How to Train Your Flyer Nerf

[Kuriositty]

Short version: Ow, my birds. Houston, we are now on the slow train! Please work on balancing the creatures!

Book version:

If flyer dinos are OP in PvP or PvE, the solution is not straight up nerfs, it's altering their utility. For example, if this is a problem don't allow flyers to pluck anybody off their mounts, OR build in a saddle utility item such as a "seat belt" to prevent such kidnappings (either on the saddle or the player wears it, and it takes durability damage during each "snatch attack" until it breaks).

I prefer to see balance rather than nerf! The biggest, most important question is, "What is this animal useful for, what is it intended for, how can it best serve its role?" And then make sure it is desirable to players, not by overbuffing it or nerfing other creatures, but by improving the animal's utility in that role.

Right now, the nerf has crippled a lot of flyers; even with the speed points refund, a lot of them were at or near max tamed level and now do not have enough points remaining to repair the stamina "damage" enough to make them effective again. Sad to say my SP birds can't make a fraction of the distance they once did; they're slower, so they cover less ground, but the stamina drain itself is just as fast or faster than it was; it costs 2-3x more to go 1/3rd the distance. It's impossible to even make a trip to the nearby metal mountain (my SP base is on the Island east coast near the swamp mouth, zone 3) without a couple of of tedious breaks, complete with fights I have to let my on-follow birds finish because the one I'm riding runs out of gas long before anything dies. And then we wait some more...the stamina regen seems painfully slow on most flyers. A trip to the volcano for obsidian is out of the question at this time.

For example: SP playtesting my low-mid 50-70 argies (easy "first" tames for newer survivors) the 300-500 stamina is so low and drains so quickly that the bird can sprint for only thirty seconds or so and doesn't have the energy to stay in the air for attacking even a moderate amount of time. Also, it's out of gas in the time it takes to snatch and kill even small beach creatures. As it stands, only high level argies even start with enough stamina to do much of anything. It's also no longer very effective at capturing tames to bring home, unless it's very close to the base or a taming pen is built on location.

Temp solution: Fly everywhere with two birds, and swap when your current mount is out of gas.

Scorched Earth question: As argy and tapy are the only ridable flyers, how on earth is anyone to snatch wyvern eggs, OR lure in female wyverns, on critters that are likely to be run down and toasted? I can run faster than most of my birds now.

Quetz was not really meant to be an offensive combat creature, so making it FAST is not as important as making sure it can do what it was intended to do--slow, stamina, heavy weight. Now that auto-turrets and plant X can't be put on dino platforms, Quetz war-riders have to be a lot more on their game and bring friends for manual turrets, if the quetz is tough but slow enough that it can be attacked by argy, ptera, and tapy riders. The stamina should be hefty but not infinite so it can't park over bases forever. Maybe make it a little less tanky and a little more stamina-y; it can stay in the air plenty long but parking in heavy crossfire would be unwise.

Tapejara wasn't fast to begin with, but now I don't think anyone will be using it as a mobile pewpew platform for rider and buddy, and especially not in any wyvern-tranqing operations. It's too easy for ptera to C-roll it down if the handler is not aware and quick on the dodge. If flyers were allowed in caves, it could be used for exploration (need more bats and wall-crawlers to make this risky! Wall pouncing spiders a la thylacoleo?) Give it a little more weight value to stand the multiple riders and their armor/weapons/ammo so it can be appealing and useful for surprising cliff and tree emplacements, but that's about all it's good for now.

Ptera will likely be king of the skies as usual, as since no one in the air can outrun it in any way shape or form, all the ptera has to do is C-roll anyone on a bird to death. Just dodge the hookshots. It doesn't even have to focus on leveling HP, since the other riders have no hope of catching it to do any return damage. Just run damage and stamina, and unless you get into air-to-air combat with other pteras, you'll rule. (Just watch the lightning wyvern's lucky shot.)

Noted: This flyer nerf does not seem to apply to the non-ridable flyers such as dimorphs and vultures. They still have speed levels, and stamina doesn't matter a whit to them. Dimorph could be the answer to pteranodon sky-king--roll them up speed and damage and send them after that guy laughing at you as he's buzz-sawing your argy on his ptera.

