Why Flying needs to return at expansion launches

Community General Discussion
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This is a topic I’ve come back to time and again because of its frequent relation to most game issues.

Flying should be IN expansions AT EXPANSION LAUNCH.
Unlocking it? Fantastic, I think the Pathfinder Part 1 achievements are just about right for the time and effort unlocking Flying should take. But it shouldn’t be Part 1, that should be the entire unlock.

You wanted me to see the world?
I explored every zone.
You wanted me to see the world?
I did all the main story questlines for every zone.
You want me to see the world?
I spent a few WEEKS traversing them on foot to get rep.

I HAVE SEEN AND APPRECIATED THE ZONES JUST FINE BY GROUND WITHIN THE FIRST WEEK OF THE EXPANSION. THANK YOU, I APPRECIATE THEM.
That’s not sarcasm, I really do. I think the game has done progressively better at making more interesting or amusing quests and characters and narratives.

But making us wait until the expansion is half over for flying?
Why?
It achieves none of the above. The only thing it does do is frustrate players.
- My alts are more tedious to play. That makes me not want to play alts.
- World Quests are 90% travel time, <10% actual content. This makes me not want to do them, which means I may not want to even play my main.
- Also, because I’m not levelling alts, my alts ALSO aren’t doing World Quests and other world content.

And why?
Because you want me to “see the world”?
I did. I did that back when I got Pathfinder at the start of the expansion.
But I want to play World of Warcraft, not Flight Path And Walking Simulator 2019.

World Quests are fine content WITH FLYING.
World Quests are a boring uneventful slog without flying, particularly because WQs violate the lessons learned in MOP and WOD that your dailies should not be spread out everywhere and take forever to get to. Excessively slow travel for the sake of excessive and slow travel is NOT good design or gameplay.

You may not think it, because people overlook it, but this is one of the top reasons people have stopped playing this game. When alts are a dull chore and dailies are a dull chore, people stop playing, and they blame content itself which is actually fine content while completely missing the fact that the content is a slog because it takes forever to travel to and you spend 90% of the time travelling rather than doing the content.

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People say WoW was the best during Vanilla.

Vanilla didn’t have flying

Therefore having no flying is a factor that made WoW great.

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Well, I can’t argue with that flawless logic!
See you in WoW Classic for the two weeks it is out before it gets shut down because people realize just how much of a chore such obtuse and archaic gameplay is. ;p

Just kidding, I’m not blinded by rose-tinted goggles enough to torture myself with Classic.

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Actually I would rather they remove it all together.

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[quote=“Denona-khazgoroth, post:2, topic:155756”]
People say WoW was the best during Vanilla.
[/quote] People say a lot of things. Doesn’t mean I believe everything they say.

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You literally have wings and fly on your own.

“I’ve sacrificed everything, what have you given?”
I sacrificed Metamorphosis so that you exist. ;D

But seriously, MOP and WOD dailes were less of an issue here because they were condensed into an area. You went to an NPC, flew out somewhere, did a whole batch close by, and then you were done.
World Quests?
I got Turtles out by the water, some Azerite in a cave, Nagas way out on the other coast of the continent from the turtles… and then I guess I just sled down a random mountain. And all those WQs take like 2-3 minutes, while the travel time takes 12-13.
Wouldn’t necessarily be less time with manual flying, but it sure would feel better.

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Except technically you haven’t experienced the content because new areas get added over the course of the expansion and some of the areas you have explored get changed sometimes due to events occurring. So adding flying at launch would just allow you to skip experiencing content that would appear later down the line.

So either we get flying at launch at the expense of getting new content or we just keep Pathfinder as is and just play the game as intended, when available and players can just control the consumption of content to more reasonable levels.

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don’t you people have gliders?

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What good does that do you on flat terrain?

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Alex, I will take “What is incorrect” for 200 please. I have wings but I can not fly with them. The best I can manage is to glide, which is a far cry from actually flight.

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Nope, not playing that game. This is not valid, you do not have a point, and you’re just undermining to troll.
“Well, ackshually…”
Nope. Don’t even bother. This is bait.

There is no either. Besides which, assuming I even wanted to give you the bare minimum credit that you’re not just trolling and baiting, they could add a Part 2 for new locations.

You do realize TBC, Wrath, Cata, and MOP all existed right? But I guess those expansions were all bad and nobody was playing as intended.
By the way, Wrath was the game’s peak, and most consider MOP the best expansion in gameplay and overall fun. I could fly in MOP at level cap just by going to a vendor AND my dailies were condensed into pleasant hubs instead of on the butt end of two different continents.

This was FAR more sincerity in my reply than your obvious bait warranted.

I miss Aviana’s Feather and that engineering rocket thingie in WOD. In MOP, you could fly at level cap, but even in WOD you still had toys and tools that allowed some creative and fun navigation of zones.
Really shows just how inadequate the Whistle is by comparison.

But, of course, why not just have flying after the few weeks of effort it already takes to do Pathfinder Part 1?
Oh right, there’s literally zero reason not to, which was the point of the thread.

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Yeah but vanilla didn’t have such convoluted terrain as some of the newer xpacks do. These newer maps look like they were designed to be traversed via flying. Back in vanilla traveling had a purpose, traveling in BFA is just there to… annoy you.

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There was no such terrain in the last two expansions. Every place you needed to go, you could get to on a ground mount, flight path or some in zone assist (talking about that grapple gun). Flight was a luxury, not a necessity.

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I pick emissary world quests by proximity to flight paths (because no flight), by not being up cliffs (because no flight), by minimum number of mobs kills (because I’m a healer), and by using the most possible world quests to count for two emissaries. I did two emissaries with six world quests today.

I generally don’t do archaeology until after flight is enabled (and maybe not until the next expansion to make any mob killing a whole lot easier).

World travel is tedious; therefore, I do as little as possible. The terrain has a lot of hills that can’t be walked up. Many streams abound deep and wide enough to make you swim if you aren’t using water walking. (And now they are displeased by the dominance of the water strider mounts). If we had flight after a pathfinder one (or even just purchased), the world would have a huge variety of mounts.

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Some of the terrain is really convoluted with objectives at the top of a crazy hill that must have some way up, but it isn’t on the map and doesn’t look like a path. I don’t go to new world quest location because they might end up being like one in Suramar where I literally rode around for 15 minutes and gave up. Whee fun!

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Unless they made it so you can’t fly in the new areas until you have done all the quests and seen all the sites. Like a mini pathfinder for each new area. But you still have flying in the older areas. So we get flying in the first after doing pathfinder then are required to complete the new area pathfinders to fly in those areas.

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Well, they can’t. Not without a massive rework of some older zones and quests.
Most of Icecrown and Stormpeaks zones are built around flight. You can’t do 90% of the quests there without it.

Some of the cata zones require flight. So do some areas of the Outland zones.

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Yeah but they could always just limit it to areas that actually need it. I mean if they can disable flight in certain zones, they could just as easily go the other direction with it as well.

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You know, you could always just skip the game until flight becomes available, then play your few weeks to unlock it and continue on like nothing ever happened.

Devs want Pathfinder parts 1 and 2 to be in the game. So that’s what we have to deal with. Don’t like it? Gave you a substitute option :slight_smile:

Cheers

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Maybe we had different experiences but finding certain mobs @ Highmountain was just a nightmare. It took me an hour to figure out how to get to the southeaster corner of that map. Suramar was also horrible to travel on foot with every inch of it packed with mobs and hard to descifre pathing. Stormheim was annoying but “ok”.

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