How the hell do I make dragonriding not suck?

[Grinning Serpent]

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.

[WowIsDead64]

Their goal - faster movement, but still "challenging" and without being able to "avoid" so called "obstacles". And they think, that with dragonriding they've reached their goal. But they don't understand, that we don't need: 1) Their "challenge" 2) Their "obstacles".

[Merin]

Yeah, you need the glyphs. I had them all finished before I was done leveling, very easy to do.

Two vigor, nope way up, enough altitude for unlimiited flight. Nose down slightly when gliding/boosting. Pretty standard game stuff once you got your tools.

I didn't like it at first either, now I'm first to the point because it's fun and fast as hell. Its an amusing contrast when I quit both BfA and SL due to puttering around glacially with the game expecting you to AFK and watch TV rather than play.

Their goal - faster movement, but still "challenging" and without being able to "avoid" so called "obstacles". And they think, that with dragonriding they've reached their goal. But they don't understand, that we don't need: 1) Their "challenge" 2) Their "obstacles".

There is no challenge and you can fly over every obstacle. This really is an end user issue, this is some "I can't beat the tutorial " kind of shit

Personally I dont care if they patch back in optional classical flying. If slower gamers want to hover around going a few MPH, watching old sitcoms and doing world quests, talking about how much everything sucks now: cool. Just let me have my option to fly my fast and easy to use acrobatic jet to raids and dungeons please.

[Hansworst]

First of all; get all the glyphs. There are a ton of guides nowadays that let you start with the easy ones. The more you get you will notice that actually Fly Upward is your best friend. Especially when you almost have all the glyphs, tap it twice and it will almost instantly regenerate vigor.

[crusadernero]

Unsure if you have all the glyphs or not, but anyway; Get them. Spend the talent points as you see fit, but not really many meaningful choices there anyway.

When it comes to farming ore & Herbs, dragonflying is ass compared to regular flying. Often enough I mount up, spend vigor to gain altitude, only to find a ore/herb nearby, go down to get it and this can happen several times in a row and by then im out of vigor and gotta wait.

It really does require your attention most of the time, somewhat planning all the time and use of terrain. If you are unlucky, you get herb/orde that are on high mountain tops. So you gotta wait for vigor before you can reach it.

One can find a decent stride by being somewhat concervative with vigor use, use the terrain and all that - but it quickly gets clunky and it all depends on the zone/area you are in. Certain places are much worse than others.

Its alot more "work" than how it used to be.

[Venziir]

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.

Just get the glyphs, it takes like an hour to find them all.

[schwarzkopf]

Just get the glyphs, it takes like an hour to find them all.

Or if you are really bad at it like I was - it can take 3-4 hours, but be it 1 hour or 4 hours - get them all and life will be easy.

[crusadernero]

Yeah, you need the glyphs. I had them all finished before I was done leveling, very easy to do.

Two vigor, nope way up, enough altitude for unlimiited flight. Nose down slightly when gliding/boosting. Pretty standard game stuff once you got your tools.

I didn't like it at first either, now I'm first to the point because it's fun and fast as hell. Its an amusing contrast when I quit both BfA and SL due to puttering around glacially with the game expecting you to AFK and watch TV rather than play.

I found it fun at first too, but it gets boring and annoying after a while. Especially if im out just to farm ore & herbs. If im just out and about in the world, I dont mind it. But from mine to mine or herb to herb? Gets quite tedious. So I just stopped doing it lol

[Beastiel]

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.

Aim straight up. Mash space bar (or whatever skyward ascent is). Using it when you aren't aiming straight up barely does anything.

This should make it very easy to collect all the glyphs, which should then make dragonflying even easier.

Gathering is still probably annoying though

[Nathanyel]

Regarding herbing/mining, the "trick" is to unlock the specialization perk that lets you gather DF nodes while mounted, but that can take a while to unlock.

In the meantime, this macro to switch between Dragonrider's Cultivation and Dragonrider’s Hunt can help:

/run DragonridingPanelSkillsButtonMixin:OnClick()local g,b=GenericTraitFrame;g:Hide()b=g.nodeIDToButton[64062]b:SetSelectedEntryID(b:GetSelectedEntryID()==82381 and 82382 or 82381)EditMacro(GetRunningMacro(),nil,0+select(3,GetSpellInfo(b:GetSpellID())))

On use, it updates its icon to show the currently selected talent. Doesn't work in combat, but while flying.

