Focused Feedback: Travel Power Updates (FLY POOL) - Build 2

[Arcadio]

On 3/13/2021 at 8:26 AM, GM Arcanum said:

Pool: Flight

•  Hover
  • Added new customization themes that allow you to remove the hover animation

 

Can PB's combat flight get this option?

[Aracknight]

 

 

Hey, with this change:

 

 Hover

• Added new customization themes that allows you to remove the hover animation

Since you can now change the Hover animation to be the same as for Fly, could you also conceivably change Super Speed, Infiltration, Super Jump, Sprint, etc to have alternate options so that we could activate Super Speed but have Ninja Run animation, Infiltration but have Slide animation, Super Jump but have Beast Run animation, and so on?  This could make it so instead of changing a stance under the inherent tab and being stuck in Beast Run mode all the time, I could change it in a travel power and only be in that stance when that travel power is activated!

[Excraft]

13 hours ago, Obitus said:

I don't understand complaints about the Fly changes.

 

If you didn't already have Afterburner, or if you want to drop it post-patch, the benefits are even more obvious: you're basically getting Afterburner's old travel functionality (sans LoTG mulehood) for the price of one power pick instead of at least three.

 

 

Some of us just don't see this as a needed, welcomed or necessary change.  And no, the new Afterburner isn't the same functionality as the old one.  It's now a click with a recharge instead of a toggle we can turn on and off as desired.  I like how it works now.  This is change for the sake of change.  Travel is totally trivial now anyway.

[Starforge]

45 minutes ago, Excraft said:

 

Some of us just don't see this as a needed, welcomed or necessary change.  And no, the new Afterburner isn't the same functionality as the old one.  It's now a click with a recharge instead of a toggle we can turn on and off as desired.  I like how it works now.  This is change for the sake of change.  Travel is totally trivial now anyway.

I don’t believe anyone said the New Afterburner was the same functionality as the current Afterburner. It’s Evasive Maneuvers that is the same functionality as current Afterburner. New Afterburner is a bonus.

[Bionic_Flea]

3 hours ago, GM Arcanum said:

Mechanically identical to Evasive Maneuvers, but prettier

 

This may be the best patch note ever.

[arthurh35353]

2 hours ago, chi1701 said:

ive logged onto test, cant see anything in terms of visual fx, what am i missing?

That's probably the float bug where some people where stuck stuttering/jittering on the floor due to the VFX.

  

5 hours ago, GM Arcanum said:

Slotting travel powers for speed should actually matter (looking at you, Fly)

Why was my comment on flipping this around to that SS/SJ/TP actually are improved to match Fly's lower threshold of needing less slots hidden?

 

It's a valid part of this discussion as it throws into question the Devs design paradigm on travel powers. Currently they are looking at the fact that Fly is somehow overperforming by not needing a lot of slots to reach it's (built in) caps. Teleport on the other hand really requires at least 3 or 4 slots to hit its cap. Fly is attractive for builds where you could put those slots into other, direct combat powers or set bonuses that are far more attractive or to allow you mule LotG +recharge.

 

Travel power set bonuses even mirror or match that. There are really no outstanding 3rd or 4th  set bonus for investing in travel powers. Almost all their useful abilities actually give you an effective dead slot for something like stealth or -KB. IIRC, most don't even have more than 4 or 5 pieces in their sets.

 

Teleport is still not really being equalized for travel powers as jump, flight and run get free enhancement out of slotting swift and hurdle with your travel power bonus. Why doesn't hurdle allow you get a small bonus to range that you can boost with range modifiers? You could even put it is as because of your training in landing from leaps, you know how to brace/aim yourself for hitting things at long range. An extra 10 feet that you can enhance to 12 or 13 feet with the free slot is not game breaking. And hey, gives poor sentinels a possible way to recover a little range. 

 

Teleport is ludicrously expensive endurance-wise. SS/SJ/Flight can get you across the zones with only a blip on their end for about 66% or 75% of the speed? But Teleport with the same End slotting (because everyone hates to waste slots on -END as it's never the purpose of the power to spend END) and you can be down to 5% to 10% max end at the end of the journey across large zones (or even run out in the shadow shard if you aren't careful.)

 

((Ooh, another brainstorm thought. If you want to equalize long range END cost for teleport but not short hops across rooms, give Teleport a End Reduction buff that stacks for 10 seconds on the teleport power. So the longer you teleport across a zone, the cheaper the power is to use, but just going across a room won't affect it.))

