The divisive nature of underwater content in Guild Wars 2 has always fascinated me. If you look up reviews of new players trying out the game, they almost always cite it as a notable upside, sometimes even as one of their favorite parts of the core game; if you ask a veteran player's opinion, however, you'll almost certainly get a less favorable response.
What's even more fascinating is that this juxtaposition doesn't just exist in the opinions of new and old players—there also appears to be a trend of players wanting updates and improvements to underwater content despite vehemently disliking it. In the comments of a previous article, where I speculated on possible expansion concepts, one commenter stated they want to see an expac that focuses on underwater locations, themes, and lore, but that had as little actual underwater gameplay as possible.
In this article, I'd like to answer three questions: what's actually wrong with underwater content, why do opinions on it vary so vastly, and, finally, what could the developers do to improve upon it?
What's wrong with underwater content?
First, let's establish what makes underwater content even worth discussing. GW2 isn't the only MMO to feature underwater areas; what makes it distinct is that it has dedicated systems and mechanics that make underwater content unique compared to similar content on land. You use different weapons and skills while underwater, which makes underwater combat an entirely different experience than fighting on land.
In most other games, this isn't the case; just for an example, let's consider World of Warcraft (I will preface this by saying I'm not a WoW player, so please correct me in the comments if anything I say here is untrue). While WoW has a small selection of underwater zones and encounters, as well as some skills designed to be used underwater, underwater combat is largely the same as combat on land. You can use all the same skills as you do on land, even if they wouldn't logically function underwater; the only significant difference is that you can swim up and down and have a breath meter. Unlike GW2, underwater content isn't designed with the intention of feeling like a unique and different system or experience, it's just content that happens to be taking place underwater.
The unique aspects of underwater content are almost all directly linked to combat, so that will be what we discuss for the majority of this section. That said, there is one issue with underwater content that applies not only to the combat, but to all other activities as well.
Problem #1: There isn't any
With how often underwater content and its flaws come up in community discussion, you'd think there's a lot more of it than there actually is. In reality, 90% of notable underwater content takes the form of renown hearts and dynamic events in Core Tyria. There are a handful of underwater events and areas scattered across the games many expansions, but there is no part of the game's world where there is even close to as much underwater content as there is in Core.
What makes this problem worse is that very little of the underwater content we do get is what I will call "frequently replayed content". Technically, all content in the game is replayable (except a few achievement-specific things), but players will generally only go out of their way to replay certain types of content that are particularly fun and/or rewarding: meta-events, world bosses, instanced content, etc. Very little underwater content fits into this category, and a vast amount of it takes the form of Core Tyria renown hearts, which can't be replayed on the same character.
There are only a very small handful of underwater encounters that I'd consider frequently replayed content. Off the top of my head, they are:
- The Aquatic Ruins fractal
- Some portions of the Honor of the Waves dungeon
- The Bloodstone-Crazed Shark boss, which appears in 3 open-world zones
- The Juvenile Leviathan world boss, which also appears in 3 open-world zones
You can squeeze a few more entries onto that list if you stretch the definition of "frequently replayed" a bit—you could argue the Orr minidungeons should be included, or that the Champion Rock Drake Broodmother in Ember Bay should count since it is tied to a LW3 daily—but even if you do, the reality is clear: there is very little meaningful content to actually do underwater.
This fact is the primary cause of most of the issues underwater content faces today. For whatever reason, the team avoided placing significant content underwater in core, which resulted in players spending relatively little time underwater; because players spent so little time there, the devs gave it little focus in new updates, resulting in underwater systems falling behind; as underwater content became more dated, players began to enjoy it even less; because players so heavily disliked underwater content, the devs were further discouraged from making more of it.
This continues in an infinitely recursive loop. The lack of underwater content creates a lack of interest in said content which then results in even less underwater content; to the developers, the idea of focusing on underwater content again becomes less and less appealing the longer this loop continues, and a lack of new content also discourages them from spending valuable development time on fixing the other issues we're about to go over.
Problem #2: Getting underwater gear is annoying
Part of what makes underwater combat feel distinct from land combat is that you need to obtain separate gear in the form of your underwater weapon(s) and your aquabreather, which replaces your usual headgear, as well as additional copies of the upgrades you'd slot into their terrestrial equivalents, such as runes, sigils, and infusions.
