I have gotten so use to not being able to fly in new expansions that I never think to use flying. Fortunately I truly hate the dragons so it was no great loss giving up on them. There really wasn’t any need for the dragon whilst levelling and I got to cap a number of times with not bothering.
It doesn’t help that the maps are utterly useless in Dragonflight. I guess they didn’t bother cus most would just be flying over everything.
Flying is a personal choice thankfully. I do love my regular mounts, ground and flying and also appreciate just how wonderful the world is when on foot. The game is what it is and it lets you do what you want, so I fly where I can and have some quite magical original dragons… but those things in Dragonflight are a world apart from what I enjoy when flying, so only ground mounts on the Dragon Isles. Thankfully I’ve finished there now anyway, so no need anymore. The place turned out to be the most boring of all the expansions, and I’ve been here since the first TBC so I guess I know what I like. I really didn’t like Dragonflight, moslty cus the dragon theme left me numb.
As long as the dynamic flight system is optional it won’t matter to me anyway. If it became the norm I’d just give up on flying. I seriously would prefer to walk.
The dynamic ground mounts is a cool idea the way you presented it but due to nostalgia I would love if we ccould get something like the warhorses in Lord of the Rings online.
It worked like this:
It played with a mount speed bar, with 3 different controls to control the bar and ergo speed
Trotting when the bar was at minimun speed
Accelerating when you pressed or held the forward key
Decelerating when you pressed the backwards key
3 different mount types (Light, Medium and Heavy) these classifications effected how fast your acceleration and deceleration was, heavy being the slowest to ramp and light the fastest.
Heres where it gets immersive, the faster you are the harder it is to turn, and the more armored your mount is classified as the less likely it is that you get knocked off by daze.
I love the idea of dynamic ground mounts. It would be very cool to have mounts have some kind of “weight” to them whenyou steer or jump. Rather than my 2 tonne yak hopping around like a bunny on a cloud.
Though I do want them to give us combat mount abilities. Like, idk, a bear can charge a player/mob and stun them for a few sec or a cat mount can pounce as a targeted ability (like heroic leap) and maybe slow in an aoe (also useful for navigating terrain, would make it really fun to use honestly).
Also, opens possibility for mount gear? Mount stats? MOUNT ARENAS? So cool actually!
Imagine how cool battlegrounds would be! Maybe a meta would be to have a tank mounted on something that can do a lot of cc. And then enemy team would counter it with their own mounts?
I hate to be negative but I can’t stand the dragon flying at all! I would like to use ground mounts more. When I did mop remix I used the normal flying and I like to walk around when questing.
I have proposed in the past a system where didfferent types of mounts perform differently in various settings.
Horses go faster on road.
Rams can climb steeper areas.
Water Strider goes back to Water Walking.
Elekks are imune to Stun / Daze but are slower.
Some large cats can do Stealth, so rogues can be stealthed and ride at a certain speed.
I could be up for that.
If it was a Dynamic system where I had to constantly steer and use vigor to even move then no thanks.
For me, what I wish they would do, is lower the amount of quests, and buff the exp gain.
The reason I zoom through with flying, is because there are too many “Oh pick this stick up from the opposite side of the map and return it to me”… Then the quest after is “Go to that exact same spot you just were, and kill that one guy!”… Its tedious running back and forth…
Had they grouped the quests into bigger, and longer ones for higher exp, I would be more inclined to actually use my ground mount, just for the chillin’ and exploring
That was questing in Vanilla.
By Cata / MOP they are organised the questing in chapters that were a lot more streamlined.
But for doing end game content, gathering herbs or ore, WQs, getting to a dungeon, Pet Battles, fishing, hunting rares / world bosses or whatever you wanted to do yourself then flying came into its own.
I still think the best way they did flying was quest up to max level on the ground and then unlock flying Account Wide. Either by paying a load of gold or a simpler pathfinder (not the wait til x.3 patch and do 12 rep farms), just max level Loremaster and Explorer achievements in x.0 or x.1 at the latest.
