Soldier of Anguish (Medium)

2: Weapon Damage
3: Weapon Critical
4: Weapon Damage
5: When you deal damage with a melee attack, you have a 25% chance to traumatize your enemy, negating their next 5500 points of healing for 4 seconds. This effect can occur once every 4 seconds.

This set is the greatest testament that the people who oversee pvp combat and balance in this game either don't understand how to address the issues that creep up from patch to patch, or don't care about the far reaching consequences of the things the implement.

Let's get one thing straight, there is nothing wrong with strong "meta" sets as long as they are properly implemented . Examples of this would be

- burning spellweave
- bone pirate
- warriors fury
- spinners
- seventh legion
- war maiden
- innate axiom
- spriggans
- mechanical acuity
- automaton
- hundings rage
- necropotence
- hulking draugr
- bloodspawn
- infernal guardian
- balorghs

The majority of these sets offer strong damage or recovery buffs and have fair conditions applied to them.
The thing about sets like these are in the hands of a good player, you can obliterate people with high burst damage and a healthy amount of sustain, whereas a mediocre or weaker player wearing the exact same gear won't reap near the same effect.

Lets look at some poorly implemented sets with little to no counterplay which are clearly overturned.

- Zaans
- Sloads
- Viper
- Valkyn Skoria
- Caluurions Legacy
- Troll Kings
- Pirate Skeleton
- Earthgore
- Impregnable

In contrast to the former list of sets, the amount of thought and skill required to make a combination of these sets work is virtually non existent. You can have a weak rotation in PvP with weak animation cancelling and can easily combo 15k+ damage especially if something like Zaans is on someone. Sets like these heavily carry players healing and survivability allowing them to not have to actively think about things like healing, surviving/avoiding damage, and weaving since the sets cover that aspect for them.

Now the reason I've mentioned these list of sets is to give an idea of where I'm coming from and why soldier of anguish is simply apalling to see.
First of all, it won't come as a surprise to anybody to say that healing is much stronger now than it was in the past.
The ability to roll an argonian templar, slot a restoration staff, wear two defensive sets with little to no Magicka bonuses, and still have enough healing due to CP and recovery to carry multiple players in a large group without even having to look or aim at anyone, or quickly running out of Magicka is a problem.

ZoS seems to have a habit of trying to address in game issues with blanket changes or sets that would affect more than just what they intended it to counter, or even have the opposite effect. Some examples of that include

Sloads - intended to counter Shields, which it did, however it ended up being the most powerful set in the game against every player due to it having absolutely no counterplay and stacking with other players applications

Duroks bane - probably intended to counter high healing, especially on heavy armor templar builds. But the ironic thing is this set was actually strongest against players who played stamina and didn't use shields or already build insane healing to begin with.

The "proc sets can no longer crit" change - back during the first prococalypse, sets like viper, tremorscale, velidreth, and widowmaker were insanely over performing. So instead of ZoS to address those sets specifically, they decided to make a blanket Nerf to all proc sets making none of them crit. What this actually did was make any proc set that wasn't viper, tremorscale, velidreth or widowmaker obsolete since it paled in comparison when it came to damage to the four strongest ones.

Soldier of anguish seems to be ZoS answer to Earthgore ball groups with heavy armor argonian pocket healers who are Invincible unless you can deal a coordinated burst with abnormal amounts of damage within one global cooldown. However what's actually going to happen is more players will play with, or spec to pocket healers in group to counter the lack of healing, and anyone who doesn't already have an abnormal amount of healing will be absolutely destroyed by this set since it passively applies, doesn't cost a global cooldown, and can be used in conjunction with bleeds, dots, poisons, defile, and ultimates.

this is not the answer

What needs to happen is to actually address issues directly. If healing is an issue then tune down, the blessed cp passive, make argonians only have 5% healing received instead of also healing done. Make Earthgore have more counterplay by splitting the healing based on the amount of people within the circle, so the more people it hits the less each person is healed, make breath of life heal for significantly less than honor the death since it hits more than one person and both heals can crit. Change all healing so that you must at least face your target or have them in your view for your healing ward, breath of life, etc. To hit them. These are obviously just examples however.

How come every single patch since as far back as I can remember, extremely over performing, blatantly overpowered sets keep being introduced that have absolutely 0 counterplay? First one tamriel prococalypse, then sloads in summerset, now this.

Have you not learned from those days? We're told constantly every patch that the devs are working desperately to bring plenty of PvP balance changes and are always listening to player feedback to improve the game. You even went as far as to introduce the class rep system to show just how much dedication you have to fixing the PvP issues in this game, yet absolute balance failures still sneak into patch notes such as putting a cast time on sorc shields.

Transparency would be great. If free burst damage, no counterplay, overtuned sets are a direction the combat devs in this game are interested in, simply just tell us. Don't misdirect us and pretend you're interested about real PvP balance when every patch encourages the weak to be strong without having to actually learn how to PvP due to absolutely insane sets like these that require 0 understanding of game mechanics and stats to work.

On another hand, please do not introduce a class rep system designed to let you know exactly how the PvP community feels about certain sets in the game and balance changes when you do not intend to gear game updates towards said feedback.