Unfortunately, veteran players find this distinction more annoying than novel, and this annoyance is greatly amplified by how rarely you actually participate in underwater combat. Why spend so much time, effort, and gold getting the ideal underwater gear if you're hardly ever going to use it? For this reason, it's extremely common to find veteran players running around on characters with no underwater gear at all, or with incredibly outdated gear they happened to obtain while leveling; due to rarely needing to use their underwater gear, these players either forget about it or simply never bother to obtain any.
Players' feelings aren't the only way in which the lack of underwater content amplifies this problem—less underwater content means less underwater rewards, meaning high-end underwater gear is actually significantly harder to get than terrestrial gear. By this, I don't mean that the actual process is difficult—farming winterberries for an ascended aquabreather is very easy—but that there are far fewer options for obtaining this gear, and thus far fewer chances for players to obtain it naturally. After a point, the devs stopped including underwater weapons in many of the new weapon sets they added, and there are only a couple ways to obtain ascended aquabreathers.
If they don't serve a significant purpose, spending time or money on underwater gear just feels like unnecessary tedium or a waste of resources. And, with as little as you actually need that gear for now, it definitely isn't serving a significant purpose.
Problem #3: There isn't much variety in underwater builds
A big part of what makes GW2's combat and buildcrafting so unique and compelling is the insane variety of possible builds. Between all of the weapons, skills, and specializations each class has access to, you can put together a wide variety of builds that fill very different niches.
As is the trend, this isn't exactly true for underwater combat. With only three different underwater weapon types, there's far less variety when putting together underwater builds, which is compounded by the fact that many skills are disabled underwater. Furthermore, the above statement regarding there being three underwater weapons is a bit misleading, since each class is only able to use 1-2 of those options.
The lack of weapon variety not only makes underwater combat feel a lot more "samey", with far fewer possible builds, but it also stands in the way of different classes filling various niches, especially in organized groups doing difficult content (though the only example of that we really have is Aquatic Ruins). On land, each class can use different weapons to focus on dealing power or condition damage, or on being a support instead; not a single class has weapons for all three niches underwater, and poor Elementalist and Engineer each only get one weapon option, for some reason.
Weapons aside, some of the choices for which skills don't work underwater are baffling. For one example, most classes' wells do not function underwater—despite the fact that Necromancer's wells do, meaning the devs have already implemented a perfectly functional solution to underwater wells and just... arbitrarily decided not to apply that same solution to other classes?
Problem #4: Some specs do not function underwater
Skills aren't the only thing that take a huge hit while underwater—some spec's unique mechanics just straight up don't work underwater. For one example, take Vindicator. This spec's gimmick is that its dodge is replaced with a dragoon-esque leap that deals huge damage; underwater, however, its dodge is instead replaced with an explosion(?) that has an absurdly long cast time, both making it feel terrible to use and making it pretty weak (which is a shame, because swimming up to enemies and pressing the 'explode' button is very fun).
This isn't the only example, of course. If you're the type of person who reads articles about GW2, you almost certainly already know that Mechanist loses its main gimmick—its mech minion—while underwater. The reasoning behind this has always baffled me. It couldn't be an in-universe issue, since we have tons of examples of waterlogged jade tech working fine; yet, it doesn't seem to be a gameplay issue, either. There was a short time where a bug allowed you to take your mech underwater, and its AI functioned perfectly fine when you did so.
Aside from Vindi and Mechanist, some other specs that get nuked underwater include Catalyst, which can't use its jade spheres; Renegade, which is unable to enter its titular Renegade Stance; and Chronomancer, which becomes basically unplayable by losings its wells and access to support weapons.
Problem #5: Learning a second build is annoying
The long-awaited sequel to problem #2. This point is pretty self-explanatory: just as players don't want to invest time and effort into getting underwater gear, they don't want to learn how to play their build optimally underwater, either. Most endgame players I know hardly even know what their underwater skills do.
Unsurprisingly, the core of this issue stems from the same cause as problem #2: there's just too little to do underwater. Learning to play effectively underwater feels like a waste of time with how little you actually do there. This applies even more than problem #2, since there's really only a single encounter in the game that actually demands you be somewhat competent at playing underwater, and that's Aquatic Ruins; everything else is casual open-world content that you can breeze through by spamming buttons.
