Does the skill Maneuvering Boosters do nothing or am I just missing what it's actually supposed to do?

From what I can tell, one or two upgrades do nothing The skill works only when maxed out, the boosters deploy automatically inches above the ground but only if you free fall. If you hit the ground tangentially from a sprint, you can take damage. This is my experience so far. Waste of LP.

If you played Elex, then you know that the best thing is to use save game very liberally. You save it, do your experiment, and then reload. The autosave every 3 or 5 minutes is great for this. quicksave is great too. Learn to love your F5 and F9 keys. Make them become an extension of yourself like your fingers, eyes, and ears. Only then can you master the true enjoyment of this game. Then you don't waste LP. But of course, you have all of those potions you can make to give yourself LP and various other points. Of course, killing bugs and rats makes you a cold-hearted jerk in this game, so you know, be careful with that when you're taking those LP potions and probably the other ones too ... unless you want Jax to become a cold-hearted jerk. Then by all means.

My question is regarding Maneuvering Boosters, not Retrorockets. I don't have the slightest clue what this has to do with my question.

My bad! I had a personal gripe with the retros and it bled into this thread. Maneuvering Boosters work as intended with the "Floating" skill by allowing to move in any direction while maintaining height. Floating without Maneuvering boosters you can only maintain height and go forward. While sprinting, I don't feel any difference in lateral drift with or without boosters. This is my only instance where boosters don't work.

Tested it again now that I have the Floating skill and I'm still not noticing the slightest difference before or after. I can move in any direction without Maneuvering Boosters already, and there's no difference in speed that I can tell either.

I meant they you just have to play around with them for a bit and see if there is anything different. I had to do that all the time in Elex. Sometimes it was fast. Sometimes I spent 2+ playing sessions just to see if something was actually worth it.

To know for certain, you will need to increase the flying time. That tiny bit we get to start isn't anything.

If you can't do that yet, then don't waste the LP. Wait until you can do a proper test.

General rule of thumb that I generally followed in Elex was if I couldn't tell the difference, then I didn't waste the LP.

It may be a forgotten implementation, and maybe we were supposed to only be able to go up and down before adding maneuvering boosters.

Maybe maybe it was supposed to let you go forwards and backwards, or change direction mid-flight easier?

Right now, my jetpack is the default, and its flight is so short, I can't really tell if I'm maneuvering or it's just the direction I jumped towards.

Right, I played around with it and couldn't find any difference, but I'm not certain I grasp what exactly it's supposed to change. This is why I asked the question on this forum.

It's certainly possible Maneuvering Boosters is currently bugged. I have it, but I hadn't tried aerial combat prior to getting it, so I don't have any idea if it's made a difference or not for me.

I think that's what this forum is supposed to be for, but there's not a lot of engagement yet.

My guess is that they chose not to restrict the player to up and down only until maneuvering boosters because they hadn't figured out how to still allow the player to jump and fall at angles, but also only allow the jet pack to accelerate Jax only in the up direction. I can't imagine that's an easy difference to put to programming code, especially if you want to retain the physics of changing angles as an other than gravity force is applied during current horizontal momentum.

I just tested a bunch of stuff on the jet pack, and I think I figured out what the intent was with maneuvering boosters. I think it's supposed to apply only to the floating improvement. Since there's flying enemies, and with the floating improvement you can fight in the air, maneuvering boosters were probably supposed to be what allowed you to move horizontally and dodge when a flying monster tries to attack you while you're floating.

The dodge while floating doesn't seem to work, and you can move horizontally while floating without the maneuvering boosters, but I noticed a bug. When you activate the floating improvement, a window pops up that tells you that you "now have" maneuvering boosters, even when you haven't activated maneuvering boosters yet.

So, there's definitely a bug in the jet pack improvement system, and at some point pirahnabytes will probably patch it, but probably not before you beat the game,

Found the time to finally check it out (with the current patch).

The skills do make a difference (at least now? again, didn't checked it prior the last patches). Without the floating upgrade, you constantly loose height and you cannot draw your weapon in the air. With the upgrade you can keep your height and draw your weapon.

With the maneuver upgrade, you can "evade" in the air (didn't test it in combat). Jax is swirling around himself and sidestepping one or two meters.

For now reverting to no upgrades, though.

EDIT: Typo.

Loaded the game up again and grabbed the skill to test if the latest patch added it or something.

Nope. Cannot 'evade' in the air after getting the skill. The skill also doesn't give a pop-up explaining how it works.

I used the normal evade button (using controller: Circle / B). I tested it with the hovering upgrade together. The weapon was drawn, iirc.

Will test it later today again, just to be sure.

Not sure what keyboard key that would correspond to, but tested the basic dodge-roll button after getting Maneuvering Boosters and drawing my weapon. Nothing happening for me.