFA pathfinder was uniquely terrible because it required 4 base reputations to revered, large amount of story/war quests I didn’t do before I was kicked out to the new zone, and worse still, the waste of time expansions in Mechagon and Nazjetar which are just complete time sinks. And gnomes are annoying.
Solution? My opinion is when you fit the requirements of the upgraded expansion, you should be able to fly the old zone. So in Shadowlands, that would be 48 to fly in BFA, no? Probably 60 now that SL doesn’t exist.
Sending people back to old content is unpleasant. Either keep us in an expansion longer, or release the flying block when we promote out of old content into the current expansion.
5 Likes
BfA is the expansion that has been designated as the place where new players learn the game. Ion said as much in his Preach interview. The reason they picked BfA is that it has a lot of new mechanics that didn’t exist earlier such as dailies, world quests and a bunch of other new things.
So apparently they want people down on the ground for a while learning the game. Now I’m not saying I agree or disagree but I’m guessing that is what’s behind the motivation for keeping Pathfinder.
BfA is truly still a mess.
Still can’t even solo the raids despite them being 2 expansions old
8 Likes
I could, on paper, see a valid argument in favor of removing Pathfinder entirely from being attainable when it enters “two expansions ago” in the Pathfinder format… meaning, when Dragonflight gets Pathfinder, BfA’s would be fully removed, with all rewards, but you can fly from … whatsitnow… level 30?.. just buy the basic flying license as normal…
I know this isn’t what people in BfA would want now, but it would be a clean system to still keep things approximately 2-4 years “valid” in terms of farming, grinding, earning, etc. I know, removing rewards kinda sucks, but there are plenty of rewards no longer in the game that those who achieved it still have, kinda like a badge of honor of sorts…
I wouldn’t say BfA is worse than SL… and yes SL was bad, but I did actually prefer SL over BfA… too many bad memories and bad experiences taint the content, even if it’s not the content’s fault. That’s a personal subjective view however… I will put forward that the flow of story progression felt more thought-out in BfA vs SL, even when you start dipping further and further into the expansion which most players won’t see nowadays… it still felt more planned. I love the covenant system, but it fell short in performance, mostly due to how the community used it. Even with a good covenant system, it doesn’t change that the story was just a patchwork quilt of ideas that, at present point, aren’t unified enough to be counted as anything less than a slice of swiss cheese with the plotholes that you can’t not stare at
2 Likes
At this point unlocking flight in BfA should not require leveling to 60, doing the entire campaign, doing Mechagon and Nazjatar. It should be trivial.
10 Likes