Suggestion: Allowing flyer speed to vary with taming conditions/effectiveness. OR it can double making bred animals more valuable, and breeding more desirable, by allowing flyers to have the imprint bonus to their speed again. Effort = Reward. This would allow at least some variability, and some hope, to the flyer speed issue. Or even if speed levels cost more and give less speed boost, just make it possible to CHOOSE that, obviously at heavy cost to health, stamina, damage, etc. I.e. a speed argy is not going to be good for pvp, it's made of paper.

In the end, it's just unrealistic that my flying creatures should be so easily outrun at a slow lope by even the derpiest of my ground animals. If this is a thing, look at nature (where nothing is fair, every deck is stacked, and nobody gets any shortcuts!) and balance the speeds of ALL creatures. I'm fine with having to use heavy ground animals to haul the biggest loads down from the mountains, but I also want to be able to choose to carry less through the air and not be laughed at by passing turtles as I do so. :) (How fast can a speed boosted turtle run? Pretty darn fast, as it turns out.)

Side note: On the Center, where Wild Giga can spawn ANY DARN WHERE, it's not laziness that prompts flying everywhere for everything--it's pure survival, pvp or pve. On that map, where most of the area is blind cliffs and dense jungle, by the time you see the Giga it's already running at your face, and I don't know anybody (except maybe a few sporty raptors or the new iguanodon) who is able to outrun a Wild Giga on the ground. I've lost a few hauler trains that way. (What I was told? "Fly more, noob." So I did. Now?)

If stat adjustments, buffs, and nerfs are going to be the order of the day, then to avoid steaming up a lot of players and forcing everyone to re-tame constantly, allow creatures to make use of Mindwipe Tonic or a similar item AT LEAST for the duration of Early Access, until stats settle out more. This makes playtesting quicker and easier and lets fewer people feel like they have been busted back to a do-over. It will not make any animal inherently stronger or weaker to do so (nobody magically gets more or less points than they would have started with), and will allow players to re-tune their creature when a big stat change rolls out. Especially for those working hard at breeding. It's fine if a Creature Mindwipe Tonic is hard to get or hard to make.

Looking forward to more improvements!


PS: Loving the horse, btw. :D

PPS: No TL:DR comments please; if you don't want to take the time to read it, don't waste your time commenting on it, I'll just giggle at the minutes I cost you. :)

[Kuriositty]

More playtesting update using lower level flyers that "newbies" would be taming easily:

Low level argies can't escape ants. They can't fly far enough fast enough to get out of the flying ants' range, and their pursuit is neverending as long as you're in their chunk of landscape, so every time you stop and rest to regain stamina (which is sloooww) the ants will catch up. I played hopscotch with a pack of ants around the northern coast of the Island for a while, then rested and tried to kill them instead (because they're annoying).

You guessed it, the mid 50's argy did not have enough stamina while ridden to complete air combat with decently leveled ants before running out of gas. The ants' stamina debuff/disease makes air combat with them practically impossible, even with a higher level argy, due to how quickly the bird's stamina drains even under normal circumstances.

Result: Mounted argy and I walking very slowly away from the ants, realizing this was impossible to escape, jumping off the argy so that it can magically fly again and do combat with the ants on its own while I poke some of them with a pike.

Haven't tested ants vs ptera yet, and my quetz doesn't generally travel low enough to bother with them (I haul with quetz, I don't fight with them). Dangers in Ark need to always have options: EITHER to defeat it OR escape it effectively, using decent strategies (*coughWTFWILDGIGAcough*). In this case, one player on a slower, lower stamina bird could neither defeat nor escape the hazard without "dismounting hax."

I realize ants are meant to be a moderately dangerous nuisance, but I didn't think that a single sting from them should be enough to effectively ground even a moderate leveled (70+) argentavis.

Solution: Nerf ants.
OR
Balance flyers.

[Sipowicz]

nah man, makes much better sense to just nerf Everything directly into the ground. Its the only way to make sure NO ONE has an advantage.