Flight.. The 5th slowest travel power..

Okay, so a friend of mine has no official travel power. He has Swift, Sprint, Quickness, and Elude (spelling). I have no idea how he has them slotted but he is faster than my 42 flyer and I have 6 slots full of max SO speeds (yes i know it caps out at 4. consider the other 2 saftey systems incase one fails...)

now i've always been content with flights speed. sure i would like it to be faster, but i didn't have anything against it.

but this just makes it so worthless now. someone without a travel power can move faster than me and i am as fast as i can go.. i'm not demanding something be done, i just want to bring it up. i want to make sure the devs know that we can be slower than someone without a travel power..

If you're correct then that combo of powers is also faster than unslotted SS since SS's base speed is fly's speed cap.

Sounds like this player has invested in 4 powers - 3 of which he choose, and most of which he has probably slotted more than 6, and he still cannot fly. How much more of an investment did he make compared to your 1 power? How much did he have to give up compared to you and he still cannot go vertical.

No matter how you slice it, flying is ultimately safer than super speed, and offer an undeniable vertical advantage over super speed (or in this case, 4 other speed powers). If flyspeed had the same max as runspeed, why would anyone ever take superspeed?

Yes, SR can go faster than unslotted SuperSpeed.

But it's a lot like my Main(ill/Kin) who took no travel power and just uses his Secondary too... It's a real PAIN until you get them all. For me that was about level 28 that I got both of them. It was "trying", sprinting around 1/2 the time while everyone else was zipping past me, fliers included who were much safer might I add. And SR doesn't even get Perma Ellude until about 40. ...Yech, if you wanna wait till 40 before you can travel quickly, you might as well just go play WoW.


Also, this Thread's subject is grammatically flawed, it should read "Flight.. The 5th fastest travel power) ...indicating that 4 other travel methods are all faster than it is ... which you should also add "Inertial Reduction" and "Siphon Speed" making Flight the SEVENTH fastest travel power, practically dead-last to just Sprint with Swift only.

...Intersting Note too, Inertial Reduction doesn't stack when applied a second time by just yourself, UNLESS you just finished zoning, in which case Inertial Reduction STACKS, and gives HUGE hangtime even faster than slotted SuperSpeed. ...I kid you not, I was able to Jump from the Tram to Ms Liberty... in one single Leap. It feels unbelievable and puts Flight even further to shame.

If another /SR player took fly he would most likely also take those other 3 powers(Swift, quickness, elude). If he put 5 slots into those powers and compared to putting 5 slots into fly, who would be faster over a straight line?

Intersting that you brought that up comsidering that Fly was just made mutaually exlusive to SuperSpeed, yet stacking those running buffs on might be even better than Fly + Superspeed, and certainly cheaper on Endurance, heh.

...No I don't have the answer, was just pointing out the Irony

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No matter how you slice it, flying is ultimately safer than super speed

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Not indoors. In an indoor mission, Superspeed is by far safer due to the stealth component.

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If flyspeed had the same max as runspeed, why would anyone ever take superspeed?

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Why would anyone take Superspeed if Fly could be slotted up to the same speed...

1) SS gives stealth, which makes a big difference in indoor missions.

2) SS doesn't affect your accuracy.

3) SS has Hasten as a prerequisite, making it very attractive because, in effect, that's no prerequisite at all. (Most people take it anyway.)

I think that if six-slotted Fly was the same speed as Superspeed, plenty of people would still take SS for the above reasons.

Remember, that's five slots you'd have to spend to get to that speed. That's not something most people would be willing to do.

five SO slotted fly is as fast as unslotted SS.

4 is the cap.

*waves hand* I'm the friend he's talking about. I can tell you how I have them slotted... 1 run speed in Swift, one in Sprint, and one in Quickness. No run speeds in Elude, just 5 recharge reducers and 1 defense buff (no Hasten, so I need that extra recharge).

