Flying might not be for you.

[Vampyrr]

"Flying being part of the world" also requires danger to flying players, and I for one don't think people would be particularly happy if every other mob camp has dismounting net guns and aggressive flying mobs in between - a mechanic that would permanently hinder you, not just for the first half of an expansion until you earn flight.

No but they could shoot projectiles that you can dodge that if they hit you, you fall. Blades Edge in BC had that mechanic, a fel cannon that could dismount if it hits but you can dodge it.

[rrayy]

No but they could shoot projectiles that you can dodge that if they hit you, you fall. Blades Edge in BC had that mechanic, a fel cannon that could dismount if it hits but you can dodge it.

And you know why they never did it again? Because players simply flew high above it and avoided it completely. It was a complete waste.

[SirCowdog]

And you know why they never did it again? Because players simply flew high above it and avoided it completely. It was a complete waste.

Until you had to actually do an objective in the area covered by the mobs or guns. You know...how an actual threat is supposed to work in a game like this.

The only real problem with threats to flying players in TBC was that the server tech and enemy AI was shit back then, and the speed at which players moved with epic mounts made it difficult for the game to pose a credible threat to something moving that fast.

But today? Today's tech and servers are much better, as is net code and speeds. Monster AI is also better in some regards. Make flying move at a reasonable speed closer to ground mounts, and give enemies proper tools to threaten a flying player, and the environment is much different. Sure, the people who only want to skip things are going to be angry, but the point is not to cater to them, but rather to make flying an actual part of the game instead of just a shortcut speed/god mode.

[Shelly]

AP is locked for a huge part behind WQ's you need AP to stay competetive, so yeah even your raider has to do open world stuff. They should've just given it the WotLK treatment but oh well... Time sinks

Even with AP out of the occasion there will be some new stuff you need to grind to a certain cap which will involve WQ or some other inconvenience (like grinding certain items across the world).

Primary and largest gain of AP is islands.

You earn not only the big once a week reward but at least 300AP for less than 10 minutes of time with each island. You also gain significant AP from raids.

You could have hit your 2nd essence slot by the week Mythic raids opened up - and in fact had to - by grinding islands which after you have finished your world quests becomes the ONLY source of AP.

[Tiwack]

And you know why they never did it again? Because players simply flew high above it and avoided it completely. It was a complete waste.

Actually it was because players whined that they couldn't easily complete their dailies for that area with their newly acquired flying capabilities. It was the same issue players had with Skettis and the obnoxious quick birds in that area.

[stomination]

This isn't about the merits of Pathfinder or not, but rather a critique of what flying does and why it doesn't matter.

Flying more than anything is a way of speeding game progress. While this is especially true for leveling it's also true for world content such as your daily quests.

Now Blizzard has talked about how their dislike of flight often stems from the way it trivializes the world itself. Terrain is no longer a barrier, neither is mob density surrounding assassination targets.

So Blizzard has designed a world where you area expected to experience the world as you level, but what about after leveling?

Well at max level you have two main ways of character progression. Open world content and instanced content.

Instanced content would be:
Raids
Instanced PvP
Dungeons - normal, heroic and M+
Islands

Open world content would be:
Gathering
World Quests
Open World PvP

Meanwhile they have created a world where you don't need flight.

No, seriously.

Every single dungeon or raid entrance is accessible almost immediately from a flight path or in the case of many things through a queable system in the menu options.

As are battlegrounds.

The main thing that flight speeds up for people is the open world.

So if you don't spend time in that open world. If you're primarily a raider, M+, PvPer. Then chances are flight isn't really for you and is meant to be a reward for those out experiencing the open world.

Im sorry but raiders pvpers and m+ ppl still do dailies.

[hulkgor]

What's the purpose of this thread again?

[stomination]

Flying needs to go back to bc quality. It was a means to get to certain places only. And there was certain places where you can be shot down.

[Elias01]

Flying needs to go back to bc quality. It was a means to get to certain places only. And there was certain places where you can be shot down.

Just becouse there were few place acessible only by flying didnt make flying part of the game. It was just gate mechanism. And those place where you could be shot down? You mean cities what you can easly avoid? Or that Blades Edge area with cannons what shot you down only if you stoped flying for like 5 seconds? Thats like no threat at all. Flying in TBC wasnt any different. You just hop on mount skip everthing and finish obj. Chance you can get shot down by antiflying cannons was like 0.01%.

[valax]

This isn't about the merits of Pathfinder or not, but rather a critique of what flying does and why it doesn't matter.

Flying more than anything is a way of speeding game progress. While this is especially true for leveling it's also true for world content such as your daily quests.

