Water Strider Discussion

If they made gilded versions of special function mounts and put them on the shop… They would sell. They don’t have to take to add value. :frowning:

I’m not following what you think is so difficult. The answer to what their motive is lies in the answer of why did they feel it necessary to nerf the Strider for a system that is no doubt inferior. And as exampled by this topic, they have already created and dismissed the problem of removing something major we all earned.

Their logic does not revolve around what the players like, it revolves around what will benefit them by lowering the workloads(as they downsize repeatedly). No one can argue at this point that they put feedback over their own preferences. You do what they want how they want it when they want it and you will just have to deal with it. THAT is their logic.

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They don’t have to take but they CAN take. And as we all know it is always easier to destroy than create. Easier to remove than to add. It really shames the word developer.

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I also don’t think they are canning water walking completely after this change. I think their goal is to delay or control when it becomes available (in future patches and expansions) by putting recipes on QM vendors that require exalted to learn. That or materials that are raid or dungeon drops and are slow to acquire.

After their attempt at limiting strider abilities to the respective expansions in Legion Beta, I’m hard-pressed to think that Blizzard is just like “welp, we think you all should have it now! Here’s our super plan that only benefits you, and not us in any way.”

I hope I’m wrong and just thinking weird from this tinfoil hat.

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There is another reason for this.

Esports.

To limit and lock what benefits a competition mythic+ team can bring into a run. “Building a deck” like for hearthstone. Can’t swap equipment after the run starts, but you could swap mounts, and they don’t like that.

So no special function mounts. Herbing doesn’t matter, vendors are pretty useless in there already.

Not that I care, I have less than zero interest in esports, unless development for them improves things I want.

And this? Does not.

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Omg,no wonder even with slow fall you’ll die,Blizzard!

So this is what happened: Water Striders have bouncy (like the Panderians have with falls).

Blizzard REMOVED that and JUST gave players back water walking.

So, they took away and ability that folks may not be aware of - the Panderian racial of taking less fall damage. It’s a two stat mount.

Dirty move, Blizzard.

Check your mount abilities!!!

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And that logic could be made manifest without making a new game system to micro-manage mount abilities when they haven’t actually created the problem yet. That is more work for them to do, not less.

I don’t see how turning off waterwalking makes their lives easier. Unless their zone design suddenly embraces large numbers of giant, monster-filled ponds, they’re not going to save themselves any workload in zone design.

In terms of content consumption, they will save seconds out of the day by dumping waterwalking. I used my waterstrider to reach a daily in Stormsong this morning. Took about 6 seconds from the flightpoint. Multiply that by several characters and they might have prolonged the life of their content by a minute on that day. Tomorrow, waterwalking might not even be a factor in the WQ rotation, and they don’t squeeze any extra time out of me. As combat takes less and less time as gear inevitably improves, any travel time gains will likely be lost to savings in combat time, and will evaporate completely in content where flight is available. The content where flightless, waterwalking players would likely eat up the most time is levels 20-59, not new stuff.

I simply do not see any guaranteed upside for Blizzard in monkeying with waterwalking. Too many other factors work against the rate of content consumption to believe that eliminating waterwalking would slow players down much. They’re still going to have to timegate the hell out of everything. Could Blizzard make additional money selling tokens to players who can’t scrape together 50g or craft their own barding and whatnot? Maybe, but I doubt there’d be a lot repeat customers after the initial rush.

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One of the worst decisions they have made for this game, that in no way could be described as trying to satisfy the players or maintain the health of the game, was getting rid of the class devs. History has shown that their decisions are not focused on what players want but what they and the stockholders want.

So what do the stockholders want? If they want us to be purchasing tokens and services, this is one small step towards improving the chances. In 2 years, you could very well be looking at the only way to waterwalk being through a dk or shaman. OR the equipment being very very expensive. Either way… cha-ching. Boosts and/or tokens. For right now, considering that they are literally stealing time we spent, they’ll allow us to purchase them for cheap.(slowboil)

What do they(blizz) want? Increased purchases and increased time-played. The former is evidenced by most of the unique mounts going to the cash shop while players complain about bad re-skins. It is also evidenced by the changes they made to leveling. They slowed it down so much players were giving up on alts. The AP grind extends time-played not just for your main but for your alts. Just as we saw in Legion. They only changed it when players got burned out and started leaving. The excessive dazing in BFA? It adds just a few minutes every day to your tasks and over the course of a million players, that’s a lot of artificial time they added on to their metric.

If Blizzard is about choice, why remove the way PvP’ers geared up? Instead of having direct goals to work toward we instead got a horrible rng system. The players are/were disgusted but they try to feed us that “people couldn’t find the vendors.”

Wall of text but there’s still so much to list. The common denominator of their decisions is that it results in everything taking longer.

If you want to look at it with only one dimension, sure, you may not see the logic but work today can save you time tomorrow.

