Lyriana can now fly. Well, she could kind of fly before, because she has fast runspeed from her bard class abilities and safe fall/gliding from her racial abilities, which meant being able to spend a lot of the time in the air if she was able to find a tall enough place to jump off of. Anyway, the new expansion added a new flying mount mechanic to deal with the pesky problem of gaining altitude.
My perspective may be skewed because of my race/class, but I'm not sure that this is a feature the game was missing. Having a flying mount means being able to go safely overhead above any threats, dropping in for just long enough to loot a quest item before taking to the skies again. Yes, sometimes you can find something interesting on top of a mountain that you didn't think you could scale before, but there's no reason why that problem couldn't be addressed with NPC-controlled flight paths/teleports. If the game isn't going to go out of their way to include content that actually incorporates flight, I'm not entirely convinced that the value added is worth the value that is lost by no longer needing to pay any attention to travel.
(That said, again, bards have it pretty good because we can outrun most anything and stealth past a lot of other stuff, even before you include Fae wings.)
We'll see whether EQ2 manages to make this mechanic worthwhile. One place where it could be a big deal is for non-adventuring crafters, who could have a much easier time harvesting or getting to daily crafting quest hubs without worrying about mobs they can't kill.
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| Unlike WoW flying mounts, EQ2's will go into a dive-bomb animation if you fly straight down. |
