Guild Wars 2

Just curious about people’s issues with underwater. I never had an issue with it. It’s always worked well enough for my mesmer, warrior, ele and ranger. Didn’t play my engineer enough to get a feel for her…

But yeah, just curious why you hate underwater combat beyond just utility skills being unavailable.

I enjoy most aspects of UW and it’s a shame so little skins and explorable content has been left out. I was delighted to find the UW passage in Tangled Depths only to find such a large pointless area.

It’s clearly not been well balanced though. Ele and warrior work really well UW as you say. Now try something like thief – it has so little of which makes the class what it is. Plus a severe lack of usable utilities doesn’t help. Even Rev I think is still waiting for the UW to be finished off from what I read from a dev post last week.

Personally I want more UW content and more skins, not them cutting it out

I was thinking this was about the underworld at first xD
my biggest issue with underwater combat in PvE is mobs act weird (like sink into the ground or go though walls or worse just go invulnerable for no reason in melee range)

Because it feels extremely slow and my main is a tempest.

The only thing I think is wrong with underwater combat is the fact that it’s a 3-D environment, with only 2-dimensional attacks. You can still sort of cleave enemies with a spear, for example, but it only seems mostly towards enemies in front of you, rather than around you, especially the Z-Axis.

I don’t care much for underwater combat even though it had potential. Admittedly some of the hero points were fun but overall lots of mobs with four second float and sinks just isn’t fun. For a complete revamp (at least in whatever new hypothetical maps for that expansion) I suggested switching to a first person shooter mode (as in a whole other genre’s mechanics) for underwater or possibly even a railed shooter during part of the meta boss battle. The “underwater” expansion I proposed in earlier threads would mostly be on 16th century Caribbean inspired tropical archipelagos with maybe some volcanic islands. Each map in that expansion would have to be unique in some way but boating or surfing would be a common theme for travel such as a hurricane mastery to navigate in those conditions.

Boating/surfing could even be brought to main game Tyria and would simply be faster swimming in those maps. And who can forget quaggans? The krait are a slaver race and that should be explored further as there are many dynamic events where you have to stop their slaving. That I can see tie into a water expansion. That and lots of puzzle like areas like the base game story mode quest with the Largos Lady. Even if actual combat won’t be in water (out of respect for its lack of popularity, that or with revamped FPS mechanics I mentioned earlier) areas the puzzle solving and swimming part are fun.

just not as fleshed out as on land combat, it could be so much more, and with all these feature patches that convenience land combat nothing really ever changes with UW combat, it’s still the same as it was in the beginning.

Because I can’t fish

One thing I didn’t like is how oddly restrictive the skills were. Especially the Elite skills. For example, the Necro can have minions underwater, but not its elite minion. And if the Necro can have minions, then why can’t the Ele? Why were traps not made to cover a spherical area underwater so they could be used. In fact, why were so many skills blocked from underwater use when a bit of reworking would have made them useable. And then of course, you get a completely different set of weapons that function essentially like a land weapon (eg. speargun vs rifle). I think it would have been better to keep the land weapons and skills with some modifications for underwater instead of a brand new set of skills that most people don’t remember because they use them so rarely.

Underwater combat is, imo, fine. It’s underwater skills, stats, and traits that are a problem:

• Too many skills don’t have an underwater variant.
• A lot of traits are useless underwater, since they augment skills that don’t work underwater.
• You lose buffs (esp from sigils) going underwater.
• Revenant has only one weapon underwater (but two slots) and Herald can’t use their elite, which makes that traitline a waste.
• Underwater breathers have no use, since you can breathe without them. However, they require extra funds and, to keep your (6) rune bonus going, you have to buy a 7th rune… for the 10% of the time you use the build u/w.
• There’s a lot of places where you end up underwater briefly, with no combat. You still get your skills changed (see above, re: losing buffs).
• Because there’s so few places to fight underwater, people often have no idea what to do with their skills. So it’s often frustrating (when the fights are non-trivial).

In short, there’s nothing wrong with the combat or the mechanics. The problem is that it’s still incomplete.

Although I do like u/w combat, I hope ANet doesn’t work on it for a while — plenty of other stuff to work, that impacts more people more often.

It is much more broken than simple “another set of skills”, much of it can never be fixed. And Anet has rightly ignored it for some time now.

1. It is in 3D. It means you very rarely know what is going behind you, as your blind area has grown a lot. People are used to walking on the ground and can easily manage similar system in games, full 3D is so much more confusing.

Part of problem with 3D battles is that there is no more ground targeting.. No ground = no ground targeting. Whole subset of skills relies on being cast at exact distance from you, all these are unavailable.

