Diving Attachment- Rebalance for Practicality

[GunnyTheGrey 27]

The Diving Attachment is better in concept than in practice.  I've actually stopped using the suit, and rather simply buff fortitude and swim down naked because the oxygen usage reduction provides more use than the attachment does by a significant margin.

Problems:
1- It doesn't last enough to swim to bottom, loot one object, and swim back up. While there are perks to improve that, it can only be improved long enough to clear a path to the inside of a ship and still not enough at that point to actually loot.

2- The vision impairment is excessive.

3- Any wreck worth looting contains a significant amount of weight to haul. Assuming you maxed the diving skill perks, you'll be able to get down, open the hull, go back up, refresh the suit, and dive again.. But you'll then have to do this for over an hour as you make limited hauls attempting to control the weight per trip. While I understand "teleporting resources" to the resource box would be a bit overpowered, making every wreck a one-trip job.... I feel as though some form of balancing to extend diving time would make the suit a better alternative to simply swimming with the points you'd put in fortitude to survive in general.

 

4- The 100hp makes the attachment a one-time use. I never build them until I am over top of a wreck. As they will generally be lost when travelling.
 

5- That the suit provides no protection to the player, yet obscures their vision, makes it more of a liability than not using it. If the cages that came with the skill could be rigged to the attachment and lowered down, would give a viable use to the attachment simply by way of allowing descent in areas with some degree of hostile aquatic wildlife.

SUGGESTED TWEAKS:
Allow cage attachment to diver. Have low descent and ascent speed, limiting weight to 5% of ship's total carry capacity (so 1,500 per trip with a Galleon, but much less on any smaller ships.) Make the suit last MUCH longer. The cage will protect divers, and require a second person manning the pulleys to lift or lower them. The rate of descent and ascent will allow for control of fhow much can be hauled in a given time. The cage itself will give cause to use the attachment, by protecting the player if a wreck has sharks nearby.
This will give the attachment a use, while controlling the expected gains and time investment of using it, to balance against non-pirate gameplay styles of resource acquisition. But will at least give it SOME reason to be used over just swimming down without the attachment.

Edited January 15, 2019 by GunnyTheGrey
added suggestions

[TheSzerdi 79]

Great idea! I was just going to suggest a net bag that can be filled with wreckage and hauled up, but this is better. The whole diving rig and suit is such a neat idea and so totally worthless in it's current form. 

[MisterMyztik 59]

Couldnt agree more!

[Merpz 7]

Suit last longer? Put oil in the diving attatchment 500 oil = 2hrs of dive time

 

i agree with everything else!

Edited January 24, 2019 by Merpz

[arzosah 84]

When using the diving attachment allow you to inflate balloon crates to float resources to the surface to be looted without having to swim back down over and over.

Edited February 8, 2019 by arzosah