Guild Wars 2

Currently:
Underwater content is weak!
It’s not like A-net haven’t put effort into it. Quite the opposite, they designed special weapon with special skills for reach profession, along with plenty underwater villages, vistas and hidden stuff.
The problem with underwater is that people don’t find it very enjoyable, and most of them it’s hard to describe why.
I tried to deconstruct the reason Underwater lacks, and come up with fixes.
“Removing it” is not an option!

In terms of gameplay.

• Give a different trait tree for Underwater combat.
  Sadly, people design their traits with land combat in mind, so when they go underwater, they realize that they haven’t paid much attention to how their builds would work with their underwater skills. The sane way the game remembers your skill and weapon layout each time you dive into the water, it should remember your trait build for the occasion.
  Having different, unique and smaller trait tree specifically for Underwater will also help greatly.

• Skill Variety.
  Whenever you fight underwater, you always feel that you are just spamming skills. There are almost no mobility skills, or generally skills that would encourage some sort of strategy. The best examples are the thief and dagger-elementalist who on land are jumping all over the place, but on see they are just standing there exchanging blows.

• Hybrid weapons for equipment variety.
  You might wonder why you can use a spear underwater and not a dagger. Allowing for some weapons to be used both on land and see will give some much needed variety and will also give some new skill opportunities to implement the above suggestion. Not that wearing a hybrid weapon in a land equipment slot will also make it appear in water equipment slot in gray form (aka you can place another item over it if you want), so players won’t ever require to own the same item twice.
  It would also be good to finally make some use of the versatility of some skills by putting hazards above or bellow a swimming area.

• Acknowledge that you cant judge distance without 3D glasses
  On land, we can easily judge the distance with the enemy by moving the camera and looking at the floor. On water it’s not that easy.
  I suggest some sort of indication of the enemy distance on screen, along with skills that send you near the enemy, and the modifications of skills that require a second press of the button to activate (see engineer “Scatter Mines” and “Toss Elixir H”) to have some sort of sphere are that indicates the effected area if the skill is activated.

• Increase all damage
  I can’t help but feel that all Underwater, especially in higher level zones, take a few seconds longer than advertised to end. This might be in my mind because the lack of variety and lack of Builds, but an increase of 5% on all underwater damage will make up a bit for the problems, and will encourage players to go back to water in the changing period if the above suggestions are implemented. This doesn’t have to be permanent if the other problems are fixed.

to be continued…

In terms of aesthetics:

• Claustrophobia
  I cant help but feel claustrophobic whenever I go underwater. You appear to move slowly when swimming, all underwater designed areas feel small, the draw-distance is limited and generally the place feels uncomfortable to us Human players.
  This can be dealt with a few ways:
  • Choose music carefully
    In another thread someone suggested that Underwater music should be something like this (music from another game). Playing such a soft music in underwater cities when there is no combat is bout to relieve you of all stress.
  • Increase draw distance.
    Especially when there are risen in the area, the visibility tends to become realy small due to the “corrupted water effect”.
    Make so breathing apparatus of Rare and above quality, come equipped with masks that also improve vision, with the exotic gear allowing you to see as if you are on the surface without even the “blue” effect.
  • Make larger areas.
    This only applies in certain rivers, caves and ruins.
    Don’t expect us to fight scales in a river while swimming just because the water is deeper than the waist by a few meters.

• Give more variety in the environments
  Since the underwater environment seems to be the same, with the only variety being the occasional ruins or shipwreck, at least try to make them different in each area by changing the variety and color of the plants or the ruins.
  The colors must always be vibrant and easy on the eyes because normal underwater environments tends to be disgusting. (especially on the surface… Orr!)

• Visible on Map
  Make all underwater areas of importance being visible when looking on the map.
  Design a “toggle underwater content on map” if you have to!

Bonus suggestion:

• Make all the above changes in a single patch!
  Just changing bits and pieces every month won’t convince the players to give underwater content another chance. It’s best to tie the improvements with some sort of event. The event should be easy at first for people to get re-used to Underwater combat and the changes and then make it hard later.

Just wanted to pop in and say I wholeheartedly agree with much of these suggestions. I feel Underwater has taken a backseat while other areas of the game are improved, but with something as defined as this, I feel that soon it deserves its time in the spotlight.

Underwater is being removed from sPvP maps, WvW, and there hasn’t been much to anything that I can recall of underwater in the spotlight for living story. As a comparison, the Monster Hunter series has gone through this process. MH3 came out with underwater combat, and it was used for a good ~1/3 of the game between gathering materials and doing guild quests. I feel with a proper tweak to how underwater feels, we could see people wanting underwater in their maps. I don’t have many (or many different) suggestions now, but I spend some of my free time thinking.

some nice suggestions there. on the Claustrophobia thing… well, all i’ll say is that i have never been creeped out more in my life than the first time i dived into the uncharted waters surrounding Orr and found the abyss staring back at me