Dragon Helicopters
The skyscale arrived as Guild Wars 2’s first true hovering, free‑aim flight mount, and in practice, it has become the mount that quietly reshapes how you move through Tyria. Introduced with “War Eternal” in May 2019, it sits in the second wave of Path of Fire–era mounts, distinct from the earlier raptor, jackal and company by being obtained through a long story‑driven bond rather than a quick purchase or short collection chain.
The original Living World Season 4 unlock was deliberately involved: finish “War Eternal”, reach Dragonfall, then follow Gorrik’s mail into a stack of collections where you hunt down eggs, raise and feed a hatchling, complete flight trials and tick off time‑gated steps tied to Season 4 metas and currencies. It asked more for time and map participation than for gold, which made it one of the game’s slowest but more economical prestige unlocks. With Secrets of the Obscure, ArenaNet added an alternate route: a faster, more self‑contained path through SotO content that compresses gates and leans more on expansion‑era resources, giving newer players a way to get the mount without ploughing through all of Season 4, but leaving the original path intact for those who prefer to earn it in Dragonfall.
Mechanically, the skyscale is defined by three things: hover, wall‑climb and endurance. You can hang in the air, cling to surfaces and “jump” upwards in steps, and use short aerial dashes to reposition—all constrained by a shared endurance pool that forces a rhythm of climb, adjust, rest, then climb again. That makes it slower than the griffon in pure horizontal travel but far more forgiving: the griffon is a jet that wants height, dives and long clear runs; the skyscale is a helicopter that can stop, side‑slip, and pick its way around awkward rock faces, city rooftops and tangled meta‑event arenas. In practice, many players treat the two as a pair: skyscale to gain height and thread through tight layouts, griffon to glide and sprint across open maps.
Against the core Path of Fire mounts, it fills a different niche again. The raptor, jackal and roller beetle are still the kings of ground speed in the right conditions—long leaps across flat ground, blink‑dodging through hostiles, or explosive drift‑boost sprints on clear roads, respectively—but all of them are constrained by terrain. The skyscale is less specialised in any one axis, yet more convenient for everyday travel precisely because it can ignore so many obstacles. The springer once owned vertical access; now, hovering and repeated wall climbs mean the skyscale covers most of those use‑cases with more finesse. The skimmer and upgraded skimmer still win on water and hazardous terrain, and the refreshed Warclaw/Journeykin in Janthir Wilds offers brisk, combat‑flavoured ground travel, but none of them can match the three‑dimensional control that defines the skyscale’s role.
Lore‑wise, the mount is woven tightly into the aftermath of Kralkatorrik. In “War Eternal”, you meet skyscales as juvenile dragon creatures on Dragonfall’s fractured, magic‑soaked terrain, and Gorrik’s research and muttered concern about what exactly they are gives the collections a narrative weight: you are not just unlocking a tool, you are deliberately taking responsibility for a dragon‑touched being that would likely not exist without the Elder Dragon’s long shadow. That framing lets the skyscale sit comfortably alongside the wider dragon story: it feels like a consequence of that era rather than a generic “flying mount” grafted on from nowhere.
Over time, usage patterns have borne out why the mount has become so central. Once you have a skyscale, waypoints and routes start to look different: cliffs become ladders rather than walls, meta‑events with staggered platforms become much less fussy, and out‑of‑the‑way hero points, vistas and nodes are no longer exercises in finding the one intended approach. Many players report that it is their default choice for exploration and map completion, swapping to griffon or roller beetle only when they want to maximise speed over distance. That convenience has, in turn, coloured balance conversations around other mounts, but it has not eclipsed them entirely; instead, it has become the reference point against which everything else is measured—a hovering, climbing baseline that redefines movement in a post‑dragon Tyria where verticality is now the rule rather than the exception.
