How will flight be handled the next expac?

[Stacie]

Should just award it at level cap (and not for silly amounts of gold!) Nothing wrong with flying just pull an argus and not have flying on it or better still design the new areas in patch's with flying in mind. Likely be as it is now towards end of expan release it via achievement though

[Deleted]

Pathfinder is fine. It pleases (or partly sates) both sides

Paying for it IRL is a ridiculous idea

[skannerz22]

grinding an achievement

[otro]

Remove all mounts in game and all the flight paths. there, walk ur fucking way around

[Deleted]

Don't give them any ideas "OMG just think how immersed our players would be if we made them RP walk everywhere"

lol



God I hope not. I would quit for sure.

Personal flight is one of the things for me that really sets WoW apart from other MMOs

you see them teleporters in argus? thats a test. if people like it flight might be in for some rough times.

[Chemical Ellis]

A part of me sort of wishes flight had never been added to the game, and I don't really want it to be relevant in the progression part of an expansion's cycle unless the zones have been specifically designed around flight being a thing. Coming in at the tail end of an expansion suits me just fine.

Depending on mob density, yes, convenience can be a pretty major issue. I'd solve this with some trinket that drastically reduces mob aggro while mounted, a movement speed boost, and maybe an additional hearthstone or two.

[wrathblade]

I'd perfer a start without flying. then a achivement to make sure you seen all the content to unlock it account wide.

Buying it would be a cheap as Fu! abit like all the day 1 DLC nowadays... fu that.

Having it at the start would ruin allot. you would fly to the mob kill it mount up and skip the 20 trash in between. no world PVP no sense of exploring.
Also as i started a DH after my feral druid i noticed how i loved the dubble jump. it's one of those perks! once even dubble jumped over a wall to escape a pvping mage and got away! allot more fun and engaging then imprison shadowmeld mountup //spit ect.

Also buying it when your hit max level is to easy for some players. ( some peeps have millions ) while others are damm near broke.
As for achivement you can complete at launch. this would have to be a damm long achivement or ppl would complete it by grinding like hell for 2 weeks. not nearly enough time to enjoy the gameplay.

Id prefer it if we could get around abit easyer tho. as a engineer i love my wormholes! but taking a FP from 1 side to the other takes to long. and you can't really jump off when you see something you wanna pickup in flight.

Maybe having some horde/alliance gunships transporting us around the zones be a better idea.
you could get around faster then a FP.
see a herb you must have? jump! helps getting around easyer and everyone has a goblin glider nowadays.
wanna have fun? get on a flight of the opposite faction!

hell gief alliance those airships 2! the sound bloody awsome!

[SirCowdog]

It's not god mode, that's blatant hyperbole, it's a travel mechanic, Wrath and MoP are the best xpacs ever and they were designed with flying in mind.

Keep in mind here that I'm 100% a supporter of including flight in the game. I've even got a reputation for it. The ground-only fanatics tend to roll their eyes and groan when I show up in a thread(Mostly because they don't like it when I poke holes in their arguments and won't accept no-flying). So when I say something about flying, it's because I'm trying to be objective and constructive.

So one thing we absolutely MUST do is recognize that the current mechanics of flying are not optimal for the direction the game is going. Flight is not just a "travel mode", because it's something which can be used to drop in and out of content and combat. Most of the mob pathing and AI simply can't handle it. It is effectively a god mode because of this, and because Blizzard refuses to design content that can handle a player on a flying mount.

If we really want flight to be part of the game, either the entire game has to shift its design to accommodate flight, or flying has to change how it works at a fundamental level. I'm ok with either one, but I think changing how flight works is probably the more likely solution.

The end of the day this is a game not a job, I don't want to artificially inflate my travel time so blizzard can slow their content down, IMO people like you are why this game is in a worse place than it used to be, hollow shitty content that lasts longer than it should, not because of flying but because people are willing to accept artificial inflation as "content."

Don't mistake my intent here. It's not to make WoW a game with even more filler or tedium. Jumping to conclusions about a person's intent isn't going to help anything.

