EVERYTHING you NEED to know about the Dragon Riding System! - DRAGONFLIGHT ALPHA EXCLUSIVE

Hammers up, everyone. Towelliee here; Dragonflight alpha! Today, we’re talking about Dragonriding. This is how you’re going to make your way around the Dragon Isles. Right now, we’re in The Azure Span, the only zone that we currently have access to during this small little alpha event.

As you can see, this is the entirety of the map itself though, The Walking Shores, Ohn’ahran Plains, Thaldraszus and then The Forbidden Reach. But The Azure Span is the only zone that we have access to. And you know, it’s alpha so let’s talk about Dragonriding.

So right now, I have three dragons out of the four for Dragonriding. Once again, these are basically the… I’m going to call it like the covenant copy pasta of Dragonflight. So you have four dragons that you can use in Dragonriding, all very customizable.

And in that sense, it’s like the four covenants from Shadowlands. So each of the dragons are going to have their own renown, I think their own reputation.

Not sure if any of… I don’t think any of this is tied to power at all. I think this is just like a system. The better your dragon is, the faster he’s going to be, the more he can maneuver around the land quicker, access some areas that maybe you couldn’t do otherwise with a lower level or a lower renowned dragon.

That’s something we have to check out later in testing. So let me show you the three dragons I have. This is the Highland Drake; I just got this one in this zone. Then we have the Renewed Proto-Drake and then the Windborne Velocidrake which is I think the coolest one out of all of them.

Let me get back on the Highland Drake. As you can see, my UI here changed. Now we are in Dragonriding Mode. As of right now, I have three abilities. This bar down here and these abilities, this is your Vigor. So Vigor is spent by dragonriding abilities and recharges while grounded (mounted or on foot) or in the sky while dragonriding at high speeds.

Vigor recharges while grounded, whether mounted or not and while dragonriding at high speeds. So every ability you use uses Vigor. So as you can see, Surge Forward which flaps forward uses one Vigor.

Skyward Ascent uses one Vigor that just kind of pushes you in the air. Then you have Whirling Surge which I unlocked through questing in The Azure Span here which spirals forward a great distance, increasing speed and that’s on a 30 second cooldown.

So I believe in the future, you should be able to level up more so you have more Vigor, faster recharge time. So I’m going to try to get from here to the Iskaara, Azure Span. It’s going to be a tough one.This is like the beginner baby stages of Dragonriding.

So I’m just going to fall off and build some momentum.

I’m going to do some barrel rolling, there you go. I’m probably not going to get there. It’s pretty cool though. Like, you get to use it a lot. Uh oh, am I fatiguing?

Do you see the Vigor bar recharging? So the faster you’re going, the faster it’s going to recharge. But when you go down, you gain momentum. If I try to fly straight up, it’ll slow me down and dismount me eventually. It’ll just kind of float down.

I might… Let’s see. I might make it over there. Oh we made it, nice! Then if I go up into the sun and then it’ll just go right down. But no, we’re not done. We could keep going. There’s a lot of funky stuff you could do with Dragonriding and I disconnected. That’s happened quite a few times.

I think whatever code or spaghetti code they use for when demon hunters Fel Rush and they DC or when monks barrel roll or Chi Torpedo and they DC, it is the same stuff that’s happening. This happened to me quite a few times already.

There are customization options. We’ll get into that in a second. I’m in the water now… One thing I do notice though is that if I DC and come back, I’m fully reloaded now. Let’s go… I guess you can’t propel from the land. I’m trying to get up.

Alright, so that was just me using Whirling Surge because I used all three of my Vigor there. So if I want to just fly around, I could just… Let’s see… But now it’s not even letting me do it. Hold on, I have to like dismount, remount. How about now? Okay, so it didn’t really recharge.

That’s just a visual bug. I’ll report that later. But yeah, I definitely want to know what you guys think about Dragonriding. I think later on, especially during my streams, we’ll probably do something bigger, let’s go to the entire zone.

And there’s also other cool little activities, I’ll show you here in a bit, around The Azure Span and probably the other zones too. There’s little time trials where you get to see how fast you go through these rings that you capture more momentum and speed, so we can do it now.

Let’s see. So that one will boost you off the ground. That’s number 2. And then the number one surges you forward. It’s definitely best that you pretty much try to jump off high places if you’re trying to get from one part of the zone to the other.

But in general, after I dismount here; let’s say I’m around here and I’m fighting stuff… After about like a minute, you’ll have everything charged up. So if you want to get from one quest giver to another or one questing area to another, you can do it really quick with Dragonriding.

It’s just like flying. Think about it if you’re flying in Shadowlands or in Azeroth right now, you dismount to fight and then you mount back up to fly to turn the quest in. You do the same thing with Dragonriding except it looks way cooler.

Alright, on to customization. So I finally found where to customize your Dragonriding dragons. It’s called The Rostrum of Transformation in The Azure Span. It’s located pretty much northwest of Theron’s Watch. If you come here, it looks like there’s a little tower area that might be where you always find it in every zone. Or this might be the only one in the entirety of the Dragon Isles.

I’m sure there’s one in the main cities. I mean, I haven’t seen this before. This is the first time we’re clicking on this so let’s go. Oh okay, so it’s kind of like the barbershop.

