Pathfinder returns for Shadowlands

[smityx]

Pathfinder is fine but for the love of <DIETY> remove the damn time-gating. Making us wait a year+ because you want us to "admire the graphic artists work", or would that be not fully developing the environment to support flying at release to save cost/time and/or extend the MAUs, is ridiculous.

[Kyriani]

Since the Shadowlands zones are not contiguous with each other, I suspect Blizzard might allow us to unlock flight on a per zone basis in Shadowlands. They did say that “Flying will work similar to previous expansions, with a variation of Pathfinder” in Shadowlands.

That implies that it may be somewhat different than how it works now. Blizzard might feel more comfortable breaking Pathfinder up into a per zone thing in Shadowlands since the zones aren’t connected and thus you wouldn’t suddenly be forced to land as you crossed zone boundaries.

[Nobleshield]

Pathfinder as they do it is garbage. If it was straightforward and not purposely kept gated as a "reward" for some stupid grind, maybe. But what they do is absolute dogshit. It should be simple: Max level, maybe explorer, maybe do all the zone quests. Give flying as a reward for just seeing the content (you know, their lame ass reason for keeping it), rather than artificial gating after that.

[valax]

remove timegating , the only reason why i'm not going to complete bfa part 2. Can't be bothered being forced to do a chore with a limited amount of daily rep for weeks , not in one but 2 zones , and one is filled with gnomes... GNOMES! . Fuck that shit.

[SirCowdog]

How do they make it not become a way to skip every danger of the world or PvP situation?

Disable flight while War Mode is toggled on.

Place quest objectives indoors, or surrounded by ranged mobs with extra aggro range against flying targets.
Reduce flying speed to the same or slightly lower than ground mounts, so the NPC Ai can actually handle you and ground mounts become a legitimate option.
Give some enemies harpoons that can only target flying players.
Make terrain which is adverse to a flying player, such as blocking Line of Sight and Line of Effect so you can't just afk or air-drop into objective areas easily.

Basically stop being lazy with the open world design. Stop with the copy/paste of a blob area in the world filled with trash mobs and kill-x. Stop ignoring the different way in which flight changes the dynamic, and start practicing and learning how to make it better!

Flight is just the focal point. But it's actually the terrible open world design that people are getting sick of. Unless Blizzard starts addressing that(preferably by starting with flight), they're going to keep losing players from retail.

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it’s pretty clear the devs don’t like content being crushed in days simply because people can fly over all the challenges. They also don’t like having all their hard work just being ignored because it can be bypassed with flying.

Then they should make better content!

Sorry, I just don't buy this line about the devs getting sore about players not appreciating their genius. If you have to force someone to have their face rubbed in your work, then your work is shit.

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You very obviously didn't play Warmode in BfA, it has, until fying was reintroduced, been amazing.

It couldn't have anything to do with people switching their focus to Naz and Mech, and abusing phasing to always be on a winning steamroll to get those sweet bonuses. Nope. It was CLEARLY flying. Yes indeed, sir. Yup. Absolutely.

/s

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Funny thing is. When you quit wow you can give a reason why you quit. Blizzard has the data.

So either A) Not enough people really care about it
B) Nearly no one quit because of it
or C) The people who quit, for some reason did not want say they quit because of this

Or:

D) Blizzard has done the calculations, and they'll make enough money DESPITE keeping pathfinder, to keep doing it that way.

Almost all the problems with modern gaming(not just Blizzard) stem from AAA companies placing profits above gameplay. And I don't mean to suggest that businesses can't make money. But it's when making some money isn't enough. They have to make ALL the money, at the expense of quality, reputation, and player good-will.

[Starscream101]

That is untrue.

A lot of players hated the implementation of flying from the get go, as it had a huge impact on World PvP and overall immersion, especially coming out of Vanilla where meeting up at Kargath and moving as a guild towards Blackrock Mountain was a thing, with huge battles and rivalries between guilds (which is a big thing on Classic again, go figure), to a... "fly straight inside the raid" setting that completely destroyed that aspect of the game.

Flying sucks. It's convenient and speeds up people's activities, but it's horrendous to the game, and has been since day 1 of its implementation, so again, its untrue that you state that it wasn't a 'thing' back then.

Either you were ignorant about the fact... and i don't understand why you'd mention it, or you're straight up being deceitful in order to fool people that probably don't know better. Both suck.

World PvP was not hindered by flying people still got away on ground mounts just as easy. What ruined world PvP is phasing and sharding you can never get on your main to go kill that person. And with flying before the sharding and phasing I was able to track people down easier death from above and get my revenge. So no Flying is not what killed world pvp it enhanced world pvp.

