I just wanted to comment on the current PvP environment as I've been rather frustrated as of late. Everyone is doing massive amounts of burst damage making the entire concept of sustained damage/pressure type builds 100% irrelevant. It feels to me like I'm forced to be either a massive burst build, or dedicate to being a 100% pure distraction tank or some cheeseball/borderline abusive build to hope to survive more than 5 seconds in Cyrodiil. Certain NB builds are perma dodging to gain better survivability than tanks. Sorcs with Ball Lightning are probably the most trollish build I've ever had the displeasure of encountering in any MMO- and I've certainly played my fair share. You're forced to slot a limited number of teleport or charge skills to have a hope of keeping up. No single skill should have as much going for it as Ball Lightning does and it at least feels like blatant developer favoritism.
I left another title to come to your game because of this same type of balance concerns and I'm beginning to consider looking for another simply because so little is being done in such a drastically imbalanced system. I don't expect perfect balance (no one should!) but would it really be so wrong to expect incremental skill tweaks on the mini-patches you release most Mondays? "We've reduced the damage of Wrecking Blow by 5%", "Ball Lighting absorbs are limited to 4 per cast", "Successive dodges cost 50% more" or even "The Cyrodiil Battle Spirit buff has been increased from 5000 to 8000." Okay, great, maybe that's not enough but you're making a visible effort to at least TRY instead of sitting on your hands either doing nothing about these issues or looking for some magic bullet solution that you likely will never find.
In any case I can very much appreciate some of the recent patches you've made to encourage players to spread out such as the Delve and Anchors changes as well as the overall improvements of 1.6- that being said I must say (with no spite in my tone) that in the real world if other tech firms manage their products as poorly as PvP is handled in most MMOs they will lose customers in droves. Game devs, particularly MMO devs are for some reason given a free pass on some of the most obvious issues. Not even the bugs that I KNOW can be difficult to pinpoint and fix- for those I am happy to be patient with you folks on, but simple small balance oriented number tweaks (we know take far less effort to implement) you should be far more liberal with trying on a live environment. Maybe the population of caring adult gamers with standards is small enough that its drowned out by the burst addled kids who are happy enough to implode each other in these zerg battles, but it feels like the standards of this genre are far too low. I'm only 30 but feeling like old man MMO- maybe I need to think about hanging my gamer hat up if these things frustrate me as they do. I've just seen these same mistakes made over and over again in this genre and it simply baffles me that you folks can't learn from your predecessor's mistakes.
I'll keep playing and continue to stay subscribed to support the game, despite not caring for the aesthetic store items. You've got a great core game to build off of and I hope the B2P/Console business model will be successful to the point that maybe you gain more needed developer resources to work on balance and content releases in a more timely manner.
Edited by Draehl on 11 April 2015 00:09 Main: Breton Nightblade "Shadow Cleric" (Sustained Damage/offhealer) 5L/2H - Resto + S&B
Alt: Argonian Dragonknight (Stam DoTs/Tank) 5H/2M - S&B + Bow
Alt: Nord Templar Berserker (Rawr) 5M/2H - Dual Wield + Two Hander
Alt: Altmer Sorceror (Pewpew) 7L - Destro + Resto