Racial Passive, not about balance, design!

KochDerDamonen

Hello y'all, I've been watching all the hub-bub about the racial updates coming with our next update to ESO. I too find them a bit lacking of changes for what is supposed to be a focused rebalancing of them in general, but not in a balance sense. Someone more dedicated than I to optimal damage or mitigation or variability in pvp will always figure out which character combination gives them this satisfaction less there be literally no bonuses, these are fickle things dictated upon by 'metas' and while I certainly see the joy in finding that winning combo, it's not for me when creating a character whom I will play as for hours and hours. I've wasted plenty of your time getting this idea across to let you all know that this isn't what I care about in a racial rebalancing.

To me, Zenimax should sit down and figure out a pattern for the races in this game. I believe that there should be what is clearly a tank, physical damage dealer, and magical damage dealer within each vanilla-game dictated faction. The passives that promote this should be easily visible to a player upon creating their character, along with the currently existent flavor text to give the player a reason why these passives exist as they do.

Tl;DR shortlist

Want
-Clearly defined tank/stam dps/mag dps races in each faction
-Clearly communicated passives and their affects upon character creation
-Passives built from both the perspective of this game as an MMO and past lore, not one or the other solely

Not Want
-Races to be 'perfectly balanced' in a numbers game
-Removal of racial passives

Now, with that laid out I'd like to share my particular concepts in this regard. Try not to take these to heart as the focus of the thread, but rather my take on this concept of balancing the MMO environment and TES lore on racial passives. In this discussion I will be ignoring Imperials, I have some thoughts on them but they are not important to the idea at hand.

Firstly, I say that each faction should have a clearly Defensive race, Magical race and Physical race.
Aldmeri Dominion - Bosmer - Altmer - Khajiit
Daggerfall covenant - Orc - Breton - Redguard
Ebonheart Pact - Nord - Dunmer - Argonian

Put down those pitchforks, I'm not saying that these races should be crammed into these roles because MMO. I think these races should have inherent traits that would make a new player think "If I wish to play in this faction as a tank, X is the perfect race for that... if that's how I want to play". A player who takes statistics into consideration when designing their character should not be shunned. In the same vein, I wish for these races to be diverse, in a way that makes them recognizable to a returning TES player, "Oh, that's different than I'm used to, but I can definitely see why X have Y as a passive."

I further propose that each race should have a secondary ideal. More oriented towards their traditions and perhaps a bit ignorant of this primary role they possess, but still feasibly supportive of it or other playstyles. I dub these secondary traits 'Resourceful' , 'Alternative' and 'Purist'. A Resourceful race would be geared towards making use of something other than their primary attribute (ie health, magicka, stamina) whether that be one of the other attributes in max value, regeneration, or cost reduction, ultimate, or some other boon such as mobility, non-health defenses, stealth, or something else. The Alternative Race should have benefits to performing multiple roles, either separately and backseating the other bonus to primary one or simultaneously to encourage strange builds. The Purist race should be what it is on the tin, All beefy, all wizardy or all strong--Think of your Altmer, all shooty bang from the staff and nothing else going on.

Remember the classifications I gave before, they're just thoughts that I consider at least somewhat okay considering they are just suggestions to sort of fit within my concept, and are not to be taken as concrete or definitively what I want, but rather a byproduct of the concept and my thoughts on it.

Defensive(Bosmer - Alternative, Orc - Resourceful, Nord - Purist) /// Magical (Altmer - Purist, Breton - Alternative, Dunmer - Resourceful) /// Physical (Khajiit - Resourceful, Redguard - Purist, Argonian - Alternative)

These feel mostly correct to me, as if they could be molded to the lore of the singleplayer entries in the series and from the context of ESO as it exists. I would provide further thoughts but I really should lay down, I hope to return after resting to some interesting ideas. Besides, it may benefit the topic for the long run if I present no specific passive concepts to be despised! ^^

Vercingetorix

Passives will be fine as-is after the Khajiit rollback & Bosmer stam buff go into effect during the next PTS patch. If you don't like it, too bad. Most of the abilities are now actually very thematic with the race's associated culture (i.e. "Drunk Nords" and their drink duration). ZoS actually did really well this time around with the race changes - no nerfs, just buffs and only to the races that needed it (except for the cats, but are getting rollbacked).