To get things out of the way immediately, I'm feeling fairly anxious about the game in its current state. I am not having as much fun with the game as i have with others (namely World of Warcraft(retail) and Path of Exile 2) but i still love the game and for many years now i've been clinging onto some hope that the game would get better. I still log in fairly regularly, and parse and test things on the PTS. I also have long chats with my friends when i log in. What i don't do in-game is play trials anymore. i sometimes get invited to them and smash them out, but i no longer actively seek to play them anymore. Sometimes i quest though, i often get really bored as the difficulty is simply too low to hold my attention for very long.

I am what i would call a theme player, as i'm sure many of you all have seen my previous posts on the topic of frost dps warden that have sometimes gained enough traction to be implemented into the game, i really really like using frost magic spells to deal high dps. The same is true in other games. its just what i like to play, and i optimise damage as much as i can with a frost dps theme.

ESO is a difficult game to make a satisfying build in when it comes to PVE content. Over the years, things such as standardisation and hybridisation(which have never been completed) have fundamentally changed the game in a way that has, in my opinion, erroded the identities of everything. when everything scales with everything and has a standardised amount of dps it follows at the base level, the differences in classes and build types begins to rapidly disolve.

Hybridisation And Standardisation.
Everything deals nearly exactly the same damage with few unique effects of note and you have a plethora of abilities that fill the same role. There are some things can push the numbers of certain skills higher than the rest of the other ones, so they're used instead all of the time between every single class. Dual Wield and Two-Handed weapons are probably my biggest example of this. I swear, nearly every single endgame build uses daggers and two hander. Yes, you can argue that you don't have to use these because Destruction Staves exist and are a ranged option. And i get it, however, when you want to commit to using a magicka based character with spells and that sort of thing, it does not feel right that stamina weapons still end up being better at the highest end. This means the primary difference between classes is the colours of their class skills, and (IF THEY HAVE ONE) their payoff skill which may change their rotation ever so-slightly.

It is in this regard that i don't think that hybridisation has been good for the game. Standardisation has not really helped either, to me, it just seems like it made everything look nicer on a spreadsheet or something. I know as a player looking to constantly optimise dps, i don't care to use the things that deal less damage than the thing that does fire damage because for some reason, fire damage is buffed in the group when frost, shock and magic damage are not because contrary to the name "standardisation", not everything has been standardised including DK's engulfing flames debuff. we all know the most popular damage types are the ones that deal the most dps, mainly because they have additional scaling and also damage over time status effects like burning, hemo and poisoned. It was for this reason that I campaigned for chilled to mean something for frost damage dealing. something to set warden, or frost dps apart from the rest of the builds.

Sweeping Disasters.
Balance is never going to be perfect and people are always going to be mad regardless of what you as a developer do. That being said, there have been some pretty atrocious changes in the past which have made people leave en-masse. These are primarily the big sweeping nerfs to things that most people do not complain about, or are used to. Often times these changes are considered so heinous purely for the fact that there's all of this feedback about how crap it feels to play with them, and in the past they've mostly been ignored and pushed to live servers. That's been a major MAJOR issue why people are so mad. There has also been a history of changes being proposed that genuinely do not make any sense to anyone at all that have also made it to live with little or incredibly flawed reasoning. it is for this reason why the playerbase acts like this and there is constantly rising discord.

I think there is a lot to learn from other games. If there is 1 single thing i could ever hope for in this game for builds to come back, it would be some type of system that further expands upon your build passively. Champion Points and Class Sets could have been this type of effect, but instead, they ended up being generic bonuses that might as well not even exist. to expand upon what i mean, I think what this game needs is for builds to finally have upgrade nodes for specific spells, and to give spells specific interactions with eachother, and other mechanics in the game. I believe there should be MANY kinds of different nodes for all of the weapon and class trees.

Let me include all kinds of examples i thought of:
Warden:
Coordinated Attack: When you cast Scorch and then Dive while in combat, you gain Coordinated Attack for 10 seconds. Your next Direct Damage skill consumes Coordinated Attack to increase its damage done by 25%.

Nightblade:
Dark Executioner: When you use Death Stroke or its morphs, your next Execute Ability costs 50% less and deals damage as if the target were at 0% HP.

Dragon Knight:
Firey Warrior: Your Weapon Attacks deal 10% more damage as Flame Damage.

Arcanist:
Arcane Insight: you can generate and store up to 5 crux.

Necromancer:
Mass Graves: Every 5th corpse consumed summons a Blighted Blastbones to attack your last target.

Sorcerer:
Thunderfury: While Surge and its morphs are active, your Concussed status effect chance and damage are increased by 200%.

Templar:
Radical Sweep: When Power of the Light errupts, you have a 30% chance for your next (class spammable) to also cast Radial Sweep at 33% effectiveness.

Sword and Shield:
Targe of the Blooded: Your bash attacks always proc hemorraging.

Restoration Staff:
Spring to Life: Dead Players in Healing Springs are resurrected 30% faster. Allies inside the radius instantly heal for 15% of their max hp if below 50% health. this effect can occur once per target once every 45 seconds.

Two Handed:
Knock Them Down: Using Uppercut causes your next executioner or (class spammable) to deal 20% more damage and stun the target for 3 seconds.

Destruction Staff:
Crippling Weakness to Elements: Your Weakness to Elements increases your Frost/Shock/Flame damage done to the target by 20% depending on the type of your equipped staff.

Dual Wield:
Whirling Storm: Whirling Blades is now a Chanelled ability that does its damage in an area once per second, Draining your stamina while active. While Whirling Blades is active you gain a stack of Flurry Storm, increasing the damage of your next Flurry by 10% for every second of whirling storm's duration up to a maximum of 200%.

Bow:
Sic em: Your Snipe marks your target, causing your pets to deal 33% more damage to them for 10 seconds. This effect stacks with other similar effects.

I think its in ZOS's best interest to have incredibly frequent tuning passes unlike what's been happening recently. This PTS I woke up and was excited to see what changes frost DPS builds might potentially be getting, only to be disappointed once again. Dissapointment is inevitable of course because you can't change everything all of the time, but balance tuning in this game happens so incredibly infrequently that its genuinely disheartening to feel "well, crap. the game's gonna be exactly the same as it has been the last year until maybe the next pts cycle in 2-3 months". It's all well and good to work on new systems of combat, but you should also be thinking about the live game as well.

Rewards still are a massive point of contention. most of the things you guys make go on the crown store and while we all understand thats where your money is coming from, there are so many mounts created for the store that really could just be achievement rewards in the game to keep people excited and playing. you have definitely recently started commiting more things to the game than the crownstore in the past, but its still not quite at that level yet. houses could be good rewards for major things raid achievements for example.

I commend your recent attempts at communication, they're definitely what the community needs, but I just hope that things remain as is in the long term.

With all of this being said, i think the announced direction the game is going in would be fantastic if everything goes exactly as it was said in Matt Firor's letter. With the caveat being, if things that were announced are not fulfilled and content permenently drops back in scale and amount, this game is likely going to spiral into an unrecoverable state given how incredibly low community morale and ZOS's goodwill is at the moment. I genuinely believe that as someone who has been here for many years on the forums and in the community, that this is it. If things do not recover from this point this game's time is limited. Yes, it's a grim message but at this point, this game's retained players do not have any patience left. This is make it or break it ZOS. You cannot afford to mess this up. I still have hope that this can be turned around.