Dominance Offensive, HoF Progression, Developer Meeting Notes, GW2 Trial, TCG Art

Classes
Q: The way the Monk Pilgrimage spell works is pretty cool. What do I have to do to get two-way portal functionality for a Death Knight’s Death Gate? (It could even be part of the Death Gate glyph!)
A: It’s something we can consider. Keep in mind, though, the primary reason we gave Zen Pilgrimage two-way functionality was to try and prevent low-level Monks from getting stuck on Pandaria. This isn’t an issue for Death Knights travelling to Ebon Hold.

Q: Many love Zen Pilgrimage for Monks, but it can be confusing if you port to the Monk area using this spell and then leave via a BG/dungeon queue or hearthstone. Example: One day a player uses Zen Pilgrimage from Elwynn to pick up the daily quest, did dungeons all day, then hearthed to Stormwind to logout. The player flew all the way up to Hillsbrad the following day to farm herbs. When it was time to do the daily, the player uses Zen Pilgrimage and was taken back Elwynn, then had to use it again to get to the Monk area. Would it be weird to reset Zen Pilgrimage if you port out of the Monk area using any method except Zen Pilgrimage?
A: This can certainly be confusing and we will explore ways to make it easier to understand, or better communicate with the player how it’s working.

Q: Hunters are really excited about the new pets being introduced in 5.1. Requests have been coming in from both forums & social media asking if we can expand the number of stable slots so they can collect them, rather than agonize over which pet they want to release to free up a slot. Suggestions include adding more stable slots, or adding a hunter pet tab similar to the way mounts/battle pets are listed. Are there any plans for updating Hunter pet storage?
A: Not at this time. We understand the concern and are exploring options to better optimize the system, but the hunter essence wasn’t designed to be “catch them all.”

Q: DPS Shaman and Rogues still aren’t happy in PvP. Why do you thrive on their unhappiness?
A: In 5.1 we’re focused on stabilizing the PvP environment by addressing major outliers in balance. After we’ve accomplished that, we’ll be able to take a look at where things stand and make the appropriate adjustments from there, rather than sweeping changes all at once.

Q: Hunters are upset that Scattershot can be dodged, while Blind is on a 1-minute cooldown but can’t be dodged. What’s to be made of the disparity?
A: Hunters and Rogues have completely different toolsets that complement each other differently. Making side-by-side comparisons between class abilities is a good way to become needlessly frustrated. Scattershot behaves the way it does by design; it is a ranged attack and intentionally subject to being dodged.

Challenge Modes
Q: Is there any plans to remove the “You have entered too many instances recently” restriction from Challenge Mode dungeons, or is this part of the challenge as well?
A: The limit for instances created will remain the same, but with Challenge Mode dungeons, players need only utilize the drop-down menu to reset while inside. This will port players back to the beginning and reset the instance without having to zone out and back in, thus avoiding the instance creation cap.

Q: Players report that Challenge mode mounts aren’t account-wide. Was this working as intended and if so, what is the reasoning behind the restriction? For reference, we’ve informed players that mounts are account-wide except for restrictions based on profession, faction, class, or PvP rewards.
A: Our philosophy on these mounts is similar to that on PvP mounts. You have to work very hard and be skilled at playing your specific class to earn and ride these mounts.

Q: Assuming you have no intention of resetting the Challenge Mode Leaderboards this expansion, are there any circumstances you anticipate that could necessitate a reset at some point?
A: We plan to remain hands-off with the Leaderboards as much as possible, in order to preserve its meaning and prestige. Integrity in the data is key, but should a bug or exploit come into play and damage the listings, we may step in. We need to be very cautious about this and only consider manually altering the Leaderboards if their integrity is largely compromised by an extreme bug exploit or hack.

PvP
Q: Players are not too happy about the location of the PvP vendors on the wall. They realise of course that we want people out in the world again, but they feel these vendors are just in the middle of nowhere and there is no PvP going on. Also, lore-minded players claim that from a story point of view, to put your army supply line setup shop at the edge of the battlefield makes no sense, as this is one of the first places to be overrun during an all-out invasion of the enemy. Players request anything from making portals to the vendors from the cities, to moving the vendors back in the cities, to placing mailboxes and other such conveniences near the vendors. Are these concerns that we acknowledge as an actual issue, or are we happy with the location of these vendors?
A: We are happy with where they are located, but have added in new map icons and an in-game mail that goes out to players who reach level 90 that tells them where to find the NPCs. There isn’t a big lore explanation for the design, but we think it makes sense to keep your weapons accessible at the wall from where you’re launching an offensive and no further changes are planned.

