I had a bit of time yesterday after my guild pvp night so jumped on the PTS here is my review of what I saw and of the PTS in general.
Before I begin I would like to offer my appreciation to the team who have obviously worked very hard to get this out on schedule with plenty of time to test it. I could get used to these large content updates regularly and on time.
First off V14 templates seriously? I appreciate the content scales here but come on this is meant to be a test environment and with these templates testing build for the veteran mode maelstrom will be frustrating. Linked with this are the gear choices in the gear bags while I appreciate that not every specific build can be catered for with the templates I feel the gear offered does not cut the mustard for eg martial knowledge and turogs gear fine but with out turogs pact swords or great sword it limits you to running a dual staff build if your a caster also why none of the new jewlery or moster sets upgrade the templates to v16 and add these in please. Finally on the template structure Vampire and I'm assuming WW skills are unleveled and un morphed unlike all other skills in the templates please fix.

Right enough on the templates to the actual zone I didn't do any of the story as I don't want to spoil it for my self but I bought the new mount and pet and took them for a wander. It looks and feels fantastic new mobs to fight as well it just feels epic.
What I did do however was have a crack at normal difficulty maelstrom arena and this will be mainly what I talk about here.
The Story here is great I need to speak to my more lore inclined friends to find out about some of the characters. It looks feels and sounds fantastic it makes VDSA look very bland.
Also while mentioning VDSA it was so refreshing to have something other than humanoid bosses and some if not all of these were suitably epic.

The mechanics for a lot of the fights are very interesting and well done to the team responsible for designing these encounters clearly a lot of thought went into them. However here is one point I'd like to make the hints that popped up ruin the enjoyment of players like myself who like the feeling we get when we solve the problem presented by these challenges. I appreciate others don't like to wipe all night on a mechanic they are struggling with. so my suggestion would be to move these hints to the death recaps and remove the terrible have you tried using a potion recap hints these should only appear for low level charcters not in this kind of content the other hints would be a better fit and of more use. In short dont spoil the fun by giving us the answer to some of these well crafted problem it makes some feel patronised and is a massive spoiler.

The difficulty in my mind there are 2 answers to this one is done well the other not so much. The part that is done well is the learning curve they gradually introduce more mechanics throughout the arena sarting simple and moving to more tricky this is brilliant. my second thought though is that the overall difficulty for this content even on normal is set to low. Even with my previously mentioned crappy template build I was able to clear this content with out using any sigils with only a couple of deaths on my first time setting foot in there. I am not an uber elite player and I expected more than a couple deaths while learning mechanics. Even some of these deaths were me testing mechanics ie intentionally getting a poison dot and testing if you can heal through . So I feel maybe crank it up slightly even on normal as I feel the jump to veteran will seem less jarring as I am seeing threads appear already about the vast difference. I will update this when the EU server gets character tranfer with my experience in veteran with comparisons.

Loot OMG this is what I hate about the content I am running on live at the moment trying to complete sets from VWGT and VICP is terrible and you have Clearly listened as the drop rates seemed very resonable with me getting 4 or 5 set items in 1 with them becoming more frequent toward the end. The loot that did drop was interesting. a couple of pieces that caught my eye of were the Hunt leader set and the winterborn set. It seems again you have been listening to the community as an active member of the forums I have seen many posts from stamina sorcs saying the feel lack lustre and also I myself have commented that only pyromancer builds exist in the live meta with no cyromancers to be seen. These sets seem purpose built to adress that
All in all I think maelstrom arena and this DLC as a whole is very well done and demonstrates that ZOS are listening to the community and trying to provide something for all playstyles. I myself will definitely purchase this (subbed but even if I weren't) as when I cant get a healer or tank I'll just pop in to the Maelstrom.
so other than the points I raised very well done ZOS and its out on time. I like the direction your taking with the game with capped cp's and interesting new content.