Flight power - essential or not even close?

One of the disadvantages of Hasten is that because you've got powers recharging faster, you're going to be using them more often which means your endurance recovery may not be able to keep up. Especially, if you're using AOEs more since they cost more endurance. Plus, Hasten itself has a back ended endurance cost, ie it takes a chunk of endurance when it expires. The worst case scenario is not paying attention and suddenly zeroing out on endurance and your armors turning off.

In regards to Super Jump and meleers, typically the reasons are the prerequisite Combat Jump and the later Acrobatics. Combat jump includes immobilization protection and can take defense enhancements. Acrobatics includes minor hold protection and good knockback protection. Both are especially appealing by those who take the Fire Armor powerset because its anti-mez armor lacks immobilization and knockback protection, along with having no defense component in its armors. Fire Armor was all the rage a few years ago back before the Burn power was "fixed" for being overpowered. Fire Armor is the extreme example, though. The secondary effects of the powers are also good for adding additional to existing similar attributes of other powersets.

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Mmm...

Getting flight as a power or a temp, is a matter of perspective. I am essentially a role-player, thus all of my alts have biographies and are concept characters as well: Thus each of their powers they utilize must have a reason for being, as a result my alts are not going to win any awards for exceptional performance.

As a role player, in my mind, flight is a badge of distinction, the real cool and powerful heroes usually fly, there are exceptions, but to me, if you are really super you fly.

Now for the tech minded super types, the flight graphics does not make sense, and thus are revolting to a role player or concept character maker. As a result the jet pack is the way to go from an asthetics perspective.

If you are a min-max type of player, you really should by pass flight as a pool power and seriously consider leap, for combat jumping is an excellent power in the pool which adds full defense against all forms of attacks, you also choose maneuvers's defensive power and fight pool's weave and bam! You just got yourself as much as 12% defense against all forms of attack, and if you are wise during leveling you can have these bonuses available even in the lowest leveled TF/SF. You could actually use "hover" instead of combat jumping and get the same effect, but hover is broken with regards to "follow" it never closes in to allow for melee combat ranges.

If you don't acquire flight, for max defense gain and ease of play. Do buy a flight pack from your most convenient vendor and keep it for a rainy day, you may be going to Fire base Zulu where you will definetly need or for a Positron part II where they come handy, but if I remember right, Positron TF gives yo the flight temp as well, but not sure, I don't do Posi very often ( I don't like the excessive number of ambushes in part I)

Hugs

Sue

All the cool kids Fly.

Superjump is cool for playing 'cross the zone without touching the ground' when you're waiting on some friend to log on or a TF to form up.

Super Speed is faster than Teleport, until you get used to using Teleport. Also looks cool and is fun to careen around the city.

Teleport is fastest way to get long distances but does take some getting the hang of. Hover is almost a necessity during the learning curve and for short distances that require maneuvering around buildings, it's slow because you have to keep jumping past points and turning around. Once you get the hang of using buildings as stopping points without blocking your next jump, it gets less bothersome.

Super Jump plus Super Speed makes you an awesome looking bouncing comet.

Really the travel power you choose is more about style than function. Only in the really large zones is it ever going to make more than about five seconds difference in travel time from mission door to mission door. A lot of people I know choose their travel power based on the lead in power chosen.

Hasten is quite popular with many people, making Super Running one of the more common travel powers.

Teleport Friend is very common as well, being able to grab your friend out of trouble, or after a kill that has left an AV standing over him. Or just to get him to the mission door faster because he joined late or had to stop and level up.

Hover and Combat Jump both have defensive value. Combat Jump has a thematic feel for a lot of toons and used to be popular with the melee crowd to move around a skirmish but with everyone having Hurdle now it's becoming less needful. Hover gives one of the best defensive bonuses in the 'below ten' game. I call it the "Out of Reach" defense. The ranged attack is the weakest attack of many low level mobs. And if they have a target in range of their primary attack they may shift aggro to pop it off instead of continuing to use a weaker attack at you.

Other than a few 'badge spots' which require special means to reach, you do not 'need' any single travel power to do anything in the game. And for those hard to reach spots you can almost always find someone with teleport friend who will bring you over if you do not have a temp travel power to make it on your own.

But all the cool kids Fly.

A side effect peeve with taking up the Teleport pool is that you will encounter team mates who assume that you picked up Recall Friend as the prerequisite power and thus expect you to chauffeur them to every mission door.

There is no need to speed.

Certain areas require fly or teleport. Grandville and the Shadow Shard are the only places that require such travel. Luckily, that is where you can buy jetpacks.

Not even close to essential. I don't have fly on a single character, and pretty much only my blasters take hover.

For the majority of my characters, I just make sure I have a jetpack power and that meets any flight needs I might ever have.

The travel powers I choose are mostly dictated by what the concept of that particular character, so I have experience with all four of them.

My main, and my namesake character Spectreblade is a Broadsword/Dark Armor Scrapper, and I have Leaping as my power pool on him, and have all four powers in that pool. Jump Kick, while probably not the best attack power out there, is useful as a low-level attack-chain filler and another damage type in my arsenal, and Combat Jumping and Acrobatics shore up the holes in Dark Armor's mez protection. While Cloak of Darkness provides Immobilize protection, I have to turn it off when escorting hostages, which would strip me of that protection if I didn't have Combat Jumping, while Acrobatics provides Knockback protection that Dark Armor lacks entirely.

As for the other pools, One thing I've noticed while playing Motoko Michi, my Willpower/War Mace Tanker with the Teleport pool, is that it's the only travel power with no suppression, and the only one unaffected by slows. On many occasions, I've found myself in a slow patch like Quicksand or Caltrops, and responded by teleporting behind the offending foe and sending him twinkling off into the distance with a well-placed Jawbreaker. Stone Armor Tankers and Brutes often take this as their travel pool for similar reasons, as it's also the only travel power they can use at the same time as Rooted (mez protection) and Granite Armor (T9).

I almost always pick Flight. Not because it's the safest or the easiest for navigation purposes, but because for me it's just flat-out FUN to fly. I like my crew getting around that way.

(The only two characters of mine who don't fly both have Super Jump, which is also quite a lot of fun. Go-Go super bouncy-Bane! XD)

wow, i'm in the minority.

every single character i have has super speed + combat jumping. super speed will put you close to the movement speed cap, and combat jumping will allow you to clear most minor obstacles with ease. once you know the game maps (and i started in 2004...), i've found this combination to be the fastest and most reliable way to travel.

i tried really hard to use just hover + siphon speed, which put me at the fly speed cap. i did it for years even, but the last respec on my main, i went for SS+CJ because i was sick of siphoning all of the time. i realize this is a outlier, but i can't stand fly as my only travel power. with all of the temps, any time i really need to have vertical movement, i have the pocket D jetpack, and then temp flight powers if i need more than 30 seconds.