Flying is pretty divisive and there is no real way to appease everyone.
I personally don’t like the idea of flying being tied to a specific achievement in a future patch and I am not a massive fan of returning to the old ways of paying a lump sum to access it at cap.
As we know currently, you do your exploration, finish some story, get some rep. Then you wait for 1+ year. Then you get to grind some more rep, explore a bit more before finally are able to fly. Not massively rewarding nor engaging.
I think the fundamentals of flying can be changed to make it something that can be worked towards but in a different way, you can rush aspects of it if you wish, but it will come to all in time. This system is available from launch, so you can work on it while leveling in a new expansion/zone set.
Taking inspiration from Surumar’s Ancient Mana system where you had to find objects and complete quests which would increase the capacity of ancient mana you could hold.
The TL;DR is - Summon flying mount > fly until your mount is exhausted > parachute down to earth > wait for CD. Items gathered from completing content improve efficiency in a choice-based meaningful way up until the full unlock.
- New Ability - Summon Flying Mount, this may not be required, but is the only reasonable way as a non-coder I could think of to implement the system.
The main Mechanic for this is already in use when you fly over a dead zone and get a countdown, at which point you are dismounted and given a parachute.
In our addition to this you are dropped vertically down with the parachute (non cancel-able debuff, can’t use glider or abilities until you land).
We’ll call this “Burdened”.
- Burdened - “Your mount is still acclimatising to the environment and can’t sustain flight”
From expansion start Summon Flying Mount (SFM henceforth) is available, it will summon a random flying mount and give you a “Laden Flight” buff.
SFM has a cooldown of x minutes.
- Laden Flight - “You can fly, sort of, mount at x% acclimatisation”
Summoning a flying mount from the mounts page will only work as a ground mount, you need to have the Laden Flight buff gained from the SFM ability in order to fly.
“Laden Flight” has a duration of x seconds, after the time expires you are given “Burdened”.
With “Laden Flight” your mount will fly at a reduced speed - say 100%
This can be tuned to have limited gains e.g. flying up a small cliff, navigate terrain, you’re at the base of Thunderbluff and cba to wait for a lift, you’re in Nazjatar and don’t want to fight though elementals to get to the path. Tune the duration however is appropriate and set the CD of SFM to a value where there is actually a decision process behind “should I use it now” 10 minutes? Almost make it not worth using in most situations.
In the same vein as with Suramar Ancient Mana, completing the individual requirements of what is the current “Pathfinder” sections would give you an item/token (of undetermined name) which can either increase the duration of Laden Flight, reduce the cooldown of SFM or increase the speed of the mount.
Using these items increases the Acclimatisation value making flight more efficient overall.
There could be other parameters to this if you wanted to make the system more complex other than just Speed/Duration/Cooldown as I have listed.
This could be further padded out with runes or cosmetic glyphs (given you can’t pick your mount) etc
You would get a token for each achievement e.g. completing a dungeon, completing a Mythic dungeon, exploring a zone, picking up a ground object only accessible through flying, getting a faction to honoured/revered. The weekly PvE or PvP cache could award one, weekly quest/mission could etc. So once you’ve done the exploration and other conventional “Pathfinder” parts you can still earn. The amount of tokens awarded is ultimately the “timegate” on the system, so this can be tuned to last over the duration of the first few patches.
Each token rewards enough of a buff to make some noticeable improvement. The point of this is to encourage you to explore all the content the ultimate goal to finally unlock flying, but drip feeding the experience rather than an on/off situation. e.g. a possible 60 tokens for each;
- 3% Speed: 3x60 = 180% + 100% base = 280% flight speed
- 1s Duration: 5s base + (1x60) = 65s flight time
- 9s CDR: 60x9 = 540s CDR off base 600s = 60s CD on SFM
Pathfinder still exists but in a different way, after gathering all 180 tokens you get pathfinder, this allows you to use flying mounts the conventional way rather than though SMF, meaning you can get your 310% back if you have it and the CD is effectively reduced to 0.
Using BFA as the example
While the actual meta pathfinder can be “token-gated” if blizzard wish, this is farmable to a specific point but will come naturally to all e.g. with 6 factions friendly/honoured/revered/exalted would yield 24 tokens, 10 dungeons would yield 26 (-4 due to KR and SoB being mythic only at launch), 6 zones giving 12, 6 for exploration and 6 for story, add in some objects, war campaign, world quests and you’re 50% done.
50% efficiency gives; 190% speed, 35s duration, 5.5m CD
Enough of a boost to act as a flight whistle.
Ultimately there could be an override/catch-up for those who haven’t played for the first few patches. Progress is per toon however the “Pathfinder” is account wide so once you unlock unrestricted flying it’s unlocked account wide.
Laden flight mechanic can exist for future patch zones.
Because you are not losing flight between expansions its an evergreen system, the “lore” is that a new environment needs new acclimatisation or some such justification.
I’m sure there is plenty wrong with this but it think you can get more life out of a semi-grind progression system not directly linked to power such as this, compared to an artifact/neck system.
