No Flying in 8.0 Confirmed

[Deleted]

Thank god Ian knows what he is doing.

[Cathbadh]

I'm fine with the pathfinder system. I do think it should come about a couple months earlier though.

[Deleted]

This is a good thing. I don't see why people get so butthurt over not having flying. It makes the zones much more immersive.

Only problem I find is when they design shitty zones to navigate. Like the broken shore was a nightmare.

You know, if we would have zones like in Classic, then delaying flight there would not be much of a problem. In Classic, you could get around fine on a ground mount, because they did not design the zones like fucking 3D mazes where you could not figure out from your position on the minimap how to get to your destination properly.

[shammypie]

One problem is the game doesn't really know how to think in more than 2 dimensions, and whilst it might be cool to pick on Ion it's pretty doubtful that he's the only guy working on gameplay ideas, especially when you consider Blizz have been fiddling around with flying combat since TBC and WotLK was originally supposed to have flying vehicles in PvP before Blizz decided they couldn't get it to work well enough.

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I always do :-)

forget flying vehicles they couldn't get the death wing encounter to work properly and that was just jumping from rock to rock. I remember the first week trying to down him was terrible because we would randomly loose someone on the jump between platforms sometimes.

[Annamarine]

Nice thing about agreeing with blizzard is I can sit here and laugh at those who cry since I am on the winning side.

[Deleted]

Nice thing about agreeing with blizzard is I can sit here and laugh at those who cry since I am on the winning side.

Depends what you define as winning. And agreeing is hard with to much infos missing. They have barely talked about flying at Blizzcon, but the info we have is not really spot on.

- Flying will unlock in a similar way to Legion and Warlords. Team wants players to get familiarity with the world before being able to fly. They learned from Legion though and will tweak it as needed.

So similar doesn't mean "exactly like" or even "the same way as". And "learned from Legion though and will tweak it as needed" could mean anything. I doubt that there will be a sooner pathfinder since they still think it makes them more money. But right now i have no information about flying. I guess we will se more, and in Warlords and Legion (not so much) it's been later and closer to release when questions around flying got louder.... and infos being "more precise". At least they have learned not to pull some sneaky silent change stuff like they did in WoD.... i guess that is a well learned lesson.

Or do you define winning as douchebaggery of being happy to see other people discussing a mechanic/change they don't like and being upset about it?

[Yvaelle]

Part of what made Suramar possibly the best questing experience in WoW was doing it all from the ground. Meredil felt like an outpost in the wilds. Hunting for the leyline cave entrances felt like an accomplishment. Getting in and out of the Faronaar tunnels felt like a dungeon crawl. Suramar City felt huge and expansive, and dangerous on the ground.

That's why this is excellent news

Agreed but the flip side is Highmountain and Stormheim and even Azsuna were pretty horrible to navigate on the ground.

[WowIsDead64]

Vashj'ir wasn't popular because the itemizaton from quests there was terrible, you lost your mount speed for the opening stages, and it had the oppressive atmosphere of all that water. 3D movement was a factor too, of course, but it wasn't the primary reason for why that zone wasn't well received.

I would be really interested to see an entire zone completely dedicated to flying in the open air. Like others have suggested, maybe using some kind of system to level up your flying mount and give it new abilities. I'm beginning to wonder if Blizzard actually just doesn't know how to do it right. That wouldn't surprise me with Hazzicostas at the wheel. He's a raid/instance junkie. I really don't think he understands how to think in more than two dimensions.

Vashj'ir was bad exactly due to terrible navigation. It's pretty decent location, when you know, where quest objective actually are. You know, build-in quest helper was implemented for reason. Because majority of players don't want to play World of GPS - they want to play RPG. And bad thing about it - it doesn't work in 3D environment, so adding need for 3D navigation - makes it completely useless. Stormheim, Highmountain and partially Azsuna - are terrible exactly due to the same reason, so I just treat it as double-standard - Vashj'ir was terrible, but 3 of 4 Legion locations aren't? And as I've already said many times: shifting focus towards such design - is the same terrible thing, as forcing PVP on PVEers. Pro-flyers should have an option to opt out of this crap.

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Part of what made Suramar possibly the best questing experience in WoW was doing it all from the ground. Meredil felt like an outpost in the wilds. Hunting for the leyline cave entrances felt like an accomplishment. Getting in and out of the Faronaar tunnels felt like a dungeon crawl. Suramar City felt huge and expansive, and dangerous on the ground.

That's why this is excellent news

Suramar indeed has good ground experience, but due to only one reason - because mobs don't aggro by default. If whole game would be like this - I would agree not to have flying in game. For example aggro is implemented in Wildstar this way. May be Suramar was an experiment and depending on whether it would be success or not - Blizzard could decide, if they should remove forced aggro from game or not. Let's hope, that is was successful and forced aggro will be removed from game at some point.

[CaptainV]

Since the no flying community is getting wow classic I do foresee in the future that Ian will eat those words on account there will be no real benefit to pandering to a minority of players who cried "vanillia" for everything, even current wow.

Sooo, im not worried, it'll happen sooner or later.

[Dch48]

I loved Vash'jir and I hated questing in Suramar City. It was just too hard to find the way up or down. I had to resort frequently to using the kite and hearthstones. Flying would have helped immensely.

[Xandrigity]

Agreed but the flip side is Highmountain and Stormheim and even Azsuna were pretty horrible to navigate on the ground.

