I have often criticized the Dev's for endlessly paying lip service to the idea of DPS's having utility on their bar but making a game where dps is king and DOT's do 2.5x the dps of spamables (more before last patch) thus requiring everyone to pretty much remove everything else from their bars in favor of DOT's and to make DOT timer management their number one priority in combat while also de-syncing the duration's of all the DOT's so that your job was pretty much reducible to managing timers on 2 bars full of nothing but DOT's. I pretty much hated all of that and thought the game had been much better in 1.x when DOT's did not crush spamables for dps.

ZOS has now reset AOE's and sticky DOT's to 1.25x spam-able dps (this is very close to where it was at launch). What this basically means is that while they are better it is not by so much that you can't slot other things. ZOS also seem's to have moved most DOT timers to 10 seconds so you are not going to be spending your whole live looking at timers trying to maximize convoluted rotations. In fact, you will be able to use no special add on timers if you don't want to and still be functional.

I believe this will make builds far more varied and combat far more dynamic. Specifically:

1) There is no reason that a DPS cannot now afford to slot group support abilities such as a ground AOE heal, group buff, or circle of protection to aid during specific sections of specific fights. These will no longer cause a major derailment of DPS. Might we even see a resto/destro build that is actually functional?
2) You will need to pick and choose much better what ability you use on what NPC at what time. Just running though the same rotation of AOE's, sticky's, and spamables will be a waste of resources and having a full heavy in a rotation vs. not will be a big difference. You will need to place well your ground AOE's probably have an AOE spamabe, and not be wasteful. This is much more dynamic than timer management and also more fun. I'm stoked.

While I like the direction, I do have some concerns:
1) All of this change has come in the form of nerfs. eg. DD skill damage was not buffed at all, instead DOT's were all brought down to closer to it. What this means is that players will be now doing probably 50% of the damage they were doing at Elsywhere drop. Not only are people not going to like that but the content scaling will be way off from where it was and people will not be completing what they were before. Content scaling needs to be adjusted in general in light of both this and with a little more realism regarding the effect the persistently ignored and equally persistently present cheats have on the elite endgame community.

2) The whole light attack / medium attack scaling thing will loom even larger in endgame content now then it currently does. Remember, many people can't hit that tiny window of duration perfection with the ping that they have an instead land in the worthless medium range. In recent patches, and is particular content (buggy, laggy, vSS) I seem to land in it more often than not. Either some resource return scaling on mediums or a de-nerf is in order to fix that mess. I really find it hard to believe that this dysfunctional scaling has existed for more than 2 years not. Heck, channeled weapons (shock and resto) don't even do any damage on a light medium despite tricking the player with an animation into thinking that they do.

Anyhow, I like the changes and direction, but please don't go live without some sort of cushion for the ~50% dps drop in two patches. People will quit because the can't do the content that they used to even though direction of the changes makes for better combat and more build variety.