2. It is in water. Part of illusion swimming in water is how sloooooooowly you move. This means instead of usual ground battle where you constantly dodge and evade, your pretty much only option under water is to slooooowly move in one direction and then sloooowly move in next direction. This makes the battles clumsy and boring. A lot of skill in the usual fights involves knowing when your enemy will use the big damage attack and then avoiding it, that is always missing under water.

3. As the normal skills are unusable, you need entire new set of skills. Even if Anet decides to abandon idea of having 2 underwater weapons and sticks to 1, it still needs to be balanced between all 9 classes and any future class. Those new skills need to work with all the possible traits too which means most traits have to redesigned. And you still end up with less options to pick from compared with normal fights where most classes have access to many different weapons.

Randulf.7614:

It’s clearly not been well balanced though. Ele and warrior work really well UW as you say. Now try something like thief – it has so little of which makes the class what it is.

I have and granted, it’s not as strong as Ele, it does have that interesting block>counter spam skill.

penelopehannibal.8947:

The only thing I think is wrong with underwater combat is the fact that it’s a 3-D environment, with only 2-dimensional attacks. You can still sort of cleave enemies with a spear, for example, but it only seems mostly towards enemies in front of you, rather than around you, especially the Z-Axis.

So perhaps the devs could update the basic cleave skills to expand their area higher and lower? Granted they could probably update a lot of the area of skills to include more spheres or expanded disks/partial disks.

Agemnon.4608:

For a complete revamp (at least in whatever new hypothetical maps for that expansion) I suggested switching to a first person shooter mode (as in a whole other genre’s mechanics) for underwater or possibly even a railed shooter during part of the meta boss battle. The “underwater” expansion I proposed in earlier threads would mostly be on 16th century Caribbean inspired tropical archipelagos with maybe some volcanic islands. Each map in that expansion would have to be unique in some way but boating or surfing would be a common theme for travel such as a hurricane mastery to navigate in those conditions.

Boating/surfing could even be brought to main game Tyria and would simply be faster swimming in those maps. And who can forget quaggans? The krait are a slaver race and that should be explored further as there are many dynamic events where you have to stop their slaving. That I can see tie into a water expansion. That and lots of puzzle like areas like the base game story mode quest with the Largos Lady. Even if actual combat won’t be in water (out of respect for its lack of popularity, that or with revamped FPS mechanics I mentioned earlier) areas the puzzle solving and swimming part are fun.

That’s also another possibility, changing some of the core parts of UW or add features that amend to UW. Having surfing/windsurfing/etc to traverse the surface in new ways or skills with breaking leaps when done close enough to the surface. I personally think altered physics for UW wouldn’t be a bad thing. Make land combat and UW feel more distinct rather than UW just being a limited version of land combat.

I love three dimensional combat. My all time favorite MMO (not counting GW1 because some people dont cconsider it an MMO) uses it pretty heavily.

My issue with it in GW2 is that it is not as visually appealing as the dry land combat, and that weapon selection, skill choice, and build options are even more restrictive than the already too restrictive (IMO) land based combat.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

In short, there’s nothing wrong with the combat or the mechanics. The problem is that it’s still incomplete.

Although I do like u/w combat, I hope ANet doesn’t work on it for a while — plenty of other stuff to work, that impacts more people more often.

I feel this is probably the largest problem with UW combat. Players are apprehensive about effort being put toward improving it. Players feel, if time and resources are put into it, it directly draws away from a specific feature they want implemented. While it’s true that if they’re working on one thing, it’ll take workers from working on other things at the same time, that doesn’t mean the entire team cannot work on multiple improvements.

I was curious if players generally disliked UW or simply didn’t like the issues that plague it, like the lack of skills, sigil stack buff loss, etc. Just fixing some of the simple things may be a large enough improvement to make UW less disliked. If enough ground is made with the improvements, the next step could be adding more features and content to UW.

So would that be a bad goal? And if so, why is that? What content takes priority?

I came into this thread expecting discussion about The Underworld. I’m disappointed.

Endless Soul.5178:

I came into this thread expecting discussion about The Underworld. I’m disappointed.

I know right?
But, to be a decent contributor’ to this well worded thread, I will add:
Isn’t the wolf pup mini just the cutest dang thang you have ever seen, trying to hold his breath, and swim next to you under water??!!

Leo G.4501:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

In short, there’s nothing wrong with the combat or the mechanics. The problem is that it’s still incomplete.

Although I do like u/w combat, I hope ANet doesn’t work on it for a while — plenty of other stuff to work, that impacts more people more often.