Q: Why did you make the random Battleground and dungeon bonus rewards obtainable once daily again, from seven weekly? There have been moderate frustration from players who can’t login every day to “do their chores,” which is, in part, why you said you originally moved to the weekly formula.
A: The reward structure is different now, in that players receive a bonus amount of Conquest and Valor points for their first runs, and continue to earn Conquest and Valor points for every run after.

Q: Regarding the PvP blog, you do not mention Discipline Priests in the blog or your plans to increase their viability in Arenas. What plans do you have in the works for Discipline Priests?
A: Focused Will is returning to help provide some mitigation. Part of the issue is that healers are having a bit of trouble countering some DPS burst. Several of the 5.1 changes listed in the blog are being made to help in this regard.

Q: The change to Gag Order has received *many* positive responses in Europe. Do we plan to do away with more blanket silences that require no effort to land? This has been quite a large request of PvPers for a long time, as they do not like the “lack of skill” required to land these.
A: We disagree and feel that blanket silences have great strategic value to pre-emptively shut someone down from using instant-cast spells. As with all crowd-control abilities, there are diminishing returns and we try to maintain healthy cooldowns to mellow them out. If there are specific examples of skill-less silences, please share those with us.

Q: While reactions are *very* positive for the Gag order change (Players are happy to see blanket silences being removed), players feel this is too much and would be more than happy to just see the interrupt component stay while the blanket silence is removed. Would you consider this type of change?
A: Warriors have access to Storm Bolt at level 90 which is a very viable option. Generally speaking, Warriors sacrifice some ranged power for their high mobility.

Q: In the PvP blog you mention that you’re satisfied with the state of CC. However the amount of CC in the game at the moment is something the PvP community is highly frustrated with. Many players feel they are stuck in CC for half of their Arena matches (exaggerated). With large amounts of CC being instant cast (fears, Ring of Frost and stuns) they feel that landing a successful CC chain is no longer skillful, but a simple matter of spamming CC on a given target. What kinds of changes do you plan in this regard?
A: We’re happy with how crowd-control abilities are working, especially considering the trade-offs involved in using them (high cost, cooldown timers, etc.). There aren’t any plans to make changes at this time, though we do feel diminishing returns are not communicated and explained well enough.

Q: You mention that you want players to have more things to spend their Conquest and Honor points on, and that you would like to have this role filled by upgrading gear with these currencies. Players have mentioned on several different occasions that they would love to see more cosmetic rewards from PvP to display their skill, status, ranking, and rating. Have you considered adding in more cosmetic rewards such as cool armor sets similar to those from Challenge Modes?
A: We agree that players who prefer PvP should have cooler things to purchase, including more options like vanity items, and are discussing ways to better deliver on this. The current itemization model somewhat follows the original formula that implied PvPers were mostly just interested in getting direct performance enhancers. We don’t agree with that implication anymore and, with the new currency system, it makes sense to provide more flavor items to spend CP/HP on.

Q: You mention in the “Smoother Battleground Brackets” section of the PvP blog that you plan to allow gear and mechanic scaling in low-level PvP. Have you considered doing this for Arena or level cap BGs? This was also something requested by players for ranked PvP so that skill would be the deciding factor in victory. This would also allow for mechanic and stat adjustment to allow for better balance in rated PvP.
A: At this time, we are not planning to implement any scaling in endgame PvP. World of Warcraft is designed, and gameplay is centred on, players making an effort to improve their gear and their skills. If we scaled player gear, we’d thus remove virtually all meaning from endgame progression.

Q: Burst damage and cooldown stacking is a large concern in PvP right now. Players feel that there are large windows of 3-5 minutes where nothing is happening and then cooldowns are back up and there is 15 seconds of burst. What are your plans to start preventing players from stacking cooldowns, causing these small windows of burst and large sections of downtime? Are you planning on increasing the sustained damage from players and lowering burst?
A: Are there any specific examples that you can share?

Our focus has been to keep burst abilities manageable and consider it good strategy to juggle the options. If a player chooses to pop all their cooldowns in order to gain a greater level of burst, they risk being crowd controlled and then have to wait to use the abilities again. That said, we’re still closely monitoring the relationship between healing and burst damage.

