Skyriding / Flying issue

[Ultimutt-silvermoon]

Bird flying is now 530% (with guild buff).

However any interaction with water surfaces, including smaller puddles still causes problems with Travel Form Skyriding switching into Static Flying. Sometimes Skyriding the abilities stay on action bar but you can continue to freely swim through the sky.

Angle of flying will still auto-level after touching the water. I’ve noticed that the game actually considers surface to be several feet under. I’ve noticed that I can sometimes penetrate the surface before my Travel Form changes into Aquatic and glide while flying, through the water.

Bird animations broken until relog, after using disc mounts (such as Soaring Spelltome).

[Feathers-bloodhoof]

Can you confirm that they are investigating the issue? It’s kind of gamebreaking considering that if you aren’t flying at a downwards angle you’re rapidly losing speed, making flying around incredibly frustrating, and making you miss events if you’re trying to get there fast.

[Syvgaard-argent-dawn]

Oddly (maybe unrelated) but I have a similar issue peculiar to the Rocket Shredder 9001, which will just suddenly drop speed.

[Ultimutt-silvermoon]

It doesn’t drop speed but instead your angle of flying becomes perfectly parallel to the ground on its own (read: neutral). If you were to tilt down by a mere 1° you would be able to maintain speed and gain vigor, but after you do that you are again only moments away from another involuntary auto correction.

You can temporarily fix it by remounting but as soon as you touch water or lift off from the ground you are subject to this bug once again. Its a constantly hassle for everyone with gathering professions, especially if you have earned the perks which allow you to stay mounted after interacting with resource nodes.

As for druids, landing even in shallow waters with Skyriding Bird Travel Form instantly switches you to Static Flying until you dismount and remount again. It is necessary that you either swim or walk a few steps onto to ground before attempting to lift off, but this isn’t unusual gameplay at all for Druids. This bug is CONSISTENT AND EASY TO RECREATE.

As for landing in deep water, it is impossible to lift-off in Skyriding bird form as is with all other mounts. This was a problem in the first week of pre-expansion patch but eventually Skyward Ascent was adjusted to be off global cooldown, which allowed you to escape water. Shortly after things got broken once again so every attempt results in rabid flying-swimming form shifting.

This has nothing to do with Camera Following Style setting from the options, it is your character that changes the angle even when your focus is on the center of the screen with the right mouse button being held down. The angle adjustment can be very subtle but is very frequent.

[Ultimutt-silvermoon]

You are skyriding as a bird.
Land into deep water so you auto switch into aquatic form.
Swim a few meters out to the shore so you auto shift back into bird form.

Your skyriding is now static flying. You did nothing, the game changed it without any casting or channeling.
Fly parallel to the ground facing the horizon, everything is fine.

You’re still in static flying, keep going forward and at a 45° angle aim up/down while holding the RMB.

Now try to level out towards the horizon slowly, as you’re flying forward.

You will notice that the manner of this involuntary angle and direction auto-adjustment is very rigid and quick. Follow the steps to recreate the bug on demand. As you are alligning closer to the steady horizontal position your bird will INSTANTLY SNAP resulting with body becoming parallel to the ground.

It looks awkward, breaks immersion and negatively affects gameplay. It’s the exact same as with skyriding involuntary angle auto-correct but this way you can recreate it on demand and it is much more obvious to the untrained eye.

There is a number of bugs here which all are connected with one activity you probably do more in the game than anything else, besides combat, which is travel, and it turns the druid player’s experience into complete misery. I haven’t even included everything in this post but it is all mentioned earlier in the topic.

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Now what is causing the same bugged behavior for other players using regular mounts? I still haven’t figured out but my best guess would be WATER SURFACES and SWIMMING while mounted.

If you are only flying from A to B in a straight line you may not have noticed anything wrong, but it is impossible to say you didn’t notice something strange if you ever participated in a dragon race or spent a session gathering materials in the open world where you are constantly lifting up towards the sky and rapidly diving down in order to accumulate momentum and build vigor.

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Skyriding Seems to be "Snapping" Into Place

[Ultimutt-silvermoon]

Druid shifting causing Skyriding to switch you to Static seems fixed, but I’m still having a very inconsistent success in escaping bodies of water using Travel Form.

Aquatic Form won’t shift into Flying Form before you swim to the surface and attempt to jump out… and while removing Skyward Ascent from global/shift cooldown helped with lifting off during the pre-expansion period, it is still not a very smooth process. Holding down the JUMP button sort of works only 70% of the time and it force the Skyriding action bar sometimes for 10 seconds in a row (while maniacally shifting between Bird and Aquatic) which will allow you to lift off, but other time the action bar will switch between Default and Skyriding every 2 seconds. It just doesn’t feel good.

