WRONG its free for the toon who earned the waterstrider.
yes there is something removed, which for whatever reason, you seem to be inable to understand: the thing that makes the striders special is removed.
how about we take the transmorg and ah from mounts too and make it avail for everyone? that would be exactly the same thing
and you havent explained why the striders CANT keep their walterwalking like the herb collecting mount can keep his special ability?
How so? It would be an incentive to actually grind out all the equipment and be rewarded for doing so.
The current system is great if you only play one character, but terrible if you have alts. If they're going to be scarce AND consumable then they need to let us apply them on a mount-by-mount basis.
Honorary member of the Baine Fanclub, the only member really.
*** you talking about? If Water strider would keep its passive people would just put in antidaze or w/e and keep using water strider for water walking. It would not fix anything. This stuff is put in so you dont have to feel forced to use water strider for water walking and you can actualy use other mounts. It looks really stupid to do rare world Q in the ocean and see 15+ people riding same mount. I love this stuff beocuse you can finaly stop using this stupid mount and actualy get to use some other mounts.
So Ion and you apparently see everyone walking with waterstriders... except they're not
For me it would be more stupid to see a horse, kodo, 2 dragons, motorbike, hyena and gronling standing on water surface than 15 water striders that have, you know, their inspiration walking on the water in the real life
As I said, I (and many more people) have plenty of mounts in the favourite button and use water strider only for walking over the water
Now in 8.2 I'll be forced to use item that would give me the convinience of 2 mounts instead of actually choosing from other equipments
Also what's the point of having anti daze equipment on a water strider when daze can be only applied by something hitting you and water walking falls off when something hits you ?
I mean this is a conversation centered around something that has zero gameplay implications so it wouldn't 'devalue' anything.
Moreover I don't agree with that sentiment at all, and clearly Blizzard doesn't either, come to think of it I cant of a single MMO that completely ignores alts. WoW already has account-wide mounts that originally took forever to grind and I haven't seen anyone complain that they're devalued.
Honorary member of the Baine Fanclub, the only member really.
Ideally? Yes, I would agree with you.
However, if the DEVs rely on people rolling alts because there isn't enough for mains to do in order to cheaply extract higher play time ans subsequently longer kept subs out of players, they no longer have the freedom to ignore the alt question entirely.
I think some conveniently shared stuff is okay but at some point the alt need to be actually played in order to progress.
I see this as mostly a positive.
Instead of the water strider just being objectively the best ground mount anywhere you have to cross water, you can now use any mount you want and equip that item if you want to.
The downside is distributing that item to all of your alts. I think the best option would be to make these mount items herilooms, or at least the water walking one, since it's taking an account wide mount and making it into an item it sounds like you'll have to individually mail to your alts if you only have one character with anglers rep. So that you don't have to take your main to the npc, buy an item for every alt and mail them out individually.
But I think the positives here outweigh the negatives. Let you pick water walking or some other mount perk while also leaving you free to use any mount you want to.
Eh.. I'm fairly neutral about mount equipment. It adds to the game in a small way, but it's not something I asked for or cared about. 2/3 of the equipments they showed are also dead on arrival until 9.0 because of flying. The parachute may be useful on characters without a slow fall.
I dont see a problem with removing it, nice to see other mounts then striders and herbmount.
You still have the waterwalking for alts if you choose that equipment, whats the problem)?
The current one is very likely to stay, whether there will be one in the next expansion? I don't think even Blizzard decided about that one just yet.
Probably depends on what people do with the current system. If everyone chooses waterwalking and keeps using the barding, Blizzard is surely going to look at that data and draw some form of conclusion.
Currently.. the water strider is a step above other mounts... which is why those that earned it... did so. Now it's the same as every other mount. It should have something extra.
Personality I LOVE the idea of equipment... I just find it terribly hypocritical for them to remove gem slots, reforging, original method of glyphing, etc... because it wasn't considered "fun"... and turn around and add a feature that is exactly the same.. except... THIS feature is vendor garbage... and has no interaction with players and their professions.
How about these items being manufactured by Blacksmiths? or multiple parts made by different professions based on what they did?
Nah.. "that would not be fun". Let's just buy it from a vendor as a gold sink and let people queue up for their umpteenth dungeon.
- - - Updated - - -
The game moved away from "mains" and "alts" years ago. I recall an old blue post where a blue was basically calling people with more than 1 or 2 alts "no lifers" and saying that it was likely they weren't actually playing the alts.
Now the game is all about playing as many characters as you want... and they have completely dumbed down the game to make it easy to do so. Leveling taking a dozen hours to max level, "account wide" everything... etc.
They have removed so much content in the name of it being repetitive... only to make the game even MORE repetitive because there is less to do but spam dungeons and world quests.
anglers fishing raft called and said hello
https://www.wowhead.com/item=85500/a...ing-raft#links
I never made it sound important.
I simply pointed out facts around the change from built-in functionality to equipment-acquired functionality.
My personal opinion is that of indifference; I don't care either way.
I would have maybe been happier if it was on a mount-by-mount basis for equipment, so in that regards, you can disagree with that opinion.
Someone asked what the big deal is, tons of people regurgitated opinion-based view points, I collected the base level of fact and provided it as such.
It takes effort to read a post, but it's okay.