ZOS' goal across the past few patches seems to be centralized around minimizing the gap between the floor and the ceiling. Let's look more into that.

To start, I was a long time player of ESO who started the game in late 2016, and played until a few months ago. While I am no longer a player of the game, my love for the combat system and the community around it, along with the recent changes that propose to derail the fundamental system that makes ESO a unique combat and raiding experience led me to make this post.

Please keep in mind that the point of this post includes zero negative intention, and is purely aimed at subjectively inspecting the differences between the high and low end spectrums of raiding. I have been at both ends of these, including world record runs on the high end, and leading a minimal experience group from vCR +1 to Godslayer on the low end.

To preface this argument, let us look at the potential arguments that could achieve the stated goal of minimizing the gap between the floor and the ceiling. These are:

i) Lowering the ceiling while maintaining the floor
ii) Raising the floor while maintaining the ceiling
iii)) A combination of both raising the floor and lowering the ceiling

i ) Lowering the ceiling while maintaining the floor
Part one of this argument looks into the specifics of high end raid groups that are intentionally/unintentionally disregarded by the floor. This argument will mainly look into support sets that debuff bosses/buff group damage. Sets such as Z'en's Redress are mandatory at the high end with relatively high uptimes. When a lower end group's support wears this sets, the uptimes are minimal enough to consider sets and those alike (MK, RO/Jorvuld, etc) irrelevant. The group is better off using more safety/utility oriented sets to aid the group with mitigation.
Nerfing these sets will directly lower the ceiling with zero impact to the floor that disregards/fails to optimally utilize the full potential of these sets.

ii) Raising the floor while maintaining the ceiling
Part two of this argument looks at a very confusing case, where helping the lower end without raising the ceiling is possible. The only situation I can think of without harming the overall health of the game would be buffing heavy attack builds, such as Undaunted Infiltrator/Queens Elegance/etc. With the current state of the game's sets and available resources, this does not seem like a realistic option.

iii) A combination of both raising the floor and lowering the ceiling
Part three of this argument looks at a middle ground between the two. This may be the trickiest case of all options, as balancing the gap between the extremes will result in the higher end finding ways around the changes, while the lower end likely ignores them. A good example of this case would be the current implementation of combat update 35. The highest end raid groups will find ways to mitigate the offset of light attack damage through changes with empower uptime, slayer uptime, and more responsibility of uptimes and debuffs on supports, while the lower end will likely be lost as to what to change, keeping their current compositions and setups the same.

At the end of the day, I believe the changes that ZOS wants to make with minimizing the gap between the floor and the ceiling is an incredibly valuable take, I just think the current iteration of this thought is being brought about the wrong way. Please take player feedback and PTS data into consideration into account as you finalize these decisions that are potentially detrimental to the livelihood of the ever-shrinking end game community in ESO.

From an ex player and theory crafting enthusiast, thank you for reading and have a great day,

BreadAndMilk