A simic hybrid with wings and enough strength can standing jump high over and over, going ten feet or so each time. There is no limits for the number of standing high jumps you can take so this build can glid forever. This is utterly broken. Any thoughts?
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You cannot jump a greater distance than your movement speed allows.
Good point. I missed that. So it would be more like a free dash.
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My posting scheduled is irregular: sometimes I can post twice a week, sometimes twice a day. I may also respond to quick questions, but ignore harder responses in favor of time.
My location is where my character for my home game is (we're doing the wild beyond the witchlight).
"The Doomvault... Probably full of unicorns and rainbows." -An imaginary quote
You cannot jump a greater distance than your movement speed allows.
Good point. I missed that. So it would be more like a free dash.
Still no, you cannot add a distance up to your movement speed at the end of the movement. If you have a movement speed of 30 and you move 10 feet, you can only glide 20 feet. You can't exceed your movement speed through jumping.
Something people are missing: the "gliding" is not part of your movement, it is only while you are falling. You can high jump and considering it falling from there. A high jump with 10 ft run-up gets you 3 + Str Mod off ground, which is typically maxed at 8 ft. Without the run up you only go up half that, so 4 ft. All movement of the jump - any run up and the ascension - is deducted foot for foot from your available movement. The manta glide ability lets you glide 2 ft across for every 1 ft you fall. This glide is still part of falling and does not deduct from your movement.
Using standing high jumps (4 ft) you get 8 extra ft across per jump. For a speed of 30 ft, you could make 7 jumps, so that could be up to 56 ft horizontal movement.
Using running high jumps (8 ft) you get 16 extra ft across per jump. For a speed of 30 ft you can make 1 jump, so that is 16 ft horizontal movement.
There is, however, ambiguity about what actually constitutes "falling". It is left to the DM to decide when you actually "fall" and by design it only comes into play when you fall from a significant height where you have risk of taking damage on landing. This ostensibly means you can only actually "fall" from a height of 10 ft or higher, as anything less carries no risk of damage. Since your max jump height is 8 ft, your jumps do not qualify as "falling". However, one must argue that if this is indeed taken as true then your character's descent from the high jump isn't considered falling and therefore counts under available movement as well and the language of the falling rules seem to support this. So it would be very reasonable for any DM to state jumping, even the descent of which, entirely costs movement and is not considered falling - and since manta glide only affects your falling, you cannot glide from an ordinary jump. Which is sensible, as it prevents the mathematical cheese detailed earlier.
Manta Glide is a weak ability by intention as Simic Hybrids get multiple abilities. It is effectively useless to spellcasters who have spells for better traversal.
And regardless of whether you agree on the vague rules of falling, if going by RAW one cannot argue that manta glide + jumping is a limited effect, not infinite.
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I have always assumed manta glide and jump do not work together. It refers to slowing you decent and glide, which allows horizontal movement as you descend. The wings do not allow you to gain height, that would be flying.
If a simic hybrid fell off a 200ft cliff they could glide to a position 400 feet away horizontally. I would also allow them to jump off getting 210 ft with str of 20 they could make a running jump off 5he cliff to gain an extra 8ft of height and 16ft of distance. They can not "jump" with their fins in mid air to gain more height.
There is then the question of how long that movement takes. Falling allows you to exceed your movement speed to 500ft per round. Manta glide slows that decent but the amount it slows is not given. If you fall off a 200ft cliff you will still take 10d6 damage which implies a speed far more than the 60ft per round if feather fall is cast. It is one of those areas left to the dm.
If you are limited by your movement speed if you take a running jump, 22ft run up to get 8ft in the air, does your turn end with you 8 ft up until it is your next turn? Is the rule different for simic hybrids and other (non flying) races
Based on the wording of manta glide, I would say it counts as movement.
So falling a 300 ft cliff every 6 seconds you move 30ft at an angle (26.8ft horizontal, 13.4 vertical) (unless you use your action to "dash") and fall twice as fast and when you land over 2 minutes later you take 20d6 fall damage.
Alternatively if you cast feather fall you have twice to overall speed, more than 4 times the verticle speed and take no damage. It doesn't seem to make sense.
