Utility

From Guild Wars Wiki

Utility is used to describe skills and players whose purpose is to provide various functionalities. Utility characters often carry some kind of snare, damage, and possibly some type of party support.

When playing a utility character, remember that your main focus is to support your team offensively and defensively instead of actually dealing damage. Placing a snare on a target your frontline is attempting to kill reduces its ability to kite, making it much more vulnerable. Alternatively, placing a snare on an enemy Warrior that you see running towards your healer allows your healer to run away and greatly increases his chance for survival.

While utility characters often carry some form of damage on their skill bar, this damage is often there as an afterthought. An Air Elementalist may carry skills such as Blinding Surge, Weapon of Warding, Shell Shock, and Lightning Orb, but a skilled player will not use Lightning Orb unless he is reasonably certain that doing so will land a kill (such as on a spike). In the vast majority of cases, he is better off using one of his other skills to help his team out.

Similarly, many utility skills deal damage, though this damage is, realistically, insignificant. The damage dealt by Freezing Gust as the Water Magic attribute increases is insignificant compared to the increased duration of the snare. For similar reasons, Deep Freeze is sometimes brought on casters with an attribute level of 0 because the important part of the spell - the AoE snare - is attribute-independent.

Utility should not be confused with toolbox, a type of character who carries various skills which the party feels they need but don't have room for elsewhere.