[Perdition]

There's currently an excellently written post in balance fu about Aquamancer's shortcoming as a class, but there is something else I feel needs to be addressed. Now, all of this is more subjective in nature, but it's something I feel strongly about.

I feel like Aquamancer is too specialized.

When I say that, the class as a whole is literally just water magic. It is an entire class dedicated to one type of magic, meaning there is very little room to fluff it or make it 'your own' so to say outside of Dark Authority, which was a welcome addition.

Let me expand on this. When it comes to the large majority of the rest of the classes in the game, they are not nearly as hyper focused on one single theme. Take Hexer for example. This is a class with a lot of dark magic, but it also supports a few different playstyles. You can be a melee focused Hexer with sadistic renewal and bloody karma. You can focus on the utility incantations, you can focus on inflictions and empowering those inflictions with hexes, so it's not really just a one trick pony class like Aquamancer.

Even with Firebird, which has a very strong theme, there's room for flexibility. While it defaults to fire, you can play a different elemental firebird with in-class support for it. The element of firebird's damage changes simply based on your active enchant. You can trigger ignite power with ice tiles as an ice based firebird, or light shafts as a lightning based one. The support for earth and wind is lackluster due to a way to generate these tiles, but the framework is there at the very least. It gives you more agency in regard to making the class feel your own, or mold it into a more fitting thing for your character.

Some people might point out classes that are focused around specific weapons, but even these classes don't feel as 'one trick pony' as Aquamancer. For example, looking at Monk, you have different elemental skills to pick from, which is a recurring theme when it comes to weapon based classes. Ranger and Magic Gunner for example have different elemental arrow skills and magic shells respectively. Even something like Kensei, which takes things a step further and works specifically with a subtype of sword, there are a few different ways to play it given you don't have enough skill points for everything. Some people go for sheathe sword gimmicks, and given you can't feasibly take all of the kensei attack skills, some people pick and choose different ones to trigger Sakki, Touki, etc. There's also elements that further change the way the class is played, even if lightning is currently overbearing due to its effectiveness.

A point of contention that might be brought up in response to this is Priest, but I feel like that class fulfills a needed class fantasy/role in the classic healer. Clerics of some kind are a staple of any RPG. Some tabletop RPGs offer ways to fluff priests with different deities for them to worship, and it would be cool if eventually Priest was allowed something similar in SL2, overall it doesn't feel like... wasted potential I guess, as a promotion.

One of the things I like the most about SL2 is that with the plethora of classes the game has, I can take them and have room to make them fit/work for my character. People are even given leeway to RP weapons as different types of weapons all together. For example, I've seen spears roleplayed as swords and so on. With a class like Aquamancer, however, that simply isn't an option. Aquamancer feels like something that could have easily been compartmentalized and fit into Evoker and Mage as another elemental tree of magic. This would end up making it more damage focused, but when it comes to a support, it doesn't feel like it brings anything new to the table that existing supports don't do infinitely better anyway. This is more of a fault of the Aquamancer skills being very underpowered, but I think it could be pulled off without dedicating an entire promotion to a single element of magic.

The elephant in the room when it comes to this post is Verglas, which is similar in regard to class rigidity. Honestly, everything I've said are also issues I personally have with Verglas, but at the very least it seems like even that class has different ways to go about it with skills that people build around specifically. 

All in all, I like SL2 for its fluidity in how you can make classes your own, so I personally would like to avoid another Aquamancer moving forward.