So when I criticize simply dropping flight into existing ground-only content, I'm not doing so because I think flight is bad, or that content needs to be stretched. I'm saying it because I think that flying needs to be PART of the content, and not just something that's used to skip around, past, or over it. That's what teleports, portals, and summons are for.

In that regard, simply dropping flight onto content which wasn't designed to use it is a bad idea. Blizzard can do better than that. We should expect better than that.

[Detheavn]

I'm fine with pathfinder tbh.

[slime]

Flying is one of the best features of WoW and one that separates it from most other mmorpgs. Too bad Blizz doesn't see it that way.

[Xjev]

This switching on and off of flying is very annoying just make your damn decision and keep it that way. Or maybe its for marketing purposes, yay patch x.x.5 with flying!

[kurama]

But what player base is blizzard going to listen?

The "90% of the playerbase liked vanilla so we MUST have a vanilla server" (vanilla didn't have flying btw)
The "90% of the playerbase who like flying and they just play because of flying" (Bullshit for me tbh why dont play a flying simulator?)
The "90% of the playerbase who thinks flying is bad but are not against to get it with an achievement"

All the players want to say that they are the majority of the playerbase to give strenght to their arguments.

For me they have now a good balance

Do you enjoy to fly? good work first on the ground to earn it.
Do you enjoy to not fly? good just dont work to earn it.

I would like it more if it is available at launch, but in case that you didn't notice, the devs want to remove it completely and all the other things like that, like the water walking mounts were close to be removed.

[Sicarius87]

To be honest, I really dont care what they do with it. I still find myself using the whistle to navigate to places a little quicker, flight paths are actually faster than flying there myself. A buddy and me tested it out the other day while he was on his pally and I still beat him to the destination by a good 45 seconds.

You people here can bitch about flying all you want but the fact is, flight paths are quicker and always will be. I will stick with flight paths as I can take a quick break using them and stretch my legs and not worry about being stuck to a mountain, tree, or other object or even overshooting my destination and finding myself fatigued.

You damn millennials make mountains out of molehills for no reason.

[SirCowdog]

I'd perfer a start without flying. then a achivement to make sure you seen all the content to unlock it account wide.

And why couldn't the content simply include flying as part of the experience in the first place?

you would fly to the mob kill it mount up and skip the 20 trash in between.

You're making the mistake of assuming that anyone gives two jackal turds about the trash mobs in the first place. Don't you ever wonder why they're called trash mobs? It's because they're worthless. They're filler. Useless. They don't even have any good loot, or lore, or really any point except to maybe daze you.

How about Blizzard took some time to make the content a little more interesting, so you didn't WANT to skip past the "trash"? How about Blizzard makes it so that even when you're flying, you have to pay attention? How about if there were actual obstacles or enemies that would stop you from just "flying up to the mob, kill it, mount up and leave?

Most of the complaints people like to list about flying are because the content design is weak, not because flying is bad.

no world PVP

World PVP was killed by battlegrounds and arena. They not only have better rewards, but are more fair, and more on demand.

If you want more world PVP, maybe you should be asking Blizzard to create real PVP objectives and rewards out in the open world instead of shitting on flight when it's not even the cause of the problem.

no sense of exploring.

Again, this is because Blizzard refuses to actually create content where flying is PART of the design. We explored just fine from TBC through MoP IF there was something interesting enough to land after catching our attention.

Also buying it when your hit max level is to easy for some players. ( some peeps have millions ) while others are damm near broke.
As for achivement you can complete at launch. this would have to be a damm long achivement or ppl would complete it by grinding like hell for 2 weeks. not nearly enough time to enjoy the gameplay.

This isn't a problem if flight is part of the gameplay from the beginning. :/

- - - Updated - - -

To be honest, I really dont care what they do with it. I still find myself using the whistle to navigate to places a little quicker, flight paths are actually faster than flying there myself. A buddy and me tested it out the other day while he was on his pally and I still beat him to the destination by a good 45 seconds.

You people here can bitch about flying all you want but the fact is, flight paths are quicker and always will be. I will stick with flight paths as I can take a quick break using them and stretch my legs and not worry about being stuck to a mountain, tree, or other object or even overshooting my destination and finding myself fatigued.

