Why do I never see fly on builds?

Fly is my "default" travel power, but I have a pretty good mix. Most of my characters who stay at range, use Hover/Fly. My characters who need an extra attack with knockdown get Air Sup/Fly. And most of my villains end up with Fly.

Melee characters who can use the little bit of extra defense from Combat Jumping usually end up with Superjump. Characters who want stealth/Invisibility or great battlefield maneuverability get Super Speed. And I even have three with Teleport.

and yes, there are builds posted using fly . . . look at my Illusion/Radiation guide. My final build for my perma-PA Ill/Rad has Hover/Fly (and Combat Jumping -- Hover and CJ were needed as LotG Recharge mules).

If it fits my character's concept then I take <insert travel power here>.

I have fly on my characters that have wings - although for one it's just Hover and Teleport.

There are two reasons I normally skip Hover, even on primarily ranged characters with Flight:

• There's no immobilize protection (which Combat Jumping provides). I've actually taken Combat Jumping on a few characters with Flight just for the immobilize protection, and most of the time I end up with Air Superiority to unlock it. Since the one with Hover also has Teleport I can still move even when immobilized.
• I hate hate hate the vertical flypose when moving. I hate it enough that I'll use Flight in combat, adding in the extra recovery and endurance reduction, and deal with the suppressed rate of travel, if I want to (and can, see below) stay above things.

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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

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Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

Flight could use some fixes imo. Due to a nasty disperity in effectiveness, almost all of my toons are leapers over fliers. I like to build to concept and I've skipped flight on toons that would be better suited for it based solely on the fact flying is so damn slow.

Combat jumping is more end efficient and offers similar defensive capabilities. If hover is going to effect endurance more, it should offer better defensive numbers. Now I'm sure some will argue that hover gives you better directional movement, but its a lot slower and everything can still get at you because pretty much everything has ranged attacks.

For pure travel ability, SJ again is much faster than flight. Anybody that's played the game for more than five minutes forgets about the minor safety advantage flight offers. I'd love to see some sort of faster flight offered, either with some sort of penalty or as a higher tier power choice.

Part of it has to do with ground-effect powers (Foot Stomp, Burning Feet, etc).

These powers are impossible to trigger from a flying stance. Now, in some cases (like burning feet), you can trigger them first, THEN start flying. But for some characters, turning on a travel/defensive power that gimps your offense is an undesirable tradeoff.

Add to the fact that the raptor pack is relatively inexpensive...

Plus the disparity in endurance consumption versus CJ (granted, Hover actually provides a SLIGHTLY more versatile movement option).

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Hover offers game benefits that are not immediately obvious in it's description. Unlike Hover, Combat Jumping basically tells you everything it does; You actually need to play the game with Hover to realize that mitigation it can offer you:

It offers Ranged Characters potent damage mitigation in the ability to avoid melee attacks to a higher degree.

It allows a character to avoid many ground based attacks through the virtue of not being on the ground. Knives of Artemis and CoT Earth mages immediately jump to mind.

It allows you to divide up a spawn by separating those that fly from those that can't.

I consider these things worth the lack of Immobilization protection that Combat Jumping offers (especially since I can just TAKE CJ as well). I don't know why CJ gets to have such low endurance, and while I would LIKE Hover to be set to match CJ, it probably makes more sense that CJ's end/s be set to match hover.


Hover+CJ is actually a pretty good Defense option as far as min/maxing goes. Neither require any prerequisites, can both be slotted with LoTG+Rech, offer about 4% Defense to everything when stacked together, offer benefits beyond just def, and don't need more than their base slot to be effective. You can safely toss either in at any point in your build and be better for it.

Give hover some form of knockback protection or something to justify the higher endurance cost would be good I think. I take flight on my blasters about only AT I even play these days.

Flight is sloppy to control, lacks the Stealth of Super Speed, has a worse prereq option than Super Speed, and is the slowest travel power. Range is mitigation to some degree, but you can usually maintain range just by moving around without any travel powers on.

Still, if Flight fits the idea of the character, I'll take it.

I love fly. It's my favourite travel power and so easy for badgers etc. The jet pack, while allowing flight, is very noisy.

