Zenimax online studios released murkmire on OCT. 22nd for PC, and with that release they have basically destroyed their combat system. Today I had a chance to play on a friend's PC account to test for myself some of the egregious failures that have accompanied this release, and I have to say it's even worse than I thought it could be.

Cast time targeted abilities are completely broken. If your cursor moves from a target before the cast time is complete, the ability cancels completely. This means that skills like Dizzying swing, dark flare, snipe (god bless), mend wounds, etc are completely destroyed. Essentially, any stam class without a class spammable that uses dizzying (stam sorc, 9/10 stam DK's, many stam wardens) are more or less unplayable. Although I literally do not care about the snipe stackers as snipe itself is a broken, exploitable ability; they make up a large number of the DPS in PvP, and I'm sure we will soon see the rage when they can no longer hit their targets with snipe due to an inability to track them. Dark flare is the only hard burst ability magplars have, and it is more or less useless.

Templar jabs are suffering from a massive delay in between casts. Some users here on the forums have claimed that weaving a light attack can prevent this bug from occurring, but any experienced pvper will know that this is not viable during prime time PvP as 50% of the time, light attacks do not fire or connect. The lag makes this bug 100 times worse, and I haven't even been able to test them during prime time but my observation is that Stamina templar is nearly unplayable in PvP.

Shadow Image, the only ability that makes a light armor magicka nightblade viable in pvp without SPAMMING cloak, is completely broken. I might remind you that there was a 6 month period in the last year where the shade did not work at all. While it was previously bugged, shading to it out of range would cause your character to bug out completely, locking you out of doing anything at all. In addition to this, you also could shade to OTHER PEOPLE'S SHADES that were in range. Now in murkmire, you cannot move vertically with the shade 9/10 times. You simply receive a "Invalid Location" message, in addition to occasionally having your character stutter and lock up for a tick or two. Oh by the way, did I mention that your shade can and will teleport you inside of objects such as towers, rocks, trees, and staircases? Or that this bug has been around since the beginning of the game?

All in all, zenimax has more or less destroyed combat for a wide variety of classes and playstyles, primarily in PvP. They have yet to acknowledge any of these issues despite showing an active forum presence since the patch, and the observation I've drawn from this is that because the players they make the most money from are those that primarily participate in housing/crown store purchases, and that since these same players tend not to care about the combat much if at all, zenimax is prioritizing issues such as ESO+ failing to work, furnishings not functioning properly, and crown store purchases not functioning properly. They are completely neglecting a large portion of their playerbase in favor of their more profitable population, despite the fact that the combat is the primary advertising point for the game.

I'll be quitting after spending over 5,000+ hours on this game if this patch goes live on console and we've yet to receive any acknowledgement of the aforementioned issues, or if they simply state "we're working on a fix for a future patch". Bugs like this in a game where fast paced, functional combat is core to both the PvE and PvP aspects of the game are unacceptable, and with the state of combat zenimax should have reverted the patch until it was bug free and ready for a real launch.

So tell me, are you happy with the state of combat?