Yep I’m that weird person who crafted all 3 underwater legendaries and personally enjoys underwater content a great deal. So as a result, I decided to take each elite spec into the water and test them against the jellyfish, tuna, sharks, and drakes in wvw. I would like to preface this by saying for the most part I am genuinely impressed with the fact that uw wasn’t forgotten about like it was in HoT and that the elite specs are mostly usable. But let’s focus on the mostly part now. There are some skills that are excluded from underwater that seem like they should be usable. Below I’ve rated how well the elite specs transfer to underwater and some notes about them.
-Spellbreaker 8/10
-why is the heal skill unusable? This single question keeps it from having a perfect score. All it does is remove boons and conditions so I fail to see why this is unusable underwater. If this was enabled, underwater spellbreaker would be perfect
-Firebrand 10/10
-perfect. both the tomes and the mantras can be used underwater nothing further to add
-Renegade 1/10
-oh boy where to begin? On top of STILL only having two legends even remotely usable underwater. Basically the entire renegade elite spec does not work underwater (rev is now 2/2 on useless underwater elite specs). Yes cats hate water, but that would be a terrible excuse for excluding another revenant elite spec from being usable underwater. The class is already bad enough, why can’t it get a break? I’ll award it one point to represent the bare minimum of effort to just make the f skills usable
-Soulbeast 10/10
-perfect everything works, no complaints. I love it underwater.
-Deadeye 4/10
-deadeye has a few too many locked utilities. Shadow Flare I can understand, but the heal should definitely be able to work (see spellbreaker). Binding Shadow could work too. instead of a knockdown, have it sink the target. Shadow Gust could have the same idea.
-Holosmith 9/10
-I love it underwater. photon forge still works. Every utility besides the elite is usable. Unlike the other exclusions though, its exclusion actually makes sense because it is a giant fire beam. It doesn’t get the perfect score because I’d still like to have the elite though (after all Goku could fire the kamehameha underwater more light less fire!).
-Weaver 8/10
-AQUATIC stance. AQUATIC and it’s not usable underwater. This is another one that is baffling. Water spirit is usable underwater and jellyfish pets can even drop water fields underwater. The exclusion of this skill from underwater use is another strange choice that I have to question. Otherwise good. can slot in 3/4 utilities and the excluded one isn’t really necessary
-Mirage 6/10
-Another class that has baffling exclusions. There are 3 shadowstep utilities and only one of them is usable? (illusionary ambush is allowed, but not mirage advance or jaunt?) The mirror util I can understand, but the other two don’t make sense to me.
-Scourge 7/10
-Another one with a few questionable choices for util exclusion. Sand swell and trail of anguish make sense both animation and function wise; however, why is t he elite usable uw and everything else isn’t? Dessicate and Sand Flare should definitely be usable and Serpent Siphon could be changed from a ground target to enemy target similar to others such as arcane wave.
Let me state again that I love the work done with the elite specs and will enjoy playing them on land and in the water, but as someone who enjoys underwater combat and sees it as one of the things that separates GW2 from other MMOs I would love to see these improved. If any of the elite spec designers read this, I thank you for your time and I hope you can take, improve, or be inspired by some of my suggestions above.