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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4402503" data-attributes="member: 42582">My quick search through the PHB found a Paladin encounter at 13 (fly Wis mod squares as part of a charge), a cleric Paragon Path daily at level 20 and a Warlock daily at 10 (both give fly 6, the Warlock one removes standard actions, the cleric one gives hover), a Warlock encounter at 15 (no attack), a Warlock 22 encounter (fly at own speed), a Wizard daily at 16 (fly 8, minor to sustain) and then the Mass version of that as a Wizard daily at 22. Wizards also have Levitate at 6 with Sustain Move for quite limited horizontal movement, a vertical cap of 4 squares and an AC/Ref penalty. And there's the chariot as a 22nd level Cleric daily that can carry up to 5 targets. Only the cleric gets the ability to hover (so the others - except Levitate - have to move or else they crash, and they lose Opportunity Attacks).I don't have the play experience with 4e to confirm this hypothesis, but to me at least that looks like Fly being less frequent, higher level, and (except for the Cleric Paragon Path 20th power) less powerful, and these (presumably deliberate) changes give me more confidence that the design team has better taken account of the availability of fly as a balancing factor for encounter mix and monster abilities.The fact that they've abandoned the old Manoeuvrability Classes, inherited from the 1st ed DMG, also makes me more confident they've had a serious look at flying as a factor contributing to encounter balance.I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me here. But non-constant flying seems to be a deliberate design choice in 4e. Again, the fact that deliberate decisions have been made about flying makes me more confident that the balance issues have been taken into consideration in monster design and encounter-mix suggestions.I don't know the 3.5 Warlock very well, but I'm sure you're right. In which case I'd have to conlcude - from my own long experience GMing a fly-heavy campaign - that the 3.5 design team made an error.Well this is the issue. Deliberate changes to fly of the sort I've mentioned above make me more confident (as I've also mentioned above) that fly won't lead to domination, because I infer that it has concsiously been accounted for in the overall design of the game.Having had the problem, I see it as completely different. It's not just an issue of overall tenable storyline (and, as I said above, I don't really care about the overland travel aspect at all - like Warforged starvation, that goes to overall campaign flavour but not to encounter design), it's an issue of tenable encounter design. As a GM I'm happy to work on campaign flavour, but I want the game mechanics to provide me with a bunch of (more-or-less) playable encounters out of the box. That means that monsters have to be balanced to take fly into account. I've stated above what I take to be the evidence (absent sufficient actual play experience) that 4e has done this.</blockquote>

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