Apathy always wins

My stamblade is great for ganking in Cyro. Feels like it just isn't my cup of tea in PvE and I absolutely loath running dungeons with it, but its fine for picking flowers and doing writs. I hate the sustain changes Morrowind brought, but that's another topic.

Its just a one trick pony. You wanna play Stamblade, you go murder the utter bejezus out of one target at a time in Cyro.

I honestly can't think of a deadlier class to get jumped by out there, and my stamblade can utterly wreck most people in five seconds, whereas I always have a fight on my hands with my magsorc.

The problem I think a lot of people, in this case the OP, wind up having is in winding up expecting all the classes to be equally good at everything there is to do in the game, and that just isn't how it is.

You want to AoE big groups of trash down? Magsorc's hard to keep up with on that front, plus its a pretty well designed class with a lot of powers that flow nicely.

You want to make a virtually unkillable tank? DK, with about 12 points on Stamina and stam regen on your jewelry. Puff up your health, get your taunts and revel in rolling around being un-freaking-killable with some of the best defensive class powers in the game, and a cheap ulti that is basically like throwing on demigod mode for a bit.

You want to try to outheal the magtemplar? Ok son. Maybe Warden could do well with that now, but Warden's the new kid on the block. I will laugh you up one side and down the other if you sit here crybabying about how DK, sorc and NB can't heal as well as templars, because that's bloody well obvious and always has been.

Everything can roam the world, do quests and kill stuff just fine. I find it easiest to burn through large quantities of quest trash on my magsorc because low hp + lots of mobs = magsorc field day. It takes longer for me to do stuff on my DB stamblade, but not because of lack of damage or even insufficient AoE. Its because my stamblade can't heal itself for sh** compared to my sorc since NB siphoning relies so heavily on magicka and you're stuck throwing marks, popping your buff and spamming light/heavy attacks while burning stam on Bloodthirst spam just to stay upright.

So the healing is there even on stamblade, but its a lot clunkier and you'll still incinerate under spikes of damage, unlike a sorc that's actually using hardened ward and, god help us all, the clannfear or matriarch heals.

My Stam DK is rolling around going greatsword/bow and...yet again, the healing is trash, but the damage is at least as good as what I can throw out on my sorc, and the AoE when using GS and bow in proper sequence and tandem is pretty high as well. Self healing is rough, but between using green dragon blood as a solid 'oshizzle' button, judicious use of Brawler and its small but effortlessly spammable shield and constant uptime on Rally, it feels more able to heal itself than my stamblade even though the stamblade has more self healing powers, as the stamblade's main source of healing relies on killing targets.

Against world and dungeon bosses, your only hope is to not get damaged in the first place and hope you can find an add to gank if you need to during the fight, because Mark is otherwise no good for healing yourself. Spamming bloodthirst and light attacks during leeching strike's constant uptime is what you're left with, and its not nothing.

Ain't great. Ain't garbage. I'm not a fan of dungeoning with mine, but you can bet that there'll come along a dozen others after this post saying they love it and farm vMA on their stamblade and do just fine, and you know what?

They probably do. And that's cool too.

And then there's my templar that I'm leveling. I went magicka with this one because HOLY SHNIKEYS, I don't even know what to do with all this healing. It doesn't feel like it hits as hard or as wide an area as my magsorc, but in the course of leveling, the only time I've died on it so far has been by falling off things or getting eaten by slaughterfish. Only time I farm dolmens on it is to get some new jewelry of the same three piece set, because running around questing in maglar self-healing solid-DPS godmode is hilarious and feels surprisingly relaxed to me. If I ever take it out into Cyrodil, I'll go full healermode and not even try to out-DPS the better DPSers or out-tank the tanks, because there ain't no heals like a maglar heals, son.

I've been messing around with soloing world bosses on that thing and its proving far easier than even on my magsorc, and I wouldn't have a fart's hope in a windstorm of doing that with my stamDK or stamblade.

Haven't dabbled in Warden yet. The whole theme of the class puts me off, and I haven't been enjoying seeing all the cliffracer spam/magic bears everyone seems to hate galomphing every which way.

Let me turn the bear into a giant cat and use other animations/sound effects for the cliff racer business and I'll give it a go. Otherwise...its the first time in a long time, on any game, that I've been so repelled by the visual/audio components of a class that that alone makes me not want to ever play it.

But yeah. Every class' toolbox has something in it that makes that class better at 'their thing' than all the other classes.

CAN you play a stamsorc? Sure. Will it run neck and neck with a stamblade in all things in all the same ways?

No. Never ever. Stamblade will remain completely unthreatened as the sneak-sneak-stab-stab king of ganking in Cyrodil.

CAN you play a stamplar? Sure. Why you would do that when all its amazing heals are magicka, I'll never understand, but you're free to make terrible lifechoices.

You can do lots of things that are sub-optimal and fail entirely to take advantage of what your class makes you best at.

Just don't sit around crying about how you think something's broken because every class isn't equally good at everything in all ways.

Figure out what class does what you want to do and play it. Stop trying to play your stamblade like its a magsorc, for example. You're not for blitzing through delves and public dungeons, mass murdering everything you see all at once in less than five seconds. You're for stealthing up on a single target and butchering the bejesus out of them, and nobody can do that better than you. Nobody. No matter how hard they try. You've got the tools and you've got the spammable stealth that, as a stamblade, isn't even pulling off your damage dealing resource pool to use with some very respectable regularity, so long as you mind your limited magicka pool and regen rate.

I'm not a huge fan of PVP on here either, and I still take my stamblade out into cyrodil pretty much daily. Why?

Because that's where it belongs, my friend. That's where it was made to show its true strength.

You'll never see a stamblade, or any NB, living up to their full potential in PvE. And frankly, I hate taking my magsorc out into Cyrodil, because it feels like a one trick pony there; an DPS bot with some heavily nerfed shields and pets, if you choose to run them, that will sometimes behave very stupidly and will usually heal the wrong people if you choose to use a healer pets at all.

Use your screwdriver on screws. Use your can opener on cans. Frustration levels diminish greatly when you play the right class for the job.