Group Fly and Pets?

Do pets stay within range as you fly with Group Fly, or do they lag behind(as they do when traveling on the ground) and end up falling?
Do they stay within range if you fly straight up, thus providing the least range for them to fall behind due to a non-spherical Group Fly bubble(if it is non-spherical, I do not know)?

Do Demons specifically do well with Group Fly?

Does lag affect Group Fly with pets too badly?
I imagine a bad rubber-band may mean the pets are out of range and fall. Does this happen?
(I have to be concerned about lag as my internet is not exactly fast or perfect all day, every day.)



I'm rather curious about the above because I have gotten a bit tired of my Demons taking too long to follow me and being killed by enemy groups they run through. If Group Fly works with them well, that would alleviate the issues and allow me to take my pets quickly through messy areas.

It would also be interesting to see how a combination of Group Fly and Team Teleport would perform, which some builds may have the space to allow.

Also....

How does Group Fly behave with Afterburner?
Is it useful for increasing the speed or is Group Fly too slow, like Hover, to benefit from it?

I know Group Fly loses the ability to affect others when Afterburner is active(which I wish it would still work), but my idea is to just work with Group Fly and Afterburner instead of Fly at all.
It may be slower, but if I'll be using Group Fly then it will mean one less toggle to mess with if I am going to take Afterburner.




I also wish we could select Group Fly as the second choice in the pool(to take instead of one of the other choices), but I'm not sure how that would make sense.
Mayeb it could work since now the tier 3 choice is a tier 1-2 choice, if it was made the new tier 3 since Fly has changed to essentially be tier 1-2.

Afterburner is affect self debuff, making everyone in your group fly.. stop flying.

It does work 'ok', lag indeed make them fall behind sometimes (or just retarted AI), but outside the bubble the fly buff still works for a few seconds for them to catch up again.

Team teleport still works good, as long pets are in range. Though Necro suffer from it on a strange way, as the T1 pets have a 'delay' after a leap/fall, they seem to get this delay also after a teleport.

I believe Group Fly still has a higher flight speed for the character with the power than for anyone else affected by the power. This means that if you fly at full speed, your pets will eventually fall behind and fall out of the sky.

One strategy to cope with that effect is to put yourself on follow to a pet, and navigate that pet around by using the "goto" command. This will insure that you're not traveling faster than your slowest flyer.

Combat while running Group Fly will be problematic, as even ranged pets want to close to melee at times. If you're too far away, they will drop to the ground.

Group Fly and Team Teleport, by themselves, are unworkable for travel powers -- they both suffer from drop outs.

However, they do work well in a mission for tactical advantages.

*Together* they do work well as a Travel power for pets/teammates since the Group Fly stops the extras from falling. But, you have to take 4 prerequiste powers to get both of them. I've been asking for the prerequisites to be dropped, or at lease reduced to one power each so that they can be taken together to make up for the eachother's shortcomings.

If you have access to First Ward, you can pick up a temporary group fly power (which has no end cost) and test stuff with your pets there. All you have to do is go around killing the Hamidon Seed's Poop (I forgot what they were called) that occasionally drops out of the sky (I forgot what they were called). Each time you kill one, you get additional time on the power. It's also a big zone to test Group Fly in.

Group fly is probably only a solo power. In a group causing people to fly will tend to upset them for several reasons.

1. They just don't to fly.

2. Thematically it does not go well for them and they feel your imposing your thematic ideas on their toons

3. Power that require you to be on the ground actually are screwed up because the person is flying now.

4. Decreased travel speed.

With group fly you do fly faster then the other people effected by it which will cause them to drop when you get out of range. Basically it is the same group fly from 7 years ago minus the Hit penalty

Please do a search for my name on the suggestion forum and review what I have posted. if you agree please support it.

This is starting to seem a lot less useful than I thought it may have been.
I guess it is another case of CoH having very very situational and annoying mechanics with certain powers, especially travel powers.



I wish they would get ideas from the competition, things that won't get them in trouble.

For example:

Pets could definitely follow better very easily.
I used to play WoW, during a long break from CoH, and they made pets follow awesomely as they would desummon when you mount up to travel and resummon when you were dismounted and ready to fight, automatically.

The pets in WoW also followed a sort of "summoning circle" pattern around the character. Any pets you have, for any reason, follow you starting directly to your left, and keeping up perfectly, and then placing themselves in a circle around you, starting from your left, counterclockwise around you.

WoW never seems to have pet follow issues, and making the pets of CoH behave just as well seems pretty obviously easy after seeing a working example in WoW.




Pets, and the travel power interaction with them, really need to be worked on to improve them. This is especially important when they are asking free players to spend extra for the archetypes with pets.
They're still fun for those of us that have learned to deal with the issues and workaround them, but the pets are still far from "a well-oiled machine" and thus difficult to interest people in.







By the way, anybody else seen how Wow pets behave?
It seems they just copy the player's actions, if they can, but off to the left, and catch up when something happens.

If CoH just changed the way pets follow from "standard behind the character trail" to s system where pets keep position in a circle around the character, each of them at a 60 degree position of the 360 surrounding a character(with additional non-MM pets trailing behind as usual since they are not essential like MM pets are) with similar code to now when they "fall out of following position" so that they keep up, then it would look so cool and work so much better when Masterminds try to keep pets close.
(Edit: I even think the issue of stairs and other terrain issues could be fixed by this, but that may require doing something like giving pets some sort of very temporary flight, that they activate when they get stuck, to get over/around the offending terrain since jumping doesn't seem to work, perhaps because it is not triggering properly.)

I certainly have better ideas, that definitely would work, than the current system. I'm surprised that no other game has really attempted to emulate and improve upon the Mastermind from City of Heroes yet, given how awesome it is and how much room there is to greatly and easily improve it.








Anyway, it seems I'll have to try testing Group Fly somehow, but will likely end up abandoning the plan if it is a pain to make it "work as intended".

It sucks that we have to work to compensate for obvious design flaws that should be fixed, and quite probably fixed easily.

Afterburner, there was a thread in the forums explaining how it really worked and how best to use it.

If anybody has that thread bookmarked, please post the link so I can read it.

7 years ago it was good.

There were not temp fly powers.. In zones like fault line you were very happy to have it. Even in firebase zulu setting. You understood its limitation and worked with them but it helped out. Nutshell it was useful but the developers made other things more useful and failed to keep this power and even several sets up to date with the game. Again being a new game it was fun to fly around sometimes.

On my masterminds, I do not use group fly (group travel) to haul pets across zones. I move out at top speed; whatever pets catch up, catch up. They will 'pet tp' to you at intervals. Resummon at the mission door.

I use group fly for two distinct situations: one, where I want the pets to move with me to a position without the insane aggro-crazy pathing up stairs or ramps. The other time I use group fly (and the only instance I use it for extended periods while fighting) is against the Knives of Artemis and the piles and PILES of insanity creating caltrops. If you are a teammate is such situations: tough noogies.