Posts with tag flying-mounts

I have very strong opinions about video games. Even when I love a game with all of my heart (like WoW), I still enjoy discussing the little things I think could have been handled differently and arguing them with absolute brutality. Matthew Rossi and I spend hours debating game design every day. Every single day.

My latest pet topic is flying mounts in World of Warcraft. Personally, I think flying mounts removed most of the feeling of adventure, danger, and discovery in WoW. Once you're able to jump on your first flying mount, the dangers of the world are no longer an issue. You no don't have to stop for a moment to figure out how to scale rough terrain. The world doesn't hold secrets from you anymore, unless they're hidden indoors or underground -- you can merely mount up and fly to anything in the world. If you wanted to, you could fly from one end of Twilight Highlands to the other and see everything the landscape has to offer with no effort whatsoever.

It doesn't matter how intimidating and oppressive Blizzard's artists and designers make the terrain of a zone. It's a distant, fleeting threat. You can essentially remove yourself from the world with the click of a button. Fly high enough into the sky, and you can close yourself off from all of Azeroth. I don't hate flying mounts; I actually quite enjoy riding a bone dragon. I just think that there was a lot lost in the process of integrating flight.

I would like to take this topic to you, dear readers. Do you think flying mounts have taken the adventure and discovery out of Warcraft? If so, how do you think it could be fixed? Do you like things just as they are?

In a stunning (not really) move, Blizzard has announced that players will have to purchase a Flight Master's License for 250g. This skills allows players to fly on Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdom continents, including the new level 80-85 zones, and is trainable at level 60.

Zarhym -- New Flight Skill

We've added a new flying skill called Flight Master's License. When World of Warcraft: Cataclysm is released, players who purchase the expansion will see this skill available from flight trainers for 250 gold once they reach level 60. This new skill is required for flying around all Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms zones, including the new level 80-85 zones.

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Zarhym -- New Flight Skill

The cost for this is 250 gold. The name has also changed. I've updated my original post with the new information. :)

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Previously, during the Twitter Dev Chat in April, the developers responded that more than likely, players would be able to fly from the beginning without purchasing the tongue-in-cheek "Old Weather Flying." As for why Blizzard is now adding such a skill, I have no idea. I don't mind ponying up the gold, considering the rate at which gold is earned in Cataclysm feels much faster than in the original game. My best guess is that Blizzard still wants flying in the old world to feel special and be a goal players will strive to reach for rather than stumble across. Also, it appears that if you do not have the Cataclysm expansion, you will not see this ability as trainable -- if you want to fly in the old world, you'll need the new expansion. What do you think about the Flight Master's License?

As you've probably already read, players will be able to purchase 310 percent flying speed from trainers in Cataclysm. While this is good news for people who hate raiding, think arena was shat into existence by the most sociopathic among the development team, or spent School of Hard Knocks trying to drown themselves in the nearest body of water, the bad news is that buying your way to super-fast flying will run you a cool 5,000 gold.

Outrageous, says this dyed-in-the-wool cheapskate. For anyone else who'd rather die than part with a centavo of hard-earned gold, the good news is that having even a single 310 percent flyer in your stable is enough to get you the skill free. Fortunately, there's plenty of time to snag yourself one of these coveted mounts before Cataclysm hits, and just as fortunately, each mount is the reward (or subject) of an achievement.

Strategy guides for obtaining each of the remaining 310 percent mounts is definitely beyond the scope of this article (although I'll probably devote an edition of OverAchiever to nabbing the Rusted Proto-Drake, above) but we can take a visual tour of the fast flyers that any hard-working player can still get in Wrath of the Lich King.

Every so often I get tired of the self-seriousness that infests some of (OK, most of) the other work I do here, and get the urge to write something purely for fun. After our series on evil achievements and the relentless misery of School of Hard Knocks, I'd like to spend some time on achievements that are nothing but an absolute joy from beginning to end.

The following is an entirely arbitrary set of five achievements that I personally believe are a hoot. Eventually, I'd like to expand this in the same fashion as the evil achievements series, and I'd welcome any comments or suggestions on your own favorites. Namely, what makes certain achievements fun? Is there any achievement you've made a point of getting on each of your characters?