I personally agree with Geko. Hey, I have to take 3 powers to get this and didn't have it until level 40 (actually, level 42 for me, but I could have had it at 40 had I slotted right). Plus, if there's a 10 foot wall in front of me, I have to spend 20 minutes looking for a way around. Plus, I have that annoying [censored] backflip ever 2 minutes or so, which stops me dead in my tracks, and kills my Endurance so I have to wait a few seconds before I can Sprint again...

Plus, it's hard to turn it off whenever I need, so precision moving is nearly impossible.

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Sounds like this player has invested in 4 powers - 3 of which he choose, and most of which he has probably slotted more than 6, and he still cannot fly. How much more of an investment did he make compared to your 1 power? How much did he have to give up compared to you and he still cannot go vertical.

No matter how you slice it, flying is ultimately safer than super speed, and offer an undeniable vertical advantage over super speed (or in this case, 4 other speed powers). If flyspeed had the same max as runspeed, why would anyone ever take superspeed?

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Actually - the super-reflex guy gives up nothing.... Every single power mentioned has other beneficial functions, with additional quickness as an added benefit... Essentially, SR scrappers can respec out of a travel power and into perma - elude when it becomes available... As for safety... A SR guy running around with perma-elude doesn't really need to worry about it...

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Sounds like this player has invested in 4 powers - 3 of which he choose, and most of which he has probably slotted more than 6, and he still cannot fly. How much more of an investment did he make compared to your 1 power? How much did he have to give up compared to you and he still cannot go vertical.

No matter how you slice it, flying is ultimately safer than super speed, and offer an undeniable vertical advantage over super speed (or in this case, 4 other speed powers). If flyspeed had the same max as runspeed, why would anyone ever take superspeed?

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IMO, this is such a moot point that it's just silly. Why are the travel powers "balanced" against each other. Who cares if Fly is the Uberest travel power. For many people it's the reason they bought City of Heroes. I know it's the reason I bought it (ok, one of the reasons) and I was sorely disappointed to find that it's disappointingly slow.

Fly should probably equal, or be a lot close to SJ in terms of speed. It already has a -ACC component and slides when you manuver. Perhaps that slide effect could be increased to offset for faster speed.

Anyways, Fly is by far the crappiest travel power in the game and one of the game's biggest disappointments.

Geko said:
If flyspeed had the same max as runspeed, why would anyone ever take superspeed?



You say it like it is Giec...err Geko!!!! Good point never thought of it like that,

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Sounds like this player has invested in 4 powers - 3 of which he choose, and most of which he has probably slotted more than 6, and he still cannot fly. How much more of an investment did he make compared to your 1 power? How much did he have to give up compared to you and he still cannot go vertical.

No matter how you slice it, flying is ultimately safer than super speed, and offer an undeniable vertical advantage over super speed (or in this case, 4 other speed powers). If flyspeed had the same max as runspeed, why would anyone ever take superspeed?

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I agree. But really, is the ACC debuff really necessary on fly as well?

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*waves hand* I'm the friend he's talking about. I can tell you how I have them slotted... 1 run speed in Swift, one in Sprint, and one in Quickness. No run speeds in Elude, just 5 recharge reducers and 1 defense buff (no Hasten, so I need that extra recharge).

I personally agree with Geko. Hey, I have to take 3 powers to get this and didn't have it until level 40 (actually, level 42 for me, but I could have had it at 40 had I slotted right). Plus, if there's a 10 foot wall in front of me, I have to spend 20 minutes looking for a way around. Plus, I have that annoying [censored] backflip ever 2 minutes or so, which stops me dead in my tracks, and kills my Endurance so I have to wait a few seconds before I can Sprint again...

Plus, it's hard to turn it off whenever I need, so precision moving is nearly impossible.

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But those are powers you would have taken anyway, right.

I've got them, and I still try to fly everywhere (due to character reasons). And a backflip every two minutes is not annoying - compared to crashing from an altitude every two minutes...

