0 sec cast and a hefty cost of some other type, for example:
Debuff - Riding Sickness
Description: You recently changed flying style. Your character gets motion sickness from trying to adjust to the change and don’t work well with their hands.
Effect: Every 15 seconds your character gets interrupted due to vomiting. All gold income reduced by 50%. All material gathering reduced by 50%.
Duration: 2 minutes
-=EDIT=-
My initial thought was to instead immediately make the character “smashed”, where the entire screen is blurry and controls go wacky; but that would be unfair for people requiring visual assistances, and also is easy to counter with coffee-type drinks.
When you change specialisation, you should have a 0 sec cast, and a debuff : dealing 50% less damage / healing…etc and self-inflicted damage when you cast techniques for several minutes?
When you go into (or out) warmode without having to go in the capital, you should have a debuff : dealing 50% less damage / healing…etc and “poorly adjusted armor” which increase the damage you get by 50% for several minutes?
You might say : “it’s not the same, my suggestion is for something totally different” and yes, I agree, your suggestion is way worse because you most likely will change flying mode more often in a day than my examples and it goes completly in the opposite direction of what this option is for.
Yes, my suggestion is worse intentionally. This is supposed to be a roleplaying game where player choices need to be impactful and bring not just positives but negatives. I despise the notion that I should be able to change my in-game choices at a whim as if nothing happened.
As for the other examples you mention:
Changing specialization already brings a small penalty to casters; they start at 0 mana. So they have to sit 10-15 seconds to recover mana. It’s a small penalty but it exists. For non-mana users there is no penalty. So I would make the game set your HP to 1 and also add a heal-absorb debuff equal to 100% of your max health when switching specializations, so that you have to spend at least 30sec eating as a sitting duck, with the first 20seconds also making you extremely vulnerable to any enemy.
Setting Warmode on and off is a different matter. Warmode ON brings a bonus of extra gold and supplies, but also the penalty of being under threat of enemy players. Not only that but it cannot be changed at a whim; I can only turn it on at the capital cities of Stormwind/Orgrimmar and Valdrakken. I cannot turn it on and off in the middle of nowhere to get the bonus and avoid the threat. Imagine if I could go to, for example, Taralek with WM OFF, switch it on while on a mountain to see if there are enemy players nearby, and then when I spot them switch it OFF before they attack me. Would that be QoL? Yes. But it’d also be a massive nerf to the roleplay element and the weight of my choices.
There is a difference between Quality of Life improvement and making the game more speedrun-y, but unfortunately every single change that has happened to the game in the name of QoL improvement has been a change to a more speedrun-style. Receiving items in your mailbox when your bags are full are definitely a QoL improvement, but shouldn’t a player be penalized for not managing their inventory properly? In this case I would still allow items to go to the mailbox, but they’d all become soubound and they’d all have a vendor value of 1 copper.
I was typing a whole wall about examples of many QoL stuff that only lead to enforing (that’s right, enforce, not enable) more speedrunning of the game, but I’d derail the thread.
I do also. But not everyone has. Even if they’ve collected all from Pandaria Remix.
They’ve said “not every flying mount will do dragonflying”. But I looked through the list yesterday (on the beta), and this one is the only one so far.
I love the blue ottuk. But I hope I’m wrong, or that some more will be added.
Not even the brewfest does that to our characters any more, I remember having to hunt for black coffee. We had a whole ‘drunk’ raid once with everyone doing brewfest event just before raid start
There is a difference between impactful and between annoying for no reason. And there is a difference between system who should have penalties and systems without. It can be a matter of opinion, but for me, traveling isn’t one of such systems. You want to make impactful the choice between dragon flying and normal. But why should it?
Dragon flying was put in game to reduce the time between long distance travel, making the mode of travel more dynamic. So obviously it has issues when you travel short distance several times in a row, or need precision. That’s where normal flying becomes useful, it’s not an impactful choice, it’s a fix for an issue in the dragon flying mode.
I’m not against system with penalties. But the systems, and the penalties should have meaning, and not be “we want to increase time to do x for reasons”. Let’s take covenant as an example. You can chose to make the choice impactful and difficult to revert. That’s fine. But then, don’t change several time the effect / power of the techniques because a class spec is only in ONE covenant and you don’t like it.
As for changing spec, your examples of penalties are meaningless. You change spec between boss, when there is downtime or when you enter a dungeon in lfg, so it has zero impact usually compared to your suggestion for flying mode. As for warmode, changing mode in capital is fine, but you realise that you can opt out in any rest zone? So you can flee and remove it instantly if you have player trying to get you? (instead of having to go to a capital to remove it)
For me the greatest question mark is why can I not choose one or the other, and have me work towards the one I did not choose at max level?
I agree that the 5-sec cast puts it more near the category of “needlessly burdensome” rather than “a choice of some consequence” but I will just use the slow version most of the time anyway.
Thinking more on your suggestion, they would have been better off making it instant but giving the current cast time as a debuff that you couldn’t swap until it timed out.
That’s a good way to describe the 5 second cast time.
