Guild Wars 2

Basically as the title topic asks: if you could, would you improve Racial Skills, if so, how would you do it? If not, why not?

I personally would, since the way I see it, as long as PvE provides decent challenge to players and they have fun, why not let racial skills be as crazy or powerful as normal skills? They can’t even be used in PvP anyway.

As for how, I cannot say for certain, partially because I know certain skills I would buff, I would want to also buff the regular profession skills similar to them.

Though the “form changing” elites (Norn Spirits, Asura battle suit, Avatar of Melandru) would get some definite slashes to the activation times of all their 1 skills, shortened cooldown on 2-5, and ultimately a lengthened duration. Also maybe a speed buff since they tend to feel weirdly slow.

The form-changing skills should work like this: you can stay in them until you go underwater or are downed, then it goes on cooldown.

Similarly, all elite summons should survive until killed/you go underwater, instead of some arbitrary time limit.

Improving race skills is a dangerous thing to do. It will start to have players gravitate to one race over others. They are supposed to be fun and very situational. In general, they are supposed to be far less powerful than non-race skills. Otherwise, because every race can play every class, you would start to see everyone play the best racial skill race. That would be a disaster.

Bombsaway.7198:

Improving race skills is a dangerous thing to do. It will start to have players gravitate to one race over others. They are supposed to be fun and very situational. In general, they are supposed to be far less powerful than non-race skills. Otherwise, because every race can play every class, you would start to see everyone play the best racial skill race. That would be a disaster.

Perhaps, but at the moment, racial skills, with extremely few exceptions (radiation field and avatar of grenth I think) are so laughably weak, there’s the question of why they’re in the game at all?

The elite skill slot has always been a bit of a strange beast. I kind of wish the elite slot could be optionally ditched for a utility skill due to the big disparity in cooldowns and usefulness of the elite skills available between classes.