I intentionally avoided highmountain on alts until I had flying unlocked on my main due to the nutty caves, tunnels BS

[Alopex Major]

You're skipping this expansion because of no-fly? I take it you highly disagree with Vanilla coming back

No, I'm skipping BfA because it looks awful and offers literally nothing of interest to me. No flying simply solidifies my decision.

[WowIsDead64]

I intentionally avoided highmountain on alts until I had flying unlocked on my main due to the nutty caves, tunnels BS

I don't know. Only bad area of Highmountain - north side. In my opinion Stormheim is worse, than Highmountain. That's why I decided not to do Loremaster (without Suramar) on every character - just to level them to 110 as fast, as possible. So, currently I always skip Stormheim on every character and do half of Highmountain. Even with flying. Leveling in Legion is just terrible. If leveling in BFA will be the same - I will never buy it, as it doesn't offer anything interesting for me.

[breadisfunny]

nice to see blizzard hasn't learned anything over the last two expansions.

[justjm]

Can you show that the 5m-ish people who came back at the start of WoD were planning on staying for the long haul and were put off by "poor design philosophy," or is it possible that a lot of them were coming back to play through new content and left after a few months because they got what they wanted?



Icecrown was a terrible zone largely because flight removed any sense of menace from what was supposed to be the heartland of the Scourge threat, also the world-quests are a better implementation of the daily-system than the hubs that littered MoP, Cata and WotLK (I personally much prefered the way the Apexis zones worked.)

Despite running out of things to do too quickly in WoD (until Tanaan) I'd say that the past two expansions have provided some of the best and most interesting world content to do at the level cap, just because you decide something is "garbage" doesn't make it objectively bad.

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Pretty straightforward really. It was "gated" because the content needed to complete it was released in a later patch, once the Broken Shore content was implemented you could work towards completing the achievement, and once you had completed the achievement you could fly.

Icecrown was terrible? It's one of the best zones they have ever done, and this included the flight aspect. It was well handled in the sense, it's such a dangerous zone with the entire area swarming with giant monstrosities and what not. However i guess people like you with their heads stuck in the cloud's (pun intended) who reject reality for their own worldview cannot comprehend something so simple.

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Depends what you define as winning. And agreeing is hard with to much infos missing. They have barely talked about flying at Blizzcon, but the info we have is not really spot on.

- Flying will unlock in a similar way to Legion and Warlords. Team wants players to get familiarity with the world before being able to fly. They learned from Legion though and will tweak it as needed.

So similar doesn't mean "exactly like" or even "the same way as". And "learned from Legion though and will tweak it as needed" could mean anything. I doubt that there will be a sooner pathfinder since they still think it makes them more money. But right now i have no information about flying. I guess we will se more, and in Warlords and Legion (not so much) it's been later and closer to release when questions around flying got louder.... and infos being "more precise". At least they have learned not to pull some sneaky silent change stuff like they did in WoD.... i guess that is a well learned lesson.

Or do you define winning as douchebaggery of being happy to see other people discussing a mechanic/change they don't like and being upset about it?

Frankly i don't trust blizzard anymore. They made legion into an endless grind, took months and months and to unlock fight, then tried to addon even more mechanics in pathfinder 2 and got abused so badly for it that they finally acquiesced and let people unlock it.

Frankly wow is nothing but a numbers game. The pitch of the next expansion is about as interesting as watching paint dry, the game's entire mechanism is no longer based on fun but using abusive mechanics like delayed flight to keep their MAU's up by forcing the DAU's to grind endlessly.

Hell look at their character services? Some of it is as expensive as some indy titles.

I could go on, but my time is better spent elsewhere

[Elim Garak]

No buying until flying confirmed

[Hatorri]

Thats a bull... if Blizzard dont want ppl flying in order to keep them more in game then lets stop asking for real money at shop for flying mounts..!!!! there is nice to take our money for nothing.. if some ppl dont want to fly then add a button to disable flying mount and let them crawl to the bushes.!!!

[SirCowdog]

Thats a bull... if Blizzard dont want ppl flying in order to keep them more in game then lets stop asking for real money at shop for flying mounts..!!!! there is nice to take our money for nothing.. if some ppl dont want to fly then add a button to disable flying mount and let them crawl to the bushes.!!!

You can't access bushes until you've completed Bushfinder Parts 1 and 2. Sorry. It's more immersive, and it allows Blizzard more control over how players approach the presentation of the shrubs. This was purely an artistic decision, and we really want players to have the best experience as they journey through the game.

[Powerogue]

I think they've found the perfect balance. Unlock flying eventually, after you've experienced the zones "the right way". They are simply designed to be experienced from the ground, rather than just flying over all the mobs and obstacles. You could scale the cliffs of Highmountain....or hold spacebar for like 2 minutes straight. Which is more interesting? (Again, yes that gets less interesting over time, but by that point you've unlocked flying, is the idea)

I do hope they keep the flightmaster's whistle though. And preferably that "emerald winds" goblin glider flapper. Those worked really well.

[Mormolyce]

Do we REALLY need this re-"confirmed" every expansion?

That has been their plan for new expansions for years and we have no reason to believe it won't be for the forseeable future.

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You can't access bushes until you've completed Bushfinder Parts 1 and 2. Sorry. It's more immersive, and it allows Blizzard more control over how players approach the presentation of the shrubs. This was purely an artistic decision, and we really want players to have the best experience as they journey through the game.

On the other hand I wish they'd implement a "QQMaster" achievement that you need to unlock before you can QQ about flying on the forums.