If I was DMing I would rule you fall at somewhat less than Volos 500ft per round but still very fast, maybe lame you overall speed 500ft so vertical is around 200. Having said that for falling smaller distances say jumping off a 10 ft balcany I can see the argument for saying the glide takes time so would probably rule that the if you land the distance travelled counts towards your movement but if you do not land you fall much further than your movement speed. (If you fall from a height of 20ft you can land 40ft from your starting point that turn but you can only move further if you dash)
Based on the wording I understand it to be falling but at a slower than normal pace. You can not control the rate of vertical decent (unless you allow dashing and using your action to fall faster just doesn't seem right to me).
Based on the wording of manta glide, I would say it counts as movement.
Falling is not part of your movement.
Manta Glide literally states: "When you fall"
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Based on the wording of manta glide, I would say it counts as movement.
Falling is not part of your movement.
Manta Glide literally states: "When you fall"
Sure, but the horizontal movement isn’t falling.
If the simic were jumping off a 500 foot tall building (the one-round falling distance given by XGtE), I wouldn’t let them glide 1000 feet in one round. I’d count the gliding as movement and work backwards to determine the vertical distance fallen.
30 ft horizontal movement is 15ft vertical so if they are doing something else with there actionthey are descending at 15 ft a round, but I can not see how a creature descending that slow can do 20d6 damage.
RAW you are FALLING at a slower speed than normal but the rules do not say how much slower. You are at liberty to say it is 15 ft per round but due to 5he damage it invokes I would say it is much faster.
I'm starting to think that this feature was never proofread, play tested, or even thought about.
Either it does barely more than reduce fall damage, makes falling comically slow, or gives you up to 1000 ft of free movement each turn depending on how you interpret it. And none of those options are very good ones.
At least outside of initiative it isn't as bad (except the potential speed of the glide).
I'm pretty sure the horizontal glide is meant to replace the vertical drop and simply be treated as a fall. As Kotath said, it's rare that this is going to actually end in a large amount of movement. Why not let the Hybrid glide for hundred of feet the one time they're able to climb to some crazy height and do something meaningful with it.
I like that it incentivizes jumping and then gliding short distances to get some extra movement. Love the image of it and makes for a completely different character feel.
I'm pretty sure the horizontal glide is meant to replace the vertical drop and simply be treated as a fall. As Kotath said, it's rare that this is going to actually end in a large amount of movement. Why not let the Hybrid glide for hundred of feet the one time they're able to climb to some crazy height and do something meaningful with it.
I like that it incentivizes jumping and then gliding short distances to get some extra movement. Love the image of it and makes for a completely different character feel.
Even so, this potentially doubles your movement speed for free. And doesn't seem intended.
I'm pretty sure the horizontal glide is meant to replace the vertical drop and simply be treated as a fall. As Kotath said, it's rare that this is going to actually end in a large amount of movement. Why not let the Hybrid glide for hundred of feet the one time they're able to climb to some crazy height and do something meaningful with it.
I like that it incentivizes jumping and then gliding short distances to get some extra movement. Love the image of it and makes for a completely different character feel.
Even so, this potentially doubles your movement speed for free. And doesn't seem intended.
Falling gives you a 500' per round movement rate. It is uncontrolled movement but nevertheless you have it.
Falling is forced movement, gliding is not. You can control your glide. 500' is also less than double your movement. Basically, this paragraph is entirely irrelevant to my point.
As for the 'hop and glide' suggestion, is one even allowed to jump more than once per turn? If you use this indoors, are the ceilings even high enough to make it viable? Not to mention that you cannot pause mid glide to open a door.
Yes. Ceilings are usually 10 feet, and if you can jump even a little to start gliding, it is enough. If there is a door you have to open, it will barely effect over all distance with 10 foot glide segments, plus it doesn't effect the "potentially double" metric I mentioned.
Meanwhile, you have a 30' base move. You use a running high jump, so you run and jump... but, the jumping distance has to come out of your base move limit, so you run 22', jump up 8' and then glide 16' for a total of 38'. And to achieve that you need a 22' runway.
You can do a standing jump for half the distance of a running jump. And any jump height at all is double that in horizontal movement, so any height is enough to double movement speed (2.5 feet if on a grid).
If you were an Aarakocra instead, you would have 50' powered flight that needs no runway. Given that, what is the problem here? That if you happen to have a convenient 500' cliff and ideal conditions, you can potentially glide 1,000' ? A situation that might be important once per campaign, if that?
