Hey ZoS,
I know you had a vision for this patch. But it has been explained to you and demonstrated to you that these proposed changes do not accomplish what it is you set out to do. All these changes are doing is causing players to quit because they are seeing nerfs to their abilities, nerfs to dps, and not much else.
Instead of making large overhauls to the combat system, why don't you focus instead on smaller balance tweaks that would help underperforming abilities find a place in a dps rotation? This would help to achieve the goal of 'play how you want',, because non top end players won't be punished as heavily for choosing cool or fun abilities over meta builds.
Revert the light and heavy attack changes.
Revert all the dot changes. You are halfway there with these, but leaving the sticky dots at 20 to 30 seconds with low dps just means they will never be used in any content. That's not what you want is it?
Honestly, in my opinion ESOs combat system on live is very fun and solid. You don't need to make sweeping changes. Just focus on abilities that need help.. for example, the shadow nightblade ultimate, or the necro spammable.
Maybe you just take some time to look at data, and say "man, no one is using skull, I wonder why?" You can then search forums, or discords, and see that skull just doesn't deal competitive damage, and also the animation makes it tricky to weave. So then for update 35 you might try:
Flame Skull now has a quicker velocity
Flame Skull now deals bonus damage every second cast up from every third
Or for Sorcerers Lightning Splash, this ability has been underperforming compared to other class ground AoEs for a long time. Why not give it a 15% damage buff?
For Nightblade shadow ultimate, this has been one of the worst in the game for a long time. Why not give it some aoe healing, other buffs than just protection, increase the radius, reduce its cost, have it deal damage baseline, anything?
I don't want to go on forever, but small balance changes to underperforming abilities I feel will make this game better, not reinventing base combat every year. You have a solid combat system now. Players react so much better to buffs than nerfs. That's not to say you should never nerf anything if it needs it, but this entire update is nerfs... who would want to play that?