It’s silly to give us Racial abilities that are so crap that they can’t even compete with any classes slot and elite skills. I desperately want to use these abilities, but they’re useless, not even just worse than, but full on useless, except Take Root and the Fern Hound, but even those range from blech to mediocre on the comparison scales. The Healing Seed has its moment, but it impossibly steals aggro off mobs I’ve been wailing on for 10-20 seconds and gets destroyed before it does much of anything. This is the case for every single Sylvari racias, the getting one or two hit by weak mobs, the grabbing aggro out of nowhere, making these all really cool…distractions.
This has all been said before by an ocean of people with working brains and basic expectations. It’s been made quite clear that racials aren’t supposed to be on par with class abilities, which is a poor design philosophy from the “FUN” perspective, but Sylvari got the shaft and the barbed hooks and duct tape with this. All of our racials have health, can be targeted, can take AoE damage, CAN’T take hits without being destroyed, don’t fulfill what they promise in any way that can be considered satisfactory; seriously, five seconds attack time on the Seed Turret? Who thought that was a good idea? They’re lucky to get one shot off per fight! Incredibly slow attack speed makes them feel lame, poorly thought out, immersion shattering, boring, hack-job, etc… Battle is a beast borne of lightning speed, fury and skill. Seed Turret in its current incarnation is a mockery of battle and it sings it’s uselessness out to the world every time it’s used. Chances are it gets attacked and one hit before it even fires.
This isn’t the kind of thing I expected from Anet, what with GW2 having excellent combat. Unfortunately, the entire list of Sylvari racials range from absolutely pitiful to mediocre. Double the HP on ALL Sylvari non-elite abilities, reduce their aggro to the absolute minimum so PvE monsters don’t constantly attack them, raise the damage of the turrets, including the Take Root turrets, drastically increase the attack speed of non-Take Root turrets even if it means lowering the damage though a damage increase would still be necessary to make them competitive, let us tear down ALL turrets by interacting with them so that we can force their cool down timers to start when we choose. Etc….etc…
Actually, that about covers it
Players love the freedom of customization that GW2 engenders, which makes it somewhat offensive to show such disregard for racial abilities, especially for the Sylvari skills. I ADORE the lore, the species, the style, the atmosphere, the graphical designs, the dialogue, kitten near everything about GW2 really. However, dangling all these excellent conceptual abilities in front of us would’ve been bad enough, but to dump these half-done, hare brained attempts at a finished, balanced spell kit is insulting to everyone, including those to whom the blame falls. Sylvari with genuinely functional / valuable racials are a dream that every Sylvari player undoubtedly holds in their heart of hearts.
With all that in mind, can we PLEASE throw away the design philosophy responsible for the drastically unimpressive, nigh useless, racial abilities being less valuable than class skills? More is better, and having valid racial skills that are, say 5-10% lower damage or duration or have slightly longer cool downs than comparative class abilities, then the design philosophy, which I imagine is intended to prevent unbalanced flavour of the month species / class combos, can still be satisfied without spitting in the eyes of everyone who isn’t a min-maxer, or kittenting in the cereal of every Sylvari player who hasn’t yet fled for greener MMO pastures.
“How’d that happen?”
“He doesn’t talk about it.” – Stephen Fry
