Maybe they will make it a single target ability, maybe they will leave it AoE and make it an exception to the cool down/cost increase rule so it works just like it does now. For the testing it will be pretty much unusable, but whatever they decide to do as a result of the testing does not mean that every AoE ability will be affected by that decision.

They think AoE is the big problem with server performance (good chance they are right), and they are looking at cool downs, or cost increase as a way to reduce server stress. They need base lines so that they know if one way or the other will make a significant difference or not. That is what the global cool down phase and the global cost increase phase are for. It's a best/worst case scenario depending on your point of view. How significant of an improvement does each test provide? They need to know this. Then they draw it back to see how much of a difference there is between those best/worst case scenarios to the point of individual skill cool downs/cost increases. If things are still warm and fuzzy they can look at removing some AoE's from having any cool downs/cost increases at all. If things are not sufficiently improved at that point they may have to look at making some of the most serious offenders share a semi-global cool down or semi-global cost increase to reduce the spamming of a particular group of highly offensive skills.

They could also end up doing some combination of both I suppose where some skills get a cool down and some get a cost increase, but that doesn't mean that every AoE skill will be affected. Some skills are much more offensive than others, but they need baseline data to work off of so that they know what the different outcomes of each can yield toward server performance.

What they do after that to balance is anyone's guess, but I am sure that if they reduce the number of times that an ability can be cast that they will compensate the power of the heal or damage of that ability to average it out from a dps/hps standpoint. The only way they can do this is on live. PTS has nowhere near the population to give an accurate portrayal of what is happening on the live server. Yes it will be different, but people won't be able to kill you as fast or heal themselves as fast either. Really it should be a quite interesting month if you just take a step back, quit worrying about killing and dying, and just do your part to try and help them improve this game to the point that skills work as they are supposed to. Heck, for me it will be an improvement over the 5 second cool down lag has been blessing me with for months. I am looking forward to having my skills fire off every 3 seconds honestly, and that is the very worst case scenario they are testing for.

Don't forget about PvE player... they don't need Single Target but aoe dps... you cannot change skill "work single on cyrodill and aoe in PvE".

I think they should get over the whole two options thing. Is it really that hard?

Mag = 1) single target, 2) aoe.
Stam = 1) single target, 2) aoe.

Four morphs. If they're going to make such drastic changes to the way the game works then I'm sure they can do it and the playerbase can handle picking one option from four instead of one from two.

If they're so determined to stick to only two options with morphs, maybe they should ask themselves why that's the case and if it can be reviewed.

At the same time, people talking about how they're destroying Templar need to remember that they specifically said that if these changes go live for good then they're going back through every class to make changes. So Templar isn't going to be left like it is. It could take a while though before those changes are done and of course we have no idea how long that'll take or what we'll end up with.

Some reassurance from the devs could help with this one, because the concerns are real when it's such an important skill.