I have been thinking lately (dangerous I know). Specifically I have been thinking about racial skills.
Racial skills at launch were a bit of a hot topic and have died off lately but when HoT came out I made a Revenant. Revenants do not get any racial skills, not one. This is not a problem really. They are weaker than class skills and many are almost useless. So my Revenant experience has been unaffected in terms of gameplay. However I began to remember why racial skills are in the game.
Racial skills exist purely for flavour purposes, a little skill based wink to why a race is cool. Some skills can be quite useful, like “pain interver” can give a necro access to confusion, while others are pretty pathetic like the norn forms. But overall players are not meant to use them, they are designed to be weak.
So now that we are all on the same page I can get to the point. How can we get the flavour of racial skills without having skills that are so weak you won’t miss them? My solution does not involve making them stronger (I know some people want this), but rather replace them.
I was thinking back to some really old posts from when the game launched and there it was the answer to the racial skills dilemma: skill reskins.
How would this work exactly? Well racial skills would be no more, poof, gone. And in each city there would be a racial skin vendor, you would purchase a racial reskin for your class at the cost of karma (let’s say about the same price as a T3 weapon). Reskins would have to be bought for each profession separately.
Not every reskin would be created equally, but would change the aesthetic of certain class skills. Some examples I can think of are as follows:
Asuran necromancers summon golems instead of minions.
Norn take an animal fomr when undertaking certain form changes, like Bear with Rampage or Raven with Lich Form.
A norn could summon minions based on reskinned versions of their animal spirit (from your character creation)
Turrets could change to match the active racial skin, plant turrets for sylvari, asuran turrets for asura, iron legion style turrets for charr, etc.
Banners could also look more flavourful to their summoned race.
Why should this replace racial skills? Because this could only feasibly implemented in PvE, just like racial skills. Costing karma would also give more a purpose to a somewhat dead currency. Not to mention these could be offered for elite specs separately from the core professions.
What do you guys think? Am I on to something here?