Dragon riding, a new type of flight mode in World of Warcraft introduced in Dragonflight (2022), the MMORPG’s ninth expansion, will soon be available everywhere, Blizzard confirms.
Unlike traditional flight, which simply has players mounting their favorite airborne mounts and moving in a direction faster than walking or moving on a ground mount, dragon riding is completely dynamic (310% faster). In Dragonflight, you can dive to increase speed, perform acrobatics, turn skyward, and use the wind to manipulate your speed to go up to 830% faster on the Dragon Isles.
For many years, the players and the developers were at odds with how flight should work in an expansion, let alone the entire game. Originally, flying mounts were introduced in The Burning Crusade (2007), the game’s first expansion, well over a decade ago.
It used to be as simple as spending some gold to unlock the ability to fly across all your characters. They still needed to have access to a mount and be of sufficient level, but there was virtually no barrier to entry.
However, when Warlords of Draenor (2014) was released, Blizzard tried to strip flight from the game completely. This caused an uproar with the player base, and instead of taking it away, Blizzard gated the privilege of flight behind a new set of achievements called Pathfinder.
These Pathfinder achievement requirements continued all the way until Dragonflight, in which Blizzard finally took a new approach. Due to the theme of the expansion, you unlock flight right from the start of the experience and can go significantly faster than any mount has allowed to date.
On the Public Test Realm (PTR), it was discovered by two content creators that a new option called Flight Styles is available for patch 10.1.5. One of these is called “Dynamic,” allowing for “dynamic flight” abilities everywhere in the game that you can use a regular flying mount, not just the Dragon Isles.
By labeling the type of flight Dynamic instead of dragon riding, the chance is good that you’ll be able to use any type of flying mount to go up to 830% faster down the line.