Balblades sounds gross. So I stopped reading. Possible stagblade or smagblade?

With the current design, stamina using weapons/skills/light attacks have their damage scale up with your max stamina. The same is true of magicka using weapons. There are a few skills who scale off health, but for the vast majority of builds its more beneficial to stack either magicka or stamina simply because you'll do more damage.

So while you can do a hybrid if you want, neither your stamina nor magicka skills will hit as hard as they would if you went for one or the other.

The usual hybrid method is to stack weapon damage and wear Pelinal's Apitude to increase your spell damage in tandem.

A hybrid will be viable for PVE overland questing. Whether or not you are viable for PVE group content depends entirely on what DPS you can reach or how good you are at healing or tanking you are with your hybrid build.

If you focus on big magicka pool and high spell damage, you will do big magic/staff damage.

If you focus on big stamina pool and high weapon damage, you will do big stamina/weapon damage.

You only have so much 'mojo' you can build for - more of one thing means less of something else. If you balance mag/stam and weapon/spell damage you will deliver mediocre damage.

There are some sets and techniques such as mentioned above to boost balanced damage to better than mediocre but not to the levels that a full stam or full mag character can deliver. Simply the facts of ESO. This was not always the case in Elder Scrolls. I love mystic archers (bow backed up with magic instead of blade) which worked fine in Oblvion but is frustrating in ESO.

For the pve side of things, your observation is true.

Aslong as u play on your own, explore the zones, do quests, stories and normal dungeons, u r basically free to do whatever u like. nothing really helps u to oneshot mobs faster.

If u want to participate in the content that has a leaderboard attached to it, u either roll as pts looks now e.g. a khajiit magblade in spell strategist and mothers sorrow with the shadow mundus and copy paste alcasts or lokis/larkys? (that new guy some ppl r talking about; im really bad with names, sry) rotation or well u dont go there. the actual build ppl tell u to use might differ by preference of the raidleader.

u can actually be very far from the "meta", before u get to a measurable difference in combat power, but ppl r extremely elitist and biased here. u dont bring meta == u dont get a spot in the raidteam. u need to be extremely lucky, to find a team/clan that does progressive raiding _and_ accepts non-meta players and is successful.

for pvp it is different. the good builds r rarely made public. the things u find in the internet r most likely outdated before ppl shared.
if u make your own builds, and they turn out to be great u will roflstomp if they dont, u will be roflstomped.
u spec very different from pve tho, investing a bit in HP, defense, sustain and stamina pool for block/dodge/breakfree is important. using cc matters. "proc sets" r great, cause among other things they do dmg for u when u r stunned. the statbalance is more of a 'nessessary evil' tho.

Thanks for the above very clear answers. I wonder, though, if this is not a bad design decision? An arrow in the chest should do the same damage regardless of who fires it, assuming an equal level of archery skill. Having a huge pool of stamina shouldn't logically make a difference.

For TANKING and some offhealing
Hybrid is Freaking great !!!

but for Pure healing
or Pure DPS
or DPS off healing

HELL NO...

i tested it ALLOT my Templar is a Hybrid tank and it was a headache to make it work in harder content but it ended up AWESOME as a hybrid... i barely need any healing lol and still doing okayish dmg..

but as i said for anything else going hybrid your nerfing yourself...