Guild Wars 2

Current Problems:

1. Highest quality breather is Masterwork
2. Trait builds have little to no benefit for Underwater Combat
3. Combat mobility is cumbersome
4. Only 2 options for breather skins, normal and Consortium
5. 1/2 the professions have only 1 option for underwater profession elites. (ele, necro, guard, thief)
6. AoE circles have limited to no visibility.
7. Underwater events/areas are highly ignored
8. Repetitive underwater enemies.

For this post I will speak upon improvements from the perspective of playing a necromancer. My main is a necro and is the profession I have the most underwater experience with.

Suggested Improvements:

1. Upgrade the quality of underwater breathers to exotic and eventually ascended. Add recipes to the crafting professions, add drops to underwater mobs/events, etc.

2. Much like PvP, a separate trait build for underwater combat is extremely beneficial. The trait would switch when the person is underwater, much like the weapon/ head slot switch already does. Trait building can be edited at any time by switching to the water icon on the Hero panel. effects only take effect when underwater.

As a necromancer who uses wells, my trait build underwater is all but useless, as I can imagine the same can be said for other professions and builds.

In the underwater trait page, all weapon benefits (staff skills recharge 20% faster) would be changed to benefit underwater weapons (trident skills recharge 20% faster)
Other land only beneficial traits would also be changed to benefit underwater combat.

3. Better animation or dodging while underwater. Instead of simply swimming a little bit faster an animation of spinning underwater would add more visibility and enjoyment of swimming .
example 0:20-0:26

4. Additional ideas for breather skins:
Full face breathing mask (like those of the largos, or just a breather with a face mask.)
Diving helmet(could be old school or something original)
A literal bubble around your head ex: from ATLA
The breathers from Star Wars E:1 (beard freindly)

5. Underwater only elite skills. Most elite skills are catered to on land combat; however, with this the underwater elites are extremely limited. Additions of one or more profession oriented Elite skill would greatly support combat.

Necros only have plague form, an undead elite minion, or elite form (like lich form) would benefit other trait builds.

Guardians could use support/ attack elites underwater other than their current immunity and F1-4 recharge elite.

6. Underwater AoE skills have very little visibility as well as no red/white rings unless you are next to a surface. Adding a visual effect such as a bubble for AoE would be fantastic. This is done already somewhat with Elementalists with their electric cage/boiling water. Adding similar effects to AoEs such as plague form, increasing the size of the plague to the entire area of effect, creating a very visible attack.

These effect bubbles could cause issues with latency, so to counter this effect, they could be thin and sparsely detailed. Any outline of attacks is good though.

7. Currently the highest concentration of underwater areas are around Orr and the coast leading up to it. Unfortunately most of these waters are highly ignored or passed over, with most people swimming on the surface instead of exploring below. This isn’t an issue with the areas themselves, but more of a problem with people disliking underwater combat. With the previous improvements underwater combat can be greatly improved and these areas may be filled again.

In addition to this adding additional underwater events and even world bosses can greatly add to underwater combat. Such world bosses could be an Water elemental, giant sea monster (there are enough megaladons), or water dragon (provided Bubbles confirmation).

Apart from all that, most underwater areas are beautiful and should be appreciated more.

8. Additional Underwater enemies. While I love skelk, jellyfish, krait, sharks, barracudas, and wurms. There are many more options for viable underwater enemies.

Possible additional enemies: crazed quaggans, largos, large sea snakes/eels, killer whales, varied forms of sharks (can I get a hammer head?), giant squids/octopi, Leviathans (up for interpretation), Sirens, karka, turtles, etc.

Any additional ideas or criticisms are more than welcome. Thanks for reading.