As a necro player we saw some nice buffs on week 1 of PTS. Although I want to see my main being buffed and some of the buffs plugged some obvious leaks, the fixes were flawed and only partly addressed the problems the class has. On top of that there are a plethora of other older issues in the game that need fixing that just aren't getting attention. After week one there's been radio silence and almost none of the player feedback seems to have made any meaningful impact. Most changes address problems players don't have and offer solutions players don't want.

In case of Warden, Arctic Blast is being butchered based on PvP reasons even though everyone who half-plays PvP will probably agree that the other morph, Polar Wind, is the problem that creates unkillable Wardens and worse yet Warden duos when they both use the skill.

Necro is finally getting its Major Sorcery/Brutality that it desperately needs which is great, but it's being put in a skill that only sees use in PvE and is underwhelming in it too. Although the Boneyard changes are a step into the right direction, they will have no real impact other than offering PvE tanks an easily accessible extra buff(Minor Vulnerability) during trash packs. The class abilities of necromancer still need some love, most notably the Skeletal Mage needs to be relevant again, Boneyard needs to be 10 yards and the other morph needs a small buff and the synergy should only be usable by the caster and nobody else. Worse yet, Necromancer still lacks CC worth mentioning and the class lacks any identity in PvP. There is more too, but I keep it simple.

Other classes also need tuning, but I want to keep the post short so I keep these two as examples.

Infinite Archive is getting an update. I was looking forward to this. Finally after a year of waiting the glaring problems are getting fixed. Except they aren't. Literally none of them have been addressed. All we are getting is more content being thrown into the mix with the old, with all the problems that make players lose interest staying. I'm not against adding new content, but I'm very much against building on quicksand where content is being added but none of the huge old issues are being addressed. More content should be added after the old content has been fixed, not thrown in as a distraction.

Here are a few examples of the Infinite Archive problems. I want to highlight that every single one of these problems have been well-known since the first patch of Archive.

1. The vision balance is in a horrible state. There is one Focused Efforts master build available, and every single deep run strategy is built around this. There are no exceptions to this rule. There is one vision that's far ahead of everything else(FE), then there are a few other good visions(Attuned Enchantments, Archival Endurance, Extended Favor) and a the rest are far behind. You stack tons of Focused Efforts for damage, and if you get enough Attuned Enchantments on top of this you can drop the weapon damage of bosses to 0, making them do no damage to you and making them ridiculously easy to kill with no additional strategy needed.

Focused Efforts is used because it's completely overpowered compared to anything else. It adds insane amounts of damage. Attuned Enchantments and Extended Favor are good visions but they are being largely used to cheese the boss weapon/spell damage to 0 where an arc 10 Gothmau or any boss will literally do zero damage with its attacks and abilities. The avatar visions are hit-or-miss, offering between irrelevant to decent benefits if you don't have all 3 but when you get lucky, they sometimes give you an extremely powerful avatar verse.

Every other vision is miles behind and irrelevant. Things like the crit damage boosters are only good if you have enough Focused Efforts. Some of the damage reductions gain value in late stages, but you only get there if you get enough Focused Efforts.

What is needed is a big nerf to Focused Efforts, big buffs to all the irrelevant visions, and Attuned Enchanments needs to not work with the Weakening enchant.

2. I already mentioned it above, but being able to nerf the weapon/spell damage of a boss to 0 is a joke. Getting the right visions allows you to effectively skip a lot of the bosses because they do 0 damage to you. It was comical to watch an arc 10 boss do 0 damage with its one-shot mechanic while the player is standing on the boss AOEs, taking 0 damage. This obvious oversight was clearly going to get hotfixed in a matter of days. Yet a year later, the problem still persists. How can something as broken as this stay in the game?

3. All the deepest duo runs were made with Magma Shell cheese strategy. You have 1-2 Dragonknights who are playing a build with lots of ultimate gain and 100% uptime on Magma Shell, making them practically unkillable unless they make a big mistake. It's boring, grindy and unimaginative strategy where you effectively skip all the mechanics of the game but currently it's the only viable build to get super deep runs. It's time to finally nerf Magma Shell.

4. Last but definitely not least, there's still no save option. This has been by far the most requested feature by virtually everyone, and there's been an entire year to implement it. There's no excuse for this. It's what everyone wanted, and all we get is a new round of class sets, visions and bosses.

I am a player who normally doesn't worry a lot about the patches. I have already accepted that a lot of problems in the game don't get fixed and if a good change happens, I will be positively surprised. But this time I've had to open my mouth because of sheer amazement how far apart the wishes of the player base and the changes ZOS implements are from each other. Most of the problems I brought up in this post are all game-breaking, large scales issues that everyone with a moderate knowledge of the game has known to exist for a long time. These are not new problems and most of them have a straightforward fix. These are old problems and the discontent players have made the developers well aware of them. However for whatever reason the problems just continue to get ignored while new random content gets added.

The disconnect between the developers and the player base is something I've never seen in a game before. In this community there are tons of very skilled, very helpful players with encyclopedic knowledge of the game who continuously offer their two cents here, effectively doing the work for the developers who quite frankly don't sometimes seem to know what they are doing. But time after time these great suggestions are just being ignored and we get changes that almost any advanced player could tell won't work within seconds. When buffing or nerfing a class, why not consider the opinion of someone who knows the class inside out? Any PvP Warden or anyone who has played against them can tell you that Polar Wind is the problem, not Arctic Blast. Any Necro main can explain the numerous problems the class has, but the buffs we are getting, while promising, are half-arsed and show a blatant lack of understanding of the class.

A few patches ago ZOS promised to up the communication between the developers and the players. It has amounted to nothing so far. Now we'll see if this post just gets censored and the problems continue to be ignored. I have tried to make this post as constructive as possible, but we'll see.