Often the reason my char doesn't have flight is I just can't squeeze it in to the build. I sense a respec of quite a few characters based on the powers the inherent fitness pool will free up.

SS is handy if you get caught on a speed run but the lack of vertical movement irritates me unless I waste another power for hurdle; I much prefer swift.

As always YMMV and often people dropping builds on the forum are going to be min/maxers who have adapted one of their own builds for you. In which case they may not alter the travel power because THEY couldn't fit it in.

I take Fly on almost all my toons for one simple reason- I like to point my toon at the mission door, hit autorun, and tab over to my desktop and check my e-mail, poke around on the internet, etc etc.

On my SJ characters, it just feels like too much work to get somewhere (although I do enjoying playing "the ground is lava".)
On my very few Speedsters, I HATE looking for stairs, ramps, etc, or having to switch to a jetpack to get over some ledge.
And I never play teleporters. Because I don't hate myself.

I wouldn't think about making a squishie toon without Hover/Fly personally.

That said, I consider it the funnest travel to take.

That said, outside of squishie toons, Hover just isn't a min/max worthy power, so you will see a lot of builds forgo it.

Build flexibility is another issue. With the coming of Ninja run, people can add in other concept related powers, have a travel power and go.

When i19 arrives, I'll most likely fit in Fly on my main and namesake again. Fly was never a concept driven power for my main, but it was a power I loved to take on her. When trying to get in a few other concept powers on my main, I saw FLY as the least concept needed one (I saw her more of the running building to building type who had the ability to fly, but didn't use it as often as she just prefere to run building to build ).

You only have so many powers, and likely to see more concept powers than you can possibly fit in, sooo...things are going to have to be left out, if you want to fit them in, without totally gimping your build (ie...I'm not going to leave out an armor on my melee toon, just to fit in fly).

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Or rather

Why take Fly and spend a power slot when you can buy jetpacks for a pittance?

I still don't think that's fair to people who actually take Fly from the Flight pool. People who didn't invest in Fly really shouldn't get all the advantages of people who did.

Temp power equivalents to Super Speed and Super Jump that are as cheap and easy to obtain as jetpacks don't really exist. All the flight temp powers still trivialize Fly and that's really lame.



.

For me there are two reasons to pick a certain travelpower, concept and how useful is a power . I rarely take sJ, or TP (even with bind it takes to much effort imho), flight, superspeed and ninja run are my most used one. Many melee chars only have ninja run these days. Although I might have a travel power on my alternative build.

My chars with stealths auras will usually take SS to give 70 stealth radius. Especially for the squishy chars is this very useful.

I'm not a min maxer.

I hate the mechanics of superspeed and my old computer... and Superheroes FLY!!!!

(Fly and super jump are my usual travel powers)

I'm fine with Fly itself. What bugs me is that temp fly is easy to get, lasts so long, and moves so fast. Temp Super Jump is isn't common and I think there's only one temp Teleport in the entire game.

However, they really need to remove the tohit debuff from Group Fly.

Air Sup / Fly is for my Ranger type Blasters, mostly.

CJ / SJ is for my Tanks and Scrappers, mostly.

SS is only for any super tight builds but I don't much like it.

Teleport... I never take it.

Now, with Ninja Run / Swift, I rarely take any travels so I can get more AT powers or pools I want. With the advent of inherent Fitness even more choices will ensue.

I like Fly just for being iconic and easy to use, though I do wish it had a higher speed cap... it's trivially easy to get to and... 58 MPH, I think it is? is not that fast. Fly and Hover are much better than they used to be, but this still bugs me.

Even so, I have Fly on a lot of characters, even a couple of Tanks and such, even though I mainly have it on squishier characters. I'd say Fly comes in second behind Super Jump for me. I like leaping about with it and/or Combat Jumping on Blasters, Tanks, Scrappers, and Stalkers. See plenty of people flying about, too, so perhaps it's just anecdotal?

Fly allows me to afk and tab back to the internet or to msn chat with my friends. A character of mine needs to have a very strong story or stat based reason to have any other travel power.