How the hell do I make dragonriding not suck?

[ZazuuPriest]

The experience without glyphs is miserable, the experience with glyphs is the best wows movement has been ever imo. the last few things you unlcok with the glyphs (the bottom of the tree) are very powerful. Spen ten mins looking up where all the glyphs are or use an addon and it will save you so much time. GLHF

i was warming to dragon riding until i started to do herbalism and learned its absolutely fucking terrible if youre doing something where you have to takeoff/land/dismount often

[Powerogue]

What I did was just level and get any glyphs I could find/reach, then once I finished the zone any that I missed I'd look up (wowhead or any number of addons). Even if it takes sitting there and having a picnic halfway up the mountain a couple times, they're all reachable.

The races are the biggest way to train. Remember, point your camera up to get the most of the flap, and down to get the most of the surge. around 45 degrees in either direction works really well.

[Swnem]

Get the effin glyphs.
There are guides, there are tom toms. Go fly and collect them all first thing. No more problem! Amazing how that works.
Honestly it takes you half an hour. You could've done it instead of writing this for what is a minor inconvenience.

[Alroxas]

i was warming to dragon riding until i started to do herbalism and learned its absolutely fucking terrible if youre doing something where you have to takeoff/land/dismount often

40 points into Botany for Herbalism solves this. (Or for miners, 40 points into Mining Process)

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Get the effin glyphs.
There are guides, there are tom toms. Go fly and collect them all first thing. No more problem! Amazing how that works.
Honestly it takes you half an hour. You could've done it instead of writing this for what is a minor inconvenience.

I think that's part of the issue between the disparity between having zero dragon glyphs and having all (or at least enough to get the both Beyond Infinity + At Home Aloft talents) talents unlocked.

Yes we know that it's a short thing to do, yes we know how much of an improvement dragon riding is with right unlocks. But WHY is it such a difference between the two states?

But Progression! Let me stop you right there, it's ZERO progression once you do it once on a character. Remember it's account-wide unlocked and I doubt there are that many players somewhere in the middle of sigil/glyph collecting. Every launch day guide and starting DF article basically tells you do the collection ASAP because the benefits are that good.

So then WHY do the players have to jump through all these hoops? Why not just give the top end version of dragonriding at the beginning and offer something else for those sigils/glyphs? Cosmetics for instance.

[FelPlague]

How to make dragonriding not suck?

Wait for next xpac to play..... No I'm serious, Do you actually think dragonriding will continue in next xpac?

yes cause for all but a handful of people it is insanely fun and far better then /noclip flying of the past.

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i was warming to dragon riding until i started to do herbalism and learned its absolutely fucking terrible if youre doing something where you have to takeoff/land/dismount often

get your points up so you don't need to dismount to herb/mine, and also learn to use the ariel halt so you literally never run out of energy.

[Swnem]

40 points into Botany for Herbalism solves this. (Or for miners, 40 points into Mining Process)

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I think that's part of the issue between the disparity between having zero dragon glyphs and having all (or at least enough to get the both Beyond Infinity + At Home Aloft talents) talents unlocked.

Yes we know that it's a short thing to do, yes we know how much of an improvement dragon riding is with right unlocks. But WHY is it such a difference between the two states?

But Progression! Let me stop you right there, it's ZERO progression once you do it once on a character. Remember it's account-wide unlocked and I doubt there are that many players somewhere in the middle of sigil/glyph collecting. Every launch day guide and starting DF article basically tells you do the collection ASAP because the benefits are that good.

So then WHY do the players have to jump through all these hoops? Why not just give the top end version of dragonriding at the beginning and offer something else for those sigils/glyphs? Cosmetics for instance.

You do realize that if the devs get wind of this, what they will do is make it harder to upgrade your dragon, right? We know how it went with regular flying. This is FINE compared to going back to the days where we need to max out all reps and wait for a patch to be able to fly. They are not gonna give us the dragon fully unlocked at the start. Just like they didn't give us flying when we hit max level anymore. This can only get worse.

[czarek]

You do realize that if the devs get wind of this, what they will do is make it harder to upgrade your dragon, right? We know how it went with regular flying. This is FINE compared to going back to the days where we need to max out all reps and wait for a patch to be able to fly. They are not gonna give us the dragon fully unlocked at the start. Just like they didn't give us flying when we hit max level anymore. This can only get worse.