The importance is that Aaracokra get 50 feet flying and natural weapons and that is it. Simic hybrids would get at least 60' of gliding, darkvision, and still gets either a much better natural weapon, +1 AC, or acid breath. And because a cliff is not required as explained above, this is always relevant if allowed.
While not really flight, it is still faster than the fastest race and only has more upsides rather than a downside to compensate for that speed. Which brings me back to "doesn't seem intended."
I honestly think this feature is pretty straightforward. Glide explicitly says you are moving horizontally, and it is explicitly optional (which means, unlike falling, it isn't forced movement). Moving voluntarily spends your movement. There doesn't seem to be a lot of wiggle room.
If you want to look at design intent, compare the other two options at this tier: Swim speed and Climb speed - two situational mobility features with very low power budget that don't actually increase your general speed. Fall damage negation/reduction and a niche but flavorful mobility trick seems to be right on par with that. A general glide/dash feature that greatly and consistently increases your speed is far, far better.
I honestly think this feature is pretty straightforward. Glide explicitly says you are moving horizontally, and it is explicitly optional (which means, unlike falling, it isn't forced movement). Moving voluntarily spends your movement. There doesn't seem to be a lot of wiggle room.
If you want to look at design intent, compare the other two options at this tier: Swim speed and Climb speed - two situational mobility features with very low power budget that don't actually increase your general speed. Fall damage negation/reduction and a niche but flavorful mobility trick seems to be right on par with that. A general glide/dash feature that greatly and consistently increases your speed is far, far better.
Movement is a specific action you take on your turn. If you fall outside of on your turn, how would the game handle the glide as movement? The only actions you can perform outside of your turn are reactions and held actions (and abilities that specifically trigger outside of your turn like the Vengeance Paladin movement), neither of which would cover suddenly falling because say, an enemy unexpectedly pushes you off a cliff on their turn. This tells me it is still considered falling, because there are situations the rules cannot handle treating it as movement.
How is 500' less than double your movement? Now you not only have given the person a 500' + cliff to jump off of, but a running start?
Yes, you could potentially double your movement if your DM allows multiple jumps rather than assuming that the high jump distance assumes you put your maximum effort into the jump (i.e. limiting you to only one jump per turn). However, if your character is 6' and the ceiling is 10' that is zero leeway for a 4' jump. You are also assuming that the landing part of a jump does count as falling for this purpose, NOT a given.
"At least 60' of gliding" assumes that hop gliding is allowed. Even if it is, it is NOT the same as flight. You cannot gain altitude other than by jumping or climbing. Full flight is far more powerful. Try hop-gliding across a body of water. Or any other unsafe terrain. You are dismissing the difference off hand.
Accidently wrote that backward. I meant double your movement is less than 500'.
There is no rule to limit jumping other than that it costs movement. And you only need to jump 2.5 feet to glide 5 feet on a grid if the exploit is allowed to work.
You might be onto something with jumping not counting as falling and might be a good patch for the potential exploit. It doesn't fix the potential costless voluntary movement if you do find a way to fall, but that requires more effort or specific terrain.
I also never called gliding flying and even specifically mentioned that it wasn't when comparing it to aaracokra's speed. We could instead compare it to a tabaxi and say that it trades skills and climb speed to upgrade the natural weapon and feline agility traits (a pretty good trade to upgrade one of the already better races).
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A simic hybrid with wings and enough strength can standing jump high over and over, going ten feet or so each time. There is no limits for the number of standing high jumps you can take so this build can glid forever. This is utterly broken. Any thoughts?
Pronouns: he/him/his.
My posting scheduled is irregular: sometimes I can post twice a week, sometimes twice a day. I may also respond to quick questions, but ignore harder responses in favor of time.
My location is where my character for my home game is (we're doing the wild beyond the witchlight).
"The Doomvault... Probably full of unicorns and rainbows." -An imaginary quote
You cannot jump a greater distance than your movement speed allows.
When you use manta glide, you are explicitly and voluntarily moving horizontally. You are still limited by your speed.
You might be able to use this tactic to help bypass difficult terrain, depending on the nature of the terrain and how strong your jump is.
Good point. I missed that. So it would be more like a free dash.
