Hover + Mez = Death

After causing a team wipe twice in the same mission due to this bug, I felt compelled to post about this. If nothing else it's something people should be prepared to work around until it's fixed.

Being held (possibly slept also, not certain) while hovering and moving will shoot you off in the direction you were traveling at full speed. For anyone who has hover slotted up for speed, global flight speed bonuses, Siphon Speed or some combination thereof, that can put you in aggro range of an extra spawn before you can click a breakfree.

Does anyone know when this bug was introduced? I haven't played a combat hoverer for quite some time, until I recently pulled an old character out of cold storage. I know it certainly didn't do that last time I played him.

IIRC, this change occured when all non-enemy-affecting toggles were set to suppress rather than detoggle when mezzed. Previously, when mezzed, your hover would detoggle and you would fall down. It's debatable which result is more dangerous.

If so, it seems likely that it isn't a bug that was introduced per se, and more of them forgetting to add -flightspeed to holds when they made the toggle change. Not that it makes me feel any better when I zip off and smack into a Zeus Titan...

The problem is caused by how Hover's flyspeed is calculated. It uses a mix of flyspeed buffs and debuffs to make sure that you your speed starts slow, but can be increased a reasonable amount via enhancements (old hover got less benefit fron flyspeed enhancements than sprint does from runspeed).

Your Inertia (a hidden stat that's based on your flyspeed; it's what causes you to drift when you stop moving during flight, and to continue forward during a jump) is based off the flyspeed buffs, not the total flyspeed; that's why you shoot off so fast. The same thing happens with fly. For some reason, Inertia doesn't degrade while mezzed, so instead of slowing and then stopping, you keep going.

The best workaround is to keep an Inertia-reducing effect on you while Hovering. Any power that lets you control your movement mid jump counts. The obvious ones are Combat Jumping, Super Jump, Ninja Run and Beast Run. In addition, the phase/superjump power Warshades get, and the PBAoE +Jump power in Kinetics (sorry, I forget the names) will accomplish the same thing. There's likely a few others that will help as well.

Thank you Roderick, that's incredibly useful advice! I'll have to see if I can tweak things to fit in Combat Jumping, at least until they fix it.

I love this bug, it's saved my blaster numerous times by allowing me to "run away" while held

Back when status effects used to detoggle your powers, it was sometimes beneficial to have hover drop.

I remember fighting Fungoids on my blaster in Founders Fall, when they'd sleep me, the fall damage would wake me up if I was high enough.

I much prefer that to floating helplessly through the air.

I would just make a panic button that would toggle off hover and/or fly:

/bind lshift+h "powexec_toggleoff "Hover"$$powexec_toggleoff "Fly""

This way I could drop at will.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shubbie Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.

I coulda swore you could turn them off, you just can't turn them back on while mezzed. I could be mistaken though.

Kheld shapeshifts might be an exception. You can NOT turn off regular toggles while mezzed.

There's a handful of rooms in office buildings that even just hover will be enough to get the attention of groups on the upper decks.

I try to remember to tell people to turn off hover in those rooms because of how often I've seen groups suddenly "overwhelmed" by those groups.

Well, this goes to show the value in doing a control when experimenting. I did 50 tests using CJ + Hover, and got a 30:20 drift:stop ratio, that is 30 times I kept floating off in the direction of travel, 20 times I stopped where I was mezzed.

For a control I used just Hover, and got... a 30:20 drift:stop ratio. So two thing learned, the bug doesn't always occur, and Combat Jumping doesn't appear to affect it at all.

I'll do a bit more testing with different power combinations when I have time. One thing of note is that my initial post is incorrect in that the bug seems to affect Fly and Hover equally, it's just noticed more often with Hover since it's used in combat more often.

Luckily I have a kinetics character handy, so I ran the test with Hover + Inertial Reduction. I got to 0:38 drift:stop before I got bored. Roderick's basic proposition that it's based on inertia seems to be plausible, as IR completely cancels the drift when mezzed.

I just tested with Fly, and I drifted every time for the 35 tests done (Fly + IR was no drifts out of 30+ tests as expected). Interestingly though, sometimes the drift seemed faster than others. Sometimes it would be slowed down to around normal Hover speed, and other times it seemed to be pretty much full Fly speed. Since judging the speed is pretty subjective I didn't record stats on that, but I strongly suspect it's in about the same ratio as Hover's drift:stop.

What I think is happening is that the toggle tick rate means that it may or may not apply one tick of the inertia control portion of Hover and Fly (Red Tomax calls it MovementFriction, so I assume that's the internal name) before the toggle is suppressed, depending on when the mez hits. Hover has a value for this of +100, which I assume means 100% and when the tick applies it stops you completely. Fly has a value of +8, which means it only partially slows you when its timing lasts past the mez.

I think the ideal solution, if the game engine can do it, would be to make the +MovementFriction portion of Hover and Fly be unsuppressible, similar to armor toggles. However, I'm not sure if only part of a toggle can remain unsuppressed. Alternately if the MovementFriction is non-self-stacking, increasing the duration might work.

I sent Synapse a note about this and he said he'd have his folks look into it, so any further insight or ideas for testing would be welcome.

One question for the OP: Did you notice this during a LAMBDA trial? Because the containers that explode stun AND repel you, which might be why you're flying so quickly.

PS: Carry break-frees.