Guild Wars 2

I would really love to know if there’s any chance for aquatic raids in the future. Although the aquatic combat system is still kind of immature ( according to friends), the idea itself is definitely attractive. (finally, we may need toughness!…..we do right? (0,0))

(it could be just one or two bosses who need to be confronted underwater. Not necessarily the whole wing)

Just an idea.

Anet is, very unfortunately, making a point of absolutely blotting underwater content, up to the bare minimum. Think of LS3 for example, even Ember Bay which is a freaking Island chain barely has any underwater stuff.

The Maguuma Jungle, which is ehrm, a kitten jungle (has any developer ever visited the Amazon? The main transportation there is by boat fyi), also barely has any drop of water, most of it being the Lore-jellyfish tunnel under Tangled Depths.

With that in mind, no it is not likely at all that we ever get any mention of underwater raiding. It was already unpopular back on dungeon golden era with Honor of the Waves, and it is even more so now. We’ll be lucky if we even get to see the Deep Sea Dragon.

Can’t have challenging underwater combat until we have, you know, actual underwater combat. I like the idea I even like some of how ANet set it up. However, it’s plagued by problems, including that most profs lose a lot of skills below water. Revenant’s underwater capability seems to be only 50% complete.

Given that ANet already has its hands full with balancing PvE lite, fractal, & raid combat, not to mention PvP and WvW, it seems unlikely that they can tackle another mode (underwater) let alone two (underwater + raids).

Aquatic raid encounters are about the worst idea that’s possible in this game.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Can’t have challenging underwater combat until we have, you know, actual underwater combat. I like the idea I even like some of how ANet set it up. However, it’s plagued by problems, including that most profs lose a lot of skills below water. Revenant’s underwater capability seems to be only 50% complete.

Given that ANet already has its hands full with balancing PvE lite, fractal, & raid combat, not to mention PvP and WvW, it seems unlikely that they can tackle another mode (underwater) let alone two (underwater + raids).

The only way they might be able to do it is through expansion (at this moment we cannot really expect any major changes to the game outside of expansions). Of course, an underwater-based expansion is not very likely to happen anytime soon.

And I think this merging of Dragon powers thread they are running, might give them an opportunity to bring the DSD inland as well.

I guess we will one day see. I hope UW content isn’t dead forever. It’s such a shame they moved away from such an opportunity.

I think the most they could get away with without starting a riot would be a raid encounter similar to Escort or Trio and just have a portion of it be underwater.

water combat is fun cuz its a fully 3d environment, but skills are in a perpetual alpha state, not even beta.

insanemaniac.2456:

water combat is fun cuz its a fully 3d environment, but skills are in a perpetual alpha state, not even beta.

Nah, even with fully fleshed out skills, 3D combat is super-hard and un-fun because the input and output devices we have really, really don’t map well to it. It’s very hard to look up and down, or move up and down, compared to looking left, right, or moving on a flat surface.

Maybe when we finally have a real VR MMO, and someone figures out a six-direction input setup on the keyboard or replaces it with some random controller, it won’t suck, but until then…

Anyway, a much better thing would be to get 2D combat in an underwater environment. Do that, and you get combat that matches reasonably well to the controls available to players.

I’d, uh, probably expect to see much sadness around combat if you stuck with the underwater weapons we have, though. They play sufficiently differently, and are sufficiently unpracticed by most players, that they wouldn’t be “fun” compared to the land skills…

Underwater combat in PvE would instantly be 10x better for me if the leashes on mobs was 1/5 what it was on land, and if the aggro range was 1/2 to 1/3. It sounds harsh, but I’ve had a single mob follow a lvl 80 char halfway through the ocean, parallel to the shoreline, in Cursed Shore. Halfway. That was easily twice the distance I’ve had mobs chase me on land when I was 4-5 levels under them. Its just ridiculous how long the aggro range is for mobs underwater because it can always follow a straight line instead of following the terrain. Same thing with the aggro range. Its annoying as kitten to have them aggro onto you, from all directions, from so far away when you are just trying to swim through. And with a lot of movement based skills disabled underwater, it makes it all that much more tedious to just swim right past them.

So decrease the leash range significantly, cut the aggro range in half. Underwater would then be tolerable to me. The combat would still need work, but it would at least be tolerable.

no….just…no

SlippyCheeze.5483:

insanemaniac.2456:

water combat is fun cuz its a fully 3d environment, but skills are in a perpetual alpha state, not even beta.

Nah, even with fully fleshed out skills, 3D combat is super-hard and un-fun because the input and output devices we have really, really don’t map well to it. It’s very hard to look up and down, or move up and down, compared to looking left, right, or moving on a flat surface.

Maybe when we finally have a real VR MMO, and someone figures out a six-direction input setup on the keyboard or replaces it with some random controller, it won’t suck, but until then…

Anyway, a much better thing would be to get 2D combat in an underwater environment. Do that, and you get combat that matches reasonably well to the controls available to players.

I’d, uh, probably expect to see much sadness around combat if you stuck with the underwater weapons we have, though. They play sufficiently differently, and are sufficiently unpracticed by most players, that they wouldn’t be “fun” compared to the land skills…

indeed, the gw2 camera design is a huge issue for a fully 3d environment too. but controlling the camera isn’t part of that. you simply need to add strafe up and down as keybinds, potentially replacing the turn keybinds as a compact default… so qwe asd for all movement, with mouse to look. you have to develop muscle memory to parse up and down movement quickly, but it’s not really more complex than the current controls, especially for key turners who haven’t figured out mouse looking yet (which is a too significant segment of the gw2 population).

but the camera would have to change and anet aint touching that.

For the record, “swim up” and “swim down” are already keybinds, though one of them isn’t bound by default (I think it’s the latter).

We would need an expansion that included a massive overhaul of underwater combat before that could ever work.

i dont know about you guys but i like underwater combat. the only thing i dont like is when i dodge and it puts me far away from melee

The problem with gw2 underwater combat isn’t the combat it’s self so much as the lack of skills and balance