Water Strider Discussion

I can understand where you’re coming with this, but why are you pinning this solely on the water strider? All mounts have been account bound for years, regardless of reputation locks. Using the same logic, why should I be able to use my MOP Challenge mode birds on alts who have never step foot in a dungeon, yet alone existed at all in that expansion. Just let the water strider keep it’s water walking ability by default (similar to the Herb Golem). The fact that every other mount now has the ability to walk on water, this discussion is a moot point and a change that does nothing but take away from the players.

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The reason why you have seen more water striders in WoD, Legion and BFA is because of the excessive gating of flying.

Yeah I said it.

Blizz creating more problems trying to “fix” things that do not need to be fixed.

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Free for all alts, just like it is right now.

Well, I’ve only been back for about a year and a half and it’s not like I sit with a stopwatch all the time clocking how long I do every little thing. But I’ve used the Water Strider when I want to I never feel forced to. Then again I like the water strider and sometime I just go around riding it for fun… you know, like games are supposed to be.

Speaking of fun, I had a lot of fun in the part of Legion I got to enjoy. It’s a large part of why I’m still subscribed. But when Blizzard plays helicopter mom and takes away player agency to protect us from making choices or prevent us from doing what we want, from quickly going places as quickly as we did before (like with the removal of portals), that’s not fun.

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Just something I’d like to get your perspective on Bornakk. If you checked my time played stats for this year and then compared them to my time played stats since this announcement was made, do you believe the latest stats are better for Blizztavision’s time-played metrics or worse than those earlier in the year?
I only ask because if this decision had not been announced, which I and many others disagree with (to put it mildly), I would not be here on the forums or on Wowhead reading and posting. I’d be busy in game playing and having that Blizzard clock tick over and count my logged in time.
To answer your questions though - twas Blizzard not I that made mounts account wide, then made most achievements account wide, and very recently reputations account wide (for achievements) - so yes, MY alt should get the benefit of MY work and MY time spent in game.
To assuage your curiosity on the second question - I would estimate that I have used the water strider every time I have encountered an area of large or intermittent water in game (not including the occasional narrow but deep stream). So that many times in the 6+ years :slight_smile:

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What do you mean exactly?

It’s been confirmed that the equipment system will be character specific.
Each character will have one equipment slot in their mount journal which will affect all the mounts when that character uses them, and have no affect on any of the mounts when any other of your toons use them.

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And then once all of the mounts with innate abilities have been nerfed, either they do away with the equipment slot entirely, or we get the song and dance of “water walking booties is too powerful, players feel forced to choose them over the other options, so to increase player choice we’ll be removing this item in our 9.2 patch.”

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If I was to speculate they will gate the mount equipment to be expansion specific and level specific like everything else (eg toys).

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It’s hard to estimate off the top of my head because its such an automatic reflex while out navigating the world. Retracing my steps, I can I think of about half a dozen times I’ve used it today.

(hard to extrapolate that over 6 years given that it is largely replaced by flying once that becomes available, but across my characters, it wouldn’t surprise me if the 2 striders combined for over 10,000 uses)

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First of all, thank you as well for chatting with us about this issue.

The Water Strider is a unique mount in that it currently can walk on water, something no other mount can do. What Blizzard is not understanding is that the Mount Equipment system is a fallacy because we will still have to use Water Walking items if we want that, leaving us no opportunity to use Anti Daze or Slow Fall mount equipment.

This is what is leading to players feeling like something is being taken away because it is. We will now have to purchase an item, EVEN if it is 99% OFF, to again recover what we can currently do for FREE. Our use of the Water Strider is also UNLIMITED, something this system cannot REPLICATE unless players are forced to ONLY use the Water Walking shoes from here on out.

If your argument is that players should use that, then throw this entire system out because there is no point to make a new system requiring an item to do what we can currently do. You are taking away options by providing the fallacy of agency through this system.

On a side note, the fact Blizzard Entertainment is not willing to relent on such a minute issue like this one where it would be SO easy to garner community appreciation is just another drop in the bucket as to why your player base feels the way it does.

This is not on you personally Bornakk, again thank you for chatting with us. However, needless to say, the fact that Blizzard Entertainment is once again forcing THEIR vision of how to play the game is disconcerting over such a simple thing.

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Yep can see the next xpac now when we go to mount up. MOLL-E all over again!

“You are in the wrong zone for this mount equipment”

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The system is “account bound” in that you only have to open it up once and all your characters will have access. Of course, you need to have a level 100 character to do that (never mind that the MoP water striders were earned by lvl 90’s). You’re out of luck if you’re a new player who doesn’t want to boost and hasn’t leveled to 100 yet.

The equipment slot itself is per character. Whatever piece of equipment you put in the slot affects only that character’s mounts, and it affects all the mounts except the sky golem. If you choose anti-daze, you will not have water walking on that character. If you decide to change out to water walking, you lose the anti-daze and must repurchase that equipment if you want to apply it again later. Blizz already estimated the cost of crafted equipment at 1000g each, but since they’ll be crafted and sold by players, it could easily go much higher if the demand is higher.

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It is so obvious now which is telling and sad that it feels like the player community has to constantly fight for basics in a MMORPG while the current devs prune, contract, and restrict everything of lasting value left in this game.

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The issue here is that what you’re trying to portray is a change to how things have actually worked previously. The point of getting the water striders has always been to get water walking on ALL of your characters INCLUDING alts.

What I feel like you’re doing here is trying to frame things as if everyone, everywhere, was thinking that you would get the water strider on the character with the rep, and getting it on alts was some sort of unforseen side-effect.

