What happened to Flight Speed?

OK, I give up. I am completely stumped. I've tried wrapping my head around the Flight Speed changes, and I just fail at it so completely. It's not the math that's confounding me, however little there is of it, but rather the more practical side of things - system application and actual impact. Here's what I mean.

I know base flight speed used to be 14.somethign mph, and is now 19.something mph. OK, so let's check and see how Hover is affecting those and... What the hell am I supposed to do with THIS:



Why is Hover listed three times? I checked the power's Real Numbers, as real as those are, and all it lists is a single 98.69% flight speed buff. To what? To base flight speed? Doesn't seem like it's doing that, because it means Hover should be showing a single 19.something mph flight speed increase, and it ain't. Even if I ignored the flight speed debuff (and what purpose does that serve?) and added together the two buffs, it still comes up to around 21.something mph, which is 100+% buff, which I don't have.

Am I supposed to ignore the buff numbers and just focus on total speed, then? Because that doesn't seem right, either. I clocked this very same character doing I think 27 or 28 mph of flight speed before I18, and she's clocking in at 31.something now, which is an increase of only around 3 or 4 mph, which is less than just the BASE flight speed increase, and the flight speed buff is supposed to be based off that.

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Confounding "real" numbers aside, this change doesn't... Feel as drastic as I was led to believe it was. Certainly flight speed is faster, though flying around with old characters doesn't really make me feel like it has suddenly gotten TOO fast, which is what I expected to see. By "too fast," I don't mean too fast to control, but rather fast enough to where I can feel comfortable in removing slots. Fact of the matter is, I don't. Not on my non-swift characters, anyway. On the one with Swift, it does feel a bit "too fast," but that's hardly what I expected.

Maybe I haven't played a slow flier recently, or maybe I got used the the Ludicrous Speed of the new Sprint... I don't know. But Hover doesn't "feel" like it got much faster. In fact, truth be told, it doesn't "feel" like it got ANY faster. And it did, which should show you how subjective that "feel" is. But again, it doesn't convince me that it's fast enough to where I can pinch slots for something else. I guess one-slot Hover isn't too bad by itself. I mean, I've played it, I've run it. It's good for a Mastermind, say. But I play Scrappers with this. I play Blasters. I can't afford to be slow, and "slow" is what it feels like this will be if I remove any speed slots.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I'm actually interested in an answer to this as well, all my flying characters have the same odd numbers showing up.



This particular character is possibly way overslotted on Fly, but the numbers make it confusing on what exactly is needed to max out fly speed now.

The "plus plus minus" you're seeing is a trick to make flyspeed enhancements more effective: the big increase is affected by slotting, while the decrease and the small increases are not. Net result is that flyspeed SOs give about a 45% increase to flight speed each.

It puzzled me too. However, for me at least, I've noticed a huge difference. My MM is hitting the fly cap now, and even my level 24 PB is pratically zipping around with Hover. Even my WS is going faster in Squid form.

It's all good.

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

The base speed of Flight was supposed to have been increased by 33% according to Patch Notes in Beta (and Live Release).

But, a mistake was made, and it was increased 50% instead. On top of that bug, buffs to flight speed (e.g. enhancements and the speed increase from Fly itself) were being calculated on the old base speed and not the new.

That was ' 'fixed' ' by making it worse. The speed was increased even further through a horrible mess made of the database of flight's components. The same horrible mess that the buff icons showed under the health bar which were almost always wrong even though the 'real numbers' under combat attributes were correct.

See here for how the buff icons have been bugged.

Now imagine that bugginess propagated to the real mechanics.

Unenhanced Flight speed is now 9 mph over the speed cap -- you know that's not right.

Previously, the combat attributes didn't break down all the individual components of Fly's buffs, but gave you a total.

Part of Fly's buff components are a -101% Fly and a +100% FlySpeed which pretty much cancel each other out. However, when you're Mezzed, the +100% is suppressed allowing a -101% FlySpeed debuff to go unchecked, which is a fancy way to give you a debuff when mezzed, something which the mechanics can not to without such mathematical gymnastics.

It's a mess and Castle is aware of it. So, expect this overbuffage to be fixed (nerfed!).

FYI: These were the components of Fly at level 50 before I18:

• 100% Fly (note, not FlySpeed, this allows one to fly at the base speed of 14.23 mph)
• 136.5% FlySpeed, Suppressed when Attacking
• 80% FlySpeed, not enhanceable, Suppressed when Attacking
• -101% FlySpeed, not enhanceable
• 100% FlySpeed, not enhanceable, Suppressed when Mezzed

and yet my flight feels slower for some reason...

Thank you, Zombie man. Let me see if I'm reading this correctly - what we see currently in Real Numbers AND Combat Attributes is wrong and unreliable, and we should wait for the mess to be cleared up? Is that it?

Additionally, the components we are seeing quadrupled are just a breakdown of buffs to make flight speed suppress when held, as well as make it not fully enhanceable. That is to say, the two primary flight speed buffs are one part enhanceable and one part unenhanceable similar to what Dull Pain has, where as the other two buffs (or rather, the buff/debuff combo) are there to handle flight speed reduction while held. Do I have that right?

That makes sense, I guess, but I'll wan to wait for flight speed numbers to be tightened up in Combat Attributes before I make any changes to my Fly or Hover slotting. Ideally, I'd like to see the final numbers in mph before I make a decision, and ideally without the jitter in final flight speed that we see now. Incidentally, do you have any idea what causes that jitter?

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I like how Hover feels like a good travel power now, but the flight speed increases are the only thing I'm happy about, even if they do get reduced once they've fixed the problem, a speed increase is a speed increase and it works.

Sprint speed though is a whole different story, all Sprint does is speed up the running animation, which is all well and good in it's old incarnation but the new sped up on makes my average sized characters run a little bit too quick for comfort, my huge characters run the same speed as old normal size characters and my tiny characters run like they're hyped up on sugar with super-speed.

Sprint really needs new animations that reflect 'running reeeeally fast' rather than 'regular running sped up to Benny Hill speeds'