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There have been many threads on this before, but none with any opinion one way or another from Dev. In light of our current spawning positions, I believe it's significant enough to bring this up again. Winged Serpent should not be free to use unless the airborne effect is caused by Leaping Lizard.

For a more detailed discussion on the implications this has on spawn positions, this already covered a lot of it. The summary is that it's extremely easy to rush people down with damage or crowd control, when everyone is so close to one another.

It should be no surprise, then, that an 8 tile long, adjustable, 0-1 momentum movement ability is too powerful. When compared to Jetpack or Backflip, Winged Serpent has more range, no cooldown, and conditionally less of a momentum cost. In exchange, Jetpack has the ability for diagonal movement. These are so grossly disproportional that Winged Serpent is almost objectively better in every situation you need it for.

For example:

This kind of freedom of movement is unheard of anywhere else in the game. I understand Cobra is 'the' kiting class, but there needs to be a clearly defined window of power beside 'always'. Anyone who has ever tried to touch a Demon Hunter using 1m airborne and Winged Serpent knows how frustrating it can get. Here's an example, without any ranged weapons or crowd control that usually accompanies this kind of behavior:


Being able to jump out of harm's way for free when someone is engaged to you is already extremely powerful in its own right; extending this capability to freely navigate the entire battlefield for one momentum is far too much.

Adding a cooldown, or simply making it so that you can't freely Winged Serpent for 0m after a burn up would likely be the way to do it.

I just don't really want to beat DH with too much of a nerf bat, even if it's very well deserved.

I think it just needs to not be free until used after leaping lizard, that seems to be the intended use.

Making it require Jump Cancel would be a start, yes.

As it stands it's insane for reasons already stated. The mobility it gives people is absurd.

I agree with the Jump Cancel being required for it.

Adding a cooldown on Winged Serpent is not optimal for a solution because it will not solve the problem, just reduce the frequency it happens.

I'd say making it require Jump Cancel is good enough. How about a single round cooldown so it can only be used once per turn as well? I think that should be fine, honestly.

Making it require jump cancel would make it worthless, however I feel that it does need a 1 turn CD to prevent this from being an in and out kind of ability, it shouldn't be that way, but we can't dismiss that this wasn't "Intended" as a strictly cobra thing, as Rising Tide was designed to benefit the other stances as well.

All in all there's no reason it should be able to get in and get out instantly, and if you can't take 3 hits in pvp you shouldn't be doing it anyways.

What about making the max range smaller (say 4), but having Leaping Lizard apply a buff that doubles the max range for the next use this turn?

This is actually interesting.

I like that idea, Dev.