What are your thoughts on Dragonriding in Dragonflight?

Dragonflight has been live for just over two weeks now, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to ride a dragon. I’ve actually been enjoying it for the most part — whether it’s quickly navigating the terrain to a Great Hunt or swooping through rings on one of the courses, there’s a lot to like about Dragonriding. At least, there is until I’m out of Vigor and missed landing on a mining node above me.

Dragonriding isn’t actually new to me; I play Guild Wars 2, and their system of mounts essentially prepared me for it, with the griffon closest in mechanics. It’s not exact — the aspect closest to Vigor is a lot more limited in uses — but in terms of handling there’s not much difference. As such, I was familiar with the frustrations of Dragonriding even before I tried to ride one, but GW2 does something that Dragonflight doesn’t: it provides other mounts for situations.

See, in Guild Wars 2 you have several mount types, of which raptor and springer are the most useful when grounded. The former is about horizontal jumping and some speed when traveling, while the rabbit-like springer is all about getting vertical. The griffon is great for getting across the zone, but when it comes time to quest or gather I’m using the raptor to move between objectives or the springer to jump up to the mining node I missed landing on (the springer also provides a lot better control on landing, as you would expect).

Since Dragonflight doesn’t provide any alternative mounts, you’re left with only your standard ground mount to get around between objectives — but the map is so large it’s inefficient to use most of the time. If I miss a node on a cliff above me, I’m going to have to sit patiently waiting for my Vigor to recharge. When we (hopefully) get to fly on our standard mounts in the Dragon Isles it’ll be nice to go back to the control provided by flying mounts; I’ll still use Dragonriding to get around the zone (it’s too large to traverse normally) but having the option to hover or quickly move up a cliff will be great.

Despite a few complaints I have with Dragonriding, I still feel it’s a good system — it’s just missing something that another type of mount would fix. What do you think? Are you enjoying Dragonriding, or does the system frustrate you? What other issues might you be having with it? And did you get all the glyphs right away or have you been picking them up as you discover them?