Why do new players like underwater content?
Before we explore possible solutions for improving underwater content, let's answer one of the questions I posed at the beginning of the article. Despite all its issues—and the contempt veteran players have for it—new players almost unanimously love and praise GW2 for its underwater content. Why is that?
Reason #1: Most problems don't apply to new players
Just by the nature of being new players, most of the big issues with underwater content don't apply to those who have just started the game. As discussed earlier, Core Tyria has the most underwater content by far, and new players will be actively doing renown hearts and random dynamic events; exploring Core for the first time is the one and only time when there actually is a ton of underwater content to dive into, so problem #1 doesn't really apply.
Problems #2, 3, and 4 don't affect new players, either. While leveling your first character, you can easily obtain underwater gear as a random drop, as a leveling reward, or from various merchants for very cheap. The lack of variety isn't a problem yet since a new player is still trying everything out for the first time, and certain elite specs being unplayable underwater doesn't matter either, since a new player obviously won't have even unlocked that mechanic yet.
Reason #2: A fleshed-out underwater combat system is novel (and so are what we perceive as "problems")
As established earlier, while a game having underwater combat isn't a particularly rare feature, it is rare for underwater combat to actually be a fleshed-out and unique system. This makes GW2's underwater combat feel incredibly fresh and novel in relation to other MMOs. To players who aren't familiar with other MMOs, the idea of underwater combat being different than terrestrial combat is still fun, intuitive, and interesting, as well.
This reason goes a bit deeper than the inherent novelty of a dedicated underwater combat system, as well. While new players are exempt from most of the big issues with underwater combat, the issues they do face don't feel like issues yet, both because they're still approaching the game with the mindset of a new player and because those issues become part of the novelty of the system rather than actual problems.
Sure, for a veteran player, the prospect of grinding out extra gear and learning a whole second rotation is annoying; for a new player, however, that isn't any different from everything else they're doing. To these players, every aspect of the game is new to them, everything they choose to do or experiment with is quick/easy/cheap and has little to no long-term consequences, and everything they try out is just another part of the novelty of picking up a new game. It's only after you reach endgame that some aspects of underwater combat stop being features and start being problems.
How could underwater content be improved?
Now that we've established what's actually wrong with underwater content—and taken a brief detour to discuss player psychology—it's time to put our money where our mouth is. Anyone can say "game bad", but we're here to go over some real potential solutions. If ArenaNet decided tomorrow that they wanted to fix underwater content, what would they have to do to make it work?
1. Add more underwater content
I've been banging you all over the head with this point, so for the final time: the root of all of the problems with underwater content is that there isn't enough of it. Even if anyone at ANet did want to fix it, they probably couldn't justify spending the time and resources necessary to do so with underwater content in its current state.
I don't necessarily think that we should get an expansion that takes place entirely underwater or anything like that, as that would be an incredibly risky move; one that simply has a heavier focus on it would suffice. What we need in particular is 'frequently-replayed content', and it needs to exist across multiple gamemodes. Give us an underwater map similar to Grothmar Valley, Inner Nayos, or Mistburned Barrens that has multiple meta-events and/or world bosses for players to take on; give us an underwater strike mission, or a raid or fractal that contains at least one major encounter that's fully or partially underwater. For any of the other changes made to matter—and to justify even making them in the first place—the game needs to give players things to actually do underwater and a reason to care about their underwater weapons and skills.
2. Fix broken specs
This point should really go without saying. The fact that a significant portion of the game's classes are all but unplayable underwater is a testament to how little both players and the team care about underwater content.
Fixing most of the broken specs should be incredibly easy. All Vindicator needs is a faster animation on its dodge—a fix that possibly amounts to just altering a single line of code. The Mechanist's jade bot simply needs to stay active underwater; as established before, it worked fine when we were able to glitch it underwater. For Chronomancer, just make its wells work the same way underwater as Necromancer's do. Repeat until all glaring issues are resolved.
3. More amphibious weapons
Problem #2 with underwater content is that getting underwater gear can be annoying, and problem #3 is that there's a lack of variety in underwater builds. We can address both of these problems with this one simple trick: amphibious weapons.