Pronouns: he/him/his.
My posting scheduled is irregular: sometimes I can post twice a week, sometimes twice a day. I may also respond to quick questions, but ignore harder responses in favor of time.
My location is where my character for my home game is (we're doing the wild beyond the witchlight).
"The Doomvault... Probably full of unicorns and rainbows." -An imaginary quote
Still no, you cannot add a distance up to your movement speed at the end of the movement. If you have a movement speed of 30 and you move 10 feet, you can only glide 20 feet. You can't exceed your movement speed through jumping.
Jumping counts towards your movement, so if you jump 20 ft. into the air, that counts as 20 feet of movement used.
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Something people are missing: the "gliding" is not part of your movement, it is only while you are falling. You can high jump and considering it falling from there. A high jump with 10 ft run-up gets you 3 + Str Mod off ground, which is typically maxed at 8 ft. Without the run up you only go up half that, so 4 ft. All movement of the jump - any run up and the ascension - is deducted foot for foot from your available movement. The manta glide ability lets you glide 2 ft across for every 1 ft you fall. This glide is still part of falling and does not deduct from your movement.
Using standing high jumps (4 ft) you get 8 extra ft across per jump. For a speed of 30 ft, you could make 7 jumps, so that could be up to 56 ft horizontal movement.
Using running high jumps (8 ft) you get 16 extra ft across per jump. For a speed of 30 ft you can make 1 jump, so that is 16 ft horizontal movement.
There is, however, ambiguity about what actually constitutes "falling". It is left to the DM to decide when you actually "fall" and by design it only comes into play when you fall from a significant height where you have risk of taking damage on landing. This ostensibly means you can only actually "fall" from a height of 10 ft or higher, as anything less carries no risk of damage. Since your max jump height is 8 ft, your jumps do not qualify as "falling". However, one must argue that if this is indeed taken as true then your character's descent from the high jump isn't considered falling and therefore counts under available movement as well and the language of the falling rules seem to support this. So it would be very reasonable for any DM to state jumping, even the descent of which, entirely costs movement and is not considered falling - and since manta glide only affects your falling, you cannot glide from an ordinary jump. Which is sensible, as it prevents the mathematical cheese detailed earlier.
Manta Glide is a weak ability by intention as Simic Hybrids get multiple abilities. It is effectively useless to spellcasters who have spells for better traversal.
And regardless of whether you agree on the vague rules of falling, if going by RAW one cannot argue that manta glide + jumping is a limited effect, not infinite.
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I have always assumed manta glide and jump do not work together. It refers to slowing you decent and glide, which allows horizontal movement as you descend. The wings do not allow you to gain height, that would be flying.
If a simic hybrid fell off a 200ft cliff they could glide to a position 400 feet away horizontally. I would also allow them to jump off getting 210 ft with str of 20 they could make a running jump off 5he cliff to gain an extra 8ft of height and 16ft of distance. They can not "jump" with their fins in mid air to gain more height.
There is then the question of how long that movement takes. Falling allows you to exceed your movement speed to 500ft per round. Manta glide slows that decent but the amount it slows is not given. If you fall off a 200ft cliff you will still take 10d6 damage which implies a speed far more than the 60ft per round if feather fall is cast. It is one of those areas left to the dm.
If you are limited by your movement speed if you take a running jump, 22ft run up to get 8ft in the air, does your turn end with you 8 ft up until it is your next turn? Is the rule different for simic hybrids and other (non flying) races
Based on the wording of manta glide, I would say it counts as movement.
So falling a 300 ft cliff every 6 seconds you move 30ft at an angle (26.8ft horizontal, 13.4 vertical) (unless you use your action to "dash") and fall twice as fast and when you land over 2 minutes later you take 20d6 fall damage.
Alternatively if you cast feather fall you have twice to overall speed, more than 4 times the verticle speed and take no damage. It doesn't seem to make sense.
If I was DMing I would rule you fall at somewhat less than Volos 500ft per round but still very fast, maybe lame you overall speed 500ft so vertical is around 200. Having said that for falling smaller distances say jumping off a 10 ft balcany I can see the argument for saying the glide takes time so would probably rule that the if you land the distance travelled counts towards your movement but if you do not land you fall much further than your movement speed. (If you fall from a height of 20ft you can land 40ft from your starting point that turn but you can only move further if you dash)
Based on the wording I understand it to be falling but at a slower than normal pace. You can not control the rate of vertical decent (unless you allow dashing and using your action to fall faster just doesn't seem right to me).