Q: With the recent limitations on how many Conquest points a player can earn for each category, this has upset several players who don’t want to do Rated BGs/Arenas, or are having trouble acquiring the additional points from their Arena/RBG rating. Will you ever consider just lifting these requirements entirely and allowing players to fully cap however they want?
A: Conquest points are considered much more valuable than Valor and are the reward for high-level PvP accomplishments. The way Conquest points are earned and the rewards they yield make a direct comparison to Valor problematic. We are, however, looking for flavorful ways of giving bonus points, like maybe, “Oh, this treasure chest I found has some Conquest in it! Woot!”

Raids, Dungeons and Scenarios
Q: While grouped in leveling dungeons we’ll commonly see the buff icon change as different classes come and go. Unfortunately the vast majority of the time it shows 1 of X, and as far as we can tell that’s all that’s available for buffs. Is it showing potential buffs at 90? Is it showing potential buffs based on various class procs? Pretty much every dungeon it shows that we’re missing buffs that we can never actually have.
A: Each class and spec are flagged to show how many buffs they can give, and this ignores what level the character is. It’s a technical limitation and we agree it’s confusing. We’ll consider our options for making the buff system more clear for players leveling.

Q: LFR Loot drop rates suck. Getting dupes sucks. Getting items not for my spec sucks. We hear this a lot. What do you make of it all?
A: Randomness in loot drops is very much intended. Part of that includes getting the occasional duplicate item. If you’re an enchanter, you can make the most of them; otherwise, they’re a little extra gold in your pocket. Not every item is flagged correctly, so there might be a few items still being awarded to certain specs incorrectly. If that happens please report the item and your spec.

Q: We’ve received feedback from some tank players that it feels very hard for them to clear all bosses in LFR. What happens is basically this:

• 1st LFR run in a week, player gets into a group that already killed the first boss. They clear the rest of the raid with them.
• 2nd LFR in this week, player again gets into a group that already killed the first boss.
• 3rd LFR in this week, see above.

This is especially frustrating for tank players that face relatively high queuing times. The situation might even be aggravated by tanks that already killed bosses two and three this week, leaving after they finally got the first boss down, which means another tank will be assigned to that slot.

Is this something on your radar, and if yes, are there any plans to alleviate the situation for tanks?
A: If a player has killed the last boss in an in-progress dungeon, the next time that player queues, the system will actively try to put him/her into a fresh run. However, we understand how frustrating it can be to end up placed into an in-progress dungeon group, and we are working on ways to improve the system. This includes backfilling methods for individuals who leave mid-dungeon, and we are keeping a close eye on behavior and completion stats at this time.

Q: With LFD valor rewards going back to 1/day from 7/week, doesn’t this give those players who might only be able to play on the weekend a disadvantage? you stated that more players were doing them at 1/day but were the stats really that drastic? Is there any other reason you’ve switched it back to 1/day besides what you stated?
A: This is no longer how our system works. Back in WotLK and Cataclysm, the only way to get the highest-level points (now Valor) was to do a run once a day, which was then changed to seven a week. Now, however, players get a bonus of Valor points on their first run, and continue to earn Valor with each addition run as well as through certain daily quests. It is very feasible that a player can now cap Valor in one day by chain-running Heroics. Since there’s a Valor bonus for every random run, we don’t feel it’s necessary to make the slightly higher bonus for the first run of the day apply to the first seven runs you do in a week. It’s a small bonus for doing at least one Heroic every day, but unlike before, players who can’t login every day aren’t prevented from being rewarded Valor more than once a day via Heroics.

Q: Do you plan to allow players to search for a third party member for Scenarios? At the moment when one leaves it is impossible so you either quit the Scenario or do it with only 2 party members.
A: The same functions that are in Raid Finder and Dungeon Finder groups will be implemented for Scenarios in Patch 5.1, so your group will be put back in the queue if you lose a member.

Questing
Q: There is a lot of mixed feedback regarding daily quests. There are players who love the fact that they have a new endgame progression system that allows them to eventually obtain better gear through reputation and Valor Points, yet there are others who feel forced to do dailies in order to keep up in PvE progression which essentially feels like an enforced ‘grind’ to them. What are your thoughts on PvE progression now after more and more players reach endgame?

