Guild Wars 2

Underwater utility skill cooldowns are transferred over to the utility skills set to use on land, and vice versa.

For example. If I set Slick Shoes in my second utility skill slot underwater and use it, it goes on 60 second cooldown as it should. Then if my engineer goes on land and the utility skill set swaps to the land based one, the Net Turret which I set in the same second utility skill slot inherits the 60 second cooldown Slick Shoes has, even though Net Turret only has a 30 second cooldown.

It doesn’t matter what skill I set in which slot on any other class, the results are the same. The cooldowns go over their maximum count. It also works both ways; a skill with a higher cooldown used on land will pass over its cooldown over the maximum on its corresponding underwater skill slot. This bug does not happen to weapon skills.

I noticed this bug after the march 36 patch, and since it is such an obvious bug I thought it would be fixed immediately or at least in the april 30 patch. It hasn’t. If it is not a bug and I simply haven’t noticed it for the past few months, I cannot possibly imagine why it would be intentionally be made this way. Completely different skills should not share cooldowns in anyway.; certainly not just because they are placed in the same slot.

I suspect the slot shares its cooldown to prevent people from going in/out of the water to avoid the cooldown — that seems ok. But it does create some annoying issues:

• If you just want to swap skills after entering the water, you have to wait until your land skill cooldowns finish.
• As noted in the original post, cooldowns could be longer than stated if the the skill sharing the slot has a longer cooldown before transition between water/land modes.

There’s probably a happier medium.

^ I’m not sure that’s the reason since skills retain all their own individual cooldowns. I can use a 60 second cooldown skill on land, then go underwater and swap any skill in any slot for it and it’ll still be counting down from 60 so I don’t see how people can avoid cooldowns by swapping skills. Going in and out of water does not reset the cooldowns on each skill so forcing a cooldown share is not necessary.
Unless you mean avoiding the disabling of utility skills caused by cooldowns and using a different set of skills underwater, which I believe should be allowed. Otherwise there is no point in the utility skills swapping sets underwater.

However upon further testing it seems under some circumstances the cooldowns are not shared unlike my initial observation, but I’m having difficulty pinpointing exactly the conditions which the shared cooldowns are not triggered.