AN OBJECTIVE LOOK AT THE PTS ATTACK CHANGES
For this post, I wanted to give an objective, precise perspective from an end-game PVE player to highlight some of the good, some of the bad, and some of the (likely) unintended consequences of the proposed changes.

THE GOOD:
All Light, Medium, and Heavy Attacks now scale with your highest offensive stats.

This is actually a terrific change that opens up build diversity. It won’t see much use in end-game PVE content, but it actually enables players the freedom to do things “their way” a little more and shouldn’t carry any negative consequences.


[*] Heavy Attacks no longer restore any resources.
[*] Partially Charged Heavy Attacks (also called Medium Attacks) now start scaling at the same damage as Light Attacks, and scale up to a maximum of their respective cap, to ensure they always deal more damage than a Light Attack but never more than a fully-charged Heavy Attack.
[*] Heavy Attacks now do varying damage based upon their cast time, and are built to always deal approximately 10% more DPS when weaving them with abilities when compared to Light Attack weaving.

I bunched all these changes together for simplicity. As much as players are confused here, this actually makes a ton of sense. Heavy attacks should do more damage than light attacks. You spend longer channeling them, it’s common sense. No issues here at all.


All weapon-based Light Attacks will restore 200 Stamina or Magicka per hit, depending on their type.

This is…interesting. It has some real potential, but also some very bad consequences we’re going to get into later. This change is kind of a 50/50 on whether it’s actually good or bad for the long-term health of the game.



THE BAD:
Decreased the damage of Light Attacks by approximately 78%, and streamlined their cooldowns to have less variance between weapon types.

This is actually terrible. Like, this is one of the worst proposed changes I have seen yet in ESO. Do light attacks need to be nerfed? Yeah, probably. The power creep in ESO is still quite absurd and reducing LA damage is a good way to blanket bring damage down without leaving some classes stranded. Instead of this, I would propose something along the lines of;

Light Attack damage reduced by ~30-40%

This way, you can bring it down further if the ultimate goals aren’t being met without completely dismantling a LA rotation playstyle. Isn’t the point to have the freedom to play in a multitude of different ways?


Empower: This buff type now increases the damage of your next fully-charged Heavy Attack by 2500, rather than increasing Light Attack damage by 40%.

I get the idea behind this change, but it makes skills like Wrecking Blow feel absolutely horrendous. This is a change that makes sense in context but is actually pretty bad in actual practice.



UNINTENDED (?) CONSEQUENCES:
This is the bread and butter of what I really wanted to touch on, because this is the part that Zenimax missed in Summerset with the initial shift to LA heavy rotations. It ended up giving us a Nightblade meta for a ~year because the supporting sustain changes weren’t addressed until later.

The biggest issue/concern with what is being proposed here is the heavy-handed, sledgehammer approach, as well as the realism that the needed paired changes won’t come immediately. You guys have a history of making sweeping changes to core mechanics and then saying “now wait six months to see our ideas fleshed out”. That’s poor game design. Changes like this have to come with their supporting changes in one package, or not at all.


RACIAL DISCREPENCIES:
This needs to be broached IMMEDIATELY if these changes are to go through. The proposed changes would funnel every DPS into one of two races; Orc or High Elf. Race diversity (what little there is) would die instantly beyond RP reasons. Orcs and High Elves are the “raw power” races who have their core weakness as sustain. With the proposed LA changes, there’s no reason at all to play anything else, as they can easily sustain their LA rotation with no drawbacks.

This dismantles the entire purpose behind the initial race changes. If this went through, I can only imagine the backlash as players demanded more race change tokens. We selected our races after the initial rework with the game state in mind. It is ludicrous to expect players to dump significant money into the game every time you make these sweeping changes. Min/max is a reality, and if you want your end-game players here after this is released, this MUST be addressed, either through race rebalancing, a new race passive system, or free race change tokens, and I don’t mean like…two.


DK META?:
This brings back memories of the “dev enforced” Nightblade and Necro metas. DKs having the only tool in the game to ramp heavy attack damage could quickly devolve into a DK-only meta, the likes of which we saw shades of during Morrowind. It’s vitally important when making changes this big to critical core systems that the needs of all classes be addressed IMMEDIATELY, not “down the road sometime”. You guys have struggled badly with balance previously, and this seems like another step in that woeful direction.


BASH WEAVING:
Currently on the PTS, bash weaving does SIGNIFICANTLY more damage than light attacks. Bash weaving is already a problem, but now you are replacing the “APM Issues” surrounding light attack weaving with the same issues, in fact much worse, surrounding bash-weaving. Combat is going to become a toxic hellhole if 5-6k of your DPS is coming from bashing, which we’re already seeing. Bashing shouldn’t even do meaningful damage without a shield, as that makes zero sense contextually, but this change pushes bash-weaving into the central DPS mechanic field instead of a secondary option to squeeze out a bit more DPS. That is a bad, bad, BAD idea, that is directly counter-intuitive to everything you claim to want to accomplish with these changes. If players can’t light attack weave, you think they can effectively BASH WEAVE!?


PAINFUL TRUTH:
So, this last tidbit if just realism. We end-gamers aren’t going back to heavy attack rotations. You’d have to buff heavy attack damage like 200% to make it worth it. We’re not asking for our “APM” (which is nonsensical in this scope but whatever) to dominate everyone, but we should be rewarded for being able to weave effectively, and this doesn’t do that. It’s too heavy-handed and reactionary, and I don’t mean this offensively, but it caters to the lowest common denominator.

In WoW, which I played at the very high end-game for six and a half years, the game saw massive lulls in players and subs when Blizzard elected to cater to more casual players, through things like “welfare epics” and “dumbing down” class rotations. Don’t make that mistake.

Bridge the gap, raise the floor, lower the ceiling some, but don’t just scrap some of the really good, thoughtful changes that have come down the pipes.

IN CONCLUSION:
I understand the overall goal here, but I think there’s better ways to accomplish it. Has anyone considered having sustain NOT tied to attacks? What if sustain was a class + race combination, and instead light/heavy attacks were themed around the rotation you prefer. If heavy attacks did 2-3x more damage than a light attack, it would give them some level of viability and actually enable choice, particularly if sustain was not at all tied to attacks. If you buff in-class and in-race sustain and opened the doors for the concept of sustaining a rotation not to be intrinsically chained to something many deem to be too high of a skill floor, more players would be able to engage.

For example, if you used a light attack rotation and aren’t good at weaving in the current meta, your DPS will drop and you’ll likely run out of resources. That’s a very ugly two-headed beast. However, if light attack damage was lowered in favor of heavy attacks being buffed and class (read: not weapon) skill damage rising slightly, to put more onus on players’ ability to use their skills properly, coupled with sustain changes proposed above, this would resolve a litany of issues.

1. The DPS loss for missing weaves would be lower
2. Sustain is completely self-contained within the kit, so poor weaving isn’t as detrimental
3. Race diversity blooms even farther and becomes more expansive
4. Heavy attack rotations become more viable
5. Rotations are more variable and open to playstyle adaptations
6. Classes can be stronger inherently through class skills, which most players seem to want

Just saying, game design isn’t as hard as you’re making it every year or two.