Maybe a dumb conversation to have as we’re gearing up for 900% MS. But in the last 10 days I made a thread saying that Astral Recall needs to be swapped out with Kidney Hearthstone. Essentially allowing Shaman to have two hearthstones.
I was decried for asking to be a mage. And someone else (seemingly taking no position) said “Everyone in retail can be anywhere in 2 mins.” I think he’s right, but that leads me to this:
Can we get around too fast in current WoW, and does that affect your game play negatively?
A part of me thinks the days where it took a boat ride to get places made the world bigger, until I need to get someplace, and then I hate that it takes 120 seconds.
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I don’t want to break the realism of the universe so I like limits on speed, and not having portals to everywhere. I think we can improve on what we have though. For example, do we need convoluted flight paths anymore? Surely we can fly more direct routes by now.
Mage portals to Gadgetzan and Area 52 would be nice though. 
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This sums it up.
- Getting around too fast makes the world feel too small. This interferes with suspension of disbelief, which is a necessary part of any good fantasy setting. Instead of feeling like you’re in a huge living and breathing world, it begins to feel like you’re in a tiny sandbox made by game designers.
- On the other hand, get around too slowly and you might feel irritated and feel like you’re wasting your time traveling when you could be actually playing the game.
Personally, I feel 310% flight speed is too fast. A good example is Zareth Mortis: the zone felt huge when we were restricted to ground mounts. But the moment we got flying, the zone started to feel absolutely tiny. It ceased to feel realistic and felt artificially small.
Dragon Riding speed peaks at 950% and reportedly can get you from A to B twice as fast as 310% flying. I worry that it will make Dragonflight’s new contintent feel too small. Especially, once players become familiar with the zones and Dragon Riding is fully leveled up.
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Decreasing the mount cast time and increasing the mount speed would make the game faster and more enjoyable.
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Less traveling, more playing. Bottom line. Getting around is just the in-between of playing the game and playing the game. It’s waiting. Less waiting is always better IMO.
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Wouldn’t bother me too much, if they slowed down flight speed some. As long as they let us have it at level cap again. Ground mount speed should be a little faster though imo. But yeah, would not have a prob, if they slowed fliying down to like 220% or something. Again, as long as they let folks fly at level cap.
Depends on the type of player you are, probably.
If your primary interest is in things behind instance portals and the world is an annoying speed bump for you, you probably think that travel in WoW is dreadfully slow because it’s impeding your access to those instanced things.
If your primary interest is a large, seamless, persistent world shared with players, you probably think travel in WoW is unnecessarily fast because it makes random encounters with other players beyond tapping a WQ mob vanishingly rare.
The problem is that the game tries to cater to both groups and ends up disappointing both.
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Mounting up faster would a good improvement.
There’s nothing like killing a mob, starting to mount and then the rest of the menagerie shows up. They come from 80 miles away before you can mount.
Most show up just as your mount indicator is at full just to irritate you.
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It’s almost October. Hold on!
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I am …lol For cooler weather.
Should have said instant mounting. And faster mounting would have been a good idea in the past.
If anything, I think we’re too slow. Especially the flight paths themselves — we ought to be teleported from Oribos into the respected shadowland, not flying slowly. It feels very artificial and weird.
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Traveling within a zone is fine… traveling between zones is too slow. I literally go do something while I fly between Maldraxxus and Bastion or any other zone.
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At least we don’t have to do the Vanilla Darnassus → Cenarion Hold flight. That was a solid 20-30 minute affair.
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As far as doing world quests and getting to dungeons and raids ? Theres always people summoning others and WQ is not really game play
Eh, I personally don’t mind having to take boats, flightpaths, zepelins and such in Classic, I barely consider retail to be a world anymore so having portals or not, fast or slow, it frankly doesn’t matter to me.
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I don’t get what’s wrong with this., though. Once the zone ceases to be important for anything other than farming rares and opening chests, why keep it feeling “huge” and the travel time so slow?
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Oh I meant the Broom Stick.
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Ever take the zep from Thunder Totem to Orgrimmar? No? I’d advise you not to.
If it shows up at all, it doesn’t port you. You ride the Zep slowly from one place to the other.
Bats are somewhat faster…but it’s still slow. Directs routes would have been a good idea instead of going miles away from where you need to go. Worse when you loop back around to where you were going in the first place.
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I always thought it would be interesting to tie the mount speed to the terrain. Perhaps full/faster mount speed on the roads, for instance. It could allow for faster travel between key areas but leave the open world feel more RPG-like.
Not saying what is a good speed % for each scenario, but could add to the immersion.
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I’m a big proponent of mounts having unique qualities in general. The way that flying mounts render ground mounts wholly obsolete when available for example is weird. There should be situations where one is preferred over the other.
I like the idea of ground mounts getting a speed boost on roads. It could also make sense to have ground mounts with added cargo space for gathering, since something like a mule or an ox is going to be able to carry more than just about anything that takes to the air.
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