As of Janthir Wilds, spears can be used both underwater and terrestrially. Extending this treatment to the other 2 underwater weapons, tridents and harpoon guns, would increase the value of those weapons and give ANet an excuse to create more avenues of obtaining them.
I've seen previous suggestions regarding adding terrestrial tridents be shot down by claims that they'd be too similar to spears, but I personally don't think that'd be an issue at all. The game already has two types of sword and two types of bow, so two types of polearm really shouldn't be that much of an issue; tridents also are considered a magical weapon type in GW2, providing an easy avenue for how to differentiate them from spears. Harpoon guns, on the other hand, are in the same category as the bows and rifles they'd be competing with, but I still don't think that's a major issue; the team has shown many times that they're able to come up with a wide variety of distinct and interesting weapon skills.
With all that said, terrestrial tridents or harpoon guns wouldn't address the lack of build variety underwater. However, they aren't the only weapons that could be made amphibious: the same could be achieved by taking some terrestrial weapons and making them work underwater.
Making some terrestrial weapons amphibious would massively expand players' options for obtaining underwater gear, and it would provide some much-needed variety for underwater builds. Whereas terrestrial spears were blanketly given to every class, I believe these would need to be done on a more case-by-case basis.
Generally speaking, I think swords, daggers, foci, staves, and scepters are all strong candidates for weapons that would logically work underwater, though there are some notable exceptions, such as Daredevil's staff. Based on some very quick research, I also learned that there are real-world guns designed for use underwater called needleguns, so we could have pistol or rifle movesets based on those, as well. Of course, ANet have added plenty of unrealistic weapon skills before, such as Revenant's hammer, so enough magic could justify just about anything. I could foresee something like a class being able to use torch underwater with a "this fire burns so hot it can exist underwater" flavor, or a warhorn skillset flavored to be like a magic conch.
Regardless of what the weapons ported underwater actually are, one thing I think the team should do is make the underwater weapon skills as similar as possible to their terrestrial variants—straight up reuse the terrestrial skills where possible, and make small alterations to others so they function underwater in a similar way.
Firstly, this would massively decrease the production cost of adding these weapons, since they'd just be altering existing skills rather than designing and balancing several dozen completely new movesets. Secondly, doing this would help to address problem #5, which is that learning a completely different rotation for underwater content can be annoying. By bringing various terrestrial weapons underwater and keeping their skills as similar as possible, this problem could be alleviated by allowing players to perform more or less the same rotation.
Miscellaneous Ideas
The three above points represent all of my ideas that are important enough to justify their own heading, but there are a variety of other things the team could do that, while not strictly necessary, would help a lot to make underwater content feel more complete.
A big aspect of solution 3 was increasing the ways players could obtain underwater gear by increasing the amount of gear that works underwater and by making underwater weapons more valuable by bringing them up onto land. Beyond this, it'd also be nice if the underwater weapons were retroactively added to some existing weapon sets and methods of obtaining weapons. For example, legendary Aurene spears, tridents, and harpoon guns could be added, or we could get standalone legendary tridents or harpoon guns similar to Klobjarne. Similarly, the team could add more methods of obtaining aquabreathers and/or a legendary aquabreather.
Of course, as improvements to underwater systems would almost certainly require an expansion that takes place at least partly underwater in order to happen, said expansion could include a number of new masteries to help make underwater content stand out more. This could be in the form of new abilities or upgrades to the skimmer, turtle, or skiff in a similar fashion to how the skyscale and warclaw have been upgraded in SotO and JW, or it could be in the form of completely new mastery lines with new methods of transportation or other unique mechanics that take advantage of the underwater setting.
Finally, it'd be nice if the team took a second look at some existing underwater rewards. Not too long ago we received an update to the functionality of sunken chests and the swim speed infusions they award, but those changes weren't without flaw, as obtaining many high-value infusions or upgrading your account-bound infusion to a significant level is exorbitantly expensive. It'd be great if they could address this by adjusting its price and/or adding more ways to obtain swim speed infusions.
Conclusion
That about wraps up all of my thoughts regarding underwater combat, but what does the community think? What are your general opinions on underwater combat? Did you follow the general pattern of loving it as a new player only to hate it later? Is there anything else you would do to improve underwater content?
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