I feel this is probably the largest problem with UW combat. Players are apprehensive about effort being put toward improving it. Players feel, if time and resources are put into it, it directly draws away from a specific feature they want implemented. While it’s true that if they’re working on one thing, it’ll take workers from working on other things at the same time, that doesn’t mean the entire team cannot work on multiple improvements.

I was curious if players generally disliked UW or simply didn’t like the issues that plague it, like the lack of skills, sigil stack buff loss, etc. Just fixing some of the simple things may be a large enough improvement to make UW less disliked. If enough ground is made with the improvements, the next step could be adding more features and content to UW.

So would that be a bad goal? And if so, why is that? What content takes priority?

You misunderstand me. I already like underwater combat, even with the issues. I am as sure as you that if it were simply fixed to work as designed (never mind improved), more people would enjoy it.

Despite that, simply fixing UW combat (never mind making it ‘good’ for most people) would be incredibly expensive. It means basically balancing yet another game mode (after PvE, Fractals, Raids, sPvP, & WvW), using the identical traits as terrestrial PvE.

And even though I also agree with you that ANet can chew gum and tie a shoe at the same time, there remain many, many other things that would improve the game for more people more often.

ANet works on a bunch of projects at any given time. Of those, some can be closed and resources re-allocated — but most cannot, because they are far along and/or the repercussions of changing them would be enormous (see: indefinitely postponing new legendaries). In practical terms, that means only a tiny fraction of folks that can be moved around easily. Right now, just consider the projects we know about, ANet is already working on WvW, on Raids, on Expac 3 (although — I hope — probably fewer people than 2 months ago), on LS3, on skills balance generally, on improving the overall experience for HoT, on adventures, on fixing legendary journeys, and so on.

I wouldn’t move people away from any of those to work on underwater combat.

Further, assuming there are any artists and combat mechanic experts remaining, I’d like to see them working on fixing things that are broken in terrestrial combat, especially things like mesmer traits not working after a transformation (which are required in several fractals), like quickness not working under the action camera).

tl;dr sure, ANet can work on lots of things. Even then, underwater is in the bottom half of my wish list. And that’s coming from someone who enjoys UW combat, even with all its current faults.

iirc, you only lose sigil stacks underwater if the underwater weapon doesn’t have its own copy of that sigil.

Main issue is most peoples 3d awareness is terrible..

The other issue is Anet spends zero time on under water… Skills as a whole are terrible and weak so most classes die in seconds a lot..

Underwater is fine if Anet had spent the effort on making it better..

I also was expecting a thread on the underworld.

I like underwater combat in GW2, but like many of Anet’s endeavors, its ambitious but unfinished and ultimately being pushed to the side. They seem to be trying to cover up and neaten the underwater that exists, specifically the removal or replacement of water from some maps, or removal of maps that have water entirely) and FINALLY fixing some of the utility skills that did not work in water (wells) while launching the specializations with well skills that don’t work underwater :/ or have unfinished underwater skills and traits, period. Aside from removal and little fixes, they seem to be not really addressing most of the serious existing issues… and instead be phasing out UW, something somewhat endemic to the game’s systems and features in general.

I like underwater combat, except on professions whose skills are so much less effective than their land-based skills. On Ele, for instance, staff seems so much more potent than trident, yet both are ranged weapons.

For instance, when I look at the wiki page,
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_elementalist_skills

I see the following:

Fireball (Staff 1): base damage: 404; scaling (1.0?)
Magma Orb (Trident 1): base damage 136; scaling (0.4?)

Both are basic attacks. Magma Orb casts twice as fast, but has roughly a third of the base damage and only ~40% of the damage from scaling.

Lava Font (Staff 2): base damage: 1292; scaling (3.2?)
Boil (Trident 2): base damage: 176; scaling (0.51765?)

Both are AoE’s which damage over a 4 second duration, and remain where targeted (i.e., can be moved out of). The differences are: Lava Font’s area is 180, v. 240 on Boil, Lava Font is instant cast v. .5 seconds for Boil, and Lava Font has CD 6 seconds v. 10 for Boil.

I’m not sure is this is intentional or simply a matter of UW skills being thrown together to meet a rushed launch date and hardly, if ever, being touched since. If intentional, I’ve no idea why Ele’s only UW weapon is so weak by comparison with its land cousins.

A good QoL for underwater would be a separate build tab for underwater, that way even if not all trait work in UW you can have a build with the ones that do.

Don’t you mean thirsty? :P Aside from being a GW1 fanboy, underwater content was one of the selling points for me in GW2. I love swimming, diving, anything water related so it’s sad seeing it in such bad shape, and generally unsupported anymore and left incomplete. I’d love it if there was a unending ocean or whatever xpan water dragon related that redesigned it and added more of it, including fishing and sailing. =))
We need more outfits and armor swimming and diving related too. and something done about the Windersday rebreather skin effect which can’t be skinned onto other things.