More specific: Are you considering additional changes to the reputation system besides the increased reputation gain for alts? Do you feel players who complain about the need to do daily quests have a point, or are there other and equally quick means of progression they haven’t discovered yet (such as running Heroics -> running LFR)?
A: The vast arrays of daily quests are there to provide players with plenty of things to do once they hit level 90. These are not intended to be completed in weeks, but enjoyed over several months. The items and goodies players can earn through these factions are all things unnecessary to remain competitive in-game, and each person has the choice of whether or not to work to earn them. Even with top-end recipes, the benefit is very minuscule by comparison to what is more readily available, and especially after players have begun wearing item level 500+ gear.

Q: When questing in groups, some players got a little bit confused about how the progress of each group member is tracked. This led them to the conclusion that MoP doesn’t really encourage questing in groups, which they feel is contradictory to the idea of an MMO. They provided a few observations and examples which I listed below.

How do you feel questing in groups works for players? How can we explain to players why the experience feels inconsistent across different kinds of quests? Is this something you’d like to address and make more streamlined in the future?

Here are the observations and a few examples players provided:
General observations:

• In killquests, kills are generally awarded to the entire group
• In gathering quests, each player needs to collect the required items individually. However, if the item drops from a mob, it can be often picked up by everyone. If it needs to be looted from an object, each group member needs to find the required amount of objects.
• In quests that require players to perform individual actions, these actions sometimes count for the entire group and sometimes they don’t.

Examples for situations in which the group experience feels off:
Gathering quests:

• Watering woes (Valley of the Four Winds, QID 30267): Each group member can loot Spindly Bloodfeathers from the same corpses; Glad Glimmers need to be picked up individually though.
• The Great Water Hunt (Valley of the Four Winds, QID 30051): Group members can’t see each other’s Mudmug, everyone needs to collect Gladewater individually)
  Quests requiring individual actions:
• Evacuation Orders (Valley of the Four Winds, QID 29982): Each group member needs to talk individually to the NPCs to complete the quests.
• Crouching Carrot, Hidden Turnip (Valley of the Four Winds, QID 29947): Regardless of which player tricks Virmen with the orange-painted turnip (lol btw, loved that quest), it counts for all group members.

A: We agree that these types of inconsistencies are not optimal and things we are certainly looking into improving. Currently, there are discussions ongoing to review group questing, implement small changes and fixes as we can, and then shoot for much greater changes designing future content. Of note, with patch 5.2, we plan to implement new tech that will help provide all grouped players with flip-the-switch-type quest objectives, which will count for everyone in the group. We currently don’t have the tech to award everyone in a group credit for quests where you have to gather loot from doodads on the ground, so we’re trying to be a little more gentle with those.

Q: Players who are really focused on doing dailies for reputation and Valor are finding that it’s actually kind of difficult to naturally acquire Justice points. This feels a little counterintuitive since it’s the lower currency. Similar to how JP drops from bosses in Heroics, how about allowing bosses to drop them in Scenarios?
A: That’s an interesting point. It does seem a little weird that one can only obtain Valor by doing Scenarios, a low-tier endgame feature, and not any Justice, the low-tier item currency. We’ll look into this and see what can be done, as Scenario bosses currently have no loot tables.

Q: Many players who frequently do dailies are complaining about having an excess amount of Lesser Charms of Good Fortune taking up bag space, and that there’s nothing to use them on if you accumulate well over 90 a week. One suggestion players had, which is similar to what we’ve offered in the past, is to allow them to be spent on tokens that would grant rep for the faction from which they’re bought. Would you consider this, or other, changes to these lesser charms?
A: We can confirm that Lesser Charms of Good Fortune will be moved to the Currency tab in Patch 5.1. The token system, however, is a dangerous one given the current setup. This will encourage players to spend all their charms on reputation to get to exalted as quickly as possible; but they’ll be really sad when they realize how much they want Elder Charms of Good Fortune, and now have to keep running dailies past exalted to acquire them. If people are getting more than 90 a week, that’s completely fine and expected. They’ll want to have a steady supply of Elder Charms after they’re done with daily quests, and inventory space won’t be an issue in 5.1.

Pet Battles
Q: Currently Pet Battle are only between the same faction. Is it possible we’ll allow cross-faction pet duels? Will we have a Spectator Mode for pet battles?
A: There are currently no plans to make Pet Battles cross-faction. There isn’t really a need to build in that functionality either, provided enough players are participating that the queue times aren’t long.