As for precision moving - that's what hover is perfect for... (And for that 10 ft wall, If you don't have fly)

You forgot the much lower endurance cost. Right now Fly is so worthless that even though I try to vary my travel powers, I don't have it on anyone. 2nd in cost, 4th in speed and accuracy debuff? For what? Safety? Sure, you can leave the comp while flying without worrying, but that's the only advantage over Super Speed. I've never, ever been aggroed by mobs I didn't wish it with SS running. I've never been killed while travelling at all after getting a travel power, actually.

Give Fly something, anything making it worthwhile. Atleast worthwhile for us who don't dream about flying or think it's inherently "cool".

I will agree that fly is certainly a safer mode of travel outside, unless you leave the safety of the ceiling and aggro a sniper on a rooftop. Then it can get you dead fast. This is understandable, but it does add to flight time as you have to make sure to fly upwards to get significantly out of any aggro range. Indoors flying can be a tricky (and sometimes risky) choice. Some tunnels/caves/hallways are too narrow or low ceilinged for safe flight. Hover can make up for it a little, but has to be heavily slotted for it to be more beneficial than just sprinting.

The speed of flight is relative. In some zones, flying can be more beneficial over other travel powers. Faultline, Boomtown, Dark Astoria, The Shard, and Skyway come to mind. With a decent slotting in fly, you can usually take the crows path to your destination while your teamates spend time finding that elusive slope or stairway to head up.

I think the speed cap is a little low relative to the endurance cost, though. Combine that with the -Acc, and the power looks a lot less appealing for most. As I've seen stated on numerous occasions, the travel powers that come from a set that has "more useful" powers over the whole set get picked more than the Flight PP. Most people seem to want Hasten, so SS is a natural choice later. Some people really like having Recall Friend, so Teleport is often taken as well. This hurts the Flight PP overall, since a good many people see Hover as essentially useless. I disagree with that, but to each his own.

I would love to see one of the three often made complaints with Fly improved, but it does keep the airways clear enough for those of us who do choose to fly.

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No matter how you slice it, flying is ultimately safer than super speed

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Not in my experience. Superspeed is an excellent escape power, flight is not. The only real danger with Super speed seems to be late spawns! Superspeed is a combat power as well as a travel power, flight is just a travel power.

I also think its time the -ACC was dropped, at least on melee attacks. I know Statesman has previously said it was too difficult to distinguish between melee attacks and ranged attacks but my Super Reflexes and Invuln chars have powers that would suggest otherwise

Fly is a nice safe cuddly travel power, but it's also dull. I respec'd mine out and changed to teleport. Now that can be a nightmare to use, but boy, it's fun. It makes travelling to places a thrill as it gives you something to do whilst travelling.

With fly I just went up high and hit auto run. Safe. Easy. Dull

I too personally wish that Flight was a touch faster, however it doesn't bother me enough to worry too much about it. What does bother me is this though:

The fact that the cap on travel speed SOs is NOT mentioned anywhere. At least not anywhere that I'm aware of and I did my research as a "normal" player ie. one that reads the game manual and pays attention to any in-game directions and/or texts as opposed to someone who reads the forums constantly or goes searching for information (travel speed SO caps not being something someone would think they need to search for).

That's what happened to me. I wanted my flight just a little bit faster and I had an extra slot to "burn" if you will. So I added it to Flight for a total of 6. I placed my fifth flight speed SO on it only to notice no difference. I was on a team at the time so I made mention "I just added a fifth SO to my flying speed and I'm not flying any faster" much to my surprise (and the surprise of three others on the team) one of our teammates spoke up and said "There's a cap at four, you can only use four SOs on flight speed." What? Excuse me? How come I didn't know this?

So I read over the game manual, nothing about travel speed SO caps in the enhancements section or the pool power section, nowhere. So I checked in-game for a few things. I read the flight power description, nothing. I read the flight power allowed enhancements description, nothing. I read the information on flight speed SOs both on the ones I already had locked into powers as well as at the store I bought them at only to one again find nothing.

