*Base movement speed while underwater increased by 25%
Why would you move underwater faster than on land? Underwater-movement is already sufficiently fast. It just doesn’t feel like it because you have no ground immediately under your feet to measure your traveling distance.
Fair point. To explain, I have to first make the point of how movement speed is abysmally slow in relation to the speed at which damage travels on land and in the sea. The reason why I propose a 25% base movement speed increase is because of how relevant the z-axis is while underwater. In comparison, while on land, combat is about as isometric as Diablo 2, and thus movement speed is rather strong because all we are doing is moving a hitbox across a flat plane of dangerous damage zones. While underwater, moving and strafing (along with the movement penalties for not necessarily moving directly forward) in three dimensions combined with the spherical shape (although many still remain somewhat cylindrical) of AoEs compounds the effectiveness of movement in general. Making everyone faster would not only help players mitigate incoming damage with actual positioning (since the skills and mechanics that I’ve proposed below have a lot of directionality and aiming to them), but it would also just be a general quality of life upgrade.
It isn’t exactly perfectly necessary, however, it will only increase the amount of player engagement in combat by allowing them to move more freely across an encounter.
*Players can now finish downed opponents while underwater.
This would require to remove the option to move while downed because currently anyone can just swim away from the enemy that’s about to finish him.
That’s a good point. It’d be easy enough to just do the anet thing and say “underwater downed state immobilizes players,” but that’s too problematic for gameplay since immobilize (for some inane reason) freezes all player axes instead of just the x and the y (which means going to the surface would be impossible, not to mention how someone might accidentally absorb a allied downed player’s perma (or long duration) immobilize with a condition transfer skill.
It’s a problem to consider, but it should be dealt with.
*Professions now only have access to a single underwater weapon.
And this makes underwatercombat more engaging for what reason? If anything we need more, not less underwater weapons. Being forced to take specific weapons shoehorns the player into a build that he/she doesn’t want to play or isn’t traited and equipped for.
The customization would have to come from the latter 5 skills. The reworks are aimed at providing a base of 5 skills which can be used often and at the discretion of the player in order to legitimately turn the tide of combat in a way that isn’t as demeaningly simple as paper covering rock. Take a look at the rebalanced effects and especially the cast-times/recharge times of the skills above. The reworks result in higher APM, but more importantly, many of the skills have multiple uses built into them aside from just straight damage. With the new GTAoE underwater mechanic combined with the rebalanced attack intervals, movement and positioning skills (which most of those classes now all have in some form) become very powerful and useful in ways that they might not have been before. On top of that, some of the weapons even have viable, consistent melee and ranged options as opposed to them being brutally segregated behind a 10-second wait timer.
*The weapon swap button remains on classes that have it solely as a button to trigger sigils (as if that’s not already its main purpose most days anyway).
Nope, it isn’t.
I will direct you to the questions raised in the first post of this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Sigil-bloat-solutions/first#post5512595
I’m sorry to tell you, but I completely disagree with the changes you proposed.
I’m crushed.
What would make underwater combat and exploring better from my point of view:
- More underwater weapons (including 1h weapons) so that we actually have a choice what to play underwater.
The reason why I consolidated most of the current underwater weapons is exactly because there was so much filler fluff that it makes underwater combat even more spammy than ground combat. Have a look at some of the skills in this thread, and you’ll see how a single weapon set can still be very active so long as skill effects are balanced properly with cooldowns, activation times and conditional effects. We don’t need more skills; we need more sustainable, consistent, well-cued actions which save the player from having little to do but spam 1 while he/she waits for the BASELINE 8-12 SECOND RECHARGE ON A 2 SKILL to come back up.
That also harkens back to what I said about weapon swapping existing to swap sigils: why design a weapon set in which the only skill that can be used repeatedly before the weapon swap timer is even fully recharged is the blasted autoattack? Anet really expected people to be satisfied with pressing their 2-5 buttons (with their typical short activations) and having nothing left to do but autoattack until maybe their 2 skill came back up just in time to swap to another weapon set with fresh cooldowns. Their design is practically begging people to just use the weapon swap button as an energy sigil proc (that is if the player isn’t just slotting one or even both of the same sigils across the two weapons—which does happen very, very often). It’s completely crazy, so I addressed that.
- Traits and equipment independent from the land build. Instead of using traits that don’t support the underwater weapon or even don’t work at all underwater, we need a seperate underwater build.
There aren’t enough things underwater or unique mechanics in all of GW2 to warrant a separate gear/trait system.
- More underwater skills. For starters ANet could make underwater versions of the skills that currently aren’t usable underwater. Most (if not all) classes only have a single underwater usable elite skill. This needs to change.
Most of those are GTAoEs. I addressed that with the mechanic I mentioned in the first post. If we can get a mechanic like that implemented (and by implemented, I mean, it’s already basically in the game in its own disassembled form), then it suddenly means that loads and loads of skills can easily be adjusted and included into underwater combat. The rest are just anet not addressing basic concepts like flesh golem dying if it enters the water or some transform abilities not having underwater equivalents (the latter of which is fine by me for the most part).
- Don’t make underwater areas too crowded with enemies. ANet already reduced the amount of underwater enemies in some areas, but there are still areas that have way more mobs than an average player can handle.
Given that I gave a lot of classes many movement and control options on their weapons now, the only thing that would quickly kill players would be loads and loads of ranged enemies. So long as we cull those to a low number, underwater with the skills up above would be more like a musou game with the player dashing about and crushing mobs of melee NPCs if they’re good enough.
- Add cosmetic options for underwater. While this may seem unimportant or even useless, GW2 is all about skins. If a player has some nice underwater skins he/she is more likely to go underwater and try the new stuff.
I can’t disagree with more cosmetics. Still seems a little contrived, though, given that there aren’t really any “ground-only” skins aside from helmets given the forced rebreather (but players can even just skin over that).