Guild Wars 2

So I have been playing the game since launch, and am proud to have played all races and all professions. One thing that has bothered me for awhile is the underwhelming racial skills. For example, Norn shapeshifting skills or plant turrets with Sylvari etc… I feel like your race should factor more into your build in some way. Unfortunately, there are very few “useful” racial skills when compared to the core profession skills. Sure the Charr have a decent shout not unlike “For Great Justice” and the human “Prayer to Dwayna” can prove to be a useful healing spell…but the vast majority of racial skills are overlooked due to being underpowered.

In a nutshell, I wish the racial skills were beefed up in some way or provided more useful integration into a more diverse build pool.

I am going to be one of “those” people and bump my own post from a month or so ago. But I was thinking about this again…

Maybe I am alone? Either way here is one possible improvement: My Norns have all these transform spells. On the face of it, it sounds awesome and was one of the things that made me want to roll a Norn before the game came out. However, in practice, they don’t last long enough, and have very long cooldowns. (plus most of the skills are mediocre). Shorten the Norn transform cooldowns and let us stay in these forms longer. Hell, let it be a toggle like engi kits.

That would be lush, but they did say they wanted to keep all races balanced. Personally I don’t think it’d a bad thing if all races were different but equal (at the moment they’re all the same because racial skills are useless), but they can’t even balance the professions properly, so let them sort that out first before making racial skills viable.

yeah, you have a fair point there about balance.

i agree with everything above, they failed in both ways, racial skills and balancing (still keep failing). The way they are going they will never do the balancing right, since their philosophy is if something is good and other thing is bad they will rather make good thing worse to be closer to bad thing than to make bad thing better.

Making the racial elites less powerful than the profession elites was a conscious decision as stated in many dev posts during development. They didn’t want players choosing a race to play based on theorycrafting. Specific racial things such as elites and armor are there for flavor, not to get people playing one race to get an advantage.

What I don’t get is the “advantage” that they are worried about. Racial skills are not allowed in sPvP, so there is no problem. WvW is more about population and coverage than actual skill – besides, making racial on par with profession skills would not hurt WvW too much imo. And PvE, there is no “advantage”…everyone is on the same team.

The main crux of my argument, and maybe where me and devs differ, is that I feel there are not enough different builds out there, I want a diverse world – not just a bunch of zerker warriors running around with an occasional mesmer. I think choosing your race SHOULD factor into how you play more than just how you look.

Well as it is now, racial elites dont even add a flavour, they could remove them and no1 would notice.

edit: And ofc there are not enough diff builds since with every balance patch they make things worse, with excuse to make ppl use “more builds” they just nerf good ones to be alike the bad ones instead to fix bad ones. But i understand them, its easier to break something then to fix it.

Imagine if there was a racial skill that was worth bringing – it would find its way into some meta build or whatever, and then people would demand that you made a norn warrior or a charr mesmer or whatever – in fact you might end up needing multiples of the same profession for different purposes, just because of different racial skills. Personally I would not mind that because I’m willing to level up another 32 chars to get one of each race and profession, but I suspect most people would burst into tears if it was deemed necessary to have a specific race for a specific purpose.