Q: Do we consider adding further music tracks to the pet battles? The current music playing during the battles gets a bit old after a while.
A: There is an option to turn off pet battle music specifically if you get sick of it. We don’t have any plans at the moment to expand upon the existing pet battle music. We did shuffle 10 tracks into different playlists and added some logic to the way they play back though. Specifically, PvP battles have the more driving pieces, and the trainer/boss battles have longer tracks that are less likely to repeat during a fight. PvE (wild) has overlap with both of these, but is weighted more with the less intense music. It’s minor, be we feel this improves the experience by tying each music piece more consistently to different types of battles.

Q: There are rumours about several UI improvements and other features being added in patch 5.1 for pet battles. Anything you can share on this?
A: Just as an example of something awesome we plan to do with the pets that drop from old raid bosses you can share, if you collect all of them you get an achievement that unlocks Mr. Bigglesworth from Naxxramas. To distinguish him from the standard Siamese cat model, we gave him some sweet frozen whiskers and a frost path behind his footsteps. He’s Undead.

Cross-Realm Zones
Q: CRZ – Server side lag, some players continue to say that cross-realm zones feel unresponsive, possibly due to overcrowding. Player observation: “It acts like I’m lagging whenever I enter and play in a cross-realm zone. Crossing from a normal zone into a cross-realm one causes a huge delay and the zone itself acts like I’m lagging even though my latency remains the same (I’ve seen other people describe it as “rubber-banding” which seems like an accurate description for how it feels). Mobs and nodes phase in and out. Some mobs can’t be looted.” Are similar reports being investigated to ensure a more seamless experience?
A: This is one of the more complicated issues currently being investigated and worked on. Considering the high amount of variables involved, this may take longer to address as greater amounts of data are collected. We want to ensure as seamless an experience as possible.

Q: CRZ – Some of the optimization tech is causing players and NPCs to spontaneously despawn/reappear when players are standing in front of them. This could be at least part of the reason that players have been making threads mistakenly claiming that CRZ has been enabled for Pandaria zones. Is this something we can better address?
A: This is a common misconception and actually has nothing to do with CRZ. Just before the launch of Mists, new optimization coding tech was implemented to help throttle the amount of data that gets sent to the player’s client. When quickly moving around, this can cause certain objects and NPCs to appear to be phasing in and out as if CRZ was having an impact, when in fact, it’s just data sorting out when/how it reaches the player.

We know it can be weird to see things appear/disappear, but before this code was added most players (not on top-of-the-line hardware) would experience a temporary lock of their client as it tried to instantly process so many character models, gear being worn, environment details, talents/glyphs and other “Inspect Character” data for nearby players, etc. Now we throttle how that information loads so that the player should experience much less of a framerate drop when entering crowded areas. Note also that the throttling radius is increased as the amount of data needed to load is increased, meaning characters, NPCs, creatures, objects, etc. will take a little longer to appear, again, in the interest of not overwhelming the player’s system with data.

Q: CRZ – Some players report their client’s framerate hitching when crossing into a CRZ zone – frequently leading to the next issue: Players say they’re still getting dismounted when crossing borders. Other border anomalies include seeing resource nodes/NPCs/players disappear. Players comment that the world feels much more fragmented. How are you working to smooth these types of issues out?
A: There are still some tech related quirks that are being hashed out, and as data is collected, we’ll be continuing to work on making CRZ smoother for players. As for dismounting, single-player mounts should not being doing this so please forward details if it’s happening. With two-player mounts, however, there are limitations with the technology involved in CRZ and it is intended that the passenger is ejected upon crossing zones. We don’t like that it happens, but it might be a difficult issue to solve for only about 3 passenger-enabled mounts.

Q: CRZ – The community has been discussing griefing by groups of high-level PVPers locking down a low-level quest hub. When high-level characters show up to defend the hub, the griefers flee into a neighbouring zone where they could be coalesced into a different CRZ, effectively hiding them. Once the high-level characters leave, they go right back to terrorizing the quest hub/slaughtering low-level characters. Is this a symptom we can address?
A: While we understand that world PvP can be frustrating, and CRZ can exacerbate that, we’re still assessing how much of a factor this actually plays in disrupting the play experience for a significant portion of people.

Miscellaneous
Q: Are there any plans to increase the old 50k gold cap limit when transferring characters at level 85 to a higher value for level 90?
A: No, an extremely tiny fraction of the playerbase has over 50,000 gold and we feel it’s good for in-game economies to have these players utilize the market to offset their total gold amounts.

