As always with a new patch, players have been doing a lot of testing and theorycrafting to see how the various classes balance against one another in PVE and PVP.
It's not looking good.
Class balance has definitely been worse in the past, and this patch took some steps toward making things better. But the game still greatly incentivizes only a few classes for DPS in endgame raids: basically, ranged magsorc and magblade, and melee stamina builds. Ranged magplars and magDKs are just doing magblades' job worse, a dubious honor they can achieve only by giving up their classes' signature skills (Flame Lash and Puncturing Sweep). And while Mechanical Acuity and Zaan have
brought new life to melee magicka builds, it isn't enough -- as huge a buff as those sets are to melee magicka builds, they're still well behind stamina melee builds in terms of DPS, meaning there's still no reason to bring melee magicka builds to a min-maxed endgame raid with limited melee slots .
Maybe that's on purpose. Maybe, for some reason, ZOS thinks magicka players should not play in melee range in endgame content, and Flame Lash and Puncturing Sweep are only intended for questing. But I don't think this is what ZOS intends. Magicka melee DPS has been a part of endgame raiding for most of this game's history, and ZOS has taken steps to fix Puncturing Sweep's scaling issues (though they have ignored our feedback about Radiant Destruction incorrectly scaling additively with other damage bonuses since the Morrowind patch). Zaan also seems to be an attempt to at least partially fix melee magicka DPS' issues.
Things are much better in PVP, but there are still issues. Gina and the devs have
gone radio silent on a major templar bug. ZOS took all the feedback the playerbase gave about stamina wardens (Shimmering Shield is too cheap and too strong; a class that can access Reverse Slice and Reverb Bash should not have access to such massive kiting, healing, and defensive potential; and so on) and responded by nerfing magicka wardens for some reason. Befoul is an offensive CP star that players can invest in without having to give up points in any other offensive CP star. Magplars have
heIIa problems. And so on.
I'm optimistic that the big rebalancing that seems to be planned for the summer (a promised class balance patch as well as the introduction of whatever the Psijic skill line turns out to be) will fix at least some of these issues. But that's a long time from now. Would it be too difficult to experiment with raising the damage of melee magicka DPS' main tools, even if just as a stopgap until the next big rebalance? Maybe Puncturing Sweep could get a damage buff in an incremental patch and the spell damage bonus of Molten Whip could be increased (to help magDKs not be so reliant on the Power Lash proc, since that is now prevented from proccing very often in raids). (These would also be non-threatening changes for PVP: I don't think anyone seriously believes magplars are on the verge of doing too much damage now, and Power Lash is still the preferred morph in PVP.) For those of us who don't play stamina DPS, magblades, or magsorcs, saying "just wait until the next patch" is hardly satisfying, especially since that's what we've been saying to ourselves for several patches now. We would like to be welcomed in raids in the meantime, please.
7-day PVP campaign regular 2016-2019, Flawless Conqueror. MagDK/stamplar/stamwarden/mageblade. Requiem, Legend, Knights of Daggerfall. Currently retired from the wars; waiting on performance improvements.