Zarhym has just posted to let us all know that the previously announced X-53 Touring Rocket, the only 2-seated flying mount currently available in game, will be claimable by qualifying Refer-A-Friend accounts starting tomorrow, Tuesday April 27. With this, the Zhevra mount will be retired, so if you want it, be sure to grab it tonight.

The full announcement text is behind the cut.

Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest, brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "We do what we must because we can. For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead." -- GLaDOS

Last week saw things in the world of WoW.com turn on their heads somewhat, with the Archmage Pants and myself trading columns for a week. A little back story might be in order. I was flicking through the forum for the Cataclysm mage changes ("Know your enemy" -- Sun Tzu) and found a lot of crying about spells being removed. For those who didn't read it, the feeling was that spells like Dampen Magic had "no clear role" in the game. Over 1,000 posts later, Ghostcrawler himself felt it necessary to step in and make a semi-retraction of the phrase to stem the flow of tears.

This experience played right into a hypothesis I have that mages are credulous crybabies. I stress here that this is a hypothesis, a tentative explanation for an observation, little better than a guess. However, these things beg to be tested and elevated to the status of theory. And so a test was performed to study both the credulity and propensity for lacrimation of mages. I put forward that this test was entirely successful in validating the hypothesis and that further such studies should be performed to corroborate -- maybe I should ask someone for a research grant. Either way, I feel that we are well on the way to scientifically proving that mages are indeed credulous crybabies.

This, my fellow warlocks, is how you come about facts. It has nothing to do with simply trusting the assertions of someone claiming a list of "facts" with no proper basis in reality. Especially when that someone is a mage.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.

Fellow fatty Kevin Smith (we're part of a super exclusive club) was kicked off a Southwest Airlines plane this weekend. And while it has absolutely nothing to do with WoW, it certainly made me stop and cringe for a moment at the prospect of getting kicked off the plane as I'm on my way to BlizzCon. Of course I could take preventative measures to combat this inevitable passenger-eject-button-pushing, but I'm too busy eating my Pepperoni Pizza for breakfast, which is far better than Alex's Hawaiian Pizza.

Nomnomnom.

Ben asked...

"Do you think the tension in Cataclysm will possibly lead to World of Warcraft: The Fourth War? It could be a very PVP centric expansion, with raid content involving major battles in war, lots of new battle grounds, y'know, the works."

Bonc asked...

"When we get cross server LFG, what will happen to VoA, for example if I dont have it on my server, can I go to another and get in there, does it go by raid leaders server?"

Good evening fine ladies and good gentlemen, I want to invite you to head over to your liquor cabinet, grab some of that fine gin and do with it what you will. I like mine without anything added, right at room temperature. Ghostcrawler prefers his with coffee. Once you're settled, come back to your computer and read up on the best of the blues and the ghostly-crab-crawler.

Welcome to a new weekly column here at WoW.com. Each week we'll take a look at what Ghostcrawler and his cohorts at Blizzard have said about the game, highlighting all the important announcements and discussions.

What Ghostcrawler says in particular is of great importance these days to WoW. A lot of the stuff he's talking about is reflective of the direction of the entire design team at WoW, and if you follow what he's saying you'll have a better understanding of where the game is headed.

So after the break we'll wrap up what Ghostcrawler and the other blues had to say this week. This week's topic include: Battleground Focus, 5 Second Rule, On Class Representation Versus Actual Power, Going to heckle at BlizzCon?, Water Dungeon, Affliction Changes, Console WoW, Truth In Developer "Promises" About Change & An Angry Community, Amount Of Leveling, Phasing Technology, and Flying In Old Azeroth.

Patch 3.2 is looking more and more solid. There are still some bugs with the bosses in the Argent Coliseum, but those are being worked out and appear to be more of a technical thing than a design flaw. This leads us to think that patch 3.2 will be dropping relatively soon.

