Guild Wars 2

For a while now racial skills have been bugging me. They are more or less useless, intentionally made to be weak so the race choice does not affect play. Why have them at all then? Well, I have an idea to make racial skills useful, diverse, but so that the race choice is not game changing.
The idea is that all racial skills have the same effect, but different names, different animation and different icon. Since they have the same effect, race choice is not game changing. I have already made a suggestion of some racial skills, as an inspiration.

Healing skill – Flat healing of certain amount

Human | Prayer to Dwayna
Sylvari | Healing seed
Norn | Feel no pain
Charr | Medical syringe
Asura | Healing concoction

Elite skills:

Summon skill – summons 2 npc to fight along side you

Human | Hounds of Balthazar
Sylvari | Summon sylvan hounds
Norn | Call wurms
Charr | Warband support
Asura | Summon golems

Transformation skills – gives player a new skill bar

Human | Reaper of Grenth (gets a new skillbar, and visual effects remain)
Sylvari | Take root (player gains control of roots, getting a new skillbar)
Norn | Spirit transformation (according to which spirit was chosen in living story)
Charr | Charzooka
Asura | Summon power suit

Norn are the trickiest for this idea, because at the moment they have four transformation skills. Idea for solution is that they get only one transformation skill, and they transform in the spirit animal they chose in character creation.
Another option for human racial skills would be for transformation skill to be avatar of the chosen god in character creation, and other skills not to be called based on human gods.
I couldn’t think of good utility skills, as I don’t have a good imagination, but you get the idea.

P.S. I like uniqueness of chosen race, for me it is fine for them to only be cosmetical, so it would be awesome to have more racial specific armors (and even weapons).

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.

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.