This is something we've all dealt with: my Hunter is traipsing through Terrokar right now, and nothing makes me more frustrated than hitting those little rivers on my mount and having to dismount in water. When you think about it, the logical reasons for our mounts disappearing once we hit water are pretty sound -- you don't want that cat or wolf you worked so hard for to drown. But on the other hand, it's a huge annoyance -- not only does it slow you down while crossing the water, but you have to wait another second afterwards to resummon the mount.

On larger bodies of water, this isn't so bad, but those little rivers are nothing but trouble (and Gnomes have it even worse). Even cowboys knew how to ford with their horses -- why can't we do the same with our mounts?

Zarhym, the new CM, doesn't seem very empathetic, so odds are that this won't change anytime soon. We can only hope that in future designs, Blizzard stays away from putting the deeper water all over the landscape, where it acts as nothing but an annoying roadblock in front of our next quest. It's not like we don't have enough problems with the water as it is.

Do you guys like the new AutoDismount option built into the interface? There's now an option that you can check or uncheck (in the interface window) that will automatically dismount you from your flying mount whenever you start casting a spell-- and that includes dropping into stealth, shapechanging (for druids-- Hugsy of Thunderhorn tested it for me), and mining and herbing.

I used to use an addon called EZDismount a while back that did exactly this, but I eventually ditched it because it seemed like it kicked me off my mount too much. But since the patch, the AutoDismount seems to be working perfectly-- it saved me tons of clicks farming herbs while flying around (and towing my orphan behind-- what can I say, I'm a multitasker). I don't know if Blizzard has theirs set up differently, because I haven't used the old addon in so long, but so far it just seems to work better.

But I do realize that not everybody likes it, and unfortunately, it seems the checkbox only seems to work for flying mounts-- AutoDismount is set on by default for all ground mounts now. If you want to turn it off for all mounts (so that you get an error message, just like before, when you try to cast a spell while mounted), you can simply type this: /console autoDismount 0. That, we're told by Slouken, the UI blue guy, is all you need to type in once, and it's set off for all mounts. I'd assume to turn it back on, you just type /console autoDismount 1. And there's a few helpful dismount macros in that thread as well-- you can use a hotbutton to select a random mount in your inventory, or use a hotbutton to turn on or off AutoDismount (if, for example, you want to use it in battlegrounds, but not in PvE). Interesting stuff. I'll be autodismounting, I'm sure, but with all that info, it's good to know that you have control over when you get on and off your mounts.