Just a thought I had. Adding more playable races is a lot of work, and some just wouldn’t be feasible to be made fully playable, but some of them have pretty cool skills. And if we can learn a whole profession off Rytlock, why can’t certain allied races pass their skills down in the form of new elite specializations?
For example, Dredge technology fits pretty well alongside Engineer tech, and Sorrow’s Embrace introduces us to dredge that are rebelling against their leadership, so lore wise, it might make sense for some of those defected dredge to join the fight against the dragons and as such, share their tech with our own playable engineers.
It could have a dredge mining suit transformation as a new elite, some sort of sonic weapon kit with shockwaves and such, and a tunneling gadget that lets you burrow underground and pop up elsewhere or maybe dig up magma wells. The traits could focus on tankyness and boon support, and definitely one that autotrigers utility goggles upon some condition (immunity to blindness, which is painfully Dredge theme appropriate). Maybe the name could be “miner” or “excavator” or something along those lines.
Thieves could maybe get a Skrit “Scavenger” specialization. As an additional class mechanic, on top of stealing things from enemies, you could get an additional F skill to pick up random bundle items/weapons from the ground. (Bonus points if lines like “Give me your shinies!” upon stealing and “More come, yes?” when summoning minions get added)
Perhaps rangers can get a class passed down from Hylek hunters that gives them poisons and elixirs, (along the lines of thief and engie skills, but with their own mechanics and flavor) and possibly has new sun god or jungle god spirits or transformations.
The idea of Elementalists getting Zephyrite aspects as new atunments has been kicked around before. An “Aspect Master” Specialization would be pretty cool. (Yeah, a faction, not a race, but still has the same sort of spirit as these other ideas so I included it) While I’m on the topic, since we see the aspect masters fight bare handed, instead of getting a new weapon, Aspect Masters might instead gain access to the “weapon swap” key which instead causes you to stow your weapon and fight with martial arts skills. (And so A-net doesn’t have to make an insane amount of skills for the new aspects, the new attunements can just apply to the barehand skills and swaping back to your weapon gives your classic ele attunements back)
Necromancers could pick up some tips from grawl for a “Shaman” specialization, perhaps.
Quaggans are mostly pacifistic but fight when they need to, which might work into the idea of a support guardian. I have no idea what skills a Quagan specialization would have other than maybe that crazy feral battle form thing which might be a Guard version of rampage.
Warriors could maybe take some cues from Ogres or Ettins for a more barbarian type class, or maybe some Kodan ice skills like what you get in the Edge of the Mists transformation (sorry I’m running out of ideas, can you tell?)
And we know the Mursaat were playing around with dimensional phasing from Arah p2, so maybe Mesmers can get a specialization from that as an extension of the distortion mechanic. Flipping between dimensions or summoning things from alternate planes of reality. Maybe making clones of your target instead of yourself.
I didn’t go much into potential mechanics on these (because this post is long enough) and I’m not familiar with some classes’ mechanics, and the lore on several races, so ya’ll might have some better suggestions for which race makes for the best specialization for a certain class. But I would like to know what people think of the general concept of specializations inspired by NPC racial skills.
(edited by Arioso.8519)