Still is, maybe not to the extend written above, but one of the first quests in Azure Span, is to go speak to a dude by the lake, and then walk 10 steps behind him and click a thing, then return…
For me the whole
Quest 1: “Go kill 10 mobs at X” Hand in
Quest 2: “Oh go back and kill their leader”
makes no sense… Would rather have quality over quantity, and for me because there are so many smaller quests, the running becomes tedious… When I go from point A to point B on a map, it should feel like an adventure, it shouldn’t feel like “something I just swiftly do”
I can only speak for myself… But if they removed all those small, post-boy quests that just seem like fillers, I would be more enticed to run on my ground mount to feel the “adventure” of travelling
The original design didn’t have quest stages (dependent, unlocking steps) but still wanted to tell a sequential story, so these have been split. (After getting to know Skyrim terminology, where a quest is a journey, I started to call them objectives.)
This also allowed gradual rewards, and difficulty differences (levels, elites, dungeons).
Story-wise it makes little sense to swoop in and cherry pick the boss. Same as in raids, first you clear trash, then you challenge the meanie.
What I really found weird were the walkie-talkie quests. Bowl of Scrying was relatively okay. Otherwise, designers had to involve some object (or a hiding spy) to talk to, in order to avoid going back to town.
In some cases sequential completion wasn’t critical, such as the case of the ogres in Loch Modan - so we’d get all quests, still allowing partial execution with rewards, but without round trips.
Of course, but in WoW its a big walk bag and forth to the same spot. They have the quests that needs no “turn in” but is completable from the quest log on the side.
So for me, it becomes dull “clearing the trash” → Run back → Clear the trash again because otherwise I will have 10 mobs ontop of boss → Challenge the meanie → Run back → "Oh damn, we forgot to take the treasure the meanie had saved! better go search for it! → Back to the same spot…
When quests are like that, I end up just flying on whatever is the fastest.
Could I ride to point A, and grind my way through different quests, with the quest log appearing on screen, I would probably ride a ground mount to immerse myself and take in the scenery
I like that this isn’t a rant. People oftentimes petition for flying to be taken away for everyone instead of doing what you did and just whipping out their ground mounts.
This reminds me of the riding quests during Brewfest, where the mount has a stamina bar and 3 different speeds (green/slow, yellow/proper, red/fast) depending on how often one presses the whipping button (or what it’s called), and we have to maintain the stamina of the mount to avoid tiring it and dropping to a slog.
Copy that, add an emergency stop button as well and we have dynamic ground riding. Heck, add a “give fruit” button too that works like the vigor recharge one.
Hated those.
There was an achievement to get from Kranos (sp?) village to Ironforge and give something to someone in a building in the Great Forge area.
I cheated and put a mage portal down to get me into Ironfarge as I’m just so bad at steering the stampeeding rams.
I definitely agree that current quest system is more fluent, even senseful, I just wanted to give my elderly perspective as explanation.
One thing I forgot is old bags, classic only really but space used to be tiny. So I grew the habit of returning after each quest phase, dumping stuff and reassessing.
Gamers (people) are a lot more hyper these days, and the game had to change, too.
Enemies are pushovers and take little time to die, effectively making the travel part of the “adventure” noticeable and comparable in time to the killing. In today’s overworld we need around 1minute per “kill X enemies” quest and 5-10seconds travel time back and forth to the questgiver, making the travel part seem long. In the old overworld we needed almost 10minutes to do the actual objective because enemies both didn’t die in 3 abilities and because we also needed to stop after every 2-3 enemies for hp/mana. So even if the travel time back was 2 minutes, it still was comparatively short compared to the time spent between killing the first and the last enemy.
In today’s game we get 2-4 quests that are all from the same questgiver or from 2 NPCs standing next to each other who coordinate on what they need. These quests have to be done in tandem and you cannot progress until you complete both. So you do those, go back and pick 2-4 new quests that again must be done at the same time to allow to progress, go back, etc. You can’t complete one questgiver, then the other, then the 3rd, you have to do their quests in parallel.
In the old game we could easily have 10+ different quests all to be done before going back to hand them in, and those quests could be from 5-6 different questgivers who just “happened” to need entirely different stuff done in the same area, and they could either be done at the same time, or as different adventures. So we could pick up everything at a quest hub, go away for like 30-45mins, and return for massive hand-ins, or we could do just one questgiver’s chain, return, then do the other’s etc. It was much more free.
So cool actually!