Also I play Condi Thief, which happens to do like.. no damage in water. All I got is a weak Bleed auto attack on Speargun and a poison skill that pushes me back, making it unspammable for dps, and often misses everything in it’s aoe. :/ Also sad that so many utilities are disabled in water when they should all be usable.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

You misunderstand me. I already like underwater combat, even with the issues. I am as sure as you that if it were simply fixed to work as designed (never mind improved), more people would enjoy it.

Despite that, simply fixing UW combat (never mind making it ‘good’ for most people) would be incredibly expensive. It means basically balancing yet another game mode (after PvE, Fractals, Raids, sPvP, & WvW), using the identical traits as terrestrial PvE.

Well, I agree that it’d be expensive to fix but it’s not quite the perfect analogy cutting UW as a whole other game mode. UW is a part of the core game, not a segmented portion like Fractals are to WvW or Raids are to PvP.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

And even though I also agree with you that ANet can chew gum and tie a shoe at the same time, there remain many, many other things that would improve the game for more people more often.

ANet works on a bunch of projects at any given time. Of those, some can be closed and resources re-allocated — but most cannot, because they are far along and/or the repercussions of changing them would be enormous (see: indefinitely postponing new legendaries). In practical terms, that means only a tiny fraction of folks that can be moved around easily. Right now, just consider the projects we know about, ANet is already working on WvW, on Raids, on Expac 3 (although — I hope — probably fewer people than 2 months ago), on LS3, on skills balance generally, on improving the overall experience for HoT, on adventures, on fixing legendary journeys, and so on.

I wouldn’t move people away from any of those to work on underwater combat.

Which is why I bring up this thread in the first place. It seems many people write off UW as half-kittened, unliked/unwanted, fine-as-is-but-not-good or just plain crap therefore further push UW aside as allocating more resources would seem a waste of time. I just see that line of thinking as a self-fulfilling prophecy: it sucks because it needs attention, it’d be a waste of resources to make it better therefore it will suck.

And lastly, I would assume that “skill balance generally” would encompass UW skills as well. Perhaps we shouldn’t consider UW combat as a new game mode but instead just different sets of skills?

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

tl;dr sure, ANet can work on lots of things. Even then, underwater is in the bottom half of my wish list. And that’s coming from someone who enjoys UW combat, even with all its current faults.

Understandable. But in the end it’s up to Anet to decide what gets attention or not. I just hope they haven’t adopted the same mentality the forums has toward those skills. There are people who enjoy UW combat so if attention is paid it will definitely be appreciated.

Underwater-combat is very unbalanced between the different classes which get a big problem in PvP and WvW. Instead of properly balancing it anet decided to (nearly) remove it.

I feel that UW combat could be fixed, but it would be a massive endeavor. The problems are not insurmountable, but they go deep (ba dum) and there are a lot of them. It could be fixed, but it’d be a TON of work, almost to the point of making a new game. Best solution is to make it as much like fighting on land as possible, both for consistency and to conserve dev resources.

1. It’s buggy af. Mobs (and players) go through walls, get stuck in scenery, don’t hit things in their attack cone/hit things that AREN’T in the cone, have very strange leash/health reset behavior, and so forth. It’s a mess.

Solution: Fix that garbage

2. Weapons are terrible. They either don’t represent their class gameplay well, don’t have build diversity (condi/power etc), are just plain terrible, or sometimes all of the above at once. Some classes are low dps with no utility to compensate, some classes are high dps with amazing utility, others are in between. It’s all over the park.

Solution: Completely rebalance EVERY class, add new UW weapons, or eliminate UW weapons and just use the land based ones.

3. The distinctive elements of GW2 combat don’t work. Combo fields, dodges, timing, and class special mechanics (with some exceptions – ranger pets are AMAZING underwater) are either disabled underwater, or don’t work well.

Solution: Rework underwater mechanics to function more like they do on land.

4. Encounter design is terrible and doesn’t account for the 3d environment. This includes situational awareness, which is terrible^3, because the UI/3rd person camera isn’t suited to a spherical combat area. A 160 degree view cone will let you survey a 360 circle with 2 or 3 quick mouse movements, adequate for fighting on land, but it can take 6, 9, 12, or even more of those same movements to survey a sphere.

Solution: Bias the AI to move to and engage their target players in a 2-d plane wherever possible, thus disguising the problem. This is a massive design problem that the entire gaming industry has struggle with for decades (see: VR/oculus rift, flight sims, IR head trackers). Solving it is way beyond the scope of some optional content in a casual MMO.