If I remember correctly at one point Blizzard outright stated that flyable mounts had been a mistake and they weren't going to be using them from that point on. Wasn't there some controversy over that with the release of WoW Classic?
I wonder what changed their minds.
I believe the original context of that quote was giving players full flight at the very start of Cataclysm was a mistake. It created a recurring issue of players bypassing 90% of trash mobs and general navigation elements to park next to an objective/monster, interact/kill or hover out of reach of other monsters until that interactable/enemy spawned, and then to take off again as fast as possible after completing the objective to avoid agroing trash mobs or traversing out of that otherwise reasonably dangerous area.
Dragonflight is restricting flight by adding more gameplay elements that they can slowly pace out over the course of the leveling grind (And possibly a little into the end game). Like yeah you get a dragon, but maybe it can only glide at first like a Goblin Glider. Maybe you can unlock dive bombs to get more speed after jumping off a cliff to let you travel further horizontally, but you still can't get meaningful altitude for a while, etc.
From the previews they've shown, the talent trees are just a ui change of the spell book with some tweaks.
I only vaguely know Frost Dark Knight, and not enough to get a lot of nuance out of the spec-specific tree. I do see that which utility branches we end up leaning into as our "Off-spec" drifts more or less depending on if you're playing with PVE (Blood) and PVP content (Unholy), but the thing about this is that it's still a two DPS/one tank tree that's trying to keep the two DPS specs apart by filling a lot of vital PVE survivability perks into the Blood tree.
So I get what you MEAN, but I need to see how tri-DPS classes like Mage treat the Utility page. There's a bit less room to define one spec as the "You basically have to take this if you're doing any PVE content" as long as Counterspell is as easily accessible in the tree as Mind Freeze is and Shimmer isn't a premium Arcane talent. Spellsteal is very nice, but also conditional and can be swapped out depending on the dungeon. Cauterize is very nice, but as a Frost Mage I can survive just as easily by being more proactive in popping my immunity vs. intentionally eating a mechanic and letting my healer deal with me being a filthy parse degenerate (And there's also Cold Snap too). Stuns and Freezes are both really great in PVE depending on affixes. That sort of thing.
blizzardwatch.com
