General WoW Dragonflight Dragon Riding Guide

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Intro
Before you read any of this, if you haven’t already, max out your dragon tree. Get handynotes/tomtom and get all the dragon glyphs. Talk to your dragon trainer and get everything in the talent tree.

Hello! I am making this guide because I feel as if I can give some meaningful information about dragon riding which you can’t really learn without experience. I feel that the guides that are out now are very basic and do not help the viewer very much in progressing towards mastering dragon riding.


Abilities
Surge Forward
  • Using this ability will increase your forward momentum in exchange for 1 vigor (ignores obstables)
  • This will be the main ability you will use to gain forward momentum, very efficient and useful
Skyward Ascent
  • Using this ability will increase your vertical momentum in exchange for 1 vigor
  • This ability is the only way of going up while also going forward, in situations where you need height this is the ability you will use. You will go up and keep your momentum trucking
  • If you need extra height you can also turn upwards with the ascent (NOT BEFORE) which will give you more height without losing momentum.
Whirling Surge
  • Using this ability will greatly increase your forward momentum in exchange for 3 vigor, half a minute cooldown
  • Outside of its niche situations like knocking someone off their mount, it’s usually better to just Surge. It is a good ability but it is too expensive for what it gives you.
  • If you are in a race where you don’t need vigor, it increases in value.
Bronze Timelock
  • This ability will let you set down a “portal” which you can return to after putting down, one minute cooldown
  • Same situation as Whirling Surge, outside of niche situations it’s pretty useless
Movement
Because dragon riding is fast, any mistakes you make will be amplified. In order to mitigate mistakes, you have to be smooth. The smoother you are, the more control you have over your drake, causing less mistakes and more optimizations. If you are erratic, you will have less control of your drake, causing you to make more mistakes and less optimizations.

Alright, be smooth, but how do you become smooth?

I would recommend lowering your sensitivity, and toggle your right click so you don’t have to hold it in order to turn. If you don’t have lots of space for your mouse, turn your keyboard until you do. Mouse space is very useful in order to keep your smoothness. Tracking in FPS games and smoothness in turning are very connected as both are continuous mouse movements. With flicking, you just move your mouse once and your done. With Tracking, you have to continuously put your crosshair on the enemies head. If you want to get smoother, you should practice tracking things in games. FPS, MMO, whatever game, practicing tracking will increase the smoothness of your turns. The BEST way to increase your smoothness would to play csgo surf maps, but obviously not everybody plays that or even knows what that is, so I keep that at last place when trying to help people.

If you don’t really understand what smoothness is, here’s a video showing smoothness.


In open world situations you want to hit max speed and then just chill, keep 1 or 2 vigor in the bank and use surge off cd. For Drakes, the best drake is obviously personal preference, but I like the smaller drakes because it allows me to see more. You can get a weakaura to make the vigor bar more “modern”, but that’s mainly preference. You can also mess around with camera settings in (options, general). If you are in a situation where you lost all your vigor points, but you need to go up, its better for you to dip back down then go up with Ascent.

Tips for Races
In races, you will very rarely want to bank vigor. Not using an ability loses you precious time, and if the route doesn't justify the time you lose you should just use abilities on cd. Because Surge ignores obstacles, most of the time you can just go straight through all the obstacles. In some races, they will starve you out of vigor, and that would be the exception to that rule. The obstacles will only affect if they hit the body of your dragon, if you hit them with your wings it wont do anything.

Going up causes you to lose speed, so therefore you should go up the least you possibly can. If you have to go up, you should use Ascent. Ascent is very useful in races as it's the only way to gain height without losing forward momentum, if there is a place you can use Ascent you should try. There has been many times I have added a couple seconds because I was using surge instead of Ascent to gain height.

When hitting rings, you should try to be in the best position possible to get to the next ring when you hit it. Instead of just going in the middle, prepare for the next ring by going to the left side, right side, top right corner whatever. Thinking ahead will always help you in races.

Ending
The rest of the things you pick up will be through experience. If you learned something you’d want to show off, you can post it here. If you found a new skip/trick, or want to learn some race routes you can go here( https://xpoff.com/threads/wow-df-dragon-riding-course-records.98761/ ).

I hope that you will take some things from this guide and improve your dragon riding skills, thank you for reading! <3 <3
 
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