Alternative to Flight: Stream

Suggestions
1

As you all know, Flight spell has been scrapped due to the use of Flight overshadowing the use of boats. I think that we can make something that accomplishes a similar goal but doesn’t necessarily blow boats out of the water. For this I’d suggest what I’d like to call Slide but somebody already made a suggestion called Dash in which Slide is a variant, so I’m going to call it Stream.

Stream would function similarly to Flight in the respect that it moves you at high speeds except it would be entirely limited to the ground. It would propel you across the floor, sliding along a trail of your magic, that would supply a degree of protection against direct-hit beams and blasts dependent on clash rates. Here are some examples as to what I would be suggesting:
Water/Ice:

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Fire:
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Ice + Wind:
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How Would This Be Implemented?

I have two suggestions:

#1. Transport Only
This would work similar to Flight in the respect that it would have an interruptible start-up time, however, since it isn’t something airborne, I would give it less speed than Flight. Having less speed would probably mean a lesser start-up time as well, less as in something like probably 2.5 seconds, for this reason it wouldn’t scale with cast-speed.

#2. Combat-Optimized
This wouldn’t work very similarly to Flight. It would have an extremely fast magic energy drain in return for a cast time similar to what we have for every other spell rather than excruciatingly long. In fact, as an alternative to having a large drain, it could potentially have a total duration so you don’t kill magic energy every time you use it. Either way, these two would change based on a speed setting, the higher the setting, the faster it runs out.

Wouldn’t This Still Clash with Boats?

I think this could be done in many ways that don’t clash with boats. The Combat-Optimized implementation would not at all clash with boat speed. However, the transportation only implementation is still a concern. I think that just solely the fact that you’re literally travelling across-sea as opposed to above-sea makes it much more different as you are more vulnerable to sea hazards than in a boat. However, the fast travel speed may be a little concerning depending on how far-distanced the islands are. For this, it is possible that this spell could only work on dry land, as in it would automatically cancel overseas. Once again, this is would be heavily dependent on island size, and it may make this spell useless if the average island is much too small. For this, I would say that maybe this spell legitimately wouldn’t be worth time adding, however, the Combat-Optimized implementation might still be something do-able. Even if it would be bad in combat, which I doubt it would be, it would still be useful for short-distance travel.

But What About Magic Speed Enchants? What About Gold Users?

We already know magic speed can scale differently with different things. For example, placed explosion cast time scales off of a magic’s native magic speed, but not at a proportional rate. Although Lightning is 3x faster than Iron, its Placed Explosions do not cast 3x faster. A similar logic could be applied to this, so that Gold Stream spells wouldn’t be useless, and stockpiling magic speed enchants wouldn’t make you the literal flash.

What About Hover?

I’m currently not sure what the plans for hover are, but no matter what it would still be a method of transportation faster than Hover with the cost of it being entirely grounded as opposed to Hover being airborne or extremely close to the ground, so they wouldn’t necessarily be the same spell. Additionally, spells would not be cast-able during Stream as opposed to Hover. Another difference is as said earlier, it would have clash properties. This wouldn’t affect AoE otherwise this spell would literally be a shield, it would only affect the attacks during travel time, so if you directly beamed or blasted a player with Fire and it hit the Stream from Water magic, it wouldn’t pass through, but if you splashed them with the AoE you could still damage them.

What About Dodging/Agility

Dodging/Agility

Cooldown?

I forgot to address this, yes there would be a cooldown otherwise this would probably be very overpowered.

2

seems legit for ground movement

3

I think it would be better to have the option of choosing the speed and or length of the spell. Maybe the longer it last the more charge up and slower it is? And if it’s faster then the charge up would increase and the duration of it would decrease. Other than that I think this could work.

4

I would focus on combat-viable, transportation isn’t really a goal because boats.

Also ground movement should be the focus, since for multiple reasons being able to move while in the air is a bad idea (original flight was designed specifically so it can’t operate well in combat, so it wasn’t a problem).
Also thanks for using gifs they helped clear it up a bit since I wasn’t able to view the first two earlier.
Lastly I think magic speed should affect the movement speed of the thing. This would be a buff to fast magics, sure, but it should also cost more mana so the distance traveled is the same, just travel speed. Furthermore it suits fast magics fighting style best, using mobility and hitting multiple times instead of hitting hard a few times.

