If you have a build and like your playstyle, you'll do well no matter what. Racial bonuses, while being icing on the cake, add just that small bit of statistical advantage that doesn't make a massive difference across performance.
If you're going for extreme min/max that must have that 4% better type of playstyle, choose an optimal race. If you're doing it because you want to play who you want how you want, choose whichever race you like. It wont make it impossible to PvP and play competitively, that usually has to do with skill. It wont exclude you from raids, the DPS changes are usually not large enough to make any sort of difference in a trial and dungeon.
For me it matters a lot. For example, take a stamina nightblade. You would want to stack as much as stamina regen to be able to do infinite dodge rolls. After you stack all that regen, just picking Bosmer race gives you 20% more regen on top of your current regen and it's huge bonus to miss imo.So I'm trying to pick a race for my Magicka based Templar. I have a VR5 Dragon Knight tank and have played long enough to understand the split between people who think it is utterly suicidal to forgo racial passives and opt for a "lesser race" (meaning passively lesser, sorry Argonian/Orcs). So my question is, will I hate myself at end game for choosing a race like say a Nord or Bosmer? I wouldn't consider myself a hardcore player by any means but I greatly enjoy performing well in both PVE and PVP. *Summary* Should I choose my race by look/lore, or is it truly important to pay attention to those ever so unique passives? Thanks for any feed back and or help on the matter!
-Alondight-
Everyone on these forums seems to say racials make or break a character. They don't. At most you're going to get a small percentage of efficiency and probably not even any effect on your dps or hps for picking one race over another.
You can make every race work for every class and role.