While I would love to see increased viability of hybrids and increased diversification of options when creating builds, I don't see much of that happening anytime soon. The mag/stam binary is too far baked into the system now, that significant overhauls would be required to shift away from it. While hybrid sets—like New Moon or Pelinal's—help, the larger issues of how damage scaling is set up currently means that hybrid setups will fall short in comparison to builds that obey the mag/stam binary.

Now, a One-Hand & Spell (Or Rune) Magicka Weapon skill line would certainly be welcome. Especially for those classes who operate at, or have skills that operate at, a melee rangeI've given it some thought, but not enough to have a fully formed idea of what the skill line would look like. A few thoughts and ideas that I have had regarding such a skill line (Sorry for the disorganization):

• Passively, it could provide a combination of the benefits of DW and Destruction. IE. Sword = 3% Damage increase, Axe = 8% chance to apply a short Magicka Damage DoT, Mace ignores 10% of Armor, and Dagger increases Crit Rating. Fire Rune = 4% increase to single target damage, Shock Rune = 4% increase to AoE damage, Frost Rune = Blocking costs Mag, 18% Block cost reduction, and 10% increased amount of damage blocked.
• One of the skills would have to provide a self buff of Major Sorcery in its base ability. It doesn't have to be a Magicka version of Rally, but... I'm sure no one would object to a skill that gave Major Sorcery and Minor Intellect.
• The blocking animation could make use of the spell/rune hand to create a kind of ward effect when blocking. Not a full bubble, but a kind of floating magical rune-shield visual. Something that wouldn't clash visually with Psijic's passive.
• Perhaps also add a Sword & Resto-Rune skill line to give healers another weapon? With perhaps a skill that's a dedicated self heal that would be great for PVP? Maybe?
• Other skills to consider: a Spammable (Instant cast, melee range), a DoT, a Burst of some type (eg. Rune that explodes after 3 sec), an Elemental Cloak. Just some ideas for consideration.
• No more beams or tethers.

StarOfElyon wrote: »

These two are inseparable though. I don't think this skill line is possible unless hybrids become competitive. It makes me wonder if the original combat designer had ever played an Elder Scrolls game before.

Not necessarily. A new skill line as described by ealdwin wouldn't necessarily require hybrids to be viable, but rather could simply be designed so it could effectively be for pure magicka (or stamina builds).

For example, if it is a one hand and rune skill, it could have runes of each magicka element (magic/fire/shock/frost), and even each stamina element (physical/poison/disease) if it is designed to also be used by stamina specs.
From this it could then
1) make all damaging skills scale with the either magicka/spell dam/spell crit or stamina/weap dam/weap crit, cost the respective resource, and deal the damage type based on the rune. So skills are effectively pure magicka or stamina skills and you can pick purely based on rune selection.
2) Have a passive (or active buff) that makes light and heavy attacks deal the damage type based on the rune (instead of physical) and heavy attacks restore the corresponding resource. Given that light and heavy attacks already scale with either mag or stam this now means they also work for either pure mag or stam based on rune selection.
3) All other passives are either "hybrid" or provide a different effect based on rune element, so could work for either magicka or stamina.

While this means the skill line wouldn't necessarily help hybrids in any meaningful way, it could give the "feel" of say using a melee weapon while casting spells.

I'm not necessarily convinced that this sort of thing would be the best implementation, as it still leaves a lot of other gaps,(personally I would like the flexibility to use any weapon configuration with either magicka or stamina specs but that's a bit more difficult to achieve).
Merely I am highlighting that such a skill line could be made while still operating with the binary magicka/stamina divide.

The other way a similar "feel" could be achieved is not via new skill line, but by tweaking some existing mechanics to reduce how specific the existing weapon types are to either stamina or magicka. Even if its just for light attacks and heavy attacks. Given we now have scaling of light and heavy based on either, imagine if the following were also possible.
1) We had some way of changing the damage type of a weapons light and heavy attacks, and the resource returned by heavy attacks. Alternatively, if we ever saw a CP rework that removed the +X% damage element stars in favour of other benefits, and if physical and spell penetration ever got mergerd, you wouldn't even need the damage types to change.
2) weapon passives were more "hybridised" in a few places (ie: things like twin blade and blunt give both spell and weapon crit for daggers)
Sure, you might not have any skills from the weapon line, but this would mean doing things like dual wield/two handed/bow could be used with magicka builds provided the build had sufficient class/world/guild skills.
Again, this approach still has other issues (like potentially having some risk of homogenisation as well as the fact it doesn't really make sense to change the damage type of a destro staff...) and doesn't allow for real "hybrids", but does open up a few more options. The other thing is as pointed out in another thread discussing this sort of topic is that this sort of change isn't really marketable as a new system, in comparison to a new skill/weapon line.