Now Blizzard has talked about how their dislike of flight often stems from the way it trivializes the world itself. Terrain is no longer a barrier, neither is mob density surrounding assassination targets.

So Blizzard has designed a world where you area expected to experience the world as you level, but what about after leveling?

Well at max level you have two main ways of character progression. Open world content and instanced content.

Instanced content would be:
Raids
Instanced PvP
Dungeons - normal, heroic and M+
Islands

Open world content would be:
Gathering
World Quests
Open World PvP

Meanwhile they have created a world where you don't need flight.

No, seriously.

Every single dungeon or raid entrance is accessible almost immediately from a flight path or in the case of many things through a queable system in the menu options.

As are battlegrounds.

The main thing that flight speeds up for people is the open world.

So if you don't spend time in that open world. If you're primarily a raider, M+, PvPer. Then chances are flight isn't really for you and is meant to be a reward for those out experiencing the open world.

Chances are flying is not for people experiencing open world either , all there is to do in the open world is farming rep or farming materials , you have to do a whole lot of farming rep to get access to flying but when you have finally got flying you don't need to do open world content anymore. This is my 2 cents about pathfinder , in this form it's only useful for your alts and never for your main character .

You may say it speeds farming , as I mentioned and i respond i can farm quicker just realm hopping the same zone like i did from the start on the ground

[FecundDecay]

What ways. Please give as few examples. If you cant think of any than you have no right to complain.

First off - I have a right to say, or complain, about whatever I damn well please - it is not predicated on my willingness to do the dev's job for them.

Regardless of that fact; a few examples would be casting abilities on mounts allowing for PvE and PvP combat, inclusion of vertical locations and designs in zones requiring a flying mount to reach such as many that existed in BC and Wrath, quests with airborne objectives or targets, enemies with anti-air defense capabilities one needed to avoid or neutralize while traveling around a zone, and so on and so forth. Both the Skettis and Netherwing Ledge areas from Wrath are a good example of flight-integration in questing and exploration. Zones like Icecrown and Storm Peaks from Wrath are good examples of zones using flight as a key part of travel and questing. They've done it well in the past, but instead of iterating and developing those ideas they threw them out the window for some reason.


There are a plethora of ideas in terms of travel, combat, and questing - and yes even dungeon and raid content if they enabled mount-use within instances - that could be introduced to work flying into the game on a fundamental level instead of it simply being a tacked-on feature used to "speed up" gameplay..... the dev team's failure of imagination in actually implementing any such thing is not an excuse for them consistently limiting a flight ability most of us have unlocked many many times over by now and are sick of having taken away over and over again for no reason.

[Dhrizzle]

First off - I have a right to say, or complain, about whatever I damn well please - it is not predicated on my willingness to do the dev's job for them.

Regardless of that fact; a few examples would be casting abilities on mounts allowing for PvE and PvP combat, inclusion of vertical locations and designs in zones requiring a flying mount to reach such as many that existed in BC and Wrath, quests with airborne objectives or targets, enemies with anti-air defense capabilities one needed to avoid or neutralize while traveling around a zone, and so on and so forth. Both the Skettis and Netherwing Ledge areas from Wrath are a good example of flight-integration in questing and exploration. Zones like Icecrown and Storm Peaks from Wrath are good examples of zones using flight as a key part of travel and questing. They've done it well in the past, but instead of iterating and developing those ideas they threw them out the window for some reason.


There are a plethora of ideas in terms of travel, combat, and questing - and yes even dungeon and raid content if they enabled mount-use within instances - that could be introduced to work flying into the game on a fundamental level instead of it simply being a tacked-on feature used to "speed up" gameplay..... the dev team's failure of imagination in actually implementing any such thing is not an excuse for them consistently limiting a flight ability most of us have unlocked many many times over by now and are sick of having taken away over and over again for no reason.

A lot of these things have been experimented with and ultimately rejected. TBC gave us aerial threats in the form of Kaliri and anti-air cannons. both of which were trivial when you realised how badly the WoW engine sucks at dealing with vertical movement and you could zig-zag to avoid everything. IIRC Kaliri were initially utterly lethal and had to be nerfed, so as an aerial threat they were very binary, either unavoidable or far too easy.

For WotLK they experimented with vehicle based aerial combat, even went as far as putting it on the box, but ultimately they decided WoW's engine and controls were not suitable for it. We did get a dungeon and a raid - Occulus and the Malygos encounter - that used mounted aerial combat but they were generally regarded as one of the worst parts of the expansion with people frequently quitting Occulus as soon as they zoned in from LFD. This expansion also featured two zones that had been designed to be experienced through flight - Stormpeaks and Icecrown. Stormpeaks I thought was brilliant and the flying exploration was a lot of fun, Icecrown on the other hand felt awful as the ability to flap over the now-harmless Scourge removed any sense of threat from them.