Currently on beta you can completely ignore the toggle if you’re a monk. Summoning a skyriding mount while you’re using Zen Flight makes the mount behave as if steady flight was enabled. If they keep the 5 second cast time for toggling between flight styles then I really hope that they don’t patch the Zen Flight bug.
That’s a bit nasty.
The current Dragon Riding mounts should always be sky riding mounts.
Those mounts that can’t sky ride should just stay are they are.
The rest should be selectable.
I’ll be turning off Sky riding as soon as I can as I don’t use it at all now. If I was venturing into TWW then I’d have to keep it on while doing the leveling campaign but I hear it’s not so long anyhow. But as I’m not I’ll just turn it off.
Whether instant cast or not, there definitely needs still to be some form of barrier to being able to do it while already mounted as is currently the case, otherwise people and more notably bots will abuse it constantly, for ex to skyride between nodes, then switch to to static to gather, rise up again for 0 vigor cost, and switch back to skyriding to get to hte next node faster.
And I get a feeling that 5 seconds is probably there for exactly that reason, to prevent people from just switching back and forth as they please and potentially working around their lack of vigor in that way.
This way they have to decide if Static is legitimately better in this situation (for ex to precisely land on top of an ore vein in a cliff to be able to mine it), or whether they just want to wait out the 1 vigor and keep flying normally…
Sure, for me personally I would love it to be instant cast and ideally useable while mounted… but I also know that there are enough botters and exploiters out there that that is never going to be the correct solution, for the aforementioned reasons and then some…
And if restrictions aren´t put in place preemtively to avoid that abuse, then it will be abused vigorously just like everything else, and the amount of QQ here and elsewhere will be infinitely higher than our current annoyance with the 5 seconds to switch modes.
Because they both exist to accomplish nearly identical purposes. So the “better” option or switching between options should either have an initial cost or a recurring cost. This is a nearly universal convention in role-playing games and also something that used to exist in WoW too:
Initial speed was running. At level 40 you could get your first riding mount to get an additional 60% movement speed. But it was not free. It required “massive” amounts of gold for its time, which means players paid for the convenience. Players had the option of getting a mount, or keeping the money (of course everyone got the mount )
Then we had fast ground mount at level 60. Its cost was again a very hefty amount for its time. So players again paid for another convenience.
Then we had slow flying. Another hefty cost, another payment for convenience.
Then we had fast flying. Massive cost, payment for convenience.
Note that gathering the gold for all of the above at the time and at appropriate level was not a trivial task. Very few people had enough gold to unlock the next upgrade on their first character at the moment it became unlockable; some never got the fast flight mount before it became “free” in Cataclysm.
Now we got Dragonflying entirely for free. No cost. At first, and before any of the upgrades were available, it felt appropriate that there was no cost for it because we neither had 6 Vigor nor did we have the ability to recover it that quickly, to the point where a player can fly without landing for hours. And while it doesn’t have the same “easiness” as skyswimming with the other mounts, it served a nearly identical purpose: Get players to a remote location. So since it competed with skyswimming for that and is also an eventual strict upgrade, the appropriate game design would be to make it incur either a starting meaningful cost or a recurring one.
There is a next upgrade: Instant teleportation. I’ve already said what I think about it and its implementation.
it currently has 0 impact because there is no penalty for non-casters, and for casters its miniscule. But imagine losing out 30sec when switching specialization during a timed run. Heck, even in untimed run it would be a deterrent.
As explained, going OFF Warmode has a penalty:
You have to abandon what you do to get to a safe space
You have to make sure that the enemy will let you get to that safe space and leave you at peace when there
You have to wait 5 minutes for it to wear off (unless you teleport to a dungeon or something).
You lose the 10% gold/supplies buff as well as any chests that may drop and which your faction can win.
And if you want to enable WM again after escaping your foe, guess what: You have to go the capital, then fly back again to where you were questing.
The entire above procedure has set you back and is the penalty for switching Warmode. It’s not free.
I was one of the few to farm the gold during BC to unlock the 280%, and bought even the 310% on all my characters. It was time consuming, yes. But then, everything was at the time. WoW isn’t the same game, it changed with its players.
It’s clear we have different opinions, and want different things. In a game like WoW, for me traveling has very little interest. So I’ll always be opposed to things that slow traveling. (I’m not saying we should have teleport to every raids, dungeons, hub of every zone…etc in our spell book, there is a balance in everything)
But you can say what you want, a 5sec cd on switching is a bad thing, since it’s a nerf of something we had before, without explanations or reasons given. Why not put the cast at 1.5sec, like it was when we landed, and switched mounts? No one would have cared, since it’s mostly the same thing. They even twisted the knife in the wound when they said : “no, flying mounts who can’t dragonflight will be land mounts if dragonflying is enable.” So we can’t do like before. Why…? They felt like it? It’s essentially puting a 300% nerf on something we had without justification.
That would actually be a useful solution if, for whatever reason, they do not want you to be able to switch every second. But I guess it would make too much sense to get implemented…
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