So with that said, I've been wondering lately about my alts. In particular the four left between 60 and 70 who are sitting in Outland not doing anything in particular. I know that if I drop the gold on them and let them fly around I'll have much more incentive to play them through to 80, and perhaps even find a new class that I love (truth be told, I'm finding my 63 rogue quite a bit of fun to play lately).

As I'm thinking of finishing my army of level 80 alts, I have to plan a little bit. Why should I level right now if within the next couple weeks I'm going to be able to fly around and do it all much faster? Wouldn't my time be better spent playing Fallout 3 working on WoW.com projects?

As dear Wryxian announced earlier today, we're getting a new build on the PTR. The unofficial notes for this build are already making the rounds, and they're... not very interesting! Perhaps the most notable change is that the change to mount casting speed, previously only applied to ground mounts, now affects flying mounts as well.

When the casting time change to ground mounts in Patch 3.2 was announced, Eliah Hecht, Michael Gray and I had a long debate about why they wouldn't have applied the change to flying mounts as well. We ended up coming to the conclusion that they were avoiding it for PvP reasons; only needing to be out of combat for a second and a half to mount up and zoom off to escape a fight that's not going your way would be a little... cheap. The outlier here was the Druid Flight Form, which is an instant cast spell. Everyone but Druids hate that though, right? It's pretty freaking annoying when you get into a scuffle, you gain the upper hand, and then the Druid just runs in circles like a headless boomkin spamming their flight button and hoping it eventually takes. So we figured that didn't count. It was a perfect example of why being able to fly away quickly was a bad thing.

Boy, are our faces red. Flying mounts get the 1.5s cast time now as well. Sometimes trying to figure out Blizzard's reasoning doesn't really pay off. I'm not going to complain that much, though. I certainly appreciate being able to get into the air faster!

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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Patch 3.1.2 brought it with the usual slew of undocumented changes, but here's one that appears to have flown under the radar for a while -- Mei Francis, Dalaran's exotic mount vendor, now sells basic Outland flying mounts (read: gryphons and wyverns) at both regular and epic speeds. This is great news for, well, anybody who doesn't want to go to Outland! I know that when my shaman hit 77 and I bought all of my flying skills, it was a pain to have to go to Shadowmoon Valley to buy my mount, so I can certainly appreciate the change.

Of course, there are even more mount changes in store -- a 150% speed flyer at 60, for example -- so this is obviously part of the devs' mission to streamline the leveling and traveling process for players of all levels. A welcome and unexpected change for quality of leveling life -- that's what I like to see.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.

Long long time ago...
I can still remember
How that music make me smile, Alex.

And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they'd be happy for a while, Alex.

Tim asked...

"When discussing new content coming out, why does Blizzard always play so close to the chest? For example, the mount changes are due to be "in the next major content patch" which everyone knows is going to be patch 3.2, why don't they just say it?"

One of the things I never forgot in the run-up to patch 2.3 was seeing the photo above from MMO Champion. This was before the Cenarion War Hippogryph went live, and it was the faction's new (albeit expensive) reward for reaching exalted. Boubouille, as so often happens, datamined a bit more than what Blizzard actually permitted to go live, and the skin at the top left was what wound up being the Cenarion Expedition's flying mount. Sprinting for the CE quartermaster when the patch hit and discovering that that was the only model available (and that it couldn't walk) was a bit of a let-down, to the point where I decided to wait on buying the mount in the forlorn hopes that the other mount colors and animations would go live. Quoth the female Tauren, moo hoo hoo.

Since then it's become apparent that the hippogryph at top right became the Argent Hippogryph (score!) and the one at bottom left is now the Silver Covenant Hippogryph. That some of the Tournament daily quests award Silver Covenant/Sunreaver reputation makes me suspicious that the hippogryph and Sunreaver dragonhawk are eventually going to be rep mounts. That still leaves two hippogryph skins "left over," and you've got wonder if they're going into the game -- and if so, in what capacity. EIther way, there aren't words to describe my happiness at not being consigned to the ugliness of a wyvern (the airborne version of Tauren cat form) forever. I'll grant that my main is a Druid so I had a ready escape anyway (and I thank thee daily, Blizzard, for thy boon of total win in the guise of swift flight form), but sometimes a girl likes options.