Ok, so most people are well aware that racial elite skills are underpowered compared to profession elites, to cause favouritism towards profession skills over racial skills. This I understand, so the question is:
Why do racial elites exist? Well two reasons come to mind,
1. Added utility, racial elites can serve functions that profession skills do not
2. Added immersion, make your character feel more unique, in that they make you feel like a norn/asura/human/sylvari/charr
So how can racial skills be changed to provide these two functions better and make them viable choices, my take on the subject.
All but the norn race have a racial elite the summons a unit related to the character’s race. These units tend to have lacklustre performance, face long cool downs, average durations, and a lack of control. Also is the lack of immersion that they provide.
Let’s say I’m a charr. I call in my warband for support. These fellows answer the call and throw their life on the line for me, but who are they? where did they come from? where do they go? what’s their story?
Unfortunately I know the answer, they don’t really exist.
So I recommend to remedy this by blending the racial summons into something similar to necromancer minions. You summon this unit, and it’s permanent. It has no duration. Also the elite skill is replaced with a new skill that you can trigger on the summoned unit. This would give the racial elites more immersion (that’s my asura’s golem, yes we go everywhere together, yea we mess enemies up, he watches my back), would add a measure of control to improve utility (it’s great that my d-series golem has this awesome shield, but I’d rather he not use it off in some far corner at a random time), and would avoid the need to buff these units (if the summons have no duration and you can trigger their skills they already have been buffed substantially).
Other Ideas:
These units don’t die when their health reaches 0, they go into the standard down state for npcs where they do not move or attack, and can be revived by anyone other than yourself (to prevent you chain rezing your unit). Or revive and return to you after combat.
You can name your unit, who doesn’t want a Sparkles 2.0 or a pair of balthazar’s hounds referred to as hell hounds?
Personal story choices have some measure of impact on the summoned unit. This is seen in warband support, where the summoned units wear armour relative to the warband you chose in your story. Why not take that a bit further and have their skills influenced by your story? Ash legion units might flank around enemies to attack and iron legion units might use a rifle, some ideas.
How would that sound? I think it would be an interesting dynamic (sorry norns, seem you draw the short straw in my suggestion)