Flying tricked AGAIN

[Kalisandra]

I'm only down with flying in relevant content if they start designing zones around it, nazjatar was the closest we've gotten in a long while to that and people hated it. I think it's safe to say you're getting flat, horizontal zones with no vertical designed without flying in mind from here onwards.

People hated it because they were forced to spend considerable time in it on the ground, and modern WoW design includes very high mob densities and the Nazajtar mobs were tuned for people in the new gear, so when you first quested in the zone, you had no flight, and lots of tough mobs that you had to beat your way through. That's a really good way to get people to hate a zone (c.f. The Maw).

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Do you want a picture or do you want games? Because there was nothing interesting gameplay-wise in Blade's Edge and Storm Peaks. They are pretty and that's it.

Meanwhile everyone praises Isle of Thunder, where you can't fly.

Funny. I loved Storm Peaks (aside from the grind for that bear mount and the Hodir rep in general), but the only good thing I can think of about Isle of Thunder is that at least it wasn't more of the early MoP rep grind and dailies a day grind.

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That stuff is all obsolete in 9.1 anyway. The eye of the jailer is gone. You can mount in the Maw. Stygia has no value as it can't be used to socket 9.1 items or get new maw/torghast buffs.

So much for not adding new systems and stuff.

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TBC had flying and more world PVP than ever before. Immersion happens at a person level, so its impossible to define what feels immersive for millions of other people. If you want the challenge of wanting to fight over all content instead of flying over it, go ahead, its your choice. Do not put a flying mount on your bar.

One thing to remember about TBC - the basic flying mount only moved at +60% speed in the air, so if there was a decent road to where you were going (so a straight line with no mobs dismounting you) it could be faster to use an epic ground mount. Large parts of Nagrand were like that. It made getting an epic flying mount a big deal because they were so much faster than everything else, and even at the end of BC the cost was not trivial. I still remember when I got mine, after spending ages mining in Nagrand to pay for it (and grinding CE rep because I decided I was going to have the Cenarion Hippogryph, cost and rep be damned). It felt worth it, though.

I quit in WoD when it looked like there would be no flight and only came back when they changed their minds. I'll quit again if they try that again, or if they make flight too worthless. I'm not actually a huge fan of FFXIV (the mandatory main questline is too long, IMO, and the gameplay just isn't as fluid as WoW's), but I'll go back to that over more no-flight WoW.

[WowIsDead64]

For me flying is big problem. Blizzard treat flying as some sort of cheating, that trivializes game, removes obstacles and difficulties. Problem is - they aren't needed in a first place. Wow isn't platformer. Getting from point A to point B isn't gameplay. Blizzard try to implement some "secrets" or "treasures", but they are just nominal. Wow would never be like metroidvania or some similar genre. Just because "ugly" game mechanics don't allow it to be platformer. It's just extra delay between actual content. Nothing more. Plus exceeding difficulties aren't actually needed in outdoor content, because it's lowest denominator content in whole game. Putting ton of elites to force players to find group before even getting to world boss just to get to him? Why it's needed? Why it's so important? If Blizzard want to make "hard" outdoor content, then it should be 100% optional. We have Maw for this purpose. And we already have ton of hard group content in this game. Dungeons, raids, BGs, arenas, Torghast, etc. I don't even talk about PVP. Blizzard said, that PVP isn't real reason, why flying is removed. Yeah, we can suspect, that they lie, because their toxic racist ganking is very important for them. That's why they try so hard to keep current content without flying. But problem is - we have WarMode now. And it's turned off for many players. May be even for 50% of playerbase. And designing whole game around WarMode on - is just one big fat mistake.

All mechanics, that Blizzard try to force via removing flying, actually make me want my flying back even more.

[Kalisandra]

If they cared about what the playerbase wanted or how good the game was they would never have removed flying, 10m mythic*, Gladiator spec, reforging, badge/emblem/point vendors, etc in the first place. All of which were changed opposed by the vast majority of the playerbase.

The problem with removing reforging is that they massively reduced the number of gem sockets on gear at the same time. So we went from being able to very strongly customise gear to not being able to much at all. At the same time they removed Hit/Expertise, etc., and thus made customising gear vastly simpler, thus comfirming in their minds that it was a bad thing, resulting in them treating it as a power upgrade rather than a way of mitigating bad gear luck and maybe doing something interesting with your gear.

