Speed Caps, Travel Pools, and Tier 5

In the not too distant future, we're going to start hearing more about the new t5 powers in the pools. For the power pools, these seem to all be 'Cap Breakers' of some kind, such as intra-zone teleport or a speed boost that ignores given arbitrary caps.

But, let's look at this situation for a bit before and ask what needs to be done to make these powers enjoyable.

In particular, let's examine flight, widely considered the weakest, slowest travel power. It comes with a huge tactical advantage in that enemies who cannot jump or fly up to meet you cannot melee you.

The speed cap for flight is 58.63 mph. As of issue 18, simply taking flight will place you at this cap without any kind of enhancement whatsoever. You cannot enhance fly to make it any faster. Despite this, it still happily accepts flight enhancements and sets.

The t5 power has been reported a few places as 'Afterburners'-- a way to temporarily boost your flight speed over the cap.

So if I want to go faster than 58.63 flying, I have to take this power. I can enhance fly all I want, but it will never go faster.

Let's look at the other speed caps in the game:

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Limits

Super Jump caps out at its apex speed with 3 SOs at 78.18 mph
Super Speed caps out with 2 SOs at 92.5
By comparison, flight comes pre-capped at 58.63

This curve is not terribly intuitive and should be revisited, I think, especially if we're about to put in powers that will alter this mucked-up balance even further.

First of all, something that I think we could all use to know is, the global speed limit-- is it still around 96 MPH? Can it be moved further out with the new improvements to the game server engine?

Second, Fly has, right now, little opportunity for enhancement. I'd personally like to do some slotting with it before buying another power to make it work faster. Can the caps be readjusted so that they're a a hair more linear than +20mpg, +20 mph, +16mp


I'd personally like to recommend a curve that went something like the following

Hard speed cap is 120 MPH

Speed's unenhanced speed is 60mph. With 3 SOs, it just the 120mp cap.

Jump's unehanced speed is 55mph. With 3 SOs, it lands somewhat short of the cap at 110mph. Futher enhancements such as swift or travel bonuses could take it to the cap.

Flight's unenhanced fly is 50mph. With 3 SOs, it lands at about 100mph. Then other enhancements, such as swift, travel bonuses, or the new Afterburners power could take it all the way up to the 120MPH global cap.


How doable is this? If something like this is completely off the wall, can you guys give us a little more info on how Afterburners or any other movement power is going to work?

I'm fine with how the caps are now, to be honest. Fly is slowest due to it's ability to let you go anywhere and stay there. It's that freedom to go airborne that causes the power to become slower to balance it out with the others. Also why Superjump is slower that Superspeed, but faster than Fly. You can go airborne, but can't stay there. Plus I enjoy not having to put enhancements in Fly to cap it out.

Going with your plan would make Afterburners useless, also, as it only increases flight speed by twenty mph. Not really worth it enough to take an entire other power.

Oh. THAT cap. Nevermind.

Either the capped speed of Flight needs to be increased or the enhancement screen needs to tell you that adding a Flight Speed Enhancement does not enhance flight speed.

I say this as someone that put slots in Fly from back when it cost more End and before the Combat Attributes screen showed me how pointless it was

I am disappointed that it sounds like Afterburner won't be that quick either. Guess I'll get Super Speed instead then.

Moo, when you talk about jump and run caps, are you factoring in powers like Swift, Hurdle and Sprint? I ask, because it seems to me that a single level 50 run speed Common in Super Speed plus one in Swift plus one in Spring ought to cap that. It did last I checked, but I could be wrong. Not sure about Super Jump, though.

Either way, the travel pool T5 powers seem like they'd be pretty dang cool. I doubt I'll ever have a build THAT tight as to be unable to snag at least one of these, and it really seems like an interesting concept, to be sure. I'm just concerned this might corrupt City Traveller, though, since I don't think I can snag a T4 or T5 travel pool power without taking two prerequisites, which City Traveller was supposed to alleviate.

Hmm...

Quote:

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.

Perhaps, rather than doing away with the City Traveller reward we could persuade the Devs to make it apply to all tiers of the travel pools?

Or make it so that you qualified for the higher tier if you had two powers from the lower tier of ANY travel power pool? That would help the people that want Hover with Teleport.

I'm frustrated by the new travel powers because while some are nice, they're not nice enough to tear my builds apart trying to fit in.

If I want Afterburner, I've got no power picks and nothing I would reasonably give up just for 12 more MPH added to flight, which is a little low when you think about it.

I would drop Hover because I only took it to get Fly, and I don't have to now. But I need Hover to get Afterburner.

It's not a fun conundrum, and I resent the devs a little for adding these powers the way they have, as opposed to putting them on a lower tier or making them as recipes to get with merits or Astrals or such. IMO, useless top tier powers that you didn't want was a better situation than slightly attractive top tiers that you can't take.


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