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[WOW] Look at me, I'm flying ! Woooo ! (after the servers come up)
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They can, but I find them removing instead of finding ways to work around it or embrace it indicative of their overall mindset and willingness to improve the game.
Basically they removed flying because designing content with flying is 'hard'. Just like how designing mythic fights around 10 mans is 'hard', and how designing non-triage healing is 'hard', or how adding new tiers of 5 mans is 'hard'. How many other things are they going to remove or avoid because it's 'hard'?
one of the main arguments by people who want unrestricted flying seems to be that they don't like running past/through/around a bunch of ground mobs; I don't think 'flight, but with a bunch of annoying air mobs that dismount you' is going to mollify these folks. Having to fly around a chunk of territory that was hostile or dismounted you (flying guards, wintergrasp, etc) was never fun, it was just irritating. If we're being honest most of the open world flying content they've tried (free flight bombing missions, the netherwing races, etc) has been pretty bad, which is probably the reason they substantially abandoned it.
The basic problem is that flying in WoW was never really more than a way of bypassing mechanics, whether that meant bypassing mobs or farming faster or camping people more effectively. Everybody basically agrees on this and even a lot of the pro-flight argumentation essentially comes down to 'but I liked being able to bypass mechanics.'
what I'd like to see are more temp flight things, since those don't present the same issues and are actually kinda entertaining to use
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
@Opty It's not being made shittier though. One of the major complaints in FFXIV originally is that there wasn't much sense of danger in the overworld. It was pretty rare to be in a fight where you couldn't beat it easily. The response to this was to make monsters in the overworld more dangerous. They are balanced around fighting 1v1 but if you find yourself tackling more than one it will be a more challenging experience.
The idea here isn't that you are required to have a group to do the content, but instead you need to actually be cautious instead of just running past everything and aggroing large groups of enemies because you can easily dispatch them. (Obviously though having a group let's you tackle larger quantities at once)
We don't have enough information yet to see if FFXIV won't fall into similar pitfalls as WoW in terms of flying. All we know at this point is that you'll get flying early on in the expansion (as opposed to having it as a reward for completing the main expansion levels) and that the environment is designed around having flying to get around. (Lots of floating islands and terrain you can only get to by flying.) However you only get access to flying in a zone when you complete the main story/objective in that zone and "attune" yourself to the particular wind currents in that zone. This forces players to do a lot of the initial exploration on the ground and then they get access to the stuff locked behind flying once they unlock the zone so to speak. This will be the case in each new zone. Will players still fly directly to their objective once they are able to do so? Most likely, but the mount speed between flying and ground is not very different which should help keep the world feeling larger even with flying.
In short it seems they are at least aware of some of the pitfalls and have taken steps in response to them. We won't know exactly how this will all shake out until early access starts on June 19th though. As an aside we already know that flying will most likely only exist in these flying zones in FFXIV, future content/expansions may also have some flying zones but may also have zones that you cannot fly in. They seems to only want players to fly in zones that are thematically designed around that aspect. Given that this expansion is all about looking to the skies that includes every zone, but in the future this may not be the case. (Although they've mentioned they want an underwater focused expansion at some point so we may have zones with submersible mounts for that one.
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Mine radius nerf is sort of big. Way less chance of people getting splashed when a Siegemaker detonates them or screwing up in phase 3.
Incendiary Shot is not the sniper shot that hits the raid and does AoE damage. That's explosive round. Incendiary shot is the ticking debuff that people on the balconies take.
So basically you take 25% less damage going up to the balcony and you take 25% less damage while you're up there. That's significant for the players going up there but not that huge overall. Incendiary Shot, depending on how efficient your balcony group is, really only accounts for a couple million damage over the course of the whole fight. By comparison Explosive shot tends to equal Blackhand's melee damage: tens of millions of damage.
I think the balcony nerf is good. Some dps classes can't do well on the balconies because they don't have enough self healing or mitigation to stay up there. It will help groups who's comp isn't particularly good for that mechanic.