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We're getting it before that, I thought. In 9.0.5? Totally agree with you on the whistle. Really annoying being stuck way out in Tirna Scithe, the far end of House of Plagues or Rituals, or Citadel of Loyalty, and having to slog your way back to civilization.

It makes me very glad my main is an Engineer. Most of the wormhole points are in annoying places, but just being able to use it as a second hearth to Oribos makes it worthwhile.

[zhorteye]

It was behind a fairly short rep grind that was in right from the start. So you hit 90, did some grinding and had flight in a couple of weeks. Wait... that was for the serpent mounts, and the grind was longer unless you had flight (so you could farm eggs).

MoP had those no-flight zones. Isle of Thunder had some questionable design, but Timeless Isle was well laid out with good flow, so it wasn't bad there (and it was small and didn't involve wading through masses of mobs to get to the main raid/dungeon entrances).

It was Warlords when they started playing the tease with flight. "There's no flight, but we'll probably make it available later on, it just takes the flip of a switch". "Nah, we don't think need to do flight." [subs drop precipitously] "Actually, we'll do flight, but you'll have to wait a while because we have to rework some stuff." [i.e. They'd actually decided 'no-flight' a couple of patches back and started taking short-cuts in their world design which they had to go back and fix.]

Legion they said "we'll use the WoD model going forward", and then it turned out that included flight rather late in the expansion, and the last part of the expac having no flight and a terrible design with crappy flow and annoying pats you had to get past to get to the raid entrance.

I roundly hated BfA aside from the levelling stories, but one thing they got right was allowing flight in the later zones, though the way they time-gated it was annoying.

And now we have Shadowlands, which overall I'm enjoying, but which has The Maw, which is awful and actually fairly essential content, where one can't even mount without mounts that are non-trivial to get (or being the right class, of course), and the new content is More Maw. The Maw should've been made attractive by making it a good place to farm stuff (and thus if you're going with WM on, to play hide and seek). To make WM something people would want, they could have more mats drop when you have WM on. This would make it like Wintergrasp was - a PvP zone that had the best farming areas, if you were willing to accept being hunted.

I have no objection to not having flight during levelling (at least the first time through), and even having behind a bit of a rep (or renown) gate, but it shouldn't be one that means you're waiting for the next content patch to be able to open it, especially if the new content is no-flight. As it is, the way flight is withheld makes Blizzard look mean-spirited.

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So you have no-flight to level, and then once you've done that and had a good look at ground level, you get flight and get to admire the hard work of the art team and world designers all over again from another perspective. I, for one, love just flying around some of the beautiful zones Blizzard's teams have designed over the years.

Dont get me wrong. I love flying around the zones too. But people saying that they need flying, when the zones are built with ground mounts in mind really just are lazy.

But hey.. im done with retail and will enjoy my gryphon in outlands in due time. Where theres actually some "cannot reach without flying" zones.

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People hated it because they were forced to spend considerable time in it on the ground, and modern WoW design includes very high mob densities and the Nazajtar mobs were tuned for people in the new gear, so when you first quested in the zone, you had no flight, and lots of tough mobs that you had to beat your way through. That's a really good way to get people to hate a zone (c.f. The Maw).

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Funny. I loved Storm Peaks (aside from the grind for that bear mount and the Hodir rep in general), but the only good thing I can think of about Isle of Thunder is that at least it wasn't more of the early MoP rep grind and dailies a day grind.

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So much for not adding new systems and stuff.

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One thing to remember about TBC - the basic flying mount only moved at +60% speed in the air, so if there was a decent road to where you were going (so a straight line with no mobs dismounting you) it could be faster to use an epic ground mount. Large parts of Nagrand were like that. It made getting an epic flying mount a big deal because they were so much faster than everything else, and even at the end of BC the cost was not trivial. I still remember when I got mine, after spending ages mining in Nagrand to pay for it (and grinding CE rep because I decided I was going to have the Cenarion Hippogryph, cost and rep be damned). It felt worth it, though.

