I want to preface this by saying I've been playing PVP on eso since around the time Imperial City went live. I've always loved the combat ESO offered, as it has been fast paced and action packed. Your skill as a player in PVP is determined by a number of things, including but not limited to; Game knowledge, mechanical knowledge and ability, situational awareness, and experience.

Over the past year, we've been travelling down a dark road for the ESO combat system, and for players who spend their time learning to utilize it to it's furthest extent.

First we the addition of cast times onto many ultimates. This change was largely opposed by anyone who cared about the combat aspects of PVP, as it was unnecessary and has widely been considered a "Coddling" or "hand holding" change. The developer reasoning was that there needed to be more counter play to these abilities, and that it "wasn't fun to die to something you can't see". At the same time this change was made, healing and mitigation in pvp VASTLY outweighed the damage potential you could achieve on a full damage setup. These burst ultimates that could be used instantly were often the only way to catch players off guard, and by adding a cast time you could no longer use them to quickly punish players for making mistakes. To make matters worse, no cast times were added to defensive ultimate - only the offensive ones, furthering the already heavy imbalance between damage and mitigation/healing. Not only did this have a negative impact balance wise, but in pure mechanical functionality all of the offensive ultimates with cast times do not work nearly as well as they used to - often missing point blank, or failing to cast entirely.

Next, we had the removal of almost all animation cancelling from the game. AC/ing as been one of the most skill based mechanics in the game since it's introduction. In order to effectively do it, you needed to spend hundreds, or sometimes THOUSANDS of hours perfecting your timing. Combat focused players as a whole loved AC'ing, as it was one of the things that would separate great players from average ones, and it was a skill based mechanic for people to practice in order to improve their own abilities. The changes to blocking functionality that caused the removal of AC'ing have been one of the most negative impacts on combat functionality ever implemented in ESO. The situations in combat where abilities become unresponsive or fail to fire have increased tenfold since the blocking rework/AC removal.

The only people that applauded this change were those unwilling to spend the time practicing it. They called it an "exploit" because they weren't willing to put in the time, or because they simply couldn't be bothered to press more buttons per minute. Zos seems to have picked up on this, and decided to adapt this into their own agenda - beginning to cite "APM" (actions per minute) as something they wanted to lower, in order to decrease the "Barrier to entry" to combat in general. Unfortunately they missed the mark - instead of decreasing the barrier to entry, they brought down the skill ceiling - the main contributors to the barrier (CP, gear grinding) are still in place.

A more minor change that followed this was the reduction of bash damage - this was also done because of the "lower APM" gameplay that ZOS is seeking out. Zenimax looked at some very specific scenarios in PVE environments where bashing was generating a small amount of DPS that gave an edge to players willing to press more buttons, and they decided to nerf it throughout the game to prevent it from being used in this manner. In PVP bash weaving was a mechanical skill that required practice and thinking to benefit from - you could edge out a small amount of extra damage on bursts at the cost of stamina, but you needed to decide when to do it based on resource availability and the situations you entered into. Now bash weaving is almost pointless.

Following this Zenimax decided to move something called "Range checks" to the server side, instead of the client side. Range checks are what the game performs when you press an ability to determine if the target player is within range of you - these are done when you press the button, and in the case of abilities with cast times, again when the ability is supposed to fire following the cast time. This has adversely affected NUMEROUS abilities in the game, damaging them to the point where they only function about half of the time. Players that focus on their combat performance and mechanics will often see the "Target is out of range" notification on any ability with a sub 10M range, despite being visually right next to or on top of the player they're targeting. Abilities like Reverb, Surprise attack/concealed weapon, executioner, fossilize, venomous claw, and similar abilities are some of the worst offenders. I don't quite remember what the reasoning behind this change was, but ultimately all it has achieved is making numerous abilities become unreliable, and generally un-fun to use.

We're now at a point where combat itself is in the worst state it has been in since launch. Almost every skill based mechanic in the game has been decimated, creating a low skill ceiling combat environment where there is very little incentive to put in thousands of hours practicing mechanics in PVP. The goal of "lowering the barrier to entry" has been totally missed with all of these changes - players still have no direction when it comes to entering PVP unless they have a mentor teaching them, or if they seek out online resources to learn the finer points of the game. They still need to grind hundreds of hours just to get to the CP cap so that they no longer have a statistical disadvantage against players, and then they need to acquire and trait change gear based on the meta during that particular patch. These are far more of a barrier to entry than anything, but players circumvent these and enter PVP unprepared - then they complain about the skill based mechanics, instead of their own (justifiable?) unwillingness to grind the CP cap and proper gear.

Now we've reached the proposal of cooldowns on ESO abilities. This idea is so incredibly unrefined, that I cannot believe it is even going to be tested without first receiving feedback on how it could properly be implemented. It is good that zenimax has identified "Ball groups/zergs spamming abilities endlessly" as one of the primary reasons that cyrodiil lags - pvp players have been telling them this for years. The problem with the things they're testing to fix it is that they do not actually negatively impact these groups nearly as much as they do the small scale or solo players. Large groups will just increase their numbers to the point that they cannot possibly die, just like they always have. It does not matter how much you limit their ability to use AOE heals/damage skills, because they will just increase their numbers or add on sets that prevent these changes for negatively impacting them.

The proposal of having both AOE heals and AOE damage abilities on the same CD's simply cannot work. The number of skills with an AOE component is immeasurable - many skills you may never have thought about have this component. The terrifying thing about the test is that there will be a positive impact on performance, and this needs to be regarded as a "False Positive". Of course reducing the number of abilities that can be used will increase performance, but it will come at the cost of every player that cares about combat itself - they will not stand for their abilities being limited, when this has been the fundamental mechanic that ESO's combat was built upon.

There are so many better suggestions out there for things that can be done. Zenimax NEEDS to listen to the people that care about combat on this one - THEY KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT. Some things that could have a huge positive impact would be:

• Healing can ONLY HIT GROUP MEMBERS. This has been suggested by more people than I can count, and for good reason. It will encourage people to actually group up if they want to benefit from other player's healing, instead of just stacking as many people as possible to the point where the layers of healing become redundant.
• REMOVE CP FROM CYRODIIL. This has been suggested so many times by people that care about the performance. Yes, NO-CP has balance issues. Yes, proc sets and poisons are insane in NO-CP. But the fact is that NO-CP historically does not lag in the same way that CP does. There are far less calculations that need to be done, and the result is improved performance. Looking back at a point I made earlier - making all PVP "NO-CP" will remove the barrier for entry almost entirely, and then PVP and PVE can be more individually balanced.
• CAP THE NUMBER OF PLAYERS HEALING CAN HIT. AoE caps on damage abilities were horrendous - anyone that played group pvp back when they existed can attest to this. However, heals and things like purge DO NOT NEED TO HIT EVERY PLAYER IN YOUR RADIUS. They should be capped to a small number of players, in addition to the earlier suggestion of only hitting group members.

There are so many more things that can be done to increase performance without destroying the last remnants of enjoyable combat left in this game. You need to listen to the class reps that are reaching out to you, you need to listen to the PVP players with thousands of hours utilizing the combat system. You need to IGNORE the people that just want to travel from keep to keep with their faction, never dying and participating in endless siege battles where they don't even use abilities. This is not what combat is about.

As a last ditch effort, consider shrinking cyrodiil and lowering the population caps as well as the group sizes, or deleting cyrodiil in favor of a new PVP zone with new objectives. Do not ruin the combat in this game while trying to fix the lag that has been present for years.