Guild Wars 2

So, you can use Necromancers Wells underwater but you can’t use Chronomancer Wells underwater, is this an oversight or is there something about Chronomancer wells I am not aware of?

As a Rev main I am wondering if the devs even bothered with underwater skills for HoT specializations at all.

Underwater combat was abandoned shortly after launch. Water was removed from PvP, removed from most starting maps and mostly removed from WvW. Underwater weapon development was also stopped thus why non of the new weapon sets have underwater weapons. When HoT came around new skills that could not be instantly transferred to underwater (i.e. things that had to be converted from AOE circles to spheres) were just left out since there was no point.

I wouldn’t say there was “no point,” but ANet has clearly decided to pay as little attention to underwater combat as possible. In addition to the things mentioned by the OP and Zudet:

• Revenants only have a single underwater weapon (and only two legendary heroes to back them up).
• Most elite skills don’t work underwater. Some profs have only one option.
• Several other skill types (besides chrono wells) won’t work underwater.
• Black Lion Weapon sets no longer include the 3 underwater weapon types (at launch, they included 19 skins; now they have only 16).

tl;dr it’s a “deliberate oversight” or “intended neglect”.

(I’m actually okay with this: I prefer they focus on all the other stuff the game needs and only come back to underwater when they have time to do it right.)

Black Lion weapon sets never included all 19 weapons. There were only 2 or 3 Black Lion sets that did. Off the top of my head, its just the Dreamthistle and Aetherblade sets, and maybe one more (I want to say the… Chaos set?) . The former two are used by enemy NPCs who can swim (Dreamthistle are used by Toxic Alliance members, specifically Krait, and Aetherblade are used by… well, the Aetherblades), which is probably the only reason the made underwater weapons for those.

That’s just arguing symantics, though. The point that Anet stopped caring about underwater content in general still stands. But it happened almost immediately after launch, probably right after the very early patch where they focused on underwater combat tweaks and everyone was like “LOL underwater? Who cares, no one likes that stuff anyway”.

Perhaps a big update or expansion entirely focused on adding/improving underwater will come some day….one can hope, as it is a part of the world, wether people like it or not, can’t just ignore it forever, Anet.

there is still a deep sea dragon alive somewhere…

Treise.6958:

Perhaps a big update or expansion entirely focused on adding/improving underwater will come some day….one can hope, as it is a part of the world, wether people like it or not, can’t just ignore it forever, Anet.

I wouldn’t count on any of that. They can totally ignore it forever and probably will.

Amadan.9451:

there is still a deep sea dragon alive somewhere...

Stevie will beach itself for our convenience and have an enslaved quaggan army constantly chucking buckets of water over it, keeping it from drying out.

Ceridwen.6703:

Stevie will beach itself for our convenience and have an enslaved quaggan army constantly chucking buckets of water over it, keeping it from drying out.

Would probably be preferable to all the underwater crap.

Because, according to physical properties I just made up, time moves differently underwater. I call it the “Baseless dilation” principal.
But it was probably an oversight since no one really seems to pay attention to water combat. And it’s probably for the best. GW2 did water combat better than any game I’ve seen so far, but it’s still just an annoyance to most people.

Amadan.9451:

there is still a deep sea dragon alive somewhere…

I think this is part of the reason why it was revealed that each dragon has TWO spheres of influence, not just one. If they reveal that Suds McDraggie has dominion over water and storms, then the final battle can be in the air, trying to force it over land before bringing it down.

Squee.7829:

Because, according to physical properties I just made up, time moves differently underwater. I call it the “Baseless dilation” principal.
But it was probably an oversight since no one really seems to pay attention to water combat. And it’s probably for the best. GW2 did water combat better than any game I’ve seen so far, but it’s still just an annoyance to most people.

Simply because we were locked into specific weapons and couldn’t use most of our traits/skills underwater. It’s nice that they wanted to differentiate it, but at this point they may have to adjust underwater combat entirely with mastery skills and tracks like they did with Maguuma.