If it was just about getting somewhere faster, then a waypoint system like every other RPG uses would be the way to go for pure travel purposes. I REALLY hope Blizzard adopts this in following expansions. Flight paths are garbage.

[Magistrate]

Feel free to use your ground mount instead.

The problem is that it's not really that simple. If anyone is going to respond to this, please read through to the end before impulse replying because I actually would like to see a comprehensive reply.

If they're going to make flight so easily accessible during the time period when content is relevant, the content itself has to be designed for flying. That's why when you look at most older zones Wrath > Mists, there's just huge swaths of land where the style is exactly the same and does nothing really new or interesting. I think Jade Forest was the only exception to this, which was mostly because each faction started at opposite ends and it included a lot of phased storytelling--both of which have their own problems and can't be done for every zone.

The thing is, if flying isn't an issue, questing, mob density, mob placement, rarespawns, chest placement, etc. are all handled differently. Stuff is mostly just sitting out in the open, geography largely doesn't exist or contains hyperbolically large mountains and large, flat, or repeating sections that take forever to travel and have just mobs doing nothing interesting and milling about (Borean Tundra, Icecrown, Kun-Lai, Uldum, Valley of the Four Winds, Dread Wastes, etc.). The zones have to be artificially inflated so that people won't complain the world is too small, like when you stretch out a picture and copy and paste little sections to make up for the new space. Because if you have the choice to ignore content and drop in/drop out at POIs, you're probably going to do that and the game needs to be designed for that. And why waste resources designing zones with detail if it's all going to be ignored?

Then where does that leave us? Well, the people that actually enjoy playing the game like an RPG don't really enjoy it as much, because an area of content that they really like was throw under a rolling pin. And the people that don't like to play the game like an RPG just burn through everything, complain that there's nothing to do, and then just queue for junk or raid and say it was an empty, pointless expansion. This literally happened every time.

I think a better compromise would have been just requiring one character to have completed the quest meta in each zone, vs. all this rep stuff, etc. It's quick enough and ensures they aren't wasting resources designing zones for people like to play content.

Or, alternatively, players who don't want to play the game like an RPG just don't play out in the world and then complain when it's designed like a world. Forgo all of the toys, mounts, achievements, etc. You deserve what you're willing to accomplish--if that's Mythic raiding or RBGs or arenas, that's great! Push the bleeding edge! But don't force the devs to water down content for the rest of us so that you can play the world content like peg.

[Dejo93]

I have a feeling it'll be the same as with WoD and legion. Ground mounts for launch to enjoy the scenery, and flying when you get used to it

[Theoris]

Pathfinder. Blizzard seems to like it, so it's probably here to stay.

[Magistrate]

you see them teleporters in argus? thats a test. if people like it flight might be in for some rough times.

Part of the reason flight paths exist is also to redistribute population concentrations and alleviate server load. I don't know if that's actually an issue anymore, but that was part of that rationale for the vanilla launch when their server capabilities were much more primitive.

[Zka]

I don't care as long as terrain isn't as annoying as now.

[SirCowdog]

Because if you have the choice to ignore content and drop in/drop out at POIs, you're probably going to do that and the game needs to be designed for that. And why waste resources designing zones with detail if it's all going to be ignored?

Then where does that leave us? Well, the people that actually enjoy playing the game like an RPG don't really enjoy it as much, because an area of content that they really like was throw under a rolling pin. And the people that don't like to play the game like an RPG just burn through everything, complain that there's nothing to do, and then just queue for junk or raid and say it was an empty, pointless expansion. This literally happened every time.

Or maybe just make stuff that isn't so boring and dull that people want to ignore it? Half of the problem is EXACTLY what you just described: Large swaths of land with nothing of interest in it. Or worse: large swaths of land filled with useless trash mobs who only exist to daze and slow you down with nothing of interest while you're there....being dazed and slow with nothing to do but trash the trash mobs.

The solution isn't to simply remove flight and cram everything into a smaller area, then force people to slog through it. The solution is to make areas that people actually want to interact with. Forcing interaction doesn't make the content good, it just removes the choice.

The solution is to stop making disposable, weak, super-linear content that gets burned through so quickly.