Guild Wars 2

For a long time people have been discussing the merits of the current elite system.

In gw1 Elites skills acted as keystones to a player’s build.
the elites in gw2 are much closer to those of Moba’s, high impact and long cooldowns.

While the moba style isn’t bad, i feel the gw1 elite skills make a game like this much more interesting. The problem is improving the system without a complete overhaul.

So what if:
1) any skill can be put into the elite slot
2) each skill has an elite form, which becomes active when it is in the elite slot, and this form has improved damage, improved or added effects, lower/longer cool downs.

It would be easy enough to alter the effects of current skills for elites versions so it wouldn’t be too hard a change to make and would remove some stagnation from builds in PvP.

This way a build can be focused around any skill and can potentially keep the high impact nature of elites for the skills where it make sense. Likewise current elites could have low impact forms as utility skills

I’d prefer an elite like you describe over what I have in the game.
I say +1.
In your system, do you change Utility skills and Weapons skills or just Utility?

I like your suggestions, the 1st one especially.

would love that system a LOT, a realtive simple change that would add a HUGE deal of versatility to builds

I like the idea, but I imagine it would be absolute hell to balance all the skills, and some would work better than others.

Example:

Thief Backstab. Already does arguably OP damage. An elite Backstab would basically be a 1-hit kill.

Warrior’s 100 blades. Yeah…

Odds are damage would be very slightly buffed, if at all, and the “elite” aspect would probably involve some of the following:

-Complete invincibility while casting
-Additional status effects.
-Class-mechanic specific effects (Ex. Instant max adrenaline for Warrior, refreshes CD on Steal.)