Actually I'd like to see a serious weapon skill set for Staves, based on Stamina. I'm thinking the whole Quarterstaff concept. The downfall of Quarterstaves came from the press of battle, for 1on1 or 1 on many fights, in the real world, staves were often better but they needed room to be used. Obviously a blade on the end of it makes it a spear or polearm.

Hmmm.... sorry I went off track. Thank you for pointing out the shortcomings of my ongoing builds, magic, it is.

The reason all the class skills are magicka based is because they are considered 'spells' or 'spell like abilities' and to be able to balance the class abilties easier between the classes. It throws a big ass wrench into the numbers when you have normal moves take hits from your stamina bar, rolling, sprinting, sneaking, etc. Can you imagine all the DK's and NB's crying if all their abilitiers were stam based instead? All the posts here would be WAAAAH I HAVE TO USE MY STAM TO ROLL *AND* FOR MY ABILITIES! SORCS AND TEMPLARS DONT WAAH.

I've heard some good ideas in this thread but IMO, when balance is the issue (as it always is with a new MMO, hell, even older MMO's hace balance problems) you don't want to go adding in completely new stats/bars into the mix as that is one GIANT variable that will toss a massive wrench into the entire dynamic. Every single class would have to be reworked to deal with it.

The idea about magicka being used to block spells or something, something small and equal to the freqency of use on average that someone uses stam moves in a fight like rolling or sprinting, would probably be a little more fair and on target with less chance of throwing it even more out of balance in some new way, then perhaps some increases in power on the weapon abilities so they are a little more on par with class abilities, so people will want to use more stam builds. It doesn't make sense to make staves stam based, or there went all your healers. (not to mention it just seems to go against the very core logic of magic and how it works, but thats more a lore thing I guess)

Perhaps part of this is because of plans that are not out as wel, like the thieves guild and dark brotherhood. Maybe they plan to have more skill lines that were originally considered but found not ready yet, so once those are in the game it would make more sense to have it setup like it is currently, but we are only seeing part of the stuff so it its a little magicka heavy.

A few ideas to improve the balance between stamina and magicka, stamina being a very poor relative currently.

*Stop sprint from draining stamina and instead have a sprint bar, just like with a horse, that doesn't reduce your stamina resource. Use this same bar for dodge roll. Passives can still make you sprint faster, and items can still reduce how fast the bar goes down and how much a roll depletes the bar but you no longer invest in it. Maybe it increases a little as you level.

*Improve stamina abilities to be comparable with magicka abilities. A must.

*Add weapon skill line ultimates so there are a lot more stamina based ultimates to choose from.

*Change CC breaking significantly. Keep block and some cc breaks using stamina as the resource but change others to use magicka instead. Some cc breaks would be more about mental willpower than physical strength, make those ones use magicka to break them (fear, silence even stun could all break using magicka). Try and ensure there is an even amount of ccs in the game that break off each resource. Seek balance.

Some might say having magicka break some ccs makes it more useful, but it would be balanced if stamina skills were made comparable to magicka ones. Others might not want to take a magicka hit to break cc, welcome to the world of a player trying to play a stamina build currently. Its so unbalanced its not even funny.

That currently stamina skills are worse, and stamina also carries the drain of being used for block, dodge and all cc seems like a massive oversight and is gimping stamina builds.

It's like stamina was an after-thought. Consider Vamp vWerewolf. The Vamp needs nerfing. How about the stamina focused Werewolf?

I think the changes above would shake things up a bit and certainly make for more hard choices and a genuine variety in builds. At the moment you are a caster or you are underpowered it seems.

I may be wrong