Yeah, I would get up there, having dropped down to 40-50% health from the smash, and then be able to stay up there for all of 3 seconds before having to jump down, depending on where my cooldowns were at. This should help a bunch
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
For some, I'm sure. Others like myself just liked flying. Mechanics and the 'difficulty' (such as it was) of the overworld mobs had very little to do with it. Sure, sometimes it was more about traversing terrain because we didn't want to have to wade through an ocean of gray or green con mobs to get to an objective for the fiftieth daily in a row. But, at least for me, moreover than anything else it was just about enjoying traveling on an impressive-looking dragon or bat or whatever (and again, while you can use those mounts on the ground, they look ridiculous and it erases the fun factor - you don't buy a dragon to walk it around).
I know there are pro and anti-fliers here (just like in every WoW community, it turns out) but reducing either side's arguments to petty one-liners based on assumptions doesn't ever lead to anything productive. Let's just agree that each side of the camp isn't going to see eye to eye with the other and call it good.
For the most part, this is what flying was used for. And this is all that Blizz sees it as. Instead of seeing a very basic form of a new kind of content that literally has the sky as the limit to what can be done. How about a sky race through a canyon full of Iron Horde snipers, chasing down an escaping orc dude that has some plans or something you need to obtain. Or maybe you need to locate a certain mount that's out and about, and so you need to go and shoot down a bunch of random enemies until you find the one you're looking for. Or you and a team of your followers (or just random dudes in gyrocopters) take on a whole flight of enemies in a massive dogfight. The tech for -all- of that is already in the fucking game. Alysrazor's fire rings, the racing quests in the Cloud Serpert stuff from MoP, it's all there and it worked great. So why the fuck am I stuck on a hopping dragon with fucking rockets strapped to its back that can't do more than lift it's ass 5ft into the air to clear a tiny fucking boulder, but can't do shit about climbing a mountain? Oh right, because FLYING IS BAD AND I SHOULD FEEL BAD. Sure Blizz.
Edit - I figured out why I love the Arrakoa so much just now. "What are we without the sky?"
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So I never had a problem with them keeping flying out but the reasoning they are giving for it (and the repeated smugness about the decision with shit like "we are going to continue working on flight paths" like they actually did fucking anything positive already. Come on. You just lost 30% of your playerbase and you pull shit like that.
But I have always hated their design philosophy. If it doesn't work, just remove it rather than find a middle ground. Because putting in some effort for a game that is like the biggest gaming cash cow in existence is waaaaaaaaaaaay too difficult!
I am finding it hard to remember why I came back here. I think going to Wildstar from GW2 made me want a good trinity game and this was the safest place to find it. And I still love WoW pvp. But... I just can't log on now without a sour taste.
I want to keep earning gold to keep up tokens just in case, but I haven't been able to bring myself to log on for even garrisons in almost a week.
Unrestrained free world flying is not a prerequisite to having flying mechanics in quests, especially since there's a bunch of flying quests in WoD as it is.
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I'm in the same boat. I initially planned to level alts to 100 for the garrisons but it became too tedious having to collect all the followers over and over. The only reason I'm subbed is for the once a week raid. It started with 17 people but it's now down to 6 at best so we have to fill it with pugs and now we're running into terrible people who can't taunt properly on bosses or do sub 20k in 680 gear. Very hard to justify logging on. I've got enough gold for 6 months or so but once it's gone there will be little reason to pay money for what's on offer.
I hoped I would be tempted by the next expansion if we got to fight the burning legion but it looks like they're going down that way with this one and it's just not very interesting. Yeah lets bring back dudes we fought before. That's cool. I guess. Story of the expansion... literally.
Blook is life.
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[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
Erm, gliders are not flying. Its gliding. And I finished spires and do not remember any flying. There were flight paths to places, but that doesn't count... at all.
The problem with argument is that having your time wasted by stupid bullshit that is neither fun nor challenging is not a "mechanic" anymore than the line at the DMV is a "mechanic." Avoiding low con mods, with the only reward for being good at such being avoiding unnecessary tedium, is not a legitimate game mechanic.
