Season 14 has brought tons of cool features. What sucks about it is that hardly any are used (probably with the exception of the grapple gun) because most of it are only viable in specific situational moments so they are just left collecting dust. The purpose of this post is to briefly suggest improvements that will encourage players to use them more in a game that revolves around fast paced combat.
- Grapple Gun - Many believed the grapple gun would be game changing, but that was before rare made it so that crews could no longer interact with the armory from other crews. The current state of the weapon and how it behaves when hooked onto the ship feels restricted and awkward. Adding either one (or all) of these three changes would make it feel more natural.
- You should be able to grapple onto the mast. High risk, high reward for boarders since it would be difficult to grapple it when the ship is moving.
-Be able to hop when grappling the edge of the ship to board. Still high risk high reward, but perfect for pve pirates to get back on their stationary ship.
-Be able to grapple onto the ship after shooting out of a cannon. Some would still say it's op, but then again the boarder has to fight with just one weapon.
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Blowpipe
-When shooting a lure dart on an enemy, their allied skeletons gets attracted to it and targets that person. Great way to turn the tables. Perfect for battling against a crewed burning blade with skeletons or pirates who like to spam bone callers.
-There desperately needs to be a timer when using a mimic dart to show how long it would last until it wears off, like the merfruit.
-Similarly, the on screen blue mimic visual effect needs to be tuned down since it disrupts players from seeing things, but it should flash as a warning when their mimic almost wears off. -
Merfruit - While being able to be sneakier by dismissing your mermaid is great, it is only once in a blue moon would anyone ever use this feature that works in a highly situational moment. I feel most people would just prefer naval combat since tucking just doesn't feel rewarding. In this case however, the problem is that there is almost no way for a player who is tucked on an island or enemy boat to urgently go back to their boat if needed besides blackscreening. A simple change for this is one that will counter the timer that prevents mermaid from spawning:
-When eating a BURNT merfruit, it should nullify the effect of the enchanted merfruit so that players can hope for a mermaid to spawn and get back to their boat. Of all the things I could come up with, I feel this change is the most reasonable logical wise. I hope that the developers should consider this addition. This change will encourage people to make creative tuck plays without the fear of the item's downside and slightly shift them away from the usual decision to put themselves in naval combat. -
Traps - Traps being in their own separate inventory is a win, but it reintroduced a bug where when pressing the throwable hotkey, it always pulls out the trap first regardless of the position. This bug was seen in the start of season 14 when pressing the food hotkey, the enchanted merfruit was the first item the player pulled out. The patch notes of that season also specifically misinformed that merfruit has been included in a separate inventory to prevent accidental deploy, which was later fixed. The same should apply for traps.
-Traps need their own hotkey, just like how bait has their own hotkey despite it being categorized as food. It will make for great easy access. -
Disguises
-Disguising as a barrel is fun, but there is no part of a ship of any ship type where you could open an ordinary barrel which makes it inconvenient for disguised barrels since they can be interacted with and catch sneaky players. For this reason, some players opt to just use the hide emote barrel instead. In general, they should make it so that when on a ship, the only way you could catch disguised barrels is by damaging it. -
Crouching - Be honest, most people only use crouching just to be able to access the disguise menu or interact with traps or hanging from ledges. The game also advertised that it makes you less detectable to skeletons when crouching, but it is hardly ever useful since the problem with it is that crouching is slow. If anything:
-Crouching speed should be slightly increased, even a small noticeable change could make a great difference because it encourages players to be sneaky across islands. It should be increased no more than the walking speed.
-Unlikely but favorable: Be able to equip items when crouched like weapons for example. What's the point of a sneaky blowpipe if you can't shoot it in a stealthy position? I understand that this change may require the most effort since you would have to account for a lot of environmental aspects and behaviors of interaction points, but this change will make crouching feel a whole lot natural just like other games that has crouching. -
Hanging from Ledges
-Fix issues with the camera sometimes blocking the player's view.
-Currently when hanging, it doesn't allow the player to look up. This also needs a fix.
In general, when it comes to decisions against an unsuspected enemy, most players opt in for naval combat and the features introduced in season 14 just isn't enough to encourage them into the thrill of creative stealth plays. Sea of thieves is a time consuming game, and people just don't have the luxury to make these kinds of decisions. Due to this, faced paced naval combat has just been a normalized method for players to enjoy the game and I hope developed could somehow take away something from this post that makes the objective of the game feel more piracy (stealing loot).
