decided to do a run through as my melee build sorc, stam DW, and my god massive difficulty jump, could only get to stage 6 before being barraged to death with slows and hard hitting adds that demanded to be roll dodged a lot, destroying my resources fast.

so i switched over to non-vet. went a lot smoother, still had a lot of struggle with both swamp based stages, spider stage and last stage. especially the last stage. there is no way the mechanics for that one were even remotely considered to be melee nor stam friendly! constant stream of ghosts that cant be killed, slow and attack you as well as fast moving gold ghosts who usually spawn closer to enemies than you, the daedroth add spewing fire on you non-stop that cant be out run with sprinting nor can he be CC, those NB adds are brutal, that ulti spam they do is pretty generous and how hard it hit on non-vet is abysmal, how anyone that's not tank built or shield stacked on vet could survive that I'm unsure and then there's the boss himself.

that boss was clearly designed for a range magicka build. he teleports often, knocks you back, AoE blasts around him self quite regularly, summons daedroth flame spewers of death, zips up to an upper arena that's pretty thin and tricky to attack the crystals+dodge everything, ran out of stamina quite well on this part. after getting him back down, i was overwhelmed by how the ghosts, gold ghosts, his knock backs, add that can summon AND his generous use of teleporting could overwhelm me, this part i died quite often due to how if HE gets 3 ghosts you pretty much die, while they spawn quite close to him and move fast while i was getting hit by slow ghosts.

overall i found the arena to be much easier as a magicka sorc than a stam build. massive difficulty spike. i feel bad for any DK or templar who puts themselves through this torture.

if anything they need to give several of the melee adds the shield breaker ability and weaken the archers slightly to balance out some of this damage and alter some of the mechanics so it doesn't favour a range as much, this was quite anger inducing that i actually had to stop and make a cup of tea to relax a little, and this was non vet(well after the stage 6 attempt of course which in itself was brutal) and they need to reduce the amount of waves to 1 "warm up" wave and a boss wave, thing takes far to long to be friendly for anyone but the jobless/student/lifeless.

TLDR: (don't be rude honestly at least try read it) Arena was not intended to be used by melee/stamina builds, give several adds shield breaker, weaken archers damage slightly, alter some boss mechanics to be more melee friendly, reduce waves to 2 only, one warm up, one boss wave.