5

Just added that to the suggestions as you were typing.

6

Continuing the magic speed thing, you note that lightning does not cast 3x faster. But magics don’t affect casting speed (or if they do they barely affect casting speed). Magic speed =/= casting speed.
Blasts and beams are noticeably different for magics, and this should be similarly affected.

7

I prefer the combat version since, y’know, boats and islands. Also, if magic tiers are still a thing, possibly unlock either stream or hover at a different tier so that you don’t get both for a normal magic or something.
…But I guess it replaces flight so it wouldn’t be that bad if they were both the same tier, however their similarities would become very obvious.

Also I’m out of votes

1 Like
8

Certain attacks do, just not blasts and beams.

If this isn’t enough clarification and Meta’s doc which mentions it isn’t enough I have several examples and a video covering this topic I could share.

9

That makes sense.

But I still think that magic speed should affect movement speed while using this spell.
One could even use a logarithmic scale to prevent people from effectively teleporting at higher levels.

10

Yeah I covered that in this section

11

With your writing you tend to make a short line before the next paragraph instead of just leaving a space

12

I have a habit of doing this. I usually use it to separate similar and different topics.
Say I start with magic speed, I’ll write and then press shift + enter if I want to split up the paragraph but still want to keep it connected.
Actually now that I think about it I just press shift + enter all the time and hit enter twice when I want to emphasize things.

13

I like the idea of this, would be cool to use on water while also not being too much, good for something like just going to a nearby island due to boat taking too much effort (boat better for long distance), and doesn’t remove risk.

14

cool suggestion, but it overshadows double tap to dash and agility builds.

islands won’t be the size of magius to need a transport spell.

15

Those work in combat, but this wouldn’t unless you managed to get enough time to charge it as well as not getting hit (since, like flight, this should end immediately upon taking damage).

They’re still going to be pretty big. Alalea felt big, and the biggest islands would be within the space of 4 of them.

16

@Alv @Bingo721 We’re talking about the same conversation so I’ll address both of you in this.

I honestly think that this is probably the biggest criticism of this so I can see the arguments for it but I’ll address them. For this I assume we’re arguing based off the combat-optimized version and not the transport only, we should clarify that for the conversation (@Bingo721 this was the first problem with your response to the dash comment, you’re using one implementation to debunk the other, we need to differentiate).

Now, onto the actual arguments. The problem with saying that this overshadows dodging and agility goes as follows, we already have an ability that is covered by a physical feature and we’re getting more. Magic jump has most advantages over T-Jump: you don’t get frozen while using it, and you can use it midair. It’s basically a better T-Jump that costs magic energy as opposed to stamina. We also have to consider that:

A. You’re even using this ability in the first place
and B. The magic energy drain will be massive

I have addressed the magic energy drain here

My wording, however, is flawed in this respect.

So with that being pointed out, let me clarify, I don’t mean that you legit lose 0 magic energy from this implementation, I mean you don’t murder like 30-50% of your magic energy bar from one use. I also haven’t stated so I will get onto adding that, but I do think this would be laughably broken as a running tool without a cooldown, so I will get on to adding that.

Onto Agility builds, I’m not sure how Agility would impact this spell specifically, if at all. If not, this would be perfectly fine because if you built on Agility this move would have 0 point depending on how fast max agility is, whereas if you built on Magic Speed this would be useful. Once again, this does depend on how fast max agility is. Even despite all this the previous logic that overuse will basically kill your magic energy still covers this.

@Bingo721 already addressed this in their own comment, and even then if we’re going off the combat-optimized version (because I personally feel this one is the best though I will leave the other implementation listed), this would mostly be used as a form of short-term transport rather than long-term, though it would help in long-term.

17

Yeah I’m not sure on how the distance between islands is gonna be so I just briefly mentioned that this could be a potential thing, if it’s a large distance between islands I think this would be a very plausible feature for the transport-only implementation.

1 Like
18

tony hawk pro skater 2

19

Use magic energy to walk on water…

20

Use magic energy to hover with Shadow…
Use magic energy to deal damage with Shadow…
Use magic energy to hover with Paper…

Yeah it definitely isn’t possible to move people using Water IRL, riptides and tsunamis and whirlpools are just social constructs, and Shadow and Paper are just fine, let’s also ignore the fact you can already Hover with Water for the sake of argument.