Gliding feels floaty,there's no real sense of speed or weight of the gravity.In Firefall if you got to slow your character it started to wobble before stalling and if you picked up lots of speed the screen started to shake and it had a subtle sound effect that gave you that sense of speed.
You should feel the drag of the air that slows you down and the gravity that pulls down on you.The way that you leverage these two elements should determine how fast and how far you glide.I think those should be the limiting factors in gliding and not cooldown.
I thing in a game a good implementation of a feature is something that is easy to learn or do but hard to master.
I remember in the early days of Firefall there was a part of the map called Sunken Harbor that wasn't ready so it was walled off behind the melding, the only way to get there was by glider.There was no deployable glider pads(if I remember correctly),the only way to glide was the static ones at watchtowers.
It wasn't something that you could do on the first try,I think it took me 40 mins of repeated attempts before I was able to get to Sunken Harbor.
When I got there I felt a real feel of accomplishment and it made me better at gliding and with subsequent attempts it got easier.
Found a vid of what i was talking about:
I do remember a lot of people complaining that they couldn't fly and that the gliders are broken but my reply was always:Gliders glide,they don't fly.
As for afterburner: in Firefall it was more of a pvp ability,it allow you to better position yourself or close the gap between you and your opponent fast,it also did damage if you hit someone in you path? dono if i remember right.If we have dash what's the point of it?
The current implementation is only good at traveling and combine that with the floaty glider you can cover huge distances,so my question is what's the need for other forms of travel like mounts?
I don't think i should be able to do this:
In Firefall there was situations when it was better to use a LGV and situations where it was better to glide,but one didn't exclude the other.