The idea of actually waiting until Azeroth is complete before implementing flying mounts there is a great idea. God knows we have enough people sneaking into unfinished areas as it is without mounts being able to drop you safely there.

Can we say Dwarven Airstrip?

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the thing about flying mounts that pisses me off the most, is that we'll need to dish out the 5000gold for one, but we'll NEED the flying mounts to get to certain areas. we pay 15 dollars already, but we don't HAVE to save up the 1000gold to get a mount to get to certain places

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Qstrike, the 5000 is for the Epic flying mount. The regular ones should cost around the same as a ground epic mount, 1000 gold.

Also, it seems that you'll make a lot more gold in Outland. I've heard of people making over 100 gold in one level alone from questing and selling vendor trash.

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I think we should be able to use the flying mounts as regular epic mounts in Azeroth, just make it so they can't fly and instead of hovering when you jump of cliffs you should just slow fall like with noggenfogger.

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One thing I'd like to know (and I'm sure it will be answered soon now that druids have flight form, even though the areas you buy flying mounts still aren't open) is whether there's an upper limit on where you can fly in Outlands, can you fly under the floating continent itself, how far away from land masses can you fly etc and what happens when you reach these edges?

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Thingy-
We've actually been asking Druids in-beta and on the forums about the height range and whatnot. I'm a hunter so I dont know from hands-on experience. What we know or can assume:

Height Range is currently unknown

Flying away from the continent itself puts you in The Twisting Nether and it seems to just stop you after a certain point. I need confirmation on that because it might end up being like fatigue.

Flying under the continent seems to be the next challenge. We'll see...

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@ 3
yes i know, but still. They shouldn't make us HAVE to buy a flying mount just to experience everything. Not all of us have enough time to grind up gold for our epic mounts even. Yes, I've also heard that we will be making far more gold per level, and if this is true, then all my worrying is for not and I will be a happy camper, lol.

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For starters, I stopped paying $15/month about 2 years ago. 6 month subscription rates are much better, and I know I'll at least be playing another 2 years from now :)

Secondly, flying mounts WILL be useable in Azeroth, just not to fly around.

Third, has anyone here actually played beta? The gold rate is much much higher than in the race to level 60, and it should take about the same amount of effort to get your level 70 mount as it did for the other mounts. Remember how difficult it was to get your first level 40 mount back in December 2004???

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What everyone else has said has mostly been right. Here's some facts (from a beta participant, level 70).

A) You make a lot more money. 1000Gold for a non flying epic mount...you'll have it by level 70 just by vendor trash and quest rewards....easily. I made about 2.5k gold from level 60-70.

B) As far as height restrictions go, there is one in place but it is fairly high and when you reach it, you get turned back around again automatically.

C) Changing the architecture of azeroth to fit flying mounts will probably never be done. Like one of the blue's said once...Take stormwind for an example. When you walk into stormwind, you can see the large spires and such, but if you've ever actually been above stormwind without going through the gate, there's nothing there in the actual terrain but a big hole in the ground. All the cities are sort of like instances, and if you approach them from any way other than the way you're meant to, they wont look/work right. So give up on the idea of swooping over the gates of orgrimmar and landing on top of the bank cos it aint gonna happen..too much effort for Blizzard for too little gain. All they can do is just ensure that all further expansions are flyable in such as northrend (of course).

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Also, Blizzard has to think about framerate issues. All the cities are built so that you can't see very far in any direction to keep the polygon counts low. Ironforge would be fine for flying mounts, but open air towns would have to be remade. Then again, I think Blizzard could create invisible walls to get around the problem, but it wouldn't be good for the immersion.

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its always nice to see people make remarks on how simple something should be without knowing the exact issues. if it was simple then there would be no reason for blizzard to not do it. it makes perfect sense that overhauling the whole current world that was never build taking into account flying mounts is a huge task, most likely not worth the effort.

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Yeah everything from 60-70 is being magnified so much it seems, so theres minimal point spending a month grinding up 1k gold for your 70 mount, or trying to deck yourself out in epics.
Blizzard appears to be making it base level for everyone again, no matter if you have just reached 60 or have been 60 for ages.

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@ QStrike:
How much different is it to buy a flying mount to experience all of the Outlands content then it is to need a raiding guild/alliance in order to experience all the content Azeroth offers? If you're in a small guild you probably haven't seen Onyxia, MC, BWL, AQ, ZG, or Naxx. These are all instances that require 20 or more well-equipped adventurers to successfully enter and conquer all the content. I know of people on my server (Silver Hand) that have played for the last 2 years since Release that have yet to see the Onyxia encounter. Yet they obviously have paid out at least $300 total in monthly fees to Blizzard. It's all in what you make of this game.

The good news is that quest reward money and item value scales up appropriately in TBC. I saw a post on the Beta forums of one person who made it to 61 and had gained well over 300 gold in that one level, and that was after buying skills, profession upgrades, and new spells. I think if you were to scale that upwards, 5000 gold probably wouldn't be too difficult to achieve.

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its cheaper to let people whine about it than to actually write in the code for it

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Who cares. Jeez...

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@14: I'm uncertain about the landbased speed of a flying mount in Azeroth, but... the airborne speed of a flying mount will be 60% for a normal mount (i.e. the same as a real normal mount) and 300% for an epic flying mount, so yes, there will be a very noticable difference in flight speeds for picking up an epic flying mount (for 5000g there better be!)

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Gee, why not just limit the height mounts can fly in Azeroth?

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Can anyone address the ground speed of both the regular and epic flying mounts? When traveling on land in Azeroth will the new mounts be faster or the same as current epic mounts? I'm mainly interested as it relates to the battlegrounds. I understand making new content in Outland that requires a flying mount, but it'd be a shame to force players to spend that much gold just to remain competitive in existing battlegrounds. Being able to move faster in AB and AV is the whole reason I bought my epic in the first place.

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I don't understand why so many people fall back on the "I pay $15 a month, I should get it all" philosophy. The honest truth is, you are paying $15 for the right to use Blizzard's client to log in to Blizzard's server. Thats right, that $15 is for the ability to sign in to the game, and thats it. Everything beyond that - the entire WoW experience - is what you make of it. If you wanted to sit in Stormwind or Thunderbluff all day for months at a time and do nothing but recite poetry, thats your prerogative. Blizzard owes you nothing, certainly not a low cost flying mount capable of flying to every zone in the game.

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Blizzard has stated that flying mounts will ONLY EXIST in outland, they do not exist at all in Azeroth and you Cannot mount on a flying mount just to run around on it in azeroth like a horse. If youre not in outland you cannot take out your flying mount, period. On another note I completely agree with comment #19 - you cant get anything for free, and quite frankly if you dont have enough time to make the gold for a flying mount then thats your problem, theyre not going to give it to you for free (and btw if you have enough time to make it to lvl 70 and could afford to do high lvl instances, and afford other epic mounts with approx the same cost, you obviously have got some time on your hands). And if the demand for flying mounts existing in Azeroth is high enough Blizzard Might do something about it, but in all reality its not really necessary as theres nothing in the air in Azeroth worth seeing, not like outland where theres a whole bunch of stuff, and it would end up in servers being slower and laggier, which would just hurt us all in the end anyway.

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