 

Should SS/SJ and Flight have their END costs increased so that you are almost out of END by the time you cross a large zone?

 

Why do AT sets like Bio Armor give nothing to range bonuses for teleport when they give (or are going to give) benefits to run/jump/flying?

Edited March 20, 2021 by arthurh35353
Not double posting and more TP thoughts

[Aracknight]

Hey, with this change, I really like that you can select the regular Fly animation with Hover. 

 

 Hover

• Added new customization themes that allows you to remove the hover animation

But since you can now change the Hover animation to be the same as for Fly, could you also conceivably change Super Speed, Infiltration, Super Jump, Sprint, etc to have alternate options so that we could activate Super Speed but have Ninja Run animation, Infiltration but have Slide animation, Super Jump but have Beast Run animation, and so on?  This could make it so instead of changing a stance under the inherent tab and being stuck in Beast Run mode all the time, I could change it in a travel power and only be in that stance when that travel power is activated!

 

(I know I asked on the old thread, but they opened this new one and locked the old one.  Thanks.)

[Jimmy]

2 hours ago, arthurh35353 said:

It's a valid part of this discussion as it throws into question the Devs design paradigm on travel powers. Currently they are looking at the fact that Fly is somehow overperforming by not needing a lot of slots to reach it's (built in) caps. Teleport on the other hand really requires at least 3 or 4 slots to hit its cap. Fly is attractive for builds where you could put those slots into other, direct combat powers for set bonuses that are far more attractive or to allow you mule LotG +recharge.

 

You're taking things out of context. At no point have any of us claimed that Fly was overperforming for any reason.

 

Fly not requiring Fly enhancements to reach its maximum potential was just bad design. Enhancements (and Fly Enhancements / sets specifically) exist for a reason. Now all travel powers have the potential to be enhanced with slots and Enhancements. Nobody has been made slower, we've just raised the ceiling so you can go higher if you want.

 

As has been explained to you countless times, Fly + EvMa on beta is faster than Fly + Afterburner on live. You are not required to use more slots to get the same speed out of Fly. No amount of mental gymnastics will change that fact.

 

You cannot reach the absolute (maxmax) speed cap on live without two Enhancements slots in Afterburner (or a specific Alpha power). Now you can put that second slot into Fly without needing to spend two additional power picks (or leave it in EvMa, which also works fine), and you'll be at the same speed (with optional short bursts of even more speed, if you so choose). Again, no amount of mental gymnastics will change that fact.

 

2 hours ago, arthurh35353 said:

Travel power set bonuses even mirror or match that. There are really no outstanding 3rd or 4th  set bonus for investing in travel powers. Almost all their useful abilities actually give you an effective dead slot for something like stealth or -KB. IIRC, most don't even have more than 4 or 5 pieces in their sets.

 

The "dead slot", as you call it, frequently has a highly valuable effect (see: the Universal Travel sets). I'm not really sure what your point is with this anyway? Most travel powers (including Fly) can be maxed out with two generic IOs.

 

2 hours ago, arthurh35353 said:

Teleport is ludicrously expensive endurance-wise. SS/SJ/Flight can get you across the zones with only a blip on their end for about 66% or 75% of the speed? But Teleport with the same End slotting (because everyone hates to waste slots on -END as it's never the purpose of the power to spend END) and you can be down to 5% to 10% max end at the end of the journey across large zones (or even run out in the shadow shard if you aren't careful.)

 

((Ooh, another brainstorm thought. If you want to equalize long range END cost for teleport but not short hops across rooms, give Teleport a End Reduction buff that stacks for 10 seconds on the teleport power. So the longer you teleport across a zone, the cheaper the power is to use, but just going across a room won't affect it.))

 

Should SS/SJ and Flight have their END costs increased so that you are almost out of END by the time you cross a large zone?

 

Teleport has always been a special and unique case. In absolute terms it has the highest speed potential, but also requires the most direct investment of both resources (ie: slots, set bonuses, etc) and interaction (you have to... keep clicking). Plenty of players like trade-off that Teleport provides, and it's not something we're interested in changing.

 

We have, however, improved Teleport in almost every other way. Between the changes in Page 1 and 2, it's significantly smoother and easier to use (both with and without macros and binds), has a longer range by default, has built-in protection, and has much more attractive picks in the rest of the pool.

