Greymoor is coming to the live servers in roughly three and a half weeks from now on.

The big theme of this patch is the vampire rework.

Since beta vampire has been more or less the same, ult morphs were changed, skills got changed, skills became overperforming and got nerfed but in the grand scheme it was the same thing: 1 ultimate, 2 skills and passives you'll always benefit from along with some downsides in order to balance those.

In the next patch this will drastically change, a completely reworked ultimate, 1 skill being preserved and one having its focus changed along with 3 new skills and new passives.
However the detriment of becoming a vampire has became a lot more punishing.

For the first time in ages the devs have shared what their ideas for vampires are:
They explicitly stated that they want skills to synergize with each other, this can be seen with eviscerate and blood frenzy for example.
Eviscerate becomes stronger the lower your health is while blood frenzy increases your over all damage but trades a portion of your health every second for the effect.
With vamp drain being based on your missing HP you can also recover from your injuries.
Now another passive kicks in and helps you "undeath".
By doing this the devs have shown that they can combine multiple skills and hand out an unique playstyle that also works along with a concept of vampires being more powerful creatures but also closer to death than others.

This sounds great however we have to touch on the big issues that are present not only with Vampires but with most classes especially warden and necromancer.

Even with this synergy between 2-3 skills and some passives vampires aren't powerful enough to compete in PvP and on top of that they can't satisfy other roles like tanking or healing and they are solely focused around magicka.

All the spell damage you gain from being a vampire along with the relatively strong spammable with eviscerate a vampire still had no sufficient offence in and of itself.

The only skill that deals damage is eviscerate, there is no Dot unless you use your ultimate and choose a specific morph or only minor damage via mist form/ vamp drain neither of those deals delayed damage or offers something.
This means a "vampire" would have to spam eviscerate from 100%-0% to kill an enemy, nothing else, light attack weave - eviscerate repeat, ofc you can use the skills of your class or weapon skills, but all of those are affected by the cost increase and the skills in general won't fit into the playstyle you try to fulfill when using the other vampire skills.

This is the point when overall class balance comes into play, the issue of lack of useable skills to satisfy a synergistic toolkit is relevant for more than just vampires.
Warden and necromancer are the two classes which are affected most by this as they've been designed in a special way of treating Healers, DDs and Tanks the same way by dedicating one skill line each for those playstyles.

This leads to the issues that both classes feel, their magicka counterparts are extremely underwhelming offensive wise as they have 5 skills and 1 ultimate to satisfy all their offensive demands for both PvE and PvP but those are incredibly different which leads to blank skills for either side as those simply don't help you.
For a necromancer in PvP this leads to 1 single skill being useable from their offensive skill line with blastbones and 1 morph with grave robber which itself limits necromancer further (for other reasons i won't analyze here)
All other skills don't fulfill any role in PvP or are so underwhelming that they can't be used like shock siphon, ricochet skulls or skeleton arcanist.

This means a necromancer has to get the following skills from non class skill lines:
An offensive CC --> non existent at the moment
A decent dot to keep pressure up --> non existent
Major buff/debuff skills --> exist but are underwhelming except for elemental drain
A spammable --> gone with next patch due to master destro nerf
An execute --> non existent (gets even worse next patch with malacath being straight better than crits)

This leaves magicka necromancers stuck in a situation where they cycle their suboptimal spammable with blastbones without access to a stun giving the opponent an easy time surviving as they can easily recover between the blastbones and don't have to fear being executed or stunned.

What necromancers have more than enough however are skills which increase their survivability, there's 2 full skill lines which are only build around keeping you alive.

For warden the situation is a little bit better as the ground AoE needed for PvE is just a morph in the taking skill line thus doesn't take up a whole skill of the offensive skill line and having access to almost every single damage buff this game has to offer from off balance, to 10% damage done, with multiple other damage increases.
But even this incredible plethora of buffs and debuffs doesn't make wardens offensive competitive in a solo environment as they struggle from the same issues of having to cycle a few skills (spammable, shalks, fetchers flies) without an offensive CC or the option to execute someone who drops low without having to wait for the next shalks to blow up.

For stamina classes those issues aren't relevant at all it's widely accepted that both stamina necromancer and stamina warden are overperforming.
Both classes have another skill line that gives them offensive presence with the 2h one along with burst ultimates even if those are held back by obnoxious cast times.
And unlike the "old" classes they have 2 full skill lines to gain survivability and healing from which has proven to make them overperforming.
Mix this with stamina necromancer having access to 100% uptime to major defile and you know why they are considered overpowered and broken.

For "old" classes this is somewhat reversed as they were designed around magicka and have only gotten stamina skills over the years often without any vision behind them, which leads to all stamina classes playing more or less the same (bar stamnb and stamplar) as they all lack a good spammable and skills that would change how they played as they use the same pool of weapon skills mixed with some class skills.

So what could be done to tackle those issues and make Vampires and all classes better on their own and overall more interesting to play?

First of all remove the idea of having to dedicate full skill lines for tanking and healing as many skill slots are already taken by non class skills and a healing/tanking skill can easily be satisfied by making one morph of an skill be focused around it an example is cinder storm of DK which can be either the ground AoE dot or be a heal, because there is always more to kill than to tank or to heal there's a reason DD numbers exceed healers/ tanks combined im trials.

Additionally offence for magicka classes has to be fleshed out on the new classes and a potentially new universal skill line that benefits all magicka classes offensive wise would make a big step of changing how all magicka specs play and can have their own viable playstyle

For stamina specs especially old one we can see that their playstyles have to be shaped more distinctively to be distinguishable from one another.

And finally the Vampire rework has a good foundation but now those 5 skill slots have to be used to make the combat identity to be viable and be fed by enough skills.

@Zos_BrianWheeler , @Zos_Gilliam

TL:DR
The devs sharing their vision on how a class/subspec should work is great

Building classes around a playstyle and having skills synergize with each other is what we need

Offence needs to be fleshed out way more than healing/ tanking and requires a bigger variety of skills while single morphs can satisfy the Healing/Tanking needs.

Dedicating 1 skill line to healing, damage and tanking is bad and leads to offensively weak classes with overtuned defence --> tank meta here we come