Cataclysm gave us a taste of "flying" (technically swimming) 3D combat with Vash'jir but it was not popular. The zone itself I felt was up there with Stormpeaks as a great experience for a flying player, and that was despite the poor combat and what I consider to be the worst, most generic and formulaic questing in the entire game. On the other hand Hyjal, Uldum and Twilight Highlands would all have been much better if they had taken the time to make them ground-based experiences. I'm on the fence with Deepholm, it was okay to experience from the air but I get the feeling that playing from the ground could have made the view from Therazane's Throne more rewarding.

[rrayy]

And that mean jack shit :P

Obviously it means more than that because Pathfinder exists and you aren't getting your way.

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Flying needs to go back to bc quality. It was a means to get to certain places only. And there was certain places where you can be shot down.

Only a fool who wasn't payig attention ever got shot down. Smart players just flew high above it to avoid it entirely. People sure have a revisionnist history about TBC.

[Nefarious Tea]

Again, don't disagree. But saying that there is no danger is just not true. It's the annoying kind and not the immersive kind, true, but it's still danger.

Their point I think is that it’s not dangerous. Every goddamn mob dazes you off your mount but unless you’re naked or asleep at the wheel no mob is ever going to kill you because you can burst things down in 2-3 globals at most.

[Ærion]

The best expansion remains WoTLK for me, mainly because it lets you get flying BEFORE(!!!) you could hit max level, at 77; why? so you could move around Icecrown and Storm Peaks. Every subsequent expansion went progressively down the shitter making it just a pain in the ass.

As was mentioned before, FF14's system is basically the best. You unlock flying per zone as you go through it, and you need to explore, do side quests, finish the main quest, and do a dungeon to unlock it. That makes it so that, the moment you're done with the zone, you can immediately fly through it and stat leveling your gatherers or something else you might need at that point. Basically the WoTLK model paired with the current "do everything" model of Pathfinder (minus those atrocious goddamn reputations).

[Phuongvi]

Blizzard can fuck anything they want , flying, Classic +++ , more LFR , lore, character, Hong Kong and WoW is still the most popular mmo.

Ion could take a shit in our mouth and we are going to beg for more

[Ihsan997]

As was mentioned before, FF14's system is basically the best. You unlock flying per zone as you go through it, and you need to explore, do side quests, finish the main quest, and do a dungeon to unlock it. That makes it so that, the moment you're done with the zone, you can immediately fly through it and stat leveling your gatherers or something else you might need at that point. Basically the WoTLK model paired with the current "do everything" model of Pathfinder (minus those atrocious goddamn reputations).

I actually didn’t see your previous post mentioning that, but damn, what an awesome system. Seriously, why can’t we have that in WoW?

[Aliven]

Obviously it means more than that because Pathfinder exists and you aren't getting your way.

We got pathfinder to stretch gameplay time as much as possible.

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I actually didn’t see your previous post mentioning that, but damn, what an awesome system. Seriously, why can’t we have that in WoW?

Because actiblizz love all the money.

[SirCowdog]

Only a fool who wasn't payig attention ever got shot down. Smart players just flew high above it to avoid it entirely. People sure have a revisionnist history about TBC.

You mean a person who played well and learned to avoid being shot down get rewarded? Gosh...playing well means objectives are easier to complete. What a shocker.

How is this different from not standing the fire in a raid?

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I actually didn’t see your previous post mentioning that, but damn, what an awesome system. Seriously, why can’t we have that in WoW?

Largely because of Blizzard's open world design where zones are interconnected without load screens. I haven't played past the firs 10 levels or so in FFXIV, so someone correct me if I'm wrong: But I believe FFXIV zones each have their own instance, and are not connected? This means that you can fly completely free in one zone, but cannot fly directly into another zone and have your flying instantly turn off.

I'm not completely sure how Blizzard could address this. Possible make you lose control of your mount when entering a zone you haven't unlocked yet, and fly directly to the nearest flight path....instead of just dismounting you and having you fall.

This really only applies to the initial launch content. Any new zones or islands Blizzard releases after the launch of an expansion could easily have its own pathfinder unlock, since most of the time new islands like that have their own instance anyway. Such as Nazjatar.