Falling is not part of your movement.
Manta Glide literally states: "When you fall"
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Sure, but the horizontal movement isn’t falling.
If the simic were jumping off a 500 foot tall building (the one-round falling distance given by XGtE), I wouldn’t let them glide 1000 feet in one round. I’d count the gliding as movement and work backwards to determine the vertical distance fallen.
30 ft horizontal movement is 15ft vertical so if they are doing something else with there actionthey are descending at 15 ft a round, but I can not see how a creature descending that slow can do 20d6 damage.
RAW you are FALLING at a slower speed than normal but the rules do not say how much slower. You are at liberty to say it is 15 ft per round but due to 5he damage it invokes I would say it is much faster.
I'm starting to think that this feature was never proofread, play tested, or even thought about.
Either it does barely more than reduce fall damage, makes falling comically slow, or gives you up to 1000 ft of free movement each turn depending on how you interpret it. And none of those options are very good ones.
At least outside of initiative it isn't as bad (except the potential speed of the glide).
I'm pretty sure the horizontal glide is meant to replace the vertical drop and simply be treated as a fall. As Kotath said, it's rare that this is going to actually end in a large amount of movement. Why not let the Hybrid glide for hundred of feet the one time they're able to climb to some crazy height and do something meaningful with it.
I like that it incentivizes jumping and then gliding short distances to get some extra movement. Love the image of it and makes for a completely different character feel.
Even so, this potentially doubles your movement speed for free. And doesn't seem intended.
Falling is forced movement, gliding is not. You can control your glide. 500' is also less than double your movement. Basically, this paragraph is entirely irrelevant to my point.
Yes. Ceilings are usually 10 feet, and if you can jump even a little to start gliding, it is enough. If there is a door you have to open, it will barely effect over all distance with 10 foot glide segments, plus it doesn't effect the "potentially double" metric I mentioned.
You can do a standing jump for half the distance of a running jump. And any jump height at all is double that in horizontal movement, so any height is enough to double movement speed (2.5 feet if on a grid).
The importance is that Aaracokra get 50 feet flying and natural weapons and that is it. Simic hybrids would get at least 60' of gliding, darkvision, and still gets either a much better natural weapon, +1 AC, or acid breath. And because a cliff is not required as explained above, this is always relevant if allowed.
While not really flight, it is still faster than the fastest race and only has more upsides rather than a downside to compensate for that speed. Which brings me back to "doesn't seem intended."
I honestly think this feature is pretty straightforward. Glide explicitly says you are moving horizontally, and it is explicitly optional (which means, unlike falling, it isn't forced movement). Moving voluntarily spends your movement. There doesn't seem to be a lot of wiggle room.
If you want to look at design intent, compare the other two options at this tier: Swim speed and Climb speed - two situational mobility features with very low power budget that don't actually increase your general speed. Fall damage negation/reduction and a niche but flavorful mobility trick seems to be right on par with that. A general glide/dash feature that greatly and consistently increases your speed is far, far better.
Movement is a specific action you take on your turn. If you fall outside of on your turn, how would the game handle the glide as movement? The only actions you can perform outside of your turn are reactions and held actions (and abilities that specifically trigger outside of your turn like the Vengeance Paladin movement), neither of which would cover suddenly falling because say, an enemy unexpectedly pushes you off a cliff on their turn. This tells me it is still considered falling, because there are situations the rules cannot handle treating it as movement.
Accidently wrote that backward. I meant double your movement is less than 500'.
There is no rule to limit jumping other than that it costs movement. And you only need to jump 2.5 feet to glide 5 feet on a grid if the exploit is allowed to work.
You might be onto something with jumping not counting as falling and might be a good patch for the potential exploit. It doesn't fix the potential costless voluntary movement if you do find a way to fall, but that requires more effort or specific terrain.
I also never called gliding flying and even specifically mentioned that it wasn't when comparing it to aaracokra's speed. We could instead compare it to a tabaxi and say that it trades skills and climb speed to upgrade the natural weapon and feline agility traits (a pretty good trade to upgrade one of the already better races).