I quit in WoD when it looked like there would be no flight and only came back when they changed their minds. I'll quit again if they try that again, or if they make flight too worthless. I'm not actually a huge fan of FFXIV (the mandatory main questline is too long, IMO, and the gameplay just isn't as fluid as WoW's), but I'll go back to that over more no-flight WoW.

Think youve misunderstood how it works or atleast is supposed to work.

http://www.online-multiplayer.com/wo...%20skill%20225.

Regular flying mounts were 100% on ground and adds another 60% in air (so 160%) with epic flying going 280

--correction--
https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Flying_mounts

According to the wiki its 150flying on standard and 280 on epic.

[LazarusLong]

Personally, I think that the current model is fine (did not like a Pathfinder). I remember vividly the Cata leveling and boy did it suck. I wish they would for once add an endgame zone that would be centered around flying though, like in the WOTLK.

[Kalisandra]

You say that but ever since flying has been introduced, they have had zones you couldn't use it in.

Tbc- isle of queldanas, and also all of ek/kalimdor (this is included cause new tbc zones were added, but you couldn't fly in them or the basic areas)

Isle of QD was part of an unplanned patch they put in to buy more time to finish up making LK. Making it no-flight was a way of making it fast and allow it to eat up player time. If you weren't on a PvP server (and if on it you didn't like PvP) it was a tedious time consumer, nothing more. At the time it came out all end-game world content in BC was flyable, and you needed flight for significant chunks of endgame content.

Wotlk- actually nothing, other then winter grasp when a battle is going on. (Also still ek and kalimdor but those had no relevancy in wotlk)

To start with Dalaran was no-flight because it was felt it was too small for it, and Wintergrasp was originally no-flight at all times. Both got opened up more as time went on.

Cataclysm- tol bad

Which my guild universally loathed. Also Molten Front, which was tolerable because it was small and limited in scope.

Mists of pandaria- thunder isle, isle of giants, and timeless isle

Thunder Isle, it was tolerated, not liked. Timeless Isle no-flight worked out okay, but it was fairly tiny and the flow was really well designed. Nothing since has come close.

Bfa- mechagon sort of... Although you could. It was discouraged.

Mainly going AFK in flight was punished. Otherwise it was pretty free.

[WowIsDead64]

Dont get me wrong. I love flying around the zones too. But people saying that they need flying, when the zones are built with ground mounts in mind really just are lazy.

Because "designed around ground mounts" - is when you can get everywhere on your ground mount without problems, like it was back in Vanilla. When it's "we put wall of elites here just for lulz" or "we put 3D maze here, so it's Vashj'ir 2.0 navigation hell" - it's not "designed around ground mounts". Size of location doesn't matter here. It's how it's designed.

[Lei]

I’m more of the opinion it has always sucked, especially from playing classic.

It just used to be new, and now it isn’t.

To be fair, if Iwas a dev, and I would get feedbacks like this reagardless of the effort we, the devs pour into the project, I would go "fuck them, they'll get something shit, because they won't appreciate whatever we do". Rightfully so to be honest.
I too want quality outdoor content, but at the same time, I'm happy for good decisions. Which hasnt happened in a loooong time.
I don't mind a bit boring content, where the reward feels good. I didn't mind pre wod rep grind, because it was fast. I gladly Polished the Helm for Sons of Hodir for 350 rep. Do I want to unearth 6 parasite gorm and kill 12 big gorm for 125 rep Pest Removal? Eeeeh.

[Dhrizzle]

no druid ever said: flying sucks and has to go

What would be wonderful is if Blizz brought back flying from the start but only for Druid flight-form. I'd have my salt supplies sorted for decades.

[Kalisandra]

I think any real WoW player knew the Maw would never have flying.
It just doesn't fit.

The forsworn fly there. We're invading the place. Why shouldn't we fly there?

[Jetstream]

Once again flying will only be unlocked for already outdated content while being unavailable in the Maw and Korthia. This is Argus all over again. Next expansion MUST have flying in from the START and it must be usable EVERYWHERE.

It won't. You know that already.

[Dhrizzle]

I understand your reasoning and I support it somewhat. The issue is that the world we run in has little to no value after reaching max level. After that the mobs dont give XP, so the mobs gotta bring something else. Its only via WQs that happens, and right now they are rather useless.

The problem with how Blizzard build these zones is that the only thing we get from being on ground is annoyance. With WM being on/off, its very rare to stumple upon world pvp, atleast for me and I always have it on. Its frustrating to navigate around in many of the zones, the mob density is way to high. They make sure theres mobs literally everywhere, while making it annoying to traverse the zones.

They need to make bigger zones that "breathe" a bit.

I dont miss flying in classic at all, but I do on retail. Even on classic I have a lousy 40% mount, on retail its 100%+pala aura. Classic zones are bigger and let the players "breathe" inbetween all the packs of mobs.

On paper it sounds good travelling on ground and that makes everything more immersive, and thats probably true for the first couple of characters you level. After that, it gets tedious and most of all just annoying. Especially when every mob there is have one purpose only: To be annoying.

I think we've reached the point where our arguments have boiled down to "I like it" vs. "I don't like it" so I'll just finish by saying that what I like about travelling places, even after several months and several characters, is there is always slight improvements going on. I can always find a slightly better route around mobs, do the world quests in a different order and of course there's the chance that someone will have gone before me, aggroed a bunch of mobs and they'll run back in time to hit me and suddenly I'll have a massive fight on my hands. To me this, along with a preference to tackling the actual content from the ground and not just hopping to kill/use/collect the quest objectives, more than makes up for any inconvenience.

[Kalisandra]

Which PVP zones? Wintergrasp? Tol Barad? Those were basically instanced battlegrounds.

But again, the context is super important here: Non-flying zones mixed in with flying zones from the beginning. Instead of an overall message of "F**k you if you want to fly...or in the case of the Maw, use mounts at all."

A more balanced approach would lead to greater player appreciation, and hopefully eventually better overall design and mount mechanics(ground and air).

Instead of making shallow content and forcing players to interact with it by taking away their agency, they should be striving to create deep, layered content that players WANT to interact with. And no...that's not easy. But the alternative is continued stagnation of the open world.

At the very least, go back to making crafting really worthwhile, and make Druids drop travel form to farm nodes. Then you'll have at least the gatherers out there doing stuff. Make gathering in WM worthwhile and it'll even promote world PvP. All this can work with flight. Heck, it'd be better with flight because gathering wouldn't be a huge chore for the non-skinners the way it tends to be without flight.

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If Blizzard keeps on making these shitass zones filled to the brim with everything, theres no wonder people want flying. Its also the fact that even though the world is filled with annoying mobs, most of the mobs and world content is useless anyway. Especially in SL. So now you have a situation were zones are filled with mobs that have no other function than being annoying after you reach max level.

Which is one thing about mobs in the older expacs (especially Vanilla) - most of the random mobs out in the world that you'd go round if you didn't have a reason to off them were at minimum used for some "get me ten bear anuses!" quests, and usually they dropped something useful to someone. Cloth if humanoid, bits you could cook if animals, or spell mats, etc. Even if you weren't a skinner they had some value. Oh, and the vendor trash was worth more, relative to other sources of income than it is today. These days at best there's the chance of a random 'high' value gray.

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Tbf, the only expansions where flying was usable in all outdoor content from that expansion were Wrath, WoD and BFA.

You can't fly in Azuremyst & Bloodmyst isles, Eversong woods, Ghostlands and Isle of Quel'Danas (introduced in TBC and are part of the TBC map files, hence the loading screen). Even with the cata update to allow flying in Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor those zones are still no fly zones.

I don't think it's really fair to count the BC starting zones, seeing as you're gone from them by level 20, and they're effectively just more of EK and Kalimdor which also weren't flyable in BC.

As for QD, it was a very late and hasty addition.

[scubi666stacy]

Flying does not change the content. It just lets you get to it quicker. The only thing flying in new content does is trivialize running from a flight path to a quest. If you consider running about between the same 10 WQ's every other day as content then click a ground mount and be happy. You could try rp walking instead to make the 'content' last even longer.

This cannot be repeated often enough. When I do callings or quest on an alt, I don't pay attention to my surroundings anymore, I just focus on what has to be done, else I waste precious time. Why is it precious? Because some morons think that wasting time with pointless travel is somehow "fun". I could tank or heal dungeons for you, but no, I sill had not find the time to level my alts because I have to waste my time with travel. They have even disabled the whistle now, which was implemented as a relief mechanism.

Also, the only thing which decides about triviality of content is your gear. Not flying. You have bad gear, mobs will rape you, rip you apart and lay eggs in your corpse. You have good gear, then you can just ride around and ignore everything. And them there are classes wth stealth and/or vanish mechanisms, which also trivialise mobs. Flying was never the problem. The execs just don't want to spend so much budget on the open world.

[Kalisandra]

To be fair, if Iwas a dev, and I would get feedbacks like this reagardless of the effort we, the devs pour into the project, I would go "fuck them, they'll get something shit, because they won't appreciate whatever we do". Rightfully so to be honest.
I too want quality outdoor content, but at the same time, I'm happy for good decisions. Which hasnt happened in a loooong time.
I don't mind a bit boring content, where the reward feels good. I didn't mind pre wod rep grind, because it was fast. I gladly Polished the Helm for Sons of Hodir for 350 rep. Do I want to unearth 6 parasite gorm and kill 12 big gorm for 125 rep Pest Removal? Eeeeh.

While I hated it at the time, one thing I think Vanilla and BC did right was allowing you to slowly grind rep. I think today that should be as well as being able to get rep quickly (in terms of play time) but at a gated rate via dailies or WQs. Thus, you can get your rep over days or weeks without much effort by doing the dailies, but if you want to spend a weekend just grinding out rep by killing stuff and turning into stacks of drops for a pathetic amount of rep per item, you can do that too.

The loss of grinding, however tedious it was, has damaged the social aspect of WoW, IMO. Back in the day you'd put aside some time for grinding rep, or mining, or farming mobs for a rare drop (a dragon whelp pet, say), and you'd grind away and at the same time you'd be chatting away with friends and guildies while you and they did your grinding. These days you log in, hit your WQs, and log out, and the WQs tend to involve enough combat (and combat has a lot more APMs now than it used to) that you can't really chat in text while doing it. A lot of things have damaged the social nature of early WoW, including this.

[Mellrod]

Once again flying will only be unlocked for already outdated content while being unavailable in the Maw and Korthia. This is Argus all over again. Next expansion MUST have flying in from the START and it must be usable EVERYWHERE.

So flying is available everywhere except for a few endgame content islands? Yea! This is Argus all over again!

And Isle of Thunder...
And Isle of Giants...
And Timeless Isle...
And Tol Barad...
And Firelands...

[Akibaboy]

What did you expect from Mr MAU Ion Hazzikoastas?

It's been 7 years. The -flying in a later patch- model was implemented when Tom Chilton was Game Director and Ion was a raid designer.

If you're implying that no-flying is designed to have people play the game more (the only way to increase MAUs), then immediate flying is by your own admission a model for not playing the game.

So flying is available everywhere except for a few endgame content islands? Yea! This is Argus all over again!

And Isle of Thunder...
And Isle of Giants...
And Timeless Isle...
And Tol Barad...
And Firelands...

Don't forget:
Wintersgrasp & Isle of Quel'Danas. Blizzard is about to release a CLASSIC expansion with no-flying end game zones lol.

[anon5123]

maybe play a different game if you have to remove things other players enjoy to have fun....

If flying around a zone and ignoring the ground is "having fun" for you, you're playing the wrong game.

[Deadite]

WOW has been a game filled with pointless chores since day 1?

Sure but they were in a big open world. Now they are in small instanced zones. Kinda shit they have done away with the big seamless world. You could fly/ride/walk across the entire expansions multiple zones without a hint of a loading screen. Sad to see one of the things that set wow apart from other mmos go bye bye.

[hulkgor]

Once again flying will only be unlocked for already outdated content while being unavailable in the Maw and Korthia. This is Argus all over again. Next expansion MUST have flying in from the START and it must be usable EVERYWHERE.

And Isle of Quel'Danas (TBC), and Isle of Thunder and Timeless Isle (MoP), and Argus (Legion)...

DAMN THEM FOR DOING SOMETHING THEY ALWAYS DID !