Wing buffet as an alternative to Teleport

[temnix]

What it says. I've been looking at using Wing buffet at very great speeds, like 500 or 5000, instead of Teleport. What it takes is an area-of-effect at target point, a very large one, big enough to include the caster, and "Original caster"-targeted Wing buffet, Towards target point. It is actually faster than teleporting at those speeds, completing even before the caster is through with the finishing pass of the spell. The only difference between them is that, unlike Teleport, Wing buffet is movement in a straight line, so it is stopped by water, cliff sides, houses and bodies of other creatures encountered on the way, unless you include an Override creature data that sets Personal space to 0. That should get the traveler through creatures, and the blocking effect of impassable terrain may be used as a nice limiting factor.

How to use this? Well, you could dispatch enemies to different ends of a large hall without sending them through walls, as with Teleport field, and at predictable distances. Although with the addition of No collision detection the Wing buffet will just as easily get you across that impassable terrain. At these supersonic speeds you only need the shortest of durations, like 5 ticks, to get anywhere in an area. And, unlike Teleport, Wing buffet can be used for avoidance, either with the Away from target point option or simply with a negative speed value. Just power it up and target an enemy to put a mile of space between you.

An interesting property of Wing buffet, not easy to appreciate when it appears in the form of sliding across floors of dragon lairs, is that it can be used to control direction of movement. Use the Away from source option and set a fairly low speed, cast on someone, then walk around in this and that direction and watch how their direction also changes. This way you can herd creatures where you like.

[Desolate Dancer]

An interesting idea, though I'm not sure if it's an improvement upon the existing Teleport effects, and it would require quite a bit of workaround and playtesting to recreate an already existing function.
 

On 8/28/2019 at 10:11 PM, temnix said:

That should get the traveler through creatures, and the blocking effect of impassable terrain may be used as a nice limiting factor.

What would be the point of limiting the effectiveness of this effect?

As a side note, I also had an idea related to the Wing Buffet opcode a couple days ago: to use it as a clerical spell (e.g. Withdraw, Divine Grasp/Hand, Saving Grace etc...) that can be cast upon your ally. It would be a nearly instantaneous casting time much like Stoneskin to make it combat-oriented, and it would cause your ally to drift toward the caster at great speed (e.g. Wing Buffet-toward original caster), thus 'saving them' effectively if they are low on HP and are otherwise helpless. I can see the use of such spell, and it fits well with a cleric's agenda. Then again, I'm not sure if it would work out all that well as I haven't tested it yet.

[temnix]

The effect's limit is useful because you don't want creatures to end up on the other side of walls or across rivers, which can easily happen with teleporting. Wing Buffet doesn't recreate an existing function, it is original and quite different. The Teleport effect (124) is also limited in where it can send creatures. It only has options for sending the caster to the destination (two varieties of this, one for Point in range and another for Living actor, but they work the same), returning to the starting point (unpredictable and for out-of-area NPC throws them in the northwestern corner of the map) and exchange. If you want something else, like some kind of blast that will scatter people, you only have Teleport field to fall back on, where distance is random within the range and there is the problem of ending up on the other side of obstacles I mentioned. Wing Buffet, on the other hand, moves people at the same speed to the same distance. If you put in a duration of 2 ticks (the minumum, 1 tick is too brief to matter) and play around with speed, you can imitate the force wave of a fireball or similar.

There are other uses for it, but I was talking about a quasi-teleport. In response to your idea about moving to an ally, you would need to use a very short duration for Wing buffet, because it is not going to end when your two characters meet face to face, it is going to stay in effect, squeezing them together while it lasts. You should use a very short duration, a few ticks, and accordingly very high speed. Also, as I said, Wing buffet is going to crash the creature it moves into others who are on the way. You could try No collision detection or Override creature data with Personal space to 0 (but in this case make the creature untargetable for the duration, or weird things will happen).