[FecundDecay]

A lot of these things have been experimented with and ultimately rejected. TBC gave us aerial threats in the form of Kaliri and anti-air cannons. both of which were trivial when you realised how badly the WoW engine sucks at dealing with vertical movement and you could zig-zag to avoid everything. IIRC Kaliri were initially utterly lethal and had to be nerfed, so as an aerial threat they were very binary, either unavoidable or far too easy.

For WotLK they experimented with vehicle based aerial combat, even went as far as putting it on the box, but ultimately they decided WoW's engine and controls were not suitable for it. We did get a dungeon and a raid - Occulus and the Malygos encounter - that used mounted aerial combat but they were generally regarded as one of the worst parts of the expansion with people frequently quitting Occulus as soon as they zoned in from LFD. This expansion also featured two zones that had been designed to be experienced through flight - Stormpeaks and Icecrown. Stormpeaks I thought was brilliant and the flying exploration was a lot of fun, Icecrown on the other hand felt awful as the ability to flap over the now-harmless Scourge removed any sense of threat from them.

Cataclysm gave us a taste of "flying" (technically swimming) 3D combat with Vash'jir but it was not popular. The zone itself I felt was up there with Stormpeaks as a great experience for a flying player, and that was despite the poor combat and what I consider to be the worst, most generic and formulaic questing in the entire game. On the other hand Hyjal, Uldum and Twilight Highlands would all have been much better if they had taken the time to make them ground-based experiences. I'm on the fence with Deepholm, it was okay to experience from the air but I get the feeling that playing from the ground could have made the view from Therazane's Throne more rewarding.

I would argue that only some of them were experimented with - and poorly at that - before being rejected. Poor or half-assed implementation of a concept is not grounds upon which to reject the concept itself as far as I am concerned.

In terms of the anti-air cannons found in TBC, they were poorly designed. As you said, they were either over-tuned to the point of irritation or easy to avoid to the point or irrelevance - I do not accept that those two extremes are the only possible options there. They could have done more to experiment with different projectile or beam types, the speed they traveled, the damage they do, and so on. In fact - and I'm not sure why it totally slipped my mind before - the anti-air capabilities of the enemies on Mechagon Island introduced recently provide a much better example of this concept moving in a positive direction. I still think they become a little too simple to avoid once the player knows how they work - but that is an issue of tuning the range and stacking debuff speed, not a fundamental failure of the concept itself. This would be a more compelling hurtle if - for example - the damage and range of their anti-air attacks were increased BUT we had the ability to fire back at them from our mounts via either ranged abilities and/or items for those who do not have ranged abilities. Imagine if instead of simply flying away to avoid them, they were numerous and dangerous enough that they should or could not be avoided, but you had the ability to remain mounted and attack them back from the air via spells, hunter arrows, thrown bombs, etc.

On the subject of the Kaliri - and again, more recent flying-type enemies found in Nazjatar and Mechagon - the issue is not with the mobs themselves, but with the fact that we are prevented from fighting back against them while mounted. Once these enemies latch on, your only choices are to either fly away until they reset OR find a safe place to LAND and kill them so you can remount. Both of these options are little more than an annoyance, and do not add to the player experience - they simply hinder us in an unenjoyable way either by forcing a time-wasting detour or a time-wasting distraction. BECAUSE we are forced to fly away until they lose agro or fly down to land before fighting them, they can not do so much damage that we are already half-dead or more by the time we can respond to their threat; so they must be tuned not to do very much damage, which means they don't do enough damage to pose a real threat if we choose to simply ignore them beating at us while we fly out of their range, and do not do enough damage to be a real threat once we finally do land to kill them making the whole experience seem pointless. If, however, like the anti-air attacks I spoke about above, we had the ability to remain mounted and fight them off, then they can be tuned to do more damage more in line with typical enemy mobs so they do not seem like trivial annoyances. You're flying somewhere, suddenly a few flying rays attack you, if you try to ignore them or fly away they will do a lot of damage to you - but you have the ability to fight them off in the air and continue along your travel. The only potential gameplay issue there would be loot - which they could easily resolve by simply auto-looting any mobs killed in the air before their bodies fall to the ground. This would be a far more logical way to introduce enemy mob threat to flying targets without forcing them to fly away or land to defeat the threat.