 

2 hours ago, arthurh35353 said:

Teleport is still not really being equalized for travel powers as jump, flight and run get free enhancement out of slotting swift and hurdle with your travel power bonus. Why doesn't hurdle allow you get a small bonus to range that you can boost with range modifiers? You could even put it is as because of your training in landing from leaps, you know how to brace/aim yourself for hitting things at long range. An extra 10 feet that you can enhance to 12 or 13 feet with the free slot is not game breaking. And hey, gives poor sentinels a possible way to recover a little range. 

 

[...]
 

Why do AT sets like Bio Armor give nothing to range bonuses for teleport when they give (or are going to give) benefits to run/jump/flying?

 

Range bonuses are universal. Without some really specific hard-wired interactions between powers, adding a range bonus to something like Hurdle would result in every ranged power being buffed.

 

There's a reason we increased the base range of Teleport from 300ft to 350ft 🙂

[Jimmy]

1 hour ago, Aracknight said:

Hey, with this change, I really like that you can select the regular Fly animation with Hover. 

 

 Hover

• Added new customization themes that allows you to remove the hover animation

But since you can now change the Hover animation to be the same as for Fly, could you also conceivably change Super Speed, Infiltration, Super Jump, Sprint, etc to have alternate options so that we could activate Super Speed but have Ninja Run animation, Infiltration but have Slide animation, Super Jump but have Beast Run animation, and so on?  This could make it so instead of changing a stance under the inherent tab and being stuck in Beast Run mode all the time, I could change it in a travel power and only be in that stance when that travel power is activated!

 

(I know I asked on the old thread, but they opened this new one and locked the old one.  Thanks.)

 

The Hover change was made because of the really awkward way Fly animations work.

 

Basically, the animation Fly uses is in fact the non-specific generic flying animation that everything uses, including powers like Telekinesis. Hover applies a specific animation which has a higher priority (which is required for it to override the default), which causes the appearance of it always overriding other flight powers. There was no way for the player to get around this.

 

Giving different animation options to all the travel powers would cause a nightmare when it came to stacking, so it probably won't be happening unfortunately. You are still able to use Ninja or Beast run along with other travel powers if you so choose.

[macskull]

2 hours ago, arthurh35353 said:

It's a valid part of this discussion as it throws into question the Devs design paradigm on travel powers. Currently they are looking at the fact that Fly is somehow overperforming by not needing a lot of slots to reach it's (built in) caps. Teleport on the other hand really requires at least 3 or 4 slots to hit its cap. Fly is attractive for builds where you could put those slots into other, direct combat powers for set bonuses that are far more attractive or to allow you mule LotG +recharge.

They're not saying Fly is overperforming, they're saying it's poor design that flight powers get little to no benefit from enhancements because the fly speed cap is so low. Builds which specifically took a flight power because it required no real investment to reach the cap (which is a really odd take but that's neither here nor there) will continue to have equal or greater speed than before without changing anything, or those builds can be tweaked to go faster than they can now at the expensive of power picks or slotting elsewhere.

 

Teleport is, once again, the odd one of the bunch of travel powers because it doesn't have an explicit speed cap - you are only limited by your endurance and the amount of range bonus you can get (the +range cap is 400%, so Teleport's 350ft becomes 1400ft which equates to a theoretical maximum travel speed of about 425MPH).

 

2 hours ago, arthurh35353 said:

Travel power set bonuses even mirror or match that. There are really no outstanding 3rd or 4th  set bonus for investing in travel powers. Almost all their useful abilities actually give you an effective dead slot for something like stealth or -KB. IIRC, most don't even have more than 4 or 5 pieces in their sets.

None of the travel or universal travel sets have more than three pieces, but their bonuses are actually pretty good for the number of slots required, especially the universal travel sets. Calling something a "dead slot" because it isn't directly enhancing the power it's slotted in is a little weird though since in many cases the benefit provided by the enhancement in that slot is more beneficial to the build as a whole than whatever the enhancement attribute would've been. I'd much rather have the slow resist or knockback protection than a bit of extra speed enhancement in my travel powers in most cases.

 

2 hours ago, arthurh35353 said:

Teleport is ludicrously expensive endurance-wise. SS/SJ/Flight can get you across the zones with only a blip on their end for about 66% or 75% of the speed? But Teleport with the same End slotting (because everyone hates to waste slots on -END as it's never the purpose of the power to spend END) and you can be down to 5% to 10% max end at the end of the journey across large zones (or even run out in the shadow shard if you aren't careful.)

