Breakfast Topic: Flying and quests

I really miss the Netherwing. It was a reputation and a really long quest chain in Burning Crusade — and it also had some of the most memorable quests. Who could forget the booterang? Netherwing Ledge featured a villain we wouldn’t actually see until years later, in Cataclysm. Not to mention the Netherwing were inadvertently the impetus of that whole Twilight Dragonflight thing. And the highlight at the end of the entire quest chain, a triumphant flight across Outland, was pretty much the icing on the cake.

Or maybe the free dragon mount was. Yeah, definitely the free dragon mount.

I honestly miss this style of learning flight. The cloud serpent trainers in Pandaria tried to do the same thing, and succeeded to some degree, but for some reason the Netherwing always tugged at my heart just a little more. Perhaps it was the desperation to survive, or the fact that I had to really work at making friends. Or maybe it was just that the Netherwing seemed far more intelligent than the cloud serpents were. Sure, raising one from an egg was fun and all, but the serpents didn’t talk to you. The Netherwing did.

While I do like the idea of flight as it will be introduced in patch 6.2, part of me still wistfully wonders what it would look like if flight were unlocked in a fashion that involved more quests and story. Something somewhere between the Netherwing and the storytelling methods used in patch 5.1’s Dominance Offensive and Operation Shieldwall storylines. I think it’d be fun — but I’m a sucker for storytelling, myself. What do you guys think? Are you happy with flight being unlocked via achievements? Do you wish there were story involved? Did you like the cloud serpents of Pandaria? Do you miss the Netherwing?