Now - while there are a number of ranged specs available in game that would be able to engage in these types of flying combat with their own base spells and abilities, obviously there are a number of melee specs that would be very limited in the number of abilities they could use to fight back against these threat. I would point to the fact that they're basically handing out persistent item tools like the PvP dismount boots/net-o-matics as proof that they could easily provide similar items to fill that slot for melee toons. There could be a handful of various mounted attack items people could acquire - or even be simply given - that would allow them to hold their own while mounted. In terms of PvP, since other ranged classes would have access to their normal class abilities, these items COULD be tuned to do damage on level with those abilities so the fights would be as "fair" as they are on the ground now. There would be no reason to prevent them from being decent sources of damage on par with any typical class/spec ability usable on a mount. Aside from providing a more viable way to integrate hostile mobs and anti-air capabilities for flying targets, this would also work to address the issues a lot of World PvP players have with flying mounts - allowing people to give chase to those flying away without it completely halting combat and acting as a get-out-of-death-free card as it does now.

They "experimented" with aerial combat in wrath INTERNALLY, and speaking as someone who was in the very first rounds of testing for that expansion I can state that it's not something the players ever got to even see, let alone test or experiment with. I can not speak to why they felt confident enough about it to put it on the promotional and packaging materials yet changed their minds so quickly and completely as to not even include it in alpha or beta testing, but given how clunky as fuck their implementation of GROUND vehicle combat (Ulduar, Strand of the Ancients, etc) as well as AIR vehicle combat (Oculus, Malygos) were - I would argue that was a completely different implementation of mounted combat than what I am suggesting. Forcing people to use special mounts and/or vehicles that had built-in attacks and different resource mechanics, and restrictive cooldowns/globals/recharges/etc is why those forms of combat were not engaging or enjoyable - in fact it's why a lot of people had major complaints about the Trail of the Crusader questing area given how obnoxious all of the horseback combat was. I think taking the approach of letting people use their OWN mounts and their OWN abilities or items is a far better way to go about that then what they actually did back in Wrath with "vehicle" combat and Dragon-back combat. Also - and lets be honest with ourselves here - while the mount-vehicle combat is a major part of why people didn't like Oculus or Malygos, they were also just obnoxious encounters that took way too long, were boring and repetitive, and offered little challenge once you memorized the correct order to spam your 2 available dragon abilities in. Their failure doesn't rest singularly on the poor implementation of the mount/vehicle combat, as much as it did suck.

Finally - when it comes to zone design.... I do not agree that Vashj'ir is an example of flying combat. Even with the swim speed buffs, SWIMMING around in an ocean doesn't look or feel at all like flying on a mount. I also think this is one of those issues where a vocal minority has soured people's memory. Plenty of people, myself included, enjoyed that zone in Cataclysm quite a bit - I've heard plenty of people speak of it fondly now in hindsight - and there were a fair number of people who were actually disappointed when we found out that Nazjatar was NOT going to be along those same lines and would, instead, be an area where the water had been pulled away to allow us to use it like a normal above-water zone.... again, myself included. While the underwater combat might not have been POPULAR, I'm not sure I accept the claim that it was UNPOPULAR either. Like many things in this game, I think there were people in both camps... just as there are people who are adamant about hating flying mounts existing and want them removed, and people who hate that flying is gated or restricted at all and want it unlocked for good from day 1. They have not completely abandoned the under-water combat systems, they still use it here and there for various quests in recent content, and they've even improved certain aspects of it. If it was universally hated, they would have done away with it completely.

Now, I would agree that Storm Peaks was a beautiful and awesome zone and probably was a better implementation of a flight-required area, but I don't think there was all that much wrong with Icecrown either. Icecrown is actually one of my favorite zones in the whole game. I do agree that flying made the armies of scourge feel less threatening, but the implementation of sky-combat with mobs and ground-based anti-air attacks you could fight back while mounted I discussed above would have generally solved the issues Icecrown had. I would not be surprised if that zone was designed with the expectation that the mounted combat they had advertised would be a factor, and it was hamstrung by that feature's removal without any further threat to re-establish the danger it lost. I simply don't agree with you at all in terms of Hyjal, Uldum, Deepholm, or Twilight highlands - since I loved and enjoyed my questing experience in those zones on multiple characters over the course of Cataclysm.

So... while I hear and understand your position, my own point remains firm. If they took the time to really develop these systems in positive ways I think it is more than possible to keep flying in the game without it basically serving as nothing more than a content/travel time skip feature. Hell, we haven't even touched on the actual QUESTING possibilities outside of combat that this could include.... look to the mounted chase/race in the Netherdrake acquisition questline for a quick example of what is possible. There are a number of ways completely unrelated to PvP or PvE fighting that flight could enhance quests that simply doesn't exist in the game at all. Imagine getting a quest to locate a heavily protected ground target from the air, follow them around until you can track them back to a camp or something... they could provide us with some type of stalking-people-from-the-rooftops type of assassin's creed style questing if they just embraced the as-of-now ignored vertical space in their game world.