What level are you?
I really liked warriors’ underwater combat in the low and mid levels but on 60+ it just felt horrible, slow and the mobs felt like they were too strong.
Now I really detest going into water, especially in areas with high underwater mob density (Mt. Maelstrom, Orr)
Underwater combat feels also great on my Mesmer (lvl 28 atm) but it felt bad in the lowish levels and I think it’ll just go down the drain like my warrior’s underwater combat.
Just did a round through Plains of Ashford, just to check this (was low on chili, though). I found 7 herb sprout nodes, surely missed one or two. Harvested them with an Iron Sickle. 4 nodes were chili, 1 was garlic, 1 pepper and 1 parsley.
The nodes were pretty far apart, though so I can understand some people not wanting to invest the time to farm them theirselves. However, for those there is the TP and while I agree that having more of them would be nice, chili is harly a mandatory ingredient.
It is a bit like vanilla: I only found 1 or 2 total (didn’t actively look for it, though) before making my alt. On my alt (leveling 1-15 in Asura territory), I found plenty of vanilla. The % of nodes dropping vanilla didn’t seem random at all. Often, I could predict which of the nodes (respawn always at same position until server restart) would drop vanilla and which would drop other stuff. From there, I just needed to remember where the nodes were and I’d port to the beginning of the zone every 2 hours or so and gather them all while walking back to my previous position.
Just gather a little of it, you really don’t need piles of the stuff… well, unless you are force-leveling your profession by following some sort of guide that somehow requires you to have a lot of chili.
Some form of 1handed ranged attack like pistol/javelin/sling to go with warhorn. Most possible options would be rather short ranged (600? 900?) for a ranged attack. Could even be the torch… throwing burning torches everywhere, now that would be some pillaging fun!