Racial skills
Long before launch, ArenaNet made it clear that they wanted racial skills to be weak. They didn’t want people to “optimize” using race as a factor. They did want them to be unique for each race
For a time, they were among the first skills you could unlock for each slot, so they were useful, since ‘something’ is better than ‘nothing’.
That said, even today many of the skills have a niche value (and arguably, Sylvari’s “Take Root” is overpowered in its niche).
And even if all of the above wasn’t true, would this really be the best use of time for the people who work on updating skills? I think there are a lot of other balance-related issues that people would like to see addressed, especially across the different game modes.
It would be nice if choosing your characters race actually had some type of impact but Anet doesn’t want that to happen because other games do it. Anet wants a boring world where nothing changes unless they change it, that’s why the Living World is in instances and it doesn’t matter if you don’t do events because nothing changes if you don’t or do. It would of been nice if the Races were as unique as they was in Guild Wars 1 but they lost all of that because it wouldn’t fit into the new story.
[????] – HoD
Having racial skills be different for each race adds a lot of flavor to the game world in my opinion, so I can’t agree with homogenizing them like this. And truthfully I wish they were a little stronger than they currently are (for the most part, take root is in a good place at the moment, and one could even argue for tuning it down).
In fact, the best suggestion I’ve ever seen regarding racial skills is to add quests to the game that would allow you to unlock the racial skills for other races. It could be similar to the collections for legendaries. Go do a series of tasks for a race, collect some items relevant to it, talk to some mentors, and learn how to use their skills.
This would make it easier from a balance side of things to buff the racial skills, since you would no longer have to worry about what race you picked in case one of the racial skills does become competitive in any scenario.