Background: WLK was the first expansion to limit flying until you achieved a certain goal. It wasn’t a horribly difficult goal, but it existed. Except that you needed flying to get into some areas - notably Storm Peaks.
So, what Blizzard did was, if you didn’t have flying by that point (and some people deliberately didn’t), they gave you a loaner flying mount; I believe the top speed was +60%. It got you over the mountains, and into areas you couldn’t reach otherwise, but not very quickly.
So, imagine that as a solution for Blizzard’s desire for you to experience content on the ground (which I’m not minding much - still don’t have even Pathfinder 1) in the next expansion - you can earn flying, maybe without nearly as much effort, but it was slower than using a ground mount. You might use it to get around annoying terrain features, but you probably wouldn’t be using it to get from one part of town to the other. It would be more of a tool than a crutch.
Also, if flying were slower, in places you could still be tracked by enemies for PvP.
Anyway, just a thought. Back to running through Kul Tiras.
You know how every generic RPG ever has a section of game that takes away one of your characters (usually your female healer) and everyone hates that part of the game because it sucks (even if you ignore the sexism and misogyny of it)?
Taking Flying away constantly is like that.
What if, stay with me here, Blizzard stopped ignoring what the customers want for what they want?
The previous director of WoW famously told players “You think you want it, but you don’t” in the context of classic. Well, record-breaking viewership, constant long queues, and daily addition of new servers has proven that maybe, just maybe, players know what they want and Blizzard’s directors need to remove their heads from their butts.
Nope. Flying is intended, even now with Pathfinder, to be a mode of convenience after proving you have done the ground content. Slowing it down doesnt bring any real benefit to the players or the devs that Pathfinder’s “compromise” doesnt already cover.
The whole point is defeated as to why they want people to wait almost a year.
The speed of flying isn’t the issue they have with it. They know it allows people to circumvent quest design, get over terrain which they intentionally make annoying(challenging I mean), and in addition it allows them to delay the development of it and the testing of it. Keep in mind that they have to test areas that people can fly in to stop people from getting through areas.
BFA is fine now that we have flying too. The only difference is World Quests suck less. And that seems like a good thing.
If Blizzard wants to take away flying, or at least limit the amount of flying that people do, then they should create a gameplay reason for that to happen. For example, imagine you could fly on Argus but the Burning Legion has AA guns that literally shoot you down if you go higher than ten feet off the ground. Flying is “unlocked” when you disable those guns.
They could even design meaningful daily/weekly quests where people do them to keep the skies clear for flying, instead of just having the quest NPCs fish some defective styrofoam out of a nearby dumpster and pretend it’s a useful armor reward.
This was true of standard flying mounts until cata. It was 60%, epic was 280% and 310% didn’t exist.
I remember using my ground mount well more than my flying one (which I would only get on to get up somewhere or dodge some inconvenient mobs) whilst leveling through Northrend.
Good times. Less convenient, but gave a reason to use both types of mounts. Well, until I eventually got my epic flying, of course.
It doesn’t need to be slower at all. The fact that it was in storm peaks on the loaner mounts was entirely arbitrary. So when you have an argument predicated on something substantive beyond a fake need we can pick this back up.
Lol yeah, I think this is one of the most overlooked reasons as to why flying is the way it is now. I remember back in WoD when they were still in that decision phase on what to do and then when they decided it was going to take a bit of time because it was not in a ready flying state. That convinced me that they obviously never even built WoD with flying as a possibility and probably allowed them to cut corners.
So that lead me to the theory that part of the reason they have us wait is because it allows them to offload a key design to a much later date that they would otherwise have to spend time on in early development.
How so?
as it is we get 0 flying or benefit for like 6 months to a year.
with my idea we could have glide effects for flying mounts during the time bliz would otherwise have us stuck to the ground.
it makes far more sense as a RP mechanic and as a game play mechanic that is over powered to the point the divs regret ever adding it.
Its a very useful ability that I would never want removed. but a minor nerf that you wont really notice unless you afk in the air or stay out of attack range for long periods of time.
you can still level in wrath on the rental flying mount lol
takes 30 minutes just to do one storm peaks questline,
and people said questing was easy/quick after classic lol. Barrens is actually super fast if you collect every quest and then do them at the same time per locations
yeah zones not designed around / looking good in the air, which means boring in the ground, they want us to fly over nazjatar and see how cool it looks but if you don’t fly its awful.
highmountain in legion had this problem it was clearly designed for flying around quest to quest but by the time legion flying unlocked highmountain was irrelevant, meta quest complete for highmountain was like <sub 5% before it was a achievement for flying.