 

((Ooh, another brainstorm thought. If you want to equalize long range END cost for teleport but not short hops across rooms, give Teleport a End Reduction buff that stacks for 10 seconds on the teleport power. So the longer you teleport across a zone, the cheaper the power is to use, but just going across a room won't affect it.))

 

Should SS/SJ and Flight have their END costs increased so that you are almost out of END by the time you cross a large zone?

 

Why do AT sets like Bio Armor give nothing to range bonuses for teleport when they give (or are going to give) benefits to run/jump/flying?

You're... practically arguing against yourself earlier in this thread at this point. First you complained that teleportation was too fast compared to other travel powers, now you're saying it's useless over long distances because it costs too much endurance? I think you're starting to realize why it's okay for teleportation to be so fast, but you're not quite putting it together yet.

 

For what it's worth, the only AT that gets movement bonuses from Bio Armor is Sentinel which has arguably the worst version of Bio Armor anyways. The (presumable) reasons Sentinels don't get an additional range boost to match their speed boost from Athletic Regulation are as follows:

1. Sentinels already get a 33.3% range boost from Aim so you can use that to bump up your speed over longer distances
2. It's not possible to give a range bonus which only applies to one power unless you make every other power ignore range bonuses so this would be a gamewide buff but you'd only have access to it if you chose one particular powerset on one particular archetype.

 

EDIT: And I see Jimmy has already addressed pretty much every one of my points, this is what I get for getting distracted in the middle of a post.

Edited March 20, 2021 by macskull

[Bopper]

Tested out Evasive Maneuvers with @Myrmidon. Most things are working as designed. First, I'll start off with the good which is just to document what was looked at that seemed to work.

 

The good:

When attacking an enemy, debuffing and enemy, or having an enemy target affected by a toggle (repel), the defense buff from EvMa suppressed.

When doing a self buff or applying an AoE buff that hit no other allies, the defense buff remained on.

When buffing a teammate via a direct buff (Speed Boost, Mystic Fortune) or AoE buff (leadership toggles, inertial reduction), the defense buff suppressed.

When using Group Fly without teammates, the defense buff remained on. When an ally received the Group Fly buff, the defense buff suppressed.

 

The bad:

There are still issues being experienced with load in (Myrmidon will have to detail that experience, I respec'd into the power and didn't test it out)

 

Inherents that check for teammates cancels out the buff. This was noticed on a Defender where my Vigilance looked within a 300 ft range for an ally. So whenever I was within that range, defense got suppressed.

 

The not sure if it's working as intended:
While receiving Group Fly buffs from a teammate, I had no fly powers on but I had Evasive Maneuvers on. I did not get the Evasive Maneuvers buffs while gaining flight from a teammate. I'm not sure if this is intended, perhaps granting the FlightActive tag from another source causes problems, but I figure I'll pass that nugget along for all you folks who wanted to use Evasive Maneuvers from somebody else's Group Fly 😜

Edited March 21, 2021 by Bopper
Forgot to mention the biggest discovery, inherents not playing nice

[Aracknight]

1 hour ago, Jimmy said:

 

The Hover change was made because of the really awkward way Fly animations work.

 

Basically, the animation Fly uses is in fact the non-specific generic flying animation that everything uses, including powers like Telekinesis. Hover applies a specific animation which has a higher priority (which is required for it to override the default), which causes the appearance of it always overriding other flight powers. There was no way for the player to get around this.

 

Giving different animation options to all the travel powers would cause a nightmare when it came to stacking, so it probably won't be happening unfortunately. You are still able to use Ninja or Beast run along with other travel powers if you so choose.

Hey, thanks for answering.

 

We can always get around it with costume and stance switches too.  Appreciate the answer tho.

[Obitus]

7 hours ago, Excraft said:

 

Some of us just don't see this as a needed, welcomed or necessary change.  And no, the new Afterburner isn't the same functionality as the old one.  It's now a click with a recharge instead of a toggle we can turn on and off as desired.  I like how it works now.  This is change for the sake of change.  Travel is totally trivial now anyway.

I didn't say that the new Afterburner has the same functionality as the old Afterburner.  I said that the new Fly power, by itself, basically gives you the same travel functionality--that is, the same speed--as the old Fly+AB.  The new Afterburner, which comes free when you select Fly, is gravy.

 

You are, of course, welcome to feel that the developers should be doing something else instead of buffing travel powers, but that doesn't speak to the quality of the travel-power changes.  And given that devs work for free, on this game that you can play for free, waxing curmudgeonly because your own pet ideas weren't implemented first isn't terribly compelling.  It isn't as if this version of CoH is littered with game-stopping bugs that have been pointedly neglected.