You will only be able to ascend (fly up) if your ping is below 50. Any higher you simply do not have enough time to press Skyward Ascent in the short time between jumping out of and touching water again because of how small the window is before you are autoshifted from Bird into Seal. With other mounts you will conveniently never have this problem, the button creates distance from water while swimming (technically only floating on surface).

As for camera bug and other related issues, I still haven’t noticed the character aggressively horizontally snapping, but while holding the RMB looking up or down sometimes feels very sluggish until you remount completely.

However, after using Soaring Spelltome or and similar disk mounts, many of the character animations for all classes, including Druid’s Flying Form while Skyriding will stay broken and semi-functional until you relog the character.

Example of Bird Form standard dive-bomb animation on my Zandalari (expecting to see folded wings) replaced by ground sitting or standing animation.

https://i.imgur.com/flWulJi.png

For other Racial Bird forms which have idle-hover animation instead of actually standing on their legs, when diving towards the ground the bug won’t force their body into a sitting position but their wings definitely won’t fold correctly either.

Last thing which feels very different from the entirety of Dragonriding experience (previous expansion period) is that flying directly into the water surface at a sharp (<45°) angle didn’t result in breaking surface and switching into swimming, but instead you would lightly “bounce off” the surface to maintain flight speed and momentum for a while longer. Not sure about the new design philosophy or if that may have been the source of the bug which was causing character snapping.

update:
Recreating this scenario with Skyriding causes no snapping, but getting more than your feet wet and continuing to fly afterwards with Mounts and Bird Flying Travel Form IN STATIC FLYING still causes intense character HORIZONTAL SNAPPING whenever you hold the RMB. While flying forward if you force the direction up or down you will notice this SNAP happen each and every time. Your mount will look like it has skipped some animation frames. Going from down to up it occurs when you are sitting perfectly parralel in relation to the surface below, but while moving the view in a downwards direction after first looking up, the snap will occur not at 0° but at an angle of around -20°. To notice the snap, you must be moving forward, steadily hovering in the air will not do.

[Heartvader-frostmane]

It was fine for a few days but the pitch autocorrection is back again after today’s mini patch for both flying modes. It is now much less subtle for dragonriding but still very horrible, intrusive and erratic with steady flight.

[Ultimutt-silvermoon]

Still unaddressed and the character still forcefully tilts in an angle in a direction towards which you have only DELICATELY moved in (up or down). The movement isn’t as aggressive as before but you still feel it. Imagine that you are using an antique balance scale and as you about reach equilibrium, someone pushes down on it with their hand. This is what is happening and it is long overdue that you invest some time in figuring it out since now is more than a full month after expansion release. To make things worse, here’s more of what I have discovered.

For Lightning Rush enthusiasts, the ability will default back to Whirling Surge if you happen to be mounted up after you long in or relog. You need to re-mount in order for the correct alternative ability to be learned properly. This happens to all classes except DRUIDS.

For some strange reason as if someone had heard some of our previous prayers, this doesn’t happen to Druids between sessions if you remain in Bird Form Skyriding. Unlike with other classes using standard mounts, for Druids Lightning Rush will be constantly showing on the action bar and won’t be auto-replaced with the default ability (despite being gray, it isn’t unlearned, you simply have not stacked up 10 charges yet).

I would assume that Ride Along - Enabled stops working in the same manner because it is also considered an alternative ability - an option to the right, same logic as with the one above. Previously there was a buff indicating active passive ability but now there isn’t anymore so I cannot verify.

[Ultimutt-silvermoon]

The root cause has been identified as mounting up in shallow water and this action will consistently trigger the bug.

For druid forms it is very likely that even simply walking through shallow water causes the same behavior without re-mounting. Many herbs and ores are often positioned in shallows as well so simply gathering the resources in these places breaks your flying as well (might have something to do with the no-dismount profession perks).

Just to remind you what the actual bug is, as you’re leveling out horizontally while flying, the angle which you are flying at in relation to the ground will snap, sometimes even by 30%. It is a very rigid involuntary movement so it can be very immersion breaking as you aim up. When aiming your view with RMB held down in opposite direction - towards the ground - the mount will instead feel super unresponsive as if the game isn’t registering half of the mouse movements. You position will remain leveled and only the camera will shift around.

Are you guys making any kind of progress with this because it has only been two months? Flying is the second most participated in activity in the game other than character combat so you can probably understand why and how annoying this can be.