In actuality, I strongly suspect that for most people who took the time to grind the mostly-pointless reputations involved with the mounts (and certainly speaking for myself, here), the ENTIRE POINT of doing all of that content was to get water-walking, for free, at any time, for all of my alts. Again - that is the ONLY reason I went for the mount to begin with, and spent (wasted?) my time doing those huge chunks of content. If it had been limited to a single character, I would never have bothered.

So, again, I feel like what you’re trying to do here is paint a picture that isn’t accurate. I currently get water walking for “free” on all of my alts, but only if you consider “a huge amount of time invested to get water-walking to begin with” as “nothing.”

And that really, really bothers me. Because it wasn’t “nothing” to me to do content that I otherwise wouldn’t have done WITHOUT the mounts being account-wide water-walking.

To be completely clear: if water-walking isn’t freely available to all of my alts as of 8.2, OR if water-walking “goes away” or is achievement-locked in a coming expansion, it will completely demolish my desire to do any future time-consuming content that includes “nice to have” perks. I won’t ever engage in doing anything that’s “time-consuming but a nice permanent reward” in the game again, because you will have proven that my time is no longer considered valuable to the dev team.

And at that point, I start considering whether it’s worth sticking around at all.

So, to directly answer your questions: if my Angler-repped alt isn’t able to buy water-walking account-bound mount equipment from the vendor for free, it will be a net loss to my gameplay, and will have made that huge rep grind a waste of time. To be clear, I don’t want ALL mount equipment to be free, JUST the stuff I’ve already earned. And no, “a little bit cheaper” doesn’t cut it, because right now it IS free - putting a price on it would be taking an EARNED ability I only went after BECAUSE it affected my alts, and will be turning it into something I now have to purchase - and that’s not a good enough solution, in my opinion.

As for how often I use the water-walking mount - any time there’s a LARGE body of water I want to cut across. If there are a lot of mobs in the way I won’t bother changing to it, or if it’s a small body of water I’ll go around/swim through it instead. It doesn’t see a switch-over every time I come across a puddle.

A couple of extra thoughts:

  • The idea that an ability like water-walking is somehow “overpowered” when attached to a mount but is NOT overpowered when attached to a class seems like some VERY questionable logic.

  • I genuinely like the Mount Equipment idea. I think it’s great. But taking earned rewards away from me will ALWAYS feel utterly rotten and make me think about permanently leaving the game every single time you guys decide to do it. I feel like the team has a great idea and system that would make EVERYONE very happy if it wasn’t being overshadowed by this “we’re taking something you’ve earned from you” nonsense yet again. Stop doing it.

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Out of upvotes; have a “well said!” instead.

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Like to see the Water Strider be left alone. If they wanted to they could add even more. A Fel Green one from Legion and a Purple on for BFA.

Like others have said. The fact we have to purchase something we already have and are 99% going to only use that equipment leaves the other two rendered mute.

Only time I can see any others come into play is when we have flying and then what is the point of any of the equipment slot outside of no dazed. <nobody wants knocked off their mounts then.

So please leave the water strider alone. It has a function and I use it for that and that alone.

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I know a lot of folks give the strider a lot of flak for not being some pretty unicorn but I like it as is, its a bug mount which is rare to begin with and based on a unique bug to boot don’t take what makes this mount special you already got folks chewing you out about the over saturation of horse mounts.

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Oh, you mean making it so that the water walking doesn’t work in BG’s on the strider? That’s was a reasonable nerf. This isn’t, and your wording makes it out to be that yes it’s a nerf.

So here’s 2 things you guys should respond to: 1) Lorewise/ storywise, explain to me how these mounts are going to lose their basic waterwalking function but be able to get it back via equipment and 2) I thought we were supposed to be having less stuff clogging up our bags, so now your’e telling us we’re going to need to take up 2-3 spots for the equipment, per toon. How is that helpful?

FYI, I still use my strider even on my shammy and dk’s, but still have the issue of not actually walking on water when I have both the mount and class spell on (sure, let me level out my camera, and try jumping 20 times to get it work) so how about fixing that first, that’d be a real help.

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Battle for Abilities should be renamed to Battle for Agony. It is an agony to fight for basics that this game used to have and not punish players that choose to stick around.

Even after the bad start to BFA why drive down the remaining BFA player morale with this constant nerfing and restrictions (eg portal prune, water strider, etc)?

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Just speaking from personal experience, I use the Strider all the time, on every character I have. Since getting it, it has been an invaluable part of my inventory. Depending on what the other options are, I personally plan on leaving it as the active equipment all the time. The only thing I would switch it for would be a speed increase item, but that is worth the tradeoff, IMO.

All that said…one rule I prefer to live by is never take away what is freely given, because it never ends well. If the ends justify the means, well, OK, but here I think it comes off more like sour grapes on Blizzards’ part. If you concede that the Strider is a powerful tool, and well worth the Angler’s Grind to get, then that grind should be good enough. Want to make it harder for newer players? Lower the rep gains if you think it is too easy (personally, the 3 plus weeks of grinding it would take seems reasonable to me), but don’t retroactively punish players who earned that item originally and have been using it as part and parcel of their kit for six years now.

And, lastly…the last two expansions had a heavy use of water, being placed all in Islands. A great deal of Draenor was land based, and so the Strider was less valuable organically. I think if the next expansion is on a continent, there is even less reason to change it.

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Another great idea with sub par execution.

What the players want is the ability to have all the buffs, at the time of their choosing.

The answer is simple. Make every mount have unique sockets, so i can use mount X for something, Y for something, Z for something else. It will also make it so people will want to gather/buy more equipment for all their mounts, making a better thing to craft or gather.

Also having rare, epic, legendary equipment enhancement with very strong mount buffs on rare drops would be an ACTUAL great use of RNG. These should not last forever, to not have it so you only ever use 1 mount.

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