Sigma Draconis is a community-based Daggerfall Covenant PvE Guild on the EU server. We have just under 500 members with a 20-day inactive policy, we have both social members and a lot of PVE endgame raiders, currently in possession of the all the top DC Trial times in EU.This is a summary of the most important feedback that we and our members have in regards to the changes in 1.6, currently on the PTS.At the moment on the PTS it seems like the cost is far too high for all types of defensive actions like roll dodge and blocking that consume stamina, leading to inability to block during situations where the game still makes blocking mandatory such as in large trash pulls during Veteran Dungeons.The current meta on live is basically “always block when AOE:ing” and this comes down to the way that these large trash pulls work, because of the large amount of mobs and graphical effects there is no real way of telling what attacks are directed at who - and also no way for the tank to keep aggro of a large amount of mobs. This has previously been stated as an element of design i.e. Tanks are not supposed to aggro all mobs, but just the biggest threats. The problem this causes is that especially Light Armor users must block all attacks directed at them or they will die within seconds. This works on Live as expected by perma-blocking, which might not be ideal, but the damage is too high not to block it.Suggested solutions to this problem is either to lower the amount of damage put out by mobs in large trash pulls, lower the amount of mobs in trash pulls or simply lower the rate of stamina consumption by blocking back to 1.5-levels.In case this is a change made for PvP, which it seems like, a better idea is to change the Cyrodiil “buff” Battle Spirit to include a higher defensive resource cost much like it decreases damage taken now in 1.6. This would enable PvE to continue to function “normally” without affecting PvP balance.This ties together with the previous point, but is also valid on it’s own. Currently the trash mobs in all Veteran Dungeons that we have tested are way harder than any of the boss fights. I have previously posted this video and will do so again as it illustrates both this point and the stamina cost very well (and as a bonus, it’s also quite hilarious):Most of the (non-add) boss fights I’ve encountered so far seem to be fair in their level of difficulty, some things hit a little too hard for no apparent reason, but that might be because Light Armor is useless now.I have personally always liked having several specs on my characters, my Templar is a Healer and a Tank, my DK and Nightblade on 1.5 have both Tank & DPS specs. This is the case for many of the raiders in the Guild. We are really happy about the current 100g cost to respec Champion Points, as this still allows characters to have multiple setups.I haven’t studied the Addon API in much detail, but I have seen there are some API references to the Champion System - and if there’s a way to provide APIs that will allow an addon to save configurations and spend points in the Champion System that would be extremely helpful for us.Please do not make CS respecs a costly affair, and if it isn’t already available, please provide API access to the Champion System in a way that makes it possible to reconfigure our setup easily. If the cost for CS respecs go up, keep them reasonable, so that respeccing to take on another role is still viable for endgame players. 1K gold is a reasonable gold sink, 10K is a barrier that locks characters into a single role.There is already an excellent thread on this subject here by f047ys3v3n. Thank you for that!I will however still highlight the need to provide loot-based incentives for completing the hardest PVE-content. We all know that creating content like Sanctum Ophidia is a massive development effort and that we can’t expect to get a new piece of endgame content every two weeks, however this also means that the content needs to provide sufficient incentive through loot, achievements, etc. to be re-run and perfected over months time while waiting for new content.In my own opinion the itemization has been rather lacking so far when it comes down to endgame content. Looking at AA and Hel Ra, the only really useful sets have been Aether, Two-Fanged Snake (jewelry esp.) and possibly the Destructive Mage or 3pc Ophidian. Even then, the 5pc bonus on Aether was never really used, and some of the bonuses on most sets are .. very lackluster.This turned a corner when the new Sanctum Ophidia loot was released, the Infallible Aether and Vicious Ophidian were both really good sets. Not overpowered, but with bonuses that made sense and could slightly increase the DPS and/or sustainability in a unique way. Eternal Yokeda is not completely useless, it serves it’s use on the Serpent fight especially and as such is quite interesting. Items that help with the content they drop from is always a bonus as it makes it worthwhile to earn them so that you can continually perform better.However, both Infallible Aether and Vicious Ophidian got a nerf in this patch, as evidenced by the post I linked earlier. Infallible Aether got it’s unique heavy attack bonus nerfed by 40%, and Vicious Ophidian had it’s weapon damage go from 22 > 170 while Hundigs Rage went from 29 to 299.Suggestion: Make set bonuses on endgame gear more valuable (not less), give slightly larger bonuses to crit , spell damage/weapon damage to these gear sets. Stop giving incentives like 5 more magicka on enchantments. We are not looking for stupidly overpowered gear, but something that provides an incentive and gives us a tiny boost.Also you can see this to see exactly how bad crit is on sets now, which is in essence why the Trial sets are useless.I am not really into PvP so I can’t comment on those sets, but the same should be applied there, PvP should also provide interesting itemization. Crafting too, but make crafting more interesting in the process. Release new 9 trait sets that have bonuses that are better than low trait sets, etc. Itemization needs to be an incentive for progression across the board.Also remove all traces of Traits like Training, Charged, Sturdy, Exploration etc. from all types of dropped Veteran Gear. These traits serve little purpose apart from very specific situations and/or filling out the number of traits required in the time sink that is crafting in ESO.With the reservation that some of this may be directly or indirectly related to the difficulty of trash mobs and/or stamina drain, it simply feels like our characters are less powerful after 1.6 with the 70 Champion Points that we’ve been given. Dungeons are harder, taking down groups of mobs is much harder. This point is hard to judge fairly as it is directly affected by other factