How the hell do I make dragonriding not suck?

[VinceVega]

Dragonflying is and will be for a long time the best addition to the game in a loooooooooong time.

Sure there are some loudmouths here on the forums. Mostly the common guys who complain about everything and for whom open "world content is overtuned" (sic)

Ingame? For previous difficult topics like sylvannas, BFA gearing and whatnot there was a constant thread of people complaining about it in the general chat.
Dragonflying is never mentioned.
You will keep flying in the old world. You won't get in the new one. I hope not even for any future zones. Old flying is a old and boring system which makes no sense.
They won't abandon old flying completly. You will always get new mounts and be able to use it in old zones.

But it really really hope they will keep DF for everything in the future. Not only because i can't stand this huge cloud of hovering dragons abover fucking rarespawn site. Looks ridicoulus. Feels stupid.

Dragonflying is easy to use and better than flying in nearly every single aspect. And flyingn is actually fun now because it is something you engage with.

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Blizzard think it's challenge vs ordinal flying, that is just "no clip AFK mode" according to them. What they don't want - they don't want you to fly between every single mob and quest item, while avoiding all obstacles, such as stupid elites, they put here and there. That's why they've added this "flying fatigue".

That's not what we asked for. We asked for way to obtain ordinal flying at release. May be not immediately. May be it should be restricted for some time. May be we should work to fully unlock it. But it should be ordinal flying. And it should be available at release, not in x.2 patch, as always, when it's way too late.

Why do you talk about DF? You don't play it. One weekend is not enough to make any kind of claim about anything.
And stop talking like you have a huge amount of people with the same opinions as you. You don't.

[DechCJC]

Could have gotten the glyphs faster than this post took, lol.

I haven’t heard of people struggling with it when it’s maxed. Arguably a bit inconvenient for gathering maybe, but that’s it.

[Gaidax]

How to make dragonriding not suck?

Press correct buttons at the right time.

[Aucald]

Except the design is completely antithetical to how they've laid out the expansion. You get the drake and immediately fuck off to go on an island-spanning scenic overview, probably spoiling yourself on factions and locations long before they become involved in the plot, all because of a poorly designed gameplay contrivance.

Blizzard has been doing breadcrumbs for almost two full decades at this point, I'm sure they can do a better version of encouraging exploration of side areas than by making the flagship feature of the expansion absolute fucking garbage until you do a bunch of arbitrary grinding.

Doing a flyby of the various zones and locales can't really spoil you on the factions considering you'll see nothing of them, in addition to the fact we live in an age where everyone is likely terminally online and already knows about them (especially in the context of an ancient game like WoW). The same probably holds true for locations, as well.

It's a new idea on the old practice of the breadcrumb and gives you the option of experiencing either incremental change or doing a quick grand tour of the new continent to acquire maximal capability with the new travel system. YMMV as to whether or not it's the right approach or even a good flagship feature, as you put it, but the reception, in general, seems overwhelmingly positive at this point.

[WowIsDead64]

Why do you talk about DF? You don't play it. One weekend is not enough to make any kind of claim about anything.
And stop talking like you have a huge amount of people with the same opinions as you. You don't.

First impression is usually right one. Yeah, I usually learn to cut some corners with time. But it's usually bad sign anyway.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

You have to go really fast (which also means relatively high, since you need to maintain a slight downward angle to maintain going fast status) to maintain steady vigor generation,

You don’t need to be high at all to maintain vigour generation, I regularly skim along the ground/water in the plains just for the fun of it and have never once ran out of Vigour.

Hell I’ve even been dismounted at full speed before form a mob hitting me I was so low.

[Big Thanks]

Why is this thread so long?

Is there even a debate that Dragonriding is bad? The mechanic is awesome...

Just tell OP to catch all the glyphs...because THATS the obvious problem, yes?

[melkesjokolade]

Uhmmm get the damn glyphs, it takes like 10 min. Its your own fault for not getting them, jesus christ…

[mysticx]

Could have gotten the glyphs faster than this post took, lol.

I haven’t heard of people struggling with it when it’s maxed. Arguably a bit inconvenient for gathering maybe, but that’s it.

My biggest issue is that maxing dragonflying is a pointless chore. (Thankfully we only have to do it once)

Getting glyphs as you pass by them takes too long, and unglyphed dragonflying is indeed restrictive to the point of nigh-uselessness, so everybody downloads add-ons and/or guides to find them all quickly and get it over with, so what's the gameplay benefit of even having glyphs in the first place?

Special mention for the Forbidden reach glyphs, hiding them in towers and stuff, that makes me think Blizz just wants players to download guides...

[ghost]

Look, it just sucks for like 10% of us. It just does. I know most of y'all think its amazing, but there are a chunk of us who just hate it.

I'd be back on my flying mount in a moment if I could, despite it be half as fast.

I have all the glyphs. I have the fancy weakaura that lets you know when you are going fast enough to charge energy. Still hate it. I can do top tier raiding. I can do high M+. Several years ago I even did high rated pvp. This dragonriding is not fun for me and is frequently frustrating. And I'm not the only one.

[loras]

Been having a blast in DF right up until I unlocked dragonriding and decided to fly around and get some ore and chests and stuff, and it's quite simply the worst mobility/motion I've experienced in any MMO I have ever played.

People say it's good, but is that only once you've unlocked all the stupid glyphs? 30 sec recharge time for one pip of stamina that doesn't even get you halfway up a small hill, much less a mountain, is just insane. I feel like they designed the movement assuming that the player only starts from a really nice, high elevation (like, say... the races! I wonder if they didn't bother actually flying around much and just used races to test things or something), because starting from the ground and trying to climb up somewhere high is absolutely miserable. In a typical momentum based flight design you want to dive to gain speed and then arc upwards and repeat the process to maintain speed and altitude over a long distance. That works just fine here, too.

But the issue is that you will very often *not* be starting up high, and there's no efficient way to gain altitude without that high starting elevation. There's a lot of glyphs on the top of very high towers and maybe they just assumed players would fly to the ass end of a giant mountain two zones away and glide back over or something, but the alternative is to just pump out your four pips of energy to gain maximum altitude, parking your drake on a convenient piece of geometry, and just getting up and fucking walking away from the game for 2 minutes before returning to repeat the process until you're high enough to nab the glyph. It's such transparently bad design that I can't fucking believe it made it to live.

I *have* to be missing something. Something the little tutorials didn't tell me or maybe something that elvui hid that would have been visible on the stock UI. Please tell me that I'm missing some crucial element to gaining altitude efficiently. I haven't had a game switch this hard from "fun" to "miserable" in a really, really long time. It was like hitting a light switch. Chilling and having fun, excited to get flying finally, do the cool little races to unlock everything, and the very fucking second I tried to fly around to get chests and ore it was like they decided to saddle me with a 2 minute delay between doing much of anything.

Well there's a "thrill of the skies" buff that lets you regenerate vigor in flight, it's necessary to get anyplace high.

Honestly i've been loving this shit since it's thrice as fast as anything before and works pretty damn well, though sometimes you have to circle around a bit in order to get altitude.

Another good realisation is that the "flap upwards" thing is an upwards boost (duh), but that also means that you have to actually face upwards for it to work properly rather than just trying to launch yourself ass first into the sky.

[Grinning Serpent]

Could have gotten the glyphs faster than this post took, lol.

I haven’t heard of people struggling with it when it’s maxed. Arguably a bit inconvenient for gathering maybe, but that’s it.

The issue is that you have to get the glyphs before dragonriding doesn't suck. It's *great* once you have your 5 sec pip recharge time and an extra 3 pips in case you have to hop around a lot, plus the regen for mining or herbing. Before you get that, it's awful.

And since it doesn't take long and it only has to be done once per account, what the fuck is even the point of having the glyphs? Nothing of value would be lost by just removing the goddamn things and making dragonriding great right from the outset. That's what the discussion is about. I assume you just skipped to the end without reading the past page or two.

[Biglog]

As others mentioned, your best bet to make dragonriding not suck is get a guide or in-game addon that helps show them on the map. Then just take an hour or two and get them all early in your DF leveling. They are account-wide, so your other toons will be maxxed out from the start on dragonriding points then. Once you are maxxed on points, you can fly a lot further with less downtime and it becomes much more fun and less frustrating.

There is still some adjustment though from being able to fly as long as you'd want with normal flying. You'll want to grab flight points as you go, since they are more important than in the past with flying because of that. Then you have 2 options for strategies to get around. Either take a flight point to get you close to where you need to go, then dragonride the rest of the way. Or just dragonride all the way and know you'll need to stop once in a while, and that can be doubled-up with stopping for gathering or a quick WQ in the area you have to stop. With maxxed dragonriding points it'll regen more quickly, and can be back on your way dragonriding to your destination pretty quickly. I will agree though that stopping in spot without much around and having to watch paint dry waiting for the meter to refill can get tiresome. But sometimes that's also a good time to soak in the scenery and chill for a minute.

Part of the point of getting the glyphs is also a subtle tutorial on how to do dragonriding. Same for the point of leveling to be learning your class. As for doing away with the glyphs entirely, the point of the whole game is doing tasks and unlocking rewards. Just because an individual player may not see a point in a certain feature, it doesn't mean that it doesn't have value for other players. That's the old "do away with normals they don't add to the game, I only do mythics" argument, and it should be clear on why that goes nowhere.

[schwank05]

Been having a blast in DF right up until I unlocked dragonriding and decided to fly around and get some ore and chests and stuff, and it's quite simply the worst mobility/motion I've experienced in any MMO I have ever played.

People say it's good, but is that only once you've unlocked all the stupid glyphs? 30 sec recharge time for one pip of stamina that doesn't even get you halfway up a small hill, much less a mountain, is just insane. I feel like they designed the movement assuming that the player only starts from a really nice, high elevation (like, say... the races! I wonder if they didn't bother actually flying around much and just used races to test things or something), because starting from the ground and trying to climb up somewhere high is absolutely miserable. In a typical momentum based flight design you want to dive to gain speed and then arc upwards and repeat the process to maintain speed and altitude over a long distance. That works just fine here, too.

But the issue is that you will very often *not* be starting up high, and there's no efficient way to gain altitude without that high starting elevation. There's a lot of glyphs on the top of very high towers and maybe they just assumed players would fly to the ass end of a giant mountain two zones away and glide back over or something, but the alternative is to just pump out your four pips of energy to gain maximum altitude, parking your drake on a convenient piece of geometry, and just getting up and fucking walking away from the game for 2 minutes before returning to repeat the process until you're high enough to nab the glyph. It's such transparently bad design that I can't fucking believe it made it to live.

I *have* to be missing something. Something the little tutorials didn't tell me or maybe something that elvui hid that would have been visible on the stock UI. Please tell me that I'm missing some crucial element to gaining altitude efficiently. I haven't had a game switch this hard from "fun" to "miserable" in a really, really long time. It was like hitting a light switch. Chilling and having fun, excited to get flying finally, do the cool little races to unlock everything, and the very fucking second I tried to fly around to get chests and ore it was like they decided to saddle me with a 2 minute delay between doing much of anything.

Im right there with you if you want us to be able to fly faster just make my flying mount move at 800% speed and Ill be just happy. I don't want to be involved when it comes to moving around the map. But in order to make it a little less awful just download a dragon glyph WA or tracker and go grab them all it takes about an hour and you can get them all unlocked.

[Zardas]

Doing a flyby of the various zones and locales can't really spoil you on the factions considering you'll see nothing of them, in addition to the fact we live in an age where everyone is likely terminally online and already knows about them (especially in the context of an ancient game like WoW). The same probably holds true for locations, as well.

I doubt that most people have much prior knowledge of the lore, locations, pnjs and various stories of the expansion before its launch. Alongside the people who purposefully avoid any forms of spoilers, I wouldn't be surprised that the vast majority of players just play for one week after having learned about the expansion two days prior.

As to adress the comment you responded to, it should be noted that for those who want to avoid spoilers as much as possible, there is only three times where you have to fly when doing the base quests of the expansion (aka the four zones) :
- During the quest where Selistra brings you to the Ruby life Pool. That's a automated flight so you can turn off your monitor
- During the quest where the green dragons bring you to their main base in the Onahara plains. That's an automated flight so you can turn off your monitor
- In order to reach Taldrazus. The only bridge is broken so you indeed have to fly unfortunately.

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Im right there with you if you want us to be able to fly faster just make my flying mount move at 800% speed and Ill be just happy. I don't want to be involved when it comes to moving around the map.

But that's precisely the point of the system : to make player more involved and not just mindlessly placing their mount in the direction of their quest marker, activating automating flying and going afk. I'm sorry that it doesn't suit what you want and it's arguably a good thing in order to make the game feels more involved. If they added 800% speed classic flying mounts, what would be the point of dragonriding ?

[ZazuuPriest]

the only good thing about dragonriding is the top speed. otherwise is a downgrade in everyway

[Malkiah]

If they added 800% speed classic flying mounts, what would be the point of dragonriding ?

so wait... is dragon riding good because it's engaging and interactive and it keeps you involved in the world, or is dragon riding good because it's fast and all the other bullshit about it is completely irrelevant and superfluous?

i would think that by the arguments most people use to try and champion dragon riding that if traditional mounts were equally fast, you people would still use dragon riding because it's *just so cool*, right?

or, are you saying that all the endless fellatio about how amazing of a system dragon riding is on its own merits is in fact a load of complete horse shit?

[Aucald]

I doubt that most people have much prior knowledge of the lore, locations, pnjs and various stories of the expansion before its launch. Alongside the people who purposefully avoid any forms of spoilers, I wouldn't be surprised that the vast majority of players just play for one week after having learned about the expansion two days prior.

As to adress the comment you responded to, it should be noted that for those who want to avoid spoilers as much as possible, there is only three times where you have to fly when doing the base quests of the expansion (aka the four zones) :
- During the quest where Selistra brings you to the Ruby life Pool. That's a automated flight so you can turn off your monitor
- During the quest where the green dragons bring you to their main base in the Onahara plains. That's an automated flight so you can turn off your monitor
- In order to reach Taldrazus. The only bridge is broken so you indeed have to fly unfortunately.

Knowledge of the lore and stories isn't really required - all that's required is the knowledge that a new system named Dragonriding is being added, and that said system is leveled up through the acquisition of floating glyphs littered across the various zones of the new continent. I'd also argue that the group of players who "avoid any forms of spoilers" is at this point in WoW's lifetime a perishingly tiny niche group. Full knowledge of Dragonriding as well as the location of glyphs (up to and including add-ons to literally lead you to them by the nose) were available on day 1 of the expansion's release.

The vast majority of current WoW players are committed lifers who play either because of the perception of sunk cost or a generalized and abiding love of the game. I can only speak anecdotally, of course; but I've not encountered an actual green and truly new WoW player for years, much less someone who didn't come into a new expansion fully prepared for the maximal run to max-level and the end game. If those players still exist, they definitely seem to be vanishingly rare.

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or, are you saying that all the endless fellatio about how amazing of a system dragon riding is on its own merits is in fact a load of complete horse shit?

I personally like Dragonriding because it is active engagement with the game and its system as opposed to passively mounting up and hitting your autorun key and just waiting to arrive at your destination. It has a sense of engagement and immersion, not to mention the speed increase to compensate for the need to involve yourself in said system. I get that some people prefer the passive system, and that's a subjective YMMV-type argument that, at the end of the day, can't really be won or lost by either party. I do think they should add the traditional flying system in for Dragonflight alongside Dragonriding so that players can use whichever system they prefer, though; because there's no real reason not to.

I don't think traditional mounts should get Dragonriding speeds unless they're using the Vigor system of Dragonriding, though; because that's the elemental trade-off for involving the player. Do you want "fire and forget" legacy flight? Well, you get "fire and forget" legacy flight speed to go with it.

[Lolites]

so wait... is dragon riding good because it's engaging and interactive and it keeps you involved in the world, or is dragon riding good because it's fast and all the other bullshit about it is completely irrelevant and superfluous?

i would think that by the arguments most people use to try and champion dragon riding that if traditional mounts were equally fast, you people would still use dragon riding because it's *just so cool*, right?

or, are you saying that all the endless fellatio about how amazing of a system dragon riding is on its own merits is in fact a load of complete horse shit?

why dont we have vedors with best gear like on PTR in live game? i mean EVERYBODY would buy gear instead of running raids, so that must mean its better for us and for game, right? RIGHT?

people will take convenience over fun, we know that bcs we SEEEN THAT with wow, multiple times...
thats why dragonriding compared to "normal" flying have to have some advantage, otherwise people will take path of least resistance, no matter how fun the other path might be...

[Malkiah]

why dont we have vedors with best gear like on PTR in live game? i mean EVERYBODY would buy gear instead of running raids, so that must mean its better for us and for game, right? RIGHT?

in this case for the comparison to work you'd need to add a vendor with the best gear and then remove all content in which one would actually use that gear.
if that were the case i'm sure some people buy the best gear so they could stand around in town and do absolutely nothing with it, and i'm sure people would do that since some people love DF and "standing around in gear with nothing to do with it" is basically the tagline of this expansion and one of the major things people keep saying is so great about it.

people will take convenience over fun, we know that bcs we SEEEN THAT with wow, multiple times...

people will also take "more fun" over "less fun", and i would posit that dragon riding is "less fun" in every conceivable sense.
if you're arguing from convenience then you're admitting that dragon riding is less convenient, which then begs the question why the hell it was introduced in the first place.

thats why dragonriding compared to "normal" flying have to have some advantage, otherwise people will take path of least resistance, no matter how fun the other path might be...

but that's a solution in search of a problem - dragon riding didn't exist for almost 20 years and then was introduced apropos of nothing, and the entirety of the arguments in bleating about how amazing dragon riding is come down to "it's engaging and fun to have to push extra buttons to do the same thing that didn't require extra button pushes 5 months ago".
so the only way that point is valid is if dragon riding is so fun entirely on its own terms that the speed is irrelevant, since if the speed is actually the real reason that dragon riding is praised then having traditional flying at 800% speed would be an unqualified better system.

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I personally like Dragonriding because it is active engagement with the game and its system as opposed to passively mounting up and hitting your autorun key and just waiting to arrive at your destination. It has a sense of engagement and immersion, not to mention the speed increase to compensate for the need to involve yourself in said system. I get that some people prefer the passive system, and that's a subjective YMMV-type argument that, at the end of the day, can't really be won or lost by either party. I do think they should add the traditional flying system in for Dragonflight alongside Dragonriding so that players can use whichever system they prefer, though; because there's no real reason not to.

i disagree with your perception of dragon riding but i completely agree with your broader point.

I don't think traditional mounts should get Dragonriding speeds unless they're using the Vigor system of Dragonriding, though; because that's the elemental trade-off for involving the player. Do you want "fire and forget" legacy flight? Well, you get "fire and forget" legacy flight speed to go with it.

that brings an interesting larger philosophical pondering, IMO... why does everything have to be a trade off? why does there always need to be a negative inherent in any kind of convenience or quality of life?
it's like how the currency vendors exchange at a loss to the player... why? other than to be a dick about it?
(that's rhetorical, i'm not literally asking that)