Oh, you know what? While I was questing, I did actually collect some Highland Drake: Spined Nose… Okay, whatever that was. Highland Drake: Swept Horns and Highland Drake: Horned Chin. Great. Alright, let’s go back.

So this is currently the only one that I can modify. I do have two other drakes but those came with my pre-made character so maybe because I earned this Highland Drake through questing, this is the only one showing up.

Let’s see the horns. Okay, so it’s like customizing… Curled down, let’s go up with the horns. Horn color, a little bit of a color there. Okay, okay. The tail. I can’t zoom out so it’s hard to see the tail. Spined, horizontal fins or bare. Let’s go spined because that’s what I got earlier.

The crest. Oh, the crest on the head, horned. Let’s see the nose; horn, spined. Let’s go with horn. Chin: spikes, horned. Horned. Jaw: bare, fin. Let’s go bare. I don’t really like the fins. I’m going to feel like a fish dragon.

For the brows, you get the plated brows.

You get to change their eyesight too which is cool. You could choose the eye color outright. Looks menacing. Let’s see. Let’s go with something like red.

Eye style: cross, glow or slit. Oh there you go, glow’s good. And then ears: fin and horn. Let’s go with the horn. And that’s pretty much it. That’s like basically the customization that you can make as of right now. Once again, this is all subject to change.

I am sure that they’re going to add a lot more to the customization of your Dragonriding and your dragon. Those three little items were just quest items that I got through questing. And that’s just from about an hour of questing so I’m sure in every zone, there’s more dragon customization.

Probably one for each of the dragons and probably through the renowned system that they have, you’ll probably unlock more. Let’s see what random does. Shoot, I might just go random for this stuff.

Wait, is it actually giving me stuff that I don’t have? Oh, this is all stuff that I’ve collected. Let’s see. Let’s go like that. There you go.

Train your dragon, build your dragon, dragonriding, Dragonflight alpha. Now let’s accept that. Let’s make sure that the change is kept. They did, that’s pretty awesome. He looks pretty badass, don’t he?

And now, we are going to go for some time trials. Get ready to race, y’all.

Alright, so on your map, it looks like a little hourglass. Let me see if I can get to this one. Where is this? Oh, it’s on top. The hourglasses I believe are what begins the speed stuff. Okay, that’s definitely not where I need to be. Okay, okay, hold on.

Back up, bro. I’m an expert. Ground mounts aren’t allowed here. It’s not a ground mount, it’s my dragon! Okay, let’s glide. Oh my god, I’m almost there. Oh, perfect. Alright, cool. So you’ll encounter on your map, you see this little hourglass. This the Bronze Timekeeper.

If you talk to him, he’ll say, “This course is the Azure Span Sprint”.

Surge Forward

Skyward Ascent

Which means we can’t use the Whirling Surge. We can’t use the barrel roll, it looks like. I’d like to try the course. Sure. And I guess we just… Oh, timer. Set, go! Let’s see. Oh god. Oh this is… Okay, here we go.

How easy peasy. It kind of tells you where to go with the arrows, which is nice. Kind of get a little momentum by going down a little bit. Okay. I’m hoping you can do this against other players because that would be awesome.

I believe there are leaderboards tied to this, so that is something to also look out for. So you can see who’s the fastest on the time trials on your server. I don’t think they’re working right now in the alpha though.

There’s supposed to be like little… There we go. We’re going fast now. I wonder what the advanced one is. Let’s try the advanced right afterward. The advanced one seems like it’s going to be pretty cool. Well, this is just fun stuff to do. I’m sure none of this is tied to any kind of power or whatnot.

Let’s see.

Race Time: seconds

Silver Time: seconds

Gold Time: seconds

Personal Best: seconds

There’s literally no information there. Alright, let’s go for the advanced course. Let’s see what that is. Let’s be Chads yo. So the advanced course still tells you where to go via the arrow so… I thought maybe you would not be able to…

Oh, what’s this green thing? Am I supposed to like not… Oh, I see, you’re starting to lose momentum though a lot quicker. I don’t know, it kind of feels the same so far. Oh snap.

Might be a little… Maybe it’s just longer.

I wonder if I’m supposed to collect that or not. It kind of reminds me of the Darkmoon Faire. Oh no. I could still go, I could still make it. Wait, did I lose? I can’t tell if I lost. Oh, the seconds are not big, I got seven seconds.

The advanced course might just be the terrain being a little harder and you having to like be damn near perfect and not lose any of your… Oh my god. Come on. Oh, come on man. The momentum. I think it’s over, boys. And we disconnected.

Damn, that’s what you get for losing. You just get DCed.

Anyway, that’s Dragonriding in Dragonflight. I hope you guys enjoyed the video. Let me know what you think about Dragonriding in general.

Obviously, we’re really hoping that Blizzard can expand on this idea and make it a really fun side activity for us to compete against each other with in races or maybe racing different NPCs in the game, finding secret hidden layers and dungeons all over the Dragon Isles with like rares and treasures.

I know I’m being super WoW-copiumed up here but you know what, I think there’s a chance that we get to see a lot of that because this is supposed to be a main feature of the expansion. Until next time. Hammers up. See you on twitch.tv/towelliee for more Dragonflight alph, beta and launch pirates, baby. Peace!