Archwing VS K-Drives?

It seems a silly question as to what’s better, Archwing or K-Drives. Both are basically infinite in their uses, but surely the answer is the K-Drive, the awesome hoverboard skateboard thing that’s rewarded to players for completing the Vox Solaris quest, which you can use to zip and zoom and trick your way across the Orb Vallis, right?

Surely the K-Drive is better than that boring old Archwing?

Well… yes and no.

You see, there’s generally two states of mind when you’re playing in the Orb Vallis. You’re either wandering around or you’re doing bounties. One of those activities has a much bigger time limit than the other. You have to get bounties done somewhat urgently. Sure, you can leave them, but you’ll eventually just want to get to each bounty location, to it and move on.

K-Drives are sometimes a little too… slow…

I’m not saying this because I only have the basic board. I’m saying this because it’s… kinda just a fact. You see, the Orb Vallis is a really, really big place with lots of strange things in it. More importantly though, it has a lot of mountains in it. A lot of them. They’re all over the place. And they’re pretty big and steep. Sure, you can go around them, but what if you’re in a hurry?

That’s where Archwing shines. Just getting from A to B. Even the slowest Archwing, the Elytron, is far faster than a K-Drive, Simply because it’s easier to go over mountains than around them. Or essentially through them, if you’re using Itzal. Frankly, nothing beats the super speedy teleportation that Itzal offers. It’s basically a jetpack made after a brainstorming session between Nova and Loki after they got insanely drunk on the fumes of a Balor Fomorian core.

Archwings also have a little more utility though, since they have abilities. Amesha in particular has the ability to make your allies invulnerable, as long as you don’t have max energy. The half-assed build I use on my Amesha gives me a good 20ish seconds of invulnerability. If you use it close to your squad, they all get the benefit too. Itzal has invisibility, Odonata gives you a Volt shield for a bit and Elytron has rockets. Lots of rockets.

Oh and you can use your guns while you use Archwing. You can’t fish, but you can still shoot things. Which is handy because there’s a lot of Corpus patrols. On your K-Drive, you either have to drive past them or leap off, kill them then get back on. When you have a non-default K-Drive, you can mod it so you can leave trails of fire or send your K-Drive flying into enemies, but the Vent Kid standing takes a while to earn.

I’m not saying in any way that K-Drives are bad. They’re fricking awesome. You can roam around, hoverboard across water and do tons of cool tricks, pissing off the Corpus as you do so. But there’s a time and a place for them. If your squad is waiting for you, maybe using Archwing is better.

Now that they both have infinite uses, you can switch between K-Drive and Archwing with ease.