 

I have yet to see a valid complaint about the Fly changes on their own merits.  "Speed number bigger, but no longer blue," isn't a reasonable objection.  Neither is "I'm just as fast now without touching Afterburner, but I don't like that now Afterburner is a zero-investment click power that gives me even more peak speed."  At this point I'm convinced that the tiny handful of relentless complainers in this thread are performing an elaborate Andy Kauffman routine.

Edited March 21, 2021 by Obitus

[Bopper]

I forgot to mention one of the bigger discoveries from my earlier testing with Myrmidon. Defender's inherent is suppressing Evasive Maneuvers whenever within 300ft of a teammate. I updated my previous post to reflect that. I suspect this also affects other inherents like Cosmic Balance and Dark Sustenance

[mechahamham]

Upon training to level 4, Afterburner still shows as a power you can select in the list of options when you choose the flight pool

Edited March 21, 2021 by mechahamham
remove bad image upload

[Myrmidon]

Preserving “Magneto Flight” for those of us that enjoy it. Give yourself a raise, team.

[Doc_Scorpion]

12 hours ago, GM Arcanum said:

Pool: Flight

•  Hover
  • Added new customization themes that allows you to remove the hover animation

I wish there was a better way to label these...  "alternate" - to what?  Maybe at least "alternate flight pose" or something so it's clear they change animations (stances) rather than just FX?

[ScarySai]

I always loved flying on my ranged characters, but the speed and combat maneuverability could be sluggish and not as snappy as I like at times.

 

EV-MA and the flying rework is amazing and a great addition to the game. Makes all my flyers play much better.

[PeregrineFalcon]

I just logged off a Brainstorm earlier today. I noticed that Fly, with a single level 50 Fly IO, is 58 mph on Live and 74 mph on test. Neither ability was at the cap. Between that increase in speed and being able respec out of Afterburner I consider this an improvement. I like it, the devs like it, it's a win/win, right?

 

Now for my focused feedback:

 

I get that all of these changes to Ninja Run and Beast Run and Shinobi-in-Riki, or whatever it's called, was done to standardize things. I don't know why that was important enough to spend developer time on, but it's your time so whatever. I honestly can't imagine that a plurality of players were posting (or DMing devs) with "Hey guys, the various non-travel power travel powers are confusing and they stack so well that it's broken. Please fix, kthxby!" I just hope that once this is done the developers will want to move on to working on/improving things the players care about.

[Monos King]

Could we also get the new flight speed cap on Tyrants flight for his personal story? His was always supposed to be "ultimate" since it already had afterburner baked in as an attribute. 

Just for fun.

[Bopper]

25 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

I just logged off a Brainstorm earlier today. I noticed that Fly, with a single level 50 Fly IO, is 58 mph on Live and 74 mph on test. Neither ability was at the cap

One thing that gets overlooked, you get that as early as level 4. On live, you had to wait until level 20 to get afterburner. Certainly a nice QoL improvement.

[Myrmidon]

1 hour ago, ScarySai said:

 

EV-MA and the flying rework is amazing and a great addition to the game.

While I 100% agree with this, Evasive Maneuvers (EvMa) doesn’t really matter to me (apart from making sure that it functions properly). The thing that I like the most is the new Afterburner, which now makes Fly as useful as Mystic Flight for my own build viability.

Edited March 21, 2021 by Myrmidon

[Myrmidon]

7 hours ago, Bopper said:

 

The bad:

There are still issues being experienced with load in (Myrmidon will have to detail that experience, I respec'd into the power and didn't test it out)

Basically, two things. 
 

1. The zone bug is in effect for Evasive Maneuvers (toggling corrects this until they patch a fix).

 

2. The Evasive Maneuvers Defense buff always shows up in the power attributes, even though the buff acts as it should based on the patch notes. This appears to be a display glitch.

 

 

Aside from both of these minor issues, Evasive Maneuvers appears to be good to go.

[cotesan]

Devs hear me out. 
combining fly with afterburner toggle is a big mistake. It is a choice and what makes some heros stand out. It should be separate. I don’t like having hero’s homogenized. Let it remain how it is and add to the pool if anything but let the ones who opt for afterburner be the ones who benefit from it. 

Edited March 21, 2021 by cotesan

[firelightx]

This is a minor thought - since you added the flight animations to Hover... is there any chance you could add Hover animations to Peacebringer's Combat Flight?