Q: Some players are speculating about the Keepers of Time Tabard worn by Loremaster Cho’s ancestor during the “Family Tree” quest and they are wondering if he was an agent of Nozdormu. Are those speculations right or is the tabard just a filler? (source: Reddit )
A: only time will tell ;-)

Q: There is some confusion about Blood Spirit (Item ID: 80433) in the community. Some believe it can only be obtained from disenchanting raid tier weapons, others believe all raid items above LFR quality and others again assume it can be disenchanted from all raid quality items, regardless of the difficulty they were obtained in. Can you clarify this for our players?
A: Yes, communication was confusing. To clarify, all epic-quality items in a raid dungeon that can be disenchanted will produce Blood Spirits.

Q: Players wonder if old models for public transport will be replaced by the new models of Gryphon and Wyvern, and/or if their existing mounts will be replaced. Can you please clarify this?
A: The current taxi models are staying as they are for the time being, but we are considering updating them at a later date. The new models that are coming in 5.1, however, are completely new mounts that players can earn through the new factions that are being introduced. Players will have the chance to earn the new mounts without armor through a quest chain. Once exalted with the new factions, then the armored versions will be available for purchase. When asked by a player if these were new taxi mount designs, here’s what Cory Stockton tweeted in response: “These are new mounts that will be rewarded from the Alliance/Horde factions in patch 5.1.0.”

Q: The graveyard nearest the Cloud Serpent dailies is at the top of a mountain in the middle of the ocean, with no way to regain your body at the daily area, forcing a spirit res. As in previous meetings we don’t want flying, but this particular graveyard just seems misplaced.
A: That sounds like a bug. We’re still hesitant to just give people ghost flight, but we can look at problems with specific graveyards like this and determine if we should flag them to auto-res people who release there.

Q: Guild perk Quick and the Dead was hotfixed “now increases the movement speed of dead players by 10%, down from 100%.” Some players understand the change was needed to prevent zerging world bosses. However, many more players feel it was nerfed too hard. Are there any plans to explore changes to possibly make the guild perk more meaningful again?
A: The change actually had nothing to do with boss zerging, but was because we didn’t intend for it to stack with movement speed boosts while dead. It was never intended to be a 100% bonus, which we felt was too fast, and we feel this change better falls into line with other guild perks which are meant to be small bonuses.

Q: Have you thought about adding portals to Pandaria in the other major racial cities? There are portals in Shrine of Seven Stars/Two Moons that go to all the major cities but only two cities that can return you to Pandaria.
A: There aren’t any plans to introduce new portals at this time, but we can certainly discuss the topic and weigh the options. Stormwind and Orgrimmar were made the primary cities in Cataclysm, in part because there was no new neutral capital (as in previous expansions), we wanted players to feel connected to their Horde/Alliance capitals again, and we made a lot of graphical updates/improvements to them. Our goal since Cataclysm launch, however, has been to really free players up to go where they want and not to be clustered in one place with everyone else on their realm, which is a major reason we started by adding the cooking/fishing dailies to other cities.

Most players set their Hearth to the Vale and, therefore, can use the portals from the Vale to the capital of their choice, and then Hearthing to Pandaria. That said, we understand, even with a 15-minute cooldown, that Hearthstones can sometimes leave you feeling trapped somewhere if you need to hop back and forth, and Stormwind and Orgrimmar are currently the only cities that don’t cause that problem due to their two-way portals. It might be worth revisiting. For example, many of us feel a little sad when going into Ironforge and seeing it so empty, when it was once a bustling city for the Alliance.

Q: For the mounts that have faction requirements in MoP, why are they not account-wide like most of the older faction/reputation mounts?
A: Pandaria faction-based mounts should all be account-wide. Are there any specific mounts that are not working across all characters? Keep in mind, while the mounts are intended to be account-wide, the ability to ride i.e. a Cloud Serpent will have to be earned by each character individually.

Q: Is it possible to allow bandages (and other similar items) to stack at more than 20? Certainly a stack of 20 Engineer Anvils isn’t the same as 20 bandages?
A: This is another example of the growing need to continue our internal discussions about how best to improve the inventory system as a whole. We’re still busy looking at ways to make things better all-around and the continued feedback has been helpful.

Q: What ever happened to the option to disable loading screen tips? Some players have been asking where this option went.
A: We’ll need to check in with the UI team to see what happened. Typically, though, we try to keep the options lists streamlined and, at times, will remove extraneous options if we notice they’re not used much. There’s possibly too much bloat in the UI options these days.