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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6965306" data-attributes="member: 996">The only thing I can think of that fits that description of 'reduced to hovering over the ground' would have been the ground-effect pixies in one of the last post-Essentials books (and the pixie was rather silly, across the board, but it did turn out to be fun in the long run).&nbsp; 4e dealt with the abuse of flight/invisibility/polymorph/etc in 3.x by 'nerfing' (as mentioned above) them, both by making them less broken and/or harder to use, and by pushing them to higher levels.&nbsp; Virtually the only example of flight at first level was the pixie, and it did have the laughable altitude limit - other heroic level flight effects only lasted for a turn or two or required you to land at the end of the action.&nbsp; By paragon, full flight became increasingly available.&nbsp; Invisibility and Polymorphic, OTOH got nerfed all the way back to something resembling classic Invisibility, Change Self &amp; Polymorph Self.&nbsp; Invisibility mostly precluded attacking (and/or any standard action), much as in the olden days, and most shapechanging effects were cosmetic (didn't change size or other abilities), or (again) precluded attacking while changed.&nbsp; Interesting exceptions included the primal Druid &amp; Warden classes, with shapechanging built into their power sets.&nbsp; So, 'nerfed' (compared to 3.x, profoundly), sure, and mechanically different (ditto), of course, but not exactly absent.&nbsp;I hadn't thought about the old plane-shift's inconvenient arrival mechanism in many years.&nbsp; I suppose 4e lessened that down side when it used the teleport circle conceit for planar portal, as well (plane shift, meanwhile, changed to a vehicle-based ritual, IIRC). It's funny the spells we miss, sometimes.&nbsp; I quite missed Shocking Grasp in 4e, and, when I designed a stereotypical fire-mage sorceress in 3.0, I quite missed the lowly Affect Normal Fires. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 6965306, member: 996"] The only thing I can think of that fits that description of 'reduced to hovering over the ground' would have been the ground-effect pixies in one of the last post-Essentials books (and the pixie was rather silly, across the board, but it did turn out to be fun in the long run). 4e dealt with the abuse of flight/invisibility/polymorph/etc in 3.x by 'nerfing' (as mentioned above) them, both by making them less broken and/or harder to use, and by pushing them to higher levels. Virtually the only example of flight at first level was the pixie, and it did have the laughable altitude limit - other heroic level flight effects only lasted for a turn or two or required you to land at the end of the action. By paragon, full flight became increasingly available. Invisibility and Polymorphic, OTOH got nerfed all the way back to something resembling classic Invisibility, Change Self & Polymorph Self. Invisibility mostly precluded attacking (and/or any standard action), much as in the olden days, and most shapechanging effects were cosmetic (didn't change size or other abilities), or (again) precluded attacking while changed. Interesting exceptions included the primal Druid & Warden classes, with shapechanging built into their power sets. So, 'nerfed' (compared to 3.x, profoundly), sure, and mechanically different (ditto), of course, but not exactly absent. I hadn't thought about the old plane-shift's inconvenient arrival mechanism in many years. I suppose 4e lessened that down side when it used the teleport circle conceit for planar portal, as well (plane shift, meanwhile, changed to a vehicle-based ritual, IIRC). It's funny the spells we miss, sometimes. I quite missed Shocking Grasp in 4e, and, when I designed a stereotypical fire-mage sorceress in 3.0, I quite missed the lowly Affect Normal Fires. ;) [/QUOTE]

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