You still cannot provide a logical answer to: IF this is just to give the ability to other mounts, then why are they nerfing the strider? AND why is the new system worse than the strider’s function? The motive behind their decision lies in the answer to that question. And keep in mind that this new system will remove the ability to stack water walking with no-daze. :wink:

Fact is, there was already the ability for players to have the ability on other mounts. The elixir already exists.

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This entire system feels half baked and thrown in as a desperate gamble to make it seem like the dev team has still got “ideas” for the game despite 8.2 having the coldest reception of any .2 update i’ve seen in the long time i’ve played this game.

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If they want to make Water Strider less forced, the solution seems pretty obvious; instead of just having one universal equipment slot, make equipment tied to each individual mount, so you could give water walking to whichever one you like, then give increased ground speed to another, etc. Then just leave Water Strider with water walking (and any other mounts with unique effects with those as well) but don’t let them equip anything else.

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Exactly, especially with this equipment slot system.

Effectively this wipes out any unique abilities (some hidden even, like the Water Strider’s Panderian bouncy ability of the Angler’s mount [reduced gravity racial]).

No wonder why the Water Strider wasn’t simply left alone like the Sky Golem.

There is no reason to launch this idea with so few mount gears. I suspect this change is supposed to make it easier to digest the water strider nerf and the gathering golem was left alone on purpose. Don’t feed me a line of “there is no gear for it” they are rolling it out right now, they could have made one if they wanted to. (Tanks already don’t need daze and a parachute is not as good as a glider if it is found to have no directional control)

Later when they release a few more gears one will be gathering and the golems will be nerfed. Now you have to choose between water walk and gathering or constantly switch back and forth. Well, too late to un-nerf the strider now suckers!

Just a thought…

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The Water Strider couldn’t be used in PvP, not due to water walking, but it can reduce fall damage (made possible by Shamans throwing players off cliffs).

Blizzard knew this, but players didn’t. We just assumed it was due to water walking. Nope, it’s a fall damage reduction mount, too.

That’s why Blizzard has been trying to nerf/get rid of that mount since WoD.

Yeah I saw it on the PTR

My god Blizzard you suck.

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No, you’re not wrong. This is them playing the long game to get their petty revenge on the playerbase for stopping them from nerfing the strider the first time they tried it.
They do this crap all the time. We’re “giving you a new portal room” but we’re (for no reasons but our own) taking away all the other portals because reasons.
We’re giving you a mount ability slot and nerfing the one mount in the game we wanted to nerf before at the same time.

This is not coincidence. This is the devs, doing their usual and being petty and passive aggressive when they don’t get their way.

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Not at all. Hunting season is over and it won’t stop raining long enough to do any real gardening beyond pots and mowing the lawn. I’ve watched months worth of youtude videos of TV shows and documentaries. At the moment I’m a little bored and interested in the Alliance stories that aren’t specific to the terrible faction war narrative. I’ve probably played 3 months total of BFA if that. I play no other Blizzard games and will likely stop again after finishing Kul Tiras until possibly mid way through 8.3 if there looks to be something interesting there.

My original account was permanently deleted at the end of Legion. I have not farmed any pets, mounts, or transmogs and just have what was given to me with the boost and a couple of mounts I needed to purchase just to have something to ride. And I have no emotional ties to the 3.25 characters on this account.

I’m nothing to Blizzard. They get their revenue now from the whales who purchase game shop goods and tokens and players who subscribe to mindlessly do WQ while alt tabbed to Netflix.

I likewise have zero interest in esports and esports (watched by a relative few and participated in by a totally irrelevant %) having negative effects on game play for the majority makes me like them even less.

Of course, if making changes to retail WoW to nerf esports kills WoW then WoW esports will die too so there’s that.

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Hunter pets have never felt the same since the old system was removed. I hope the new mount system doesn’t do the same to mounts.

Obviously, I know its not as big of a change, but, its similar in a way. Removing the parts that make things unique to make them unique.

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Think they will nerf the AH/vendor/mog mounts so you have to spend 20k to be able to sell stuff while on your mount with a shopkeeper equipment, 100k to be able to mog on your mounts, and maybe 1/2 mil to be able to use the AH on your mounts.

But if they made the strider like the Sky Golem, then you wouldn’t be able to stack daze with water walking, and then they could just keep it with baseline water walking.

No, but you’d be able to have 1 Water Walking mount and 1 Daze or Parachute mount and switch between them. Which would tick off the people who don’t like the bug or the grind since you’d have 2 options instead of their 1.

Gonna bite them in the butt when it hits Live and the Boots require Angler rep and cost way more than 50g and the crafted items use the 8.2 crafted consumables that only RNG drop for 1 player in Mythic+ runs with a recipe from a raid and thus cost several thousand gold.

I think this is just the first step in restricting how and where you can water walk in the future to bring that in line with Pathfinder and Flight since both conveniences are used to bypass random mobs and combat which for Blizzard is “content”.

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Rumor right now is they have already increased the rate that you get dazed. It just keeps getting better.

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