Guild Wars 2 Underwater Combat!

Here are my first impressions of the amazing Guild Wars 2 underwater combat system!

To start I applaud ArenaNet and specifically the devs that brought this amazing creation to us. Thanks!

Now let's start!

The drowning downed system is wonderful. They looked at being downed at a whole new angle (get it, z axis! :O) and implemented an extremely smart downed state. If you are downed underwater you will be but into a "drowning" state. Here you can either, kill somebody, get revived by an ally or reach the surface. This mechanism will work extremely well in my opinion. Firstly, the deeper you go the harder it will be to come out of this drowning state. So that means all the epic bosses will be really deep underwater, awesome! One of the developers during a video stated that at some parts of the water you swim down for approx. 45 seconds. That is bloody deep considering the movement speed is fairly quick underwater. Also they have stated that there will be actual underwater events that take place! How many though is undecided yet. But if we take that 1/3 of the world will be underwater and approx 1500 events, I would say probably less then 500. That is awesome, so much underwater immersion for a game is unheard of! Until now!

Ok now, the transfer from land to water is seamless, and I have seen it. There was one part in a video where a dev was getting mauled by a lot of higher level pirates. On the land he went down right next to the shore. In the down state he was knocked backwards into the water and from there he instantly entered the water downed state. The transfer from land to water is fast and easy. You can go from fighting enemies on shore to launching harpoons at them in an instant. ArenaNet has really thought about the annoyance of underwater seen in other games and has completely eliminated it. There is also no breathing! You don't have to find some potion or spend a bunch of money, you are fitted with a breathing apparatus as soon as you enter water. Also on a side note the breathing apparatus looks really nice, it really fits well with the character.

The weapon sets provided underwater seem to give a similar play style to your original character but of course with that extra axis. Which is always great. Each profession (the 7 so far) have two different weapons available underwater except the elementalist. Which technically has 4, for each attunement. The engineer seems to stick with explosives like torpedoes and also with nets. The Necromancer uses a spear but more at a short range, with his main attack throwing spears. The ranger of course has the longer range harpoon gun and spear although I haven't seen much game play. And also with the other professions I have seen limited underwater game play.

Now with that being said there is one not so much of a big deal complaint. Clipping. I completely understand that clipping is inevitable. With 5 different sized races and 8 professions the armor, weapons, environment provide quite a clipping disaster. Normally above ground the clipping is not that bad, mildly noticeable. The problem was underwater. I could see a lot of ground clipping with the players swimming around freely in the open 3D space. The problem only seemed to occur whilst swimming backwards because the character is at a weird angle. Some armor did clip noticeably with the underwater weapons. For me, clipping is not that big of a deal. I can easily ignore it, but for some serious RPer's it might become a huge issue. Not game breaking, just an issue.

TL:DR It is awesome.

After the huge bombardment of information this week it has been amazing. All the fans that were lucky enough to be pulled into the ArenaNet studio had a blast and it seems the staff too. I think that the Fanday was a huge success, and those that didn't attend were blessed with loads of new information.

Victory!

Ramble complete, good day!