As i remember flying back in the days i could finally unlock in time when i do realize it i dont need it much over those months Yeah its so good we got it from the bottom start.

[Beuargh]

you can get all the glyphs in less than 45min using a guide, chill mode... that's the first thing I did after unlocking dragon riding. so apart from the exp I earned until that point with my main (maybe 1 full lvl), all my toons were lvled with full glyphs dragon riding.

[bluesock]

you can get all the glyphs in less than 45min using a guide, chill mode... that's the first thing I did after unlocking dragon riding. so apart from the exp I earned until that point with my main (maybe 1 full lvl), all my toons were lvled with full glyphs dragon riding.

No need even for a guide just use the handynotes addon.

[Gimlix]

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.

If you can't get used to Dragonriding then your just bad. Dragonriding is the new immersive flying which they sure reached and accomplished. Better then the lame 2004 noclip flying that is VERY but VERY outdated. I can't wait them to replace it with dragonriding everywhere in 11.0

Anyways, just get used to it. Practise my boy.

Don't blame a good feature on your miscomings.

[Schizoide]

Blizzard promised regular flight would be available later in this expansion. If they break that promise (again), I can't speak for anyone else, but I personally will quit WoW forever.

No second chances, no opportunity for them to recant two weeks later. They lie about the same thing twice in a row and I'm out.

[Soeroah]

Max out the talent tree. When you use Skyward Ascent, tilt your camera upwards for three seconds then level out. Do that a few times and you can get very high from the ground and repeating that action essentially gives you infinite vigor as long as you can keep it up consistently.

[Powerogue]

The fact that the glyph grind in DF is so short (I think it was like 90 minutes for me, stopping for rare spawns and the occasional race course along the way) really makes you wonder why it has to exist at all. I feel like it would've been smarter to just make dragonriding awesome right out the gate, and tie glyphs to getting gold medals in the races, and have those glyphs be used purely to add new features and gimmicks to the flying. Like instead of needing profession skill to gather while riding, you earn glyphs from racing and use those to buy the "mining while mounted" or "herbalism while mounted" upgrades.

I love the racing and still wouldn't want that. The racing is MUCH harder than default dragonriding, really putting your skill at it to the test and offering little margin for error. I still have only gotten maybe one gold advanced course.

Getting "herbalism while mounted" from just doing a bunch of herbalism is much more sane for people who aren't dragonriding to be the very best, like no one ever was, but just to get from herb node to herb node. I got it within a week of playing thanks to knowing to prioritize it.

I'm still not getting this constant jumping back and forth between "getting the glyphs is not hard at all and can be done in an hour or so using a guide" and "IT'S JUST SO TERRIBLE THAT GLYPHS EXIST AND ADD A PROGRESSION PATH TO IT." Like is it inconveniencing you or not? I actually out of curiosity hopped on a ground mount and went from the starter docks as far as I could go to see how navigating the dragonriding continent without it works, and you don't even need dragonriding to get places until that singular broken bridge into Thaldrazsus. (Would recommend the trip though, it's very relaxing. Got a lot of herbs/treasures/easter eggs as I strolled.) It's certainly ridiculous to propose that navigating the zone is somehow "too hard" until driding is absolutely maxed (which again, only has to be done once per acct) considering the continent is deliberately littered with high ledges to jump from, "ferry" NPCs to take you up, and flight points placed high up.

Off the top of my head some good ones:
-Three falls in Best Zone New Grizzly Hills, the entire zone slopes downward from that point.
-the dragonriding training place, ruby dragonshrine, and Wrathion/Sabellian fortress in Waking Shores
-Valdrakken dragon aspects tower is literally the highest spot in the entire continent and you can glide down without using a single flap or surge to any point in Dragonflight. Teleporter inside up the staircase. Good hearthstone spot.

Again all of this becomes redundant once you have Thrill of the Skies, and the new flap back definitely helps in conserving energy if you're having to start and stop a lot, but this is for anyone still trying to level their first character.

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Max out the talent tree. When you use Skyward Ascent, tilt your camera upwards for three seconds then level out. Do that a few times and you can get very high from the ground and repeating that action essentially gives you infinite vigor as long as you can keep it up consistently.

This, combined with using a 1 vigor surge while aiming downward will get you to thrill level speed within about 1 second. Aim both at roughly 45 degree angles (up for flap, down for surge) in my experience for best effect without losing speed/height.