With the recent terrible change to flying, I thought I would repeat a point I made back when Dragonflight launched.
Back then Blizzard and all their streamer, Youtube and forum fanboys were celebrating dragonriding as this incredible new innovative addition to WoW that would revolutionize the game (some of them still do). And I thought: No, it’s not.
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Dragonriding is terrible for gathering and many types of quests.
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Dragonriding is bad for navigating tight places, like cities.
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Dragonriding introduces a vigor-system that limits how often you can land and take off.
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Dragonriding messes up your action bars or adds more buttons to the bloat we already have.
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Dragonriding made the mount-collections that so many people had spent years building unusable for most of an expansion.
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Dragonriding fills your screen with annoying animations and white “wind-lines” that obstruct your view and causes motion sickness for some people.
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Dragonriding introduces a host of obnoxiously loud sounds like the take-off sound, the wind sounds, the landing boom and the constant terrible “ping-ping-ping” vigor-regeneration-sound.
The ONLY good thing dragonriding did was increase flight speed. That’s it. That’s the incredible new innovation.
I dare Blizzard to add a speed-boost-toggle to regular flying that allows us to switch between 400% (for gathering etc.) and 800% (for long distance travelling) at will. No cd, no bs. Do that and no one will ever touch dragonriding again, because except for being fast, it’s simply bad.
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I actually really like the feel of it. The speed certainly adds to that, but it goes beyond that. It is much closer to how I imagine flying on an organic mount (or as a bird) than the old “air swimming”.
The only downsides for me are the vigor limits and the relative difficulty of landing in a specific, elevated spot (like the top of a narrow pillar, for example).
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Dragonriding is good because it’s fast, interactive (I don’t feel like falling asleep on my way to the other side of the continent) and immersive (you can’t expect me to believe huge dragons can just hover mid-air physics don’t work that way).
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It gives me motion sickness so I use it as little as possible. It’s going to slow me down levelling in the new expansion because they are gating slow flying, the disadvantaged poorer cousin of flying. Which as you can tell, I’m less than impressed about.
I find it impossible to go exploring with a skyriding mount, you just whizz past the terrain at great speed. I also can’t take nice pretty screenshots.
However I think it’s great they’ve added this kind of flying for people who enjoy it. It’s fast and interactive and many seem to love it.
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I can understand that.
Of course, the solution would be to just let people change at will. Midflight. No cd, no bs. Just let people have fun however they want. But the Blizzard fun-police just can’t help themselves. Every time they introduce something which could be a W, there has to be a “but”. Just like they give us all transmog… but not the class specific ones. Why Blizzard? Why can my gnome priest use Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood but not Netherwind Hood?
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Did they change how Dragon Riding [Sky Riding] works? Feels a bit stiff now trying to maintain speed doing the camera tilt method as you ascend to dive again…
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I agree with that. I’d also love a per-mount toggle for the type of flight I want to use with a particular mount. The way switching works right now is needlessly cumbersome.
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Funny you should mention that, i was just thinking it myself while going round doing WQ’s. I’m having a hard time maintaining vigor all of a sudden too, which i never had trouble with before.
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Very valid point, for gathering is just terrible, it’s only useful for long distance travel.
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I’ll be honest on vigor management I don’t really have any issues, I can climb indefinetely without running out just flying around by timing my climbs, vigor during gathering hasn’t been an issue for me since they added the buff that increases vigor recovery after gathering a node, now with the 3 charge ability that just outright gives you a vigor mostly changes that I can be a bit inefficient when flying and not suffer for it which is also nice, but I have to try to run out of vigor regardless of the activity I’m doing (other then racing ofc)
The sounds generated by it aren’t any more annoying then other sounds on the sound effect audio channel and you can disable it with a hotkey so eh kind of a nonissue in my eyes, as is the locking mount collectors into a single mount. Don’t get me wrong it would’ve been a good arguement in 10.0, but now not anymore because that’s already been adressed.
The only real point I agree on is the Dejavu I’ve just been in this place before speed animations, should be able to turn those off as iirc its a factor for some people who have motion sickness, there’s other ways of tracking your dragons speed and to see if you’re still at the vigor recovery speed
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For me it’s not just the speed. While I was very skeptical about it back in the Df beta season - having got used to is - steady flight over any distance just feels odd to me - even in a certain other MMO that’s the subject of many promotional memes.
That said since getting access to the choice between both - I do still enjoy having steady flight for very short distances (examples include gathering or even doing quests in localized areas), and the 5s cast timer to switch between both styles feels pretty miserable.
Both types of flying have their uses
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As usual, I’m hearing a lot of “it’s not that bad” and “you get used to it” and “you can just disable that” which sounds a lot like excuses.
My point remains: If Blizzard had introduced 5 new special mounts with dragonriding, but with only 380% speed, no one would have touched them because of everything mentioned above. The only reason anyone uses dragonriding is because it’s faster. Sure it might also feel more immersive or w/e, but you wouldn’t care about that if you had to deal with all its bs and it wasn’t faster.
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I detest that df applies to everything at the same time. I was already used to being able to hotswap df mounts and flight form with just a press of a button. DF is just a glorified taxi. You can cover huge distances but for anything else, it’s garbage. Just let us independently apply it to certain mounts.
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Thats the most 100% correct post ever been made about dragonriding. Agreed.
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It’s good but you gotta take some of the edge off its effects.
Firstly, turn off camera shaking and all that. This removes the fisheye effect.
Then remove the wind on everything except the wings in accessibility. You can turn that off too if you like.
And now it plays and looks absolutely fine, and I no longer get motion sick - because now it just looks like the airswimming but with variable speeds.
Also the whole thing about messing up action bars… what? It goes away the second you dismount.
I really would like this, too. I don’t think it fits well at all for the mage Legion flying mount, which is a hovering disc. It doesn’t really make sense.
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I feel like most people have just posted their own views on dragonflying, wether they like it or not, what parts of it they like or not, without trying to tell you how you should interpret it. Kind of a weird potshot at the other posters in this thread really to imply that they’re trying to placate you when they’re just trying to state their own views
As for the speed, yes obviously, 380% max speed for dynamic flying would mean that forward gliding would be much slower then forward static flying. If it was even? It’d be a prefference thing, some people actually find it fun, there’s also content around it in the form of races so there is also a skill element too it. For this reason alone if forward gliding would match the static forward flight speed, we’d still see people choosing their favoured type of flying and not everyone would be on static.
It does mess up action bars. It covers up what is most likely your most important abilities on 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. so when you land you can’t use those until you manually dismount. Sure, you can work around this with macros or by moving some keybinds, but that’s my whole point. With regular flying you don’t have to.
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Oh, like that.
I think you can drag regular spells into the dragonriding bar and then use different binds for the dragonriding itself. I haven’t actually tried but this strikes me as a pretty decent idea. Gonna try it with blink 
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I always laughed when someone landed and tried to tag a mob, but instead of doing that person just hopped off in the air. Poor guy probably had his attack ability on “2”.
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