[SirCowdog]

Since the Shadowlands zones are not contiguous with each other, I suspect Blizzard might allow us to unlock flight on a per zone basis in Shadowlands. They did say that “Flying will work similar to previous expansions, with a variation of Pathfinder” in Shadowlands.

That implies that it may be somewhat different than how it works now. Blizzard might feel more comfortable breaking Pathfinder up into a per zone thing in Shadowlands since the zones aren’t connected and thus you wouldn’t suddenly be forced to land as you crossed zone boundaries.

I'm glad someone else caught that.

I was thinking it might be something they're finally going to try, but just needed the right layout of zones to make it happen. With a physical location, such as an island, zones have to be contiguous. But in a fantastic setting like Shadowlands, there's no reason to not have each zone split into its own instance, allowing a zone-by-zone unlock of flying.

They honestly could have done this in BfA. Kul'tiras, Zandalar and Nazjatar are in their own instances. Mechagon is the only post-launch open world content connected to an existing zone. Pathfinder part 1 could very easily have enabled flight in KT/Zand, with Part 2 covering Mech/Naz. Hell...Mechagon and Nazjatar could have each have had their own separate Pathfinder locks if Blizzard had put Mech in an instance instead of connected to KT(I'm still not sure why they did that).

[WowIsDead64]

Looks like I won't be preordering.

I'm sick of this garbage. Literally nobody complained before WOD about flying except like 1% of World PVPers, and another 1% of avid roleplayers who claimed "Muh immersion!"

Even Blizzard's most avid fanbase in attendance at Blizzcon was largely unimpressed by this announcement

I know, that it's something about "Vanilla effect" that isn't proved to exist in a first place. I.e. Blizzard think, that there is some immersion effect from exploring content on a ground. Yeah, may be. For some new players, who have never played Wow before. But there is nothing fundamentally new for old players even in a brand new content - it becomes routine pretty fast.

So, what? I think may be we should keep Pathfinder, but remove timegating. Because all this "Master content on a ground - get flying" thing is lie. Why? You know. One year is way too much to "master" content. Month is more than enough. At least I'm for some gradual return of flying. Pro-flyers should have at least some content with flying at release, that would keep them busy for long enough for flying to be fully released in whole game. THAT'S, what is real compromise between flying and no flying. Because when content and whole xpack is obsoleted - it's too late get flying there.

[Fistfighter]

Do you not know what "objectively" means or are you just trying to push your opinion as fact? Also WoW had flying before Minecraft was a thing.

Yes, because it is a fact that RPG games are to be played humbly from the ground up.
The only argument for flying is it makes doing boring shit like WQs, gathering and getting from one grind location to another faster.
People only want flying because the game is tedious to them, and they need to finish the daily cap as quick as possible, so they could turn the game off again. That's why it hurts the game so much. It attracts the worst type of gamers.

[MrLachyG]

I don't mind Pathfinder but yeah should be 1 part and available at launch. Will take at least a few weeks to get anyway

edit: even if they want to double the world quests needed and make the rep requirement exalted that wouldn't bother me. long as can get in first month or two then that is fine with me

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

Yes, because it is a fact that RPG games are to be played humbly from the ground up.
The only argument for flying is it makes doing boring shit like WQs, gathering and getting from one grind location to another faster.
People only want flying because the game is tedious to them, and they need to finish the daily cap as quick as possible, so they could turn the game off again. That's why it hurts the game so much. It attracts the worst type of gamers.

Didn't the idea that other people have fun and enjoy WoW more with flying ever occur to you? Why are you so set in thinking your opinion must be fact?

[Fistfighter]

Didn't the idea that other people have fun and enjoy WoW more with flying ever occur to you? Why are you so set in thinking your opinion must be fact?

I am sure people would have more fun in WoW with Martin Fury shirt, but that doesn't mean it's objectively good for the game.

[d00dles]

Disable flight while War Mode is toggled on.

Place quest objectives indoors, or surrounded by ranged mobs with extra aggro range against flying targets.
Reduce flying speed to the same or slightly lower than ground mounts, so the NPC Ai can actually handle you and ground mounts become a legitimate option.
Give some enemies harpoons that can only target flying players.
Make terrain which is adverse to a flying player, such as blocking Line of Sight and Line of Effect so you can't just afk or air-drop into objective areas easily.

Basically stop being lazy with the open world design. Stop with the copy/paste of a blob area in the world filled with trash mobs and kill-x. Stop ignoring the different way in which flight changes the dynamic, and start practicing and learning how to make it better!

