Hard Revival skills (see http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Revive#Skills_that_revive_allies) in their current state are, while not quite useless, pretty near it in most cases. It’s rare to see anybody take them.
The reasons most people don’t equip them are:
1) If the battle is easy enough, they can revive the old-fashioned way mid-battle.
2) If the battle is too hard, the downed character may very well be outright killed before you target them and use the hard revival skill, much less revive the normal way, leaving the others to just let the character die; this is most common in encounters with dungeon bosses who will continually hit the target when downed, doing far too much damage too fast for the target to mitigate.
3) Many perceive taking another utility skill that might improve both self- and party-wide survivability to prevent going down in the first place a more viable alternative.
In regards to #2, you will see this most often in fights such as with Subject Alpha, where revivals are only possible the old fashioned way if you stack melee on the target; trying to do groups and NOT stack on melee is a disaster unless the entire group dodges perfectly: one person goes down, your failure to stack means you can’t revive him, and if you brought a revival skill, its doubtful if you can find the one in question and hit him with it before the next AOE finishes him off; why take, therefore, a hard rev skill if a utility will serve better, especially allowing for more varied tactics in the meantime?
Further, dead characters are flat out gone, especially in dungeons where rez rushing is now prevented; reviving a character from death is pretty much impossible in many cases.
It seems to me there are one of a few solutions available:
1) Change the AI so that downed/dead characters and those reviving them are not targetted unless nothing else is available; this doesn’t fix hard rev skills, however, and it doesn’t seem like an easy solution.
2) Move the hard rev skills to the healing skill slot, and add in a self-heal component. This is very appealing in that you can take a skill that heals AND revives at the same time.
3) Add an ability to revive the defeated as well, perhaps at a lesser effect.
4) Combine 2 & 3 together
So, just a couple examples of how you might implement #3 and have some fun with it:
Signet of Undeath: Keep the revive of downed characters as listed, with the following addition – Defeated characters are likewise revived, but with the effect “Free-Willed Minion” applied. Character is transformed into an undead minion of the necromancer with free will, his or her skills replaced with a different selection of attacks. Once the minion’s health is fully restored, the character returns to his normal state.
Illusion of Life: Each character up to 3 in the area of effect is restored to full health, downed or defeated. Each character takes up one of the Mesmer’s illusion slots, two if the character had been defeated, and is transformed into an Illusion with a single skill, the mesmer’s #1 skill slot when revived, looking like the mesmer as well. When the Mesmer performs a shatter, each character is returned to his normal state.
Ok, I haven’t thought those through completely, not sure if they would work, but by implementing an ability to revive both defeated and downed characters would be nice; adding on an additional thematic component is just gravy.
The #2 option is probably a bit more doable however. In either case, though, I would like to see the revive skills get a revive defeated component – THAT alone would make these skills worthwhile.