As much as Blizzard wants to throw up some "dominant strategy" chaff that isn't applicable to a player doing a quest on their own, the fact is, when millions upon millions of people are given the choice, people choose to fly, because it is more fun. Refusing to allow flying in the future is deliberately sabotaging the game to be less fun.
People need to stop being sadomasochists about MMOs. Having to grind your weapon skill up, or pre-LFG tool dungeons, and all that stupid bullshit was awful, just like IRL when a substantial portion of the entire populace were subsistence farmers. Pre-flying was just as terrible as all the other shitty mechanics old WOW used to have.
Or when they took out XP loss for dying.
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The difficulty and time consumption of the game always came from outside-of-gameplay things like long travel times, expensive professions, dailies, etc.
And honestly, I'll take more interesting combat over artifical time sinks any day.
Warlocks were literally a one button class/spec during BC with Destro Locks spamming Shadowbolt, maybe two button if you were Curse of Elements bitch, but mostly one button. If anything, I'd say they've gone too far with adding procs and other mechanics; it's often not obvious what's the best damage rotation without reading up on external sites, since the average class has 2-3 procs, two resources to manage, an number of cooldowns, and several situational abilities, all from the class itself. Add in the a cooldown or two from trinkets, 2-3 procs from enchantments and trinkets and the legendary ring, set bonuses, add in raid cooldowns, and there's a lot of shit to track.
Addons can make it more managable, but they increasingly not optional, and I feel like that's a bad sign for the game.
If your qualification for a quest to count is if it has completely unrestrained flying in the non instanced world for an unlimited time frame then no, there weren't any quests like that. But there were plenty of quests that used flying mechanics--of which gliding is one--throughout WoD. The post I was originally replying to outlined some quest ideas as why permanent unrestrained flying was needed but none of them came close to requiring it, especially since it's possible to turn that sort of thing on for just one quest. A prime example is the Day Deathwing Came line in Badlands where you can fly a motorcycle as a low level who cannot have a flying mount normally. Nothing's stopping them from doing the exact same type of unrestrained flying during a quest in WoD, they just haven't and instead have only used timed flying, vehicle flying, and gliding as the means for people to fly during quests and treasure tracking.
When people talk about quests incorporating flying, they mean actual flying like on the mount. Gliding is slightly above slow falling which classes have done for ages and can do anywhere.
Bullshit. I love flying because I love flying. Flying, in and of itself, is one of the coolest fucking things you can do, in games or in real life. Being able to fly in WoW makes the game world more fun to explore and the fact is, when I can't fly around a part of WoW, I enjoy it less, full-stop.
If flying is gone, so am I. It's a dumb decision based on laziness, rather than any kind of logic.
edit: and it especially pisses me off on my druid, because shapeshifting into a goddamn bird and flying places is fucking awesome.
Agreed, I spent a lot of time just flying around the zones exploring (again on a druid). I don't do that when I have to walk because I don't want to fight mobs every 15s to see whats over the next ridge. Glad I already canceled my account, just wish it was after this announcement so I could have put it for my reason for leaving.
This also kind of really sucks for druids since turning into a flying mount is one of our class powers. The ground mount isn't even as fast as a normal mount even when glyph'd so it's kind of a slap in the face.
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I got really -really- good at doing the Skyguard quests out there. That specific quest was one of my favorites to do. Turn on some rock music, and go bring some Righteous Fury to some demons from the back of a gryphon all the while avoiding the return fire green explosions of death during the strafing runs.
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I mean, okay, but none of that is really relevant to 'flying' as most people are talking about it. Adding more stuff like cloud serpent races or the darkmoon wing thing doesn't really bear on whether you should be able to fly around at will.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Both this and the smash TV like thing you could sometimes do were awesome because there was legit skill involved. I got really good at both of them. And I was amazed at how creative they were with such a limited engine and those mechanics. Its pretty amazing what you can do with aoe zones and a little creativity. Fake actual missiles in a game that doesn't have it.