Flight is just the focal point. But it's actually the terrible open world design that people are getting sick of. Unless Blizzard starts addressing that(preferably by starting with flight), they're going to keep losing players from retail.

Alternative: Allow flying mounts within 30 yards of the flight point. Problem solved?

This means players would be able to fly fast for the first quest (assuming the quest hub has a fp) but from there on out its ground mounts only. Players cant escape from pvp or unnecessary crazy flying rules. Seems like a decent compromise to me.

[Shakana]

...while giving a single player Diabloesque tower dungeon crawler as what seems to the main original feature of the expansion...xD

Personally, it should be either: "immersion first, no flying at all" (see Classic) or "verticality in the world's design, world quests etc at max level, with flying (and without delay / timegate)". That is why i am against pathfinding. As long as the game is built around no flying / flying, both options are fine and fair. But having a world designed for flying and gating it behind grinds is not.

Thing is that we are not in vanilla anymore and the world has expanded and even with a new expansion feeling we need to always be grounded for a timegated year it's an awful feeling. Vanilla can not have flying, but the more expansions come out on retail, the more we feel the need to not walk/run all the way everywhere and be with just ground mounts. And explore content. Once a new content appears it can be seen as classic/exploration stuff, but once months pass on the same zone, you just feel it adds another zone to a big planet. I think that's a no for me, because the world keeps expanding every expansion (i mean that's even what "expansion" means, getting larger, extensive).
I think that giving the classic as an example of why they don't like flying it's such a bad comparison. The worlds have literally nothing in comparison.
In Legion for example, i had to sweat go up all those mountains in highmountain and took me so long to find it actually, and find a flight path were i can make a mount with my mining nodes up there - this one (i cannot do stuff elsewhere, with felslate, to make demonsteel bar, i need to go literally up there every single time):



After years, it's only obvious you get tired of this idea of not flying over such a big world that you can just fly over. Regardless if it's a "new zone", after months you feel like you explored everything and it's already annoying being down on the ground, once again, over and over.

I have made a pathfinder thread where i talk about this, but really, i would just remove pathfinder 2 or make it not timegated with a quest-chain of that zone, just like "Good suramaritan" Achievement: https://www.wowhead.com/achievement=...od-suramaritan, all this after you complete pathfinder 1, to be available straight away. Or make pathfinder just about this quest chain. No part 1 or 2. Just "pathfinder".

And the annoying part, too, is that when you get finally flying, you feel you don't need it as much and only served to make you occupied tried to get it and wait for no reason 1 year. After a year content starts getting stagnated, you might already be bored, flying won't help you get out of boredom. It will just feel useless now that you have done everything.

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

I am sure people would have more fun in WoW with Martin Fury shirt, but that doesn't mean it's objectively good for the game.

I never said it was. You're the one trying to push your opinions as fact and now you're deflecting. Big yikes.

[Rootsbum]

What bothers me is that pathfinder seem to release when flying almost feels obsolete.
Im exalted with everyone, Nazjatar/Mechagon didnt really have enough secret nooks/crannies to explore and we almost go into a kinda «maintenance-mode» til next expansion where I play minimal due to waiting for patches.

I would rather have NO flying than this timegating, lol

[Agrossive]

I only have one max character in the position to grind all these requirements and I hateeee playing it. Its the reason I stopped playing and now that I'm back I have to keep playing a class I hate just because its closest to finishing the achievement. That's my biggest gripe with pathfinder, that it encourages you to stick with whatever character you have played the most, even if you dont want to play it at all.

[SirCowdog]

Alternative: Allow flying mounts within 30 yards of the flight point. Problem solved?

This means players would be able to fly fast for the first quest (assuming the quest hub has a fp) but from there on out its ground mounts only. Players cant escape from pvp or unnecessary crazy flying rules. Seems like a decent compromise to me.

Didn't I already answer this in another thread? All that change would do is cause people to hearth/whistle ans re-arm their flying before dropping from above onto whatever spot. PVP with this change would always favor the first attacker, and make ganking even more degenerate than it already is.

It also doesn't address the issue of flying over content not designed for it, and just makes it more annoying to use. Getting and using flight needs to add to the game, not irritate players.

[Fistfighter]

I never said it was. You're the one trying to push your opinions as fact and now you're deflecting. Big yikes.

yikes
go back to reddit lol

[McCrazy]

I have no problem with the pathfinder, because if you level through questing and stuff, you get the most things anyway. Don't care so much about reputation, but usually one does it anyway for profession-recepies.
But the wait until patch x.y and do the second part is not so cool. Why not enable flying in the zones for pathfinder part 1 and later for part 2 when the new zones come?