It's been 5 months now. Frankly, it has probably taken that long to really get the full effect minus any temporary negatives that always occur when you make a major change to combat. I think we can now certainly agree that the update 35 combat changes are an unmitigated failure.
1) On their own stated terms
2) In terms of player response
3) In terms of build variety
4) In terms of the playability of a meta build in actual content.

For those who don't remember, the primary changes in update 35 were to:
1) Massive reduction in light attack and heavy attack damage as well as multipliers to this.
2) Increase in the duration of some DOTs and adjustment of the base DOT / spamable multiplier from a DOT = 1.5x the damage of a spamable to a DOT = 2x the damage of a spamable.
3) A rescaling so that there is little difference between one DOT and another in damage.

The reasoning for all this was the same as always. Lower the dps ceiling, raise the floor. Or as they put it:

ZOS_Gilliam wrote: »

Greetings!
.... This update brings a massive slew of balance adjustments all at once to hopefully reduce the need of large sweeping changes in subsequent updates, since some seemingly minor changes affect a huge part of the game’s combat. The main focuses in Update 35 are twofold: improving accessibility to the game’s combat by increasing the duration of outgoing ability effects (such as damage over time, buffs, and debuffs) and a continuation of the attempt to quell some of the obscene damage production at the high end. Let’s start by breaking apart some of the fundamental realities of ESO today.

The result of course was of course the opposite. It significantly raise the ceiling while dropping both the floor and probably all but the top 1% of DD's like an anvil. More than half of all raid groups have disbanded and ZOS lost something like 15% of the games general population (according to Steam Charts). It's bad and I'm here to analyze a little about specifically why.

First, why the changes failed by their own stated terms:
Dps is clearly up at the top end and way down for everyone else. The reason for this is simple. The ratio of spamable to DOT damage was changed from 1.5x to 2x. This makes simpler spamable type builds, or builds that utilize fewer DOT's in order to have some utility such as a heal or shields less viable. Having a larger mix of DOT timings by adding 20sec ones also increases the difficulty of managing them all. Meanwhile, the absolute optimum damage with perfect DOT management is increased. Hence, 120k parses are now common. Ceiling raised, everything else less viable. Similarly, though bottom end players clearly had problems with or did not weave light attacks in, everybody from the middle on up did this fine. Nerfing them was a big nerf to the middle. Light and heavy attacks are, after all, the only damage skills on everyones bar.

Why the changes failed in terms of player response:
This is really two fold. Players always hate huge combat changes and re-learning the game to no obvious purpose. It's a naked waste of effort and that change over effort derails any progress in other areas such as currently running prog groups. This disrupts those social networks requiring yet more effort to re-form. The second half of this though is the changes themselves. In this case those changes ment a bigger weight on DOT heavy builds that do very poorly when things don't go perfectly in raid and also struggle with more mechanics heavy and mobile fights. "Fragile builds" as I tend to call them. Maybe enough dps to skip bridges in the final fight of vDSR but no ability to do a bridge if need be. Hence, this is what the invite to a simple vDSR farm run now looks like:



Yea, Mechanics need not apply because the difference between a build that can do mechanics and one that can't is massive.

Why changes failed in terms of build variety:
After making mag and stam the same thing and DOTs so vital your whole bar has to be them, what did you expect. Some DOT's are still slightly better than others. Some weapons and sets clearly better than others. It should not be a surprise there is less variety now than at most other times in the games history. Interesting, not so much. Well suited to a variety of content, not at all.

Speaking of actual content how are these builds at doing that:
Well, given most difficult hard mode content (especially 4man HM dungeons) goes better with the ability to do some damage at range, heal ones self, and sheild, not so well. If you run one of those builds, you will have a lot less damage than you did pre-update 35. The result is that a lot of proging on that type content got derailed. When you do 20% less damage than before it's a bit hard to progress further on stuff you have been working on. Plainly, more versatile DPS builds, those with heals, shields, and range are doing a lot less damage than before.


What should be done:
Obviously, the basic DOT and light / heavy changes should be reverted. They had exactly the opposite effects from what was desired. Also, high DOT damage multipliers are a generally terrible idea in a game with only 10 ability slots as poor choices quickly arise between build versatility and damage output. Beyond that, now that magic and stam have been unified work should be done to better balance them. Merging the damage and resource casting aspects of mag and stam into a single "power" pool and having the stam pool handle block, dodge, and sprint only would make this easier. Though, it might not be worth while from a changes just generally *** people off point of view. I suggested it back in 2015. It was right then and is still correct now if less appealing given the operatic balance misteps of the last year. Lastly, if you want to nerf top end dps, nerf group and personal buff strength. Keeping those things up is the major reason top groups are top. If you want to keep people from skipping mechanics like bridges, you might also want to make this impossible and not just require a bit more dps. Second bridge comes up and group wipes, now for instance. More dps people will find if it means skipping mechanics. They will find it no matter what.