Swap between the talents depending on whether you're primarily questing (killing stuff) or farming herbs/ores.
Note that you can put custom stuff like this macro on the Dragonriding bars.

No, I didn't blatantly copy this from the Wowhead comment without credit, I'm Nulgar.

[Lochton]

Their goal - faster movement, but still "challenging" and without being able to "avoid" so called "obstacles". And they think, that with dragonriding they've reached their goal. But they don't understand, that we don't need: 1) Their "challenge" 2) Their "obstacles".

Don't worry, we're experiencing through the next few patches at the Flightmasters are learning about Dragonriding, and most likely will ad it for future content, and most likely along side old world flight, then you can use the old world flight if you are not as keen on having more speed at the cost of paying atten tion.

[Vampyr78]

It's better with all the glyphs. Overall Dragon Glyphs seems like a bit of a pointless system, there aren't that many of them, it doesn't take long to collect them and dragonriding sucks without getting them all. It's just simple illusion of progression system. However still Dragonriding isn't that great to fly around the zone to pick up various stuff. It's much better for quickly going between far away places.

Also it realy sucks as a demo warlock. Your demons don't despawn when you hop on and doing quick hop over group of mobs will make your demons run to you and pull them. This makes Brackenhide Hollow unplayable as Demo lock.

[Drusin]

People say it's good, but is that only once you've unlocked all the stupid glyphs?

Everyone has their opinion, I personally don't like it either but meh just waiting for OG flying to be enabled.

- - - Updated - - -

No, I didn't blatantly copy this from the Wowhead comment without credit, I'm Nulgar.

I'd be surprised if anyone cares as things like that get circulated without credit all the time and there's no way to prove who originally came up with it.

[Zendhal The Black]

Take you 1 or 2 hours of time and collect all the glyphs.. You will unlock them for all of your alts so it's one time deal and it makes a huge difference

Also for mining/herb pick the regen node. You will regen one ball by the time you mount up again (if you don't have the collecting while mounted perk)

Point yourself up, use Skyward Ascent 2 times and you're regenerating Vigor (every 5 sec when maxed) so you just slightly tilt downwards to maintain speed and you can fly forever. When you're loosing altitude, point up, use skyward and repeat. I spent 4 hours of mining just because how fun dragonriding is

[Nymrohd]

I'd say gathering will get much better this reset. Being able to stop and get back 1 vigor when you are at the node is a major quality of life improvement. It does get a bit more technical though.

[Shaqthefat]

Their goal - faster movement, but still "challenging" and without being able to "avoid" so called "obstacles". And they think, that with dragonriding they've reached their goal. But they don't understand, that we don't need: 1) Their "challenge" 2) Their "obstacles".

The universe will die of heat death before you make a coherent and reasonable statement about this game.

[Nalam the Venom]

Only use ascend and not surge forward.

Collect all glyphs.

[kosajk]

People say it's good, but is that only once you've unlocked all the stupid glyphs?
I *have* to be missing something.

lets start and finish discusion on this
unlocking glyphs take ~1h
we can continue when you do that and will still have problems

tbh i did that in first 2 hours of leveling my main

having 5sec rune regen while draft is active means that if you start with 3+ runes you can get anywhere with understanding how it works ;P

[oldgeezer]

Dragonriding is great if you need to brainlessly fly very fast in a straight line. Otherwise, it sucks, particularly if precision is required. I still consider classic flying to be FAR superior to this super nintendo mini game flying, and look forward to it being implemented in expansion content.

[erifwodahs]

Get all the glyphs?
It was somewhat miserable but it seems that you don't get the mechanic? I mean, there were like 3-4 glyphs where I definitely stopped and waited to gain vigor so I can get up this building then wait a bit more so I could get to the glyph, but that was far and few in between.

I still fly to my m+ dungeons instead of using portals just because it's so cool.

- - - Updated - - -

Dragonriding is great if you need to brainlessly fly very fast in a straight line. Otherwise, it sucks, particularly if precision is required. I still consider classic flying to be FAR superior to this super nintendo mini game flying, and look forward to it being implemented in expansion content.

Wouldn't classic flying be superior for straight line flying? Gaining/losing altitude is much faster in dragon riding mount and if you keep straight line, you will lose vigor slowly. Precision flying is what makes it fun for me , like doing narrow passes or hugging the terrain in the plains at top speed is amazing.