Its kind of sad they never really improved upon that stuff. Remember when they said Wintergrasp would have flying combat? Backtracking on that was pretty much the start of all the laziness. Oh development was getting difficult? Boo hoo, use the money from your 10 million subs to add some people to it and put it out a patch later. Suck it up buttercup.
It isn't "laziness" to remove a game mechanic that isn't fun or compelling. Wintergrasp's flying would have just been close to the same thing as flying around on dragons against Malygos only instead you'd be fighting against other players in their own flying machines. If it didn't involve vehicles then you would have been swimming in the air since the game's engine back then couldn't handle the concept of you being mounted while also being able to use your abilities (something Cata fixed). Based on how much people hated flying on those dragons and how many hated the vehicles that made their way into Wintergrasp as it is I'd say they made the right choice.
To reiterate: quest and instance design involving flying is completely divorced from the game having permanent unrestrained flying elsewhere. One does not require the other.
How is it not? It's a list of examples of what flying could be used for. Just because it isn't used for those things, does not mean it -cannot- be used for those things. I'm trying to offer good ideas here instead of just the normal "its fucking boring running around on a hoppy dragon with rockets on his back" (which, btw, is really fucking dumb looking). There's nothing out in the new content that makes use of flying as a mechanic, so of course there's no reason to have flying as a mechanic.
For all of the travel you -actually- do out in WoD zones, you don't even need a normal land mount, so might as well just do away with THOSE too, eh? I mean, they serve the same purpose in WoD that flying mounts do in old world zones, right? All they do is get you from point A to point B faster, and if you have a building in your garrison, there's no fear from mobs dismounting you. Not to mention, if land mounts were gone as well, just imagine how fucking gigantic the new zones would feel! You could run for an hour and still never reach your destination! (Of course, this would bring about a nerf to rogues, hunters, druids, and shaman.)
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You say that now, but in a month you will be saying "wtf do I so with all these bullshit resources"
If flying mounts were the same speed as ground mounts then there wouldn't be any difference in world size. As it is top level flying is twice the speed of top level ground mounts which are twice the speed of running. Vanilla, TBC, and WoD were designed around the assumption of an epic mount which means when you get a flying mount everything would be extremely close to each other. Every other expansion was designed around the assumption of an epic flying mount which leads to everything being too far away until you got the ability to fly due to the design of the world needing to trend to having huge landmasses with giant expanses of nothing between the patches of content. And yes, they could theoretically remove ground mounts in a future expansion as long as they designed the world around the lack of them properly, meaning the distance to get to places would need to be halved at a minimum. And while many games already function perfectly well with no ability to increase your speed by a huge amount, I don't see Blizzard ever doing that to WoW.
The difference in how stealth allows you to bypass content and how flying allows you to do it is the former is active while the latter is passive. In content matching your level you can't stealth and just beeline to your objective, you have to avoid mobs (which is even harder if there are anti-stealth mobs around) or else they can see you and then to take your objective you have to come out and engage with whatever's in the area before you can stealth again. With flying you can just beeline there, maybe have to kill some mobs, and beeline out. It's impossible for full unrestrained flying as it is now to ever be as active in bypassing content as stealth is, there would need to be limitations put onto it that people would hate. Stuff like limiting the flight ceiling so it's impossible to get out of range of someone attacking you from the ground, making it possible for mobs to aggro you from the ground, making it so if you take damage/enter combat while flying you're no longer able to maintain altitude and thus are forced to glide to the ground, making mounting up on a flying mount take twice (or more) as long as mounting up on a ground mount, making you have to run a bit on the ground while out of combat the entire time before you can take off and fly, making you have to jump constantly to remain in the air while flying so you can't afk, adding in a mount fatigue meter so you can only fly for so long before your mount gets too tired to continue flying, locating more content underground/underwater/inside so you can't fly at all, surrounding questing areas with anti-air turrets, filling the world with flying npcs that can attack you but you can't attack (since you can't fight while mounted), introducing npcs that can net you and drag you to the ground, peppering dismounting debuffs everywhere, giving players spells that limit people's ability to mount and/or their max mounted speed, and the end of my list but definitely not the end of potential ideas: introducing more items like the dismounting turtle shell.