While we're all talking about this ability anyway, I figured I'd share my thoughts on it as an essential part of the Magplar's kit.

Simply put, it's easily one of the most useful skills in the game. Spammable cost, AoE damage, and a health steal, so that your damage and healing outputs both increase proportionally to the amount of enemies you're fighting, letting you solo a lot of the more challenging content with relative ease. Not only that, but it also activates the Spear Wall passive, and crucially for DPS, having it slotted activates the Piercing Spear passive which increases your Critical Damage by 10%.

That being said, I'm not a fan of this skill personally, and I switch it out for Elemental Weapon instead. I dislike having a melee-ranged spammable on a staff-wielding character, and aesthetically I don't think it makes a lot of sense for my magic-user to stab enemies with a spear. Unfortunately, not using Puncturing Sweep highlights how much Magplar relies on this one skill to perform effectively.

Of course, I don't think anything is actually wrong with the skill! It's just a matter of my own personal taste. I know some people massively enjoy it and I don't want it to be nerfed or what other people find fun to be taken away. But I do feel like so much of the class identity being in the Aedric Spear skill line goes against the game's philosophy of allowing players freedom with their builds and playstyles.

Update 35 changed the Burning Light passive so that it can be activated by any damage, rather than tying it to Puncturing Jabs and its morphs, with the following commentary:

Currently, this passive is strong arming the Templar into only using Puncturing Strikes as your spammable ability, removing a lot of the potential for other abilities that center around different gameplay. With maintaining the original identity of keeping up the pressure against your primary target, we've removed the restrictions of damage source completely and added a longer cooldown window to reduce burst potential and message spam on the server, helping the passive stabilize to a more expected power budget while vastly improving its flexibility.

This is already a very welcome change in making a variety of Magplar builds a little more viable, and ZOS clearly wants to reduce the amount of reliance on this one skill. To that end, I'm going to suggest some additional changes that might help push the class in the same direction:

Make the health steal a passive. The self-heal is one of the most powerful aspects of this morph. Without it, Magplars have to rely on Living Dark (which isn't really that effective) or Channeled Focus (slow heal and restricts mobility). Making it a passive instead of tying it to a skill will not make Templar any more or less powerful, but will simply allow them to keep themselves alive while not using Puncturing Sweep. This does allow Magplar to be able to self-heal at range, something they can't normally do, but Sorcerer can essentially already do this with Critical Surge, so I don't see it as that much of a stretch. This does mean that the morph effect of Puncturing Sweep will have to do something else, and that the skill line has one too many passives now. I would change Spear Wall to being the morph effect of this skill, since users of a melee-range spammable are more in need of that Minor Protection.

The only problem I can see with this is that it would allow Stamplar access to the healing usually restricted to the Magicka morph and would be a pretty significant unintentional buff. Perhaps make it so that the life steal only applies to magic damage types?

Make Piercing Spear apply regardless of whether or not an Aedric Spear ability is slotted. The 10% critical damage bonus is a very important part of Templar's DPS output, but without using Puncturing Sweep Magplars are forced to slot another Aedric Spear ability somewhere on their front bar to take advantage of it, like Sun Shield (which I don't use because I need the sustain from Harness Magicka) or Blazing Spear (which is annoying, since I prefer to have this on the backbar with my other AoE DoTs and save a space on my frontbar for Inner Light). This wouldn't be a buff - it just saves you from having to do annoying bar-swapping all the time.

Change Puncturing Sweep to a ranged morph of Puncturing Jabs. A bit of a different direction here. Perhaps remove or limit the AoE damage or make the self-heal less powerful to make up for the advantage this skill gets from being ranged. It wouldn't require changing around any passives, and would still make Magplar very reliant on a single spammable - but considering it's no longer inconveniently melee-ranged unlike every other class's Magicka spammable (aside from Sorc, who don't get one), I could easily live with this. On the other hand, it would require designing a new skill effect and would be the labor-intensive solution for ZOS so I don't see it being as likely.

As a disclaimer, I definitely don't think any of these changes are perfectly balanced and cannot foresee every possible DPS or PvP consequence, that's what PTS is for. I'm merely putting out suggestions that I feel might help Templar gameplay be a little more diverse. Would love to hear anyone else's thoughts and ideas!