This post is an attempt to bring to the attention of the developers some of the problems that have appeared in combat since the Craglorn patch went live. I am not saying the combat is too difficult- that's not the point of this at all, and it can be done- I'm pointing out problems I have experienced that can't be intended.

To start, the hotfix appears to have fixed the health pool of the mobs as was intended, but despite numerous reports of the VR mobs still hitting very hard in comparison to how they were before the patch, the official response was that it was just an issue with players misunderstanding the death recap feature.

I have two VR-7 characters- A NB and a DK. The issues I raise have been experienced on both of them.

-VR mobs who use elemental attacks such as Thunderbugs and Sea Viper humanoids seem to spam these attacks way more often than they did previously. My spell resist is soft capped at 1928 and 1912 on my two characters, and I have over 2k health on each. If I get hit by one of these spammed attacks while blocking with a Shield (fully specced for max mitigation/reduced cost), it will still do over 1k damage. There seems to be a problem here under the hood, be it with player mitigation, or mob damage. Perhaps both. There is definitely a problem with the frequency of these attacks. Even if you evade all the damage from the first cast, they fall back on the second round almost immediately.

-I don't notice much of a difference with mobs that use most physical attacks, save for a pack of three of them being able to spam so many attacks so quickly that while blocking, they'll completely eat your stamina bar in quick fashion. The exception to the physical attack rule seems to be uppercut. It's breaking blocks fairly regularly and knocking you back. Even when you are blocking constantly and have full stamina, so it isn't a lag or timing issue. And it generally hits for about 1200 damage. There's definitely an issue there.

-Blocking isn't mitigating near what it used to. Substantial damage is getting through active blocks, even when you're fully specced to mitigate the max amount of damage. I've died far more often since the patch, and if I had to point to a culprit, this would be one of the most major ones, if not the most major one. Mitigation in this game needs re-balanced to begin with so that light armor doesn't rule all other options, but if we're going to be required to play very defensively in the veteran ranks, our mitigation needs to be suitable for the task, and between the low armor caps, balance disparity between armor types, and this new lower blocking mitigation, it's not.

Hitboxes seem to have shrunk substantially. You have to be far more cursor conscious with targets even right in front of you than before. Whether that's intended or not, I haven't a clue, but I thought I would mention it.

There seems to be a bug that has only hit since the hotfixes where your skills grey out and become unusable occasionally, even with plenty of resources available. A weapon bash, or a light attack or two fixes it, but it's very annoying to be jerked out of your rotation over a UI issue. This has happened far more often on my NB than my DK, though it did happen on both. Like the Nightblade needed a new problem, eh?

That's all that I can think of at the moment, and I'm hoping others can constructively add to my post and keep it civil so that we can get the devs to look into some of these mechanics, or give us an official statement of what's intended and what's not.