My question is, what is to keep a player who doesn't know about these things, and I'm sure there are lots more than myself and the few I mentioned above, from adding that extra, non-needed and useless slot to a travel power simply because they wanted to go faster but didn't know there was a cap? What bothers me even more about this is the enhnancement system actually ALLOWS a player to put that fifth flight speed SO on the power, knowing good and well it won't have any affect.

I luckily had an extra respec and needed to do that anyway to dispose of another power I didn't care for so I was able to respec out of that extra, useless slot. But what if I hadn't been able to? That would have meant I wasted an enhancement slot that does me NO good whatsoever (five is plenty for flight, four flight speed and one endurance reduction) and all because there's nothing to tell the casual player that travel speeds cap.

If I'm wrong about this and there's somewhere in-game or in the manual that I missed, please let me know and I'll call myself one who doesn't pay attention to details. BUT I'm pretty certain I was very thorough.

I think that there needs to be some sort of in-game text applied to travel powers to tell what the cap is for those players not in the know about such things.

All in all I guess this really has nothing to do with the original post but still, since it was on the topic of travel powers and their speed and SOs and such I figured it was as good a place as any.

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Sounds like this player has invested in 4 powers - 3 of which he choose, and most of which he has probably slotted more than 6, and he still cannot fly. How much more of an investment did he make compared to your 1 power? How much did he have to give up compared to you and he still cannot go vertical.

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To be fair, you must admit that most people have to take Swift (or Hurdle, but then if you're not Super Jumping you usually take Swift) to have Stamina that most people will want (and even moreso SR Scrappers with all these toggles), and that both Quickness and Elude are great powers that would be as great even if they had no speed boost with them. So with that in mind, it's not really 4 powers instead of 1 (2, really, since you must also take Hover or the air punchy thing to have flight) but 0 powers and a few slots instead of 1 power and a few slots.

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No matter how you slice it, flying is ultimately safer than super speed, and offer an undeniable vertical advantage over super speed (or in this case, 4 other speed powers). If flyspeed had the same max as runspeed, why would anyone ever take superspeed?

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Granted. Both in combat (with a Hover/fly keybind) and in smooth traveling, going precisely where you want and with the path you want, Fly is far superior than the other three.

HOWEVER.

A)It's more costly than Superspeed and Superjump, Endurance-wise
B)The difference between 80Mph and 50Mph (not even taking into account the fact that Fly needs MORE SLOTS to reach its poor speed cap than the other 3) is a drop of nearly 40% !
C)Fly is the ONLY Flying power to carry a (HUGE) Accuracy Debuff --With Aim, and Accuracy Enhancements, I'm still MISS-ing a lot if I forget that I have fly on in a fight-- while Superspeed has even a great side-effect to it (stealth)

So. I know we flyers are the most practical, and that everybody else is jealous because WE LOOK SO DAMN COOL, but to be fair, this travel power is clearly NOT balanced with the other 3. Sure it needs some of a downside. But Huge Acc drop PLUS 40% Max speed drop PLUS Needing more Enh to cap Speed PLUS Being more costly than the others (except TP) makes it a kinda weird imbalance...

Give us flyers some love. Pretty please ?

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Intersting that you brought that up comsidering that Fly was just made mutaually exlusive to SuperSpeed, yet stacking those running buffs on might be even better than Fly + Superspeed, and certainly cheaper on Endurance, heh.

...No I don't have the answer, was just pointing out the Irony

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SuperSpeed and Fly never stacked. You could have them both on, to leave a nice trail and be stealthy, but you didn't go any faster.

Fly is safer than Superspeed as a travel power. Obviously there are instances where Superspeed+Superjump is safer, but there isn't a travel power that offers protection from snipers. Fortunately there aren't as many snipers now as there used to be.

I have 4-slotted fly (and 6-slotted hover) on 2 characters and people underestimate the value of putting 2 extra slots in fly. The only reason I have a 4th slot is because my main is just overflowing in slots and my mind controller is a fly-only character. It's basically insurance for the other 5-10% worth of fly speed.

I am flying slightly faster than base superspeed, and marginally slower than superjump. I can't complain.

Devs,

Take the three months to code up the ability for Superspeeders to run up walls. Boost Fly by 20%. Everyone's happy.

In comics (the basis for the game, yes?) most higher-powered speedsters can at *least* run up walls. If they stop running, they fall down, taking full damage. I'm not even asking for 'through' walls or 'defense on Superspeed because you're a blur'. I have not yet, in my travels through this game, seen a speedster who doesn't at least have Hurdle (due to the basic need for the Fitness pool), if not Superjump, because of that pesky Z axis.

As a flier, I rarely see others in the sky. Why? Superjump achieves the vertical with more speed, and Superspeed takes care of the horizontal.

Geko, people will take Superspeed due to the stealth effect, the lack of a -ACC, and even the character theme effect if you raise the speed max on Fly.

If devs took the time to code up the admittedly non-trivial "past the 2nd speed enhancement, Superspeeders can run up walls", the travel powers would finally be somewhat balanced.

This whole thing is bull. Everytime flight speed comes up, people point out 10 good reasons flight is bad, and one third that many people come in and say, "but its the safest" despite it having been said in almost EVERY post regarding upping the flight speed cap or flight speed in general, like in this case, that SS is just as safe, if not SAFER than flight, unless you start every trip going as high as you can go, and hitting autopilot, which makes it take even longer. With SS you are barely there long enough to catch aggro, not to mention the nice stealth bump you get, and if you get aggro, your gone before you feel the first hit, which also happens to be the last. And lets not forget indoor missions. My bit to add is this: try using hover/fly in a low cieling room/hallway and tell me its safer than SS, granted not travel, but where other powers give you some help(yeah, TP too, since you can port anywhere you can see regardless of obstacles), flight is a hinderance.

At this point a Dev/Mod/member of the Cryptic team, usually Geko or States, comes in and says "safer," "vertical movement," and on occasion "if fly was faster why take SS?"

Basically? For the same reason people take flight now. Because its cool. And thats IN ADDITION to:

1. Stealth component
2. Combat application
3. Better escape than flight (Yes it is, I know very few blasters that rely on flight to escape, including myself.)
4. Concept
and the BIG ONE...
5. Hasten as prequisite

This is the ONE thing that really bugs me, above all else, that I would have a problem with the Devs over. Sure, the Khelds sucking bothered me, but flight speed just flat out pisses me off and makes me bitter. I had flight in my build. I respeced it out and 6 slotted hover, which I rarely use in combat, unless with a proper/really bad team and "Death from above" tactics are required. If not I use SS.

And in 3 or so pages States will come to the thread and post his usual "Flight speed is not, and will never change," flamewar begins and thread is locked.

But hey, at least that hover bug will get fixed.

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Also, I dont feel the need to point out, but I'm going to anyway, what others have said before regarding "investing in 4 other powers" to get to SS speeds.

First off, the point is having no travel power can be faster/safer* than flight. Well, ignoring what others feel/believe/weep gently to themselves over/say about SS being safer, now you have another option which fits most speeders concepts pretty well, and is basically SS and inherently safer*.

*Safer? Can't be!?
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Second, the "investment" isn't in travel. Its in safety. Those powers are for damage mitigation/avoidance (whatever YOU want to call it) for combat. We do a lot of that fighting thin in CoH don't we? These powers just HAPPEN to make you move FASTER THAN FLIGHT by SHEER COINCIDENCE as a SIDE EFFECT and are WORKING AS INTENDED, unless this was a major oversight in developement and the past few months of live since Elude was changed.