Midnight Update: Steady Flight Unleashed

[Uvania]

Thank fuck, dragon flying is the worst feature ever, such lazy and lame design



Make it the default one, always

I thought i was the only one actively never using skyriding, so far this expansion has been a total turd when i was forced to rush through the campaign just to get steady flying unlocked asap because the game gets unbearable without it, felt the same in dragonflight.

[WowIsDead64]

Unfortunately we need to accept it. Wow is and has always been very navigation-unfriendly game. Flying softens this problems. We players need flying exactly because we don't want to deal with badly designed s**t like this. Game should be intuitive and self-contained. 3rd party sites like WowHead and watching quest completion videos shouldn't be required to play game.

P.S. Going again to such s**ty place as Maw - was terrible idea in a first place. And Sylvanas again?

[SL1200]

If they take flying out of wow again, they're taking me out of wow again. Game sucks without flying.

[SpaceMistakes]

Thank fuck, dragon flying is the worst feature ever, such lazy and lame design



Make it the default one, always

Incredibly dumb take because a ton of work went into advanced flight/dragonriding. Steady flight is the lazy version, it's basically just noclip/flycam mode that still has functioning collision with the terrain/objects.

I'm not saying your preference is wrong, but to call advanced flight lazy when steady is just pressing spacebar and numlock/AFKing until you're where you want to be s goofy as hell.

[loras]

...It was not available during TWW?
I can't say i've even noticed.

[MrLachyG]

I swear, if Blizz make another Korthia where I am stuck a full patch doing content on a ground mount mid-expansion, I am going to lose it. The only reason it somewhat worked in Undermine is cause the zone was tiny and the mount was the fastest ground mount we have.

Blizz can't seem to help getting in their own way with flying/not-flying.

I am fairly certain the next patch zone or raid will be off the coast of Zul'aman. so should be flying enabled...

- - - Updated - - -

...It was not available during TWW?
I can't say i've even noticed.

you had to do an achievement to unlock steady flight for TWW and Midnight. Looks like that is something that won't be in TLT though

[meroes]

Incredibly dumb take because a ton of work went into advanced flight/dragonriding. Steady flight is the lazy version, it's basically just noclip/flycam mode that still has functioning collision with the terrain/objects.

I'm not saying your preference is wrong, but to call advanced flight lazy when steady is just pressing spacebar and numlock/AFKing until you're where you want to be s goofy as hell.

And even more work went into flying (steady flight) when there was just ground mounts. The entire map had to be redone for flying in Cata. The leap from flying to dragon flying was much less. So yes, it was lazy in that sense.

[Sicarius87]

Thank fuck, dragon flying is the worst feature ever, such lazy and lame design



Make it the default one, always

No fuck that. But im ok with having a toggle in the options that allows for this for people like you that want it and for people like me that dont.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Unfortunately we need to accept it. Wow is and has always been very navigation-unfriendly game. Flying softens this problems. We players need flying exactly because we don't want to deal with badly designed s**t like this. Game should be intuitive and self-contained. 3rd party sites like WowHead and watching quest completion videos shouldn't be required to play game.

P.S. Going again to such s**ty place as Maw - was terrible idea in a first place. And Sylvanas again?

I don't see a problem with that quest. By the time you went through K'aresh zone questline and did the Manaforge raid and the Eco-dome dungeon, your gear will allow you to effortlessly crush level 80 mobs in the overworld. Getting around the Maw is not difficult, just a little time consuming. It's not like you are playing FF11 where you are in constant terror of aggroing mobs and possibly being killed by them trying to reach a quest destination. More of that would be appreciated actually. There is no struggle in overworld questing. It sucks the tension out of the Nerubian invasion story or going to the Voidstorm when you are highly unlikely to die.

[WowIsDead64]

I don't see a problem with that quest. By the time you went through K'aresh zone questline and did the Manaforge raid and the Eco-dome dungeon, your gear will allow you to effortlessly crush level 80 mobs in the overworld. Getting around the Maw is not difficult, just a little time consuming. It's not like you are playing FF11 where you are in constant terror of aggroing mobs and possibly being killed by them trying to reach a quest destination. More of that would be appreciated actually. There is no struggle in overworld questing. It sucks the tension out of the Nerubian invasion story or going to the Voidstorm when you are highly unlikely to die.

It's specifically about that quest. Blizzard still design game with things like "player should stand at exactly this place and look at exactly this direction" in mind. That is just wrong design. Because if player isn't attentive enough or just does something non-standard - he loses track of quest logic and ends up with not knowing what to do. As Kaplan said in recent interview, devs were (and is) proud of mocking players such way. Uh oh, players are so stupid, that they don't see such obvious things, yeah. In this case I just didn't see that small white thing 100 meters away from me despite of looking at right direction. For some reason there are many such quests in TWW, where you just don't see things. For example minimap colors on Karesh are bluish, so you don't see anything on minimap.

And you should understand one thing. No-flying has nothing to do with so called "challenge". "Challenge" - is populist buzzword, that is used as excuse. It's used to force bad design. For example Blizzard put too few quest mobs, so you have to search half of location for them. And then they put some mazes and overcrowd location by mobs to slow you down. Of course it's profitable for them, when things are artificially stretched and are done much more slower. But. It can't be called challenge. Why? Challenge - is something, player can deal with. Something, he can overcome. Via some sort of skill for example. Finding mobs/items at random places can't be dealt with. It's either about wasting your time via trial'n'error or going to WowHead to copy-paste coordinates for your map addon. Do we need it? Nope. It was ok to have such bad design back in 2004. But game is 21 years old. No reason to still have artificially stretched content in 2026.

Why flying is so important in this case? It allows exploration without suffering from being slowed down. I.e. if only one passage of 100500 leads me to that quest cave - I don't have to kill over9000 mobs on my way to check them all. Or deal with some sort of rat maze. I just mount and explore things.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It's specifically about that quest. Blizzard still design game with things like "player should stand at exactly this place and look at exactly this direction" in mind. That is just wrong design. Because if player isn't attentive enough or just do something non-standard - he loses track of quest logic and ends up with not knowing what to do. As Kaplan said in recent interview, devs were (and is) proud of mocking players such way. Uh oh, players are so stupid, that they don't see such obvious things, yeah. In this case I just didn't see that small white thing 100 meters away from me despite of looking at right direction. For some reason there are many such quests in TWW, where you just don't see things. For example minimap colors on Karesh are bluish, so you don't see anything on minimap.

And you should understand one thing. No-flying has nothing to do with so called "challenge". "Challenge" - is populist buzzword, that is used as excuse. It's used to force bad design. For example Blizzard put too few quest mobs, so you have to search half of location for them. And then they put some mazes and overcrowd location by mobs to slow you down. Of course it's profitable for them, when things are artificially stretched and are done much more slower. But. It can't be called challenge. Why? Challenge - is something, player can deal with. Something, he can overcome. Via some sort of skill for example. Finding mobs/items at random places can't be dealt with. It's either about wasting your time or going to WowHead to copy-paste coordinates for your map addon. Do we need it? Nope. It was ok to have such bad design back in 2004. But game is 21 years old. No reason to still have artificially stretched content in 2026.

First, I do not think that any person at Blizzard deliberately makes quests with the intent to "waste your time" to pad subscriptions. Though ofcourse, the systems designers in charge of spreadsheeting the ilevel loot, rep reward, and rated PvP timegating might be doing a little bit of that. I think that the claustrophobic zone design of WoD through Shadowlands has more to do with the level designers trying to be more intricate and efficient with their levels, and maybe with a bit of the Skyrim mentality of not wanting the player to walk for more than 30 seconds in a direction and not run into something and get bored.

Second, World of Warcraft is conceptually a fantasy adventure game in which the main thing you do is go out and fight things. As bad as the writing can be, people still usually enjoy going up to a mob, pressing buttons, and killing it. This is something WoW does good at, or at the very least, okay with. This is what customers still playing WoW have come to expect. So it is in Blizzard's interest to continue delivering on this. That means the bulk of the gameplay will be about having you run around fighting mobs, be it getting a direct quest objective to kill 8 lightbloom enemies, or having to run through a cave in which you will naturally aggro a lot of mobs that will snare you and have to be confronted. If players are not having to fight mobs, then you get the curious FF14 and Trails gameplay experience (and curious dev budgeting) where you are running through all of these zones or levels populated by mobs that you just run past and ignore, so why do they even exist? Why are the devs spending all of this time modelling and animating and placing mobs or even making levels if you are just going to sprint through them to the next cutscene or boss fight? Why not just make the game about cutscenes and bossfights? Etc.

So the gameplay experience being provided needs mobs. But that then brings us to the paradox of retail WoW, where it is effectively a singleplayer experience built on the foundation of a MMO. Most of the time in the world, players are running around by themselves doing the world quests they want to level the reputations they want, doing the questlines at their own pace, etc. People rarely group up in the world and its usually only for a one-off world quest that requires them to kill elites or a world boss, and then they immediately go back to being solo players. The time to kill in retail WoW is also extremely short, taking 5 to 10 seconds to kill an overworld mob, maybe 15. So you have all of these people who might be running around in an area doing their own quest or world quest independently of each other, bursting down the mobs.

Mobs are just going to run out fast, and that's even with Blizzard having severely damaged their MMO by allowing anyone to get credit from tagging any mob without being partyed, layering/phasing/instancing which further degrades the communities of non-RP servers by automatically shuffling people into less populated instanced phases of the world, insanely fast respawn times which just further destroy the immersion when you wipe out a base or kill a named lieutenant in the story only for them to reappear right before your eyes before you can even leave, etc. And the designers can't add too many mobs in an area or else it becomes too immersion breaking, it becomes very performance intensive for people, lag, etc.

These are hard constraints of the game that can't be thrown off unless there is a radical revamp to turn WoW into BG3 or something so everyone player has their own world unto themselves, or back into a real MMO where players need to be working together in a party and be on the exact same step of the same quest, high time to kill, can't get credit from mobs that weren't first tagged by their party, etc.

Third, having to read wikis to find optional toys or mounts is another paradox of what Retail WoW has become. In a normal WRPG, every player is not supposed to see everything in a single player. In classic MMOs, not every player is supposed to get the same experience, ie only a few people become jedi. So that's why there is a lot of stuff that you are probably going to miss, but you might notice or find some stuff and get an item that a lot of other people missed, and that made your experience unique. But this is at odds with Retail where now it has attracted a lot of people with/cultivated the expectation that everybody can get everything (except for gladiator and mythic mounts). We now have this FOMO phenomena where people want and seem to expect to get every Remix ensemble, toy, mounts, etc. People want to get every Plunderstorm item. Every Timewalking item. Every rare mount. Etc. This conflict can't be truly resolved without separating the game into two products again that pursue different visions and provide different experiences to different audiences.

[WowIsDead64]

...

Fun - is some sort of balance between two extremes. Good reward/effort ratio, you know. You can't get fun via doing nothing, but doing exceeding amount of things also isn't fun. I don't think, that killing mobs just for sake of killing mobs is interesting gameplay. Otherwise, again, as it was said in Kaplan's interview, Vanilla wouldn't have so many quests - players would be expected to level via repeatedly killing same mobs again, again and again. Therefore motivation to kill things is important here. And here is where devs miss something. Funny thing, but even the most complex games are based on simple concepts. RPG is usually about several concepts, like "I want it all", "fill the bar" and "clear things". What players actually like - is clearing all exclamation marks on their map. They take quest, they do some "fill the bar" thing (10/12 - is exactly the same fill the bar game, but with yellow numbers), see desired question mark, get their reward, repeat to clear everything. Killing things just for sake of killing things isn't part of this fun. And this is why "side-quest-bloat" in recent xpacks also isn't fun.

Overall it's not fun, when quest is about "You either solve this puzzle and use some obscure mechanic or you have to go around that big tower through crowd of mobs to see, if may be it has some entrance and stair inside to get to it's top via some alternative way. If it doesn't (and knowing Blizzard, you might guess, that it doesn't), well, you've just wasted lots of your time, lol". Blizzard and alternative approaches? Are as far from each other, as different edges of universe. Sometimes it's bearable. May be when it's 1 quest of 100. It's ok for some quest to have some special flavour. But if each quest is like this (what Blizzard obviously want), then it's big no-no for me, sorry.

Overall I hate:
1) Killing things for no reason just to move
2) Aggro/combat/mob trail for no reason
3) Kindergarten grade puzzles, jump/navigation puzzles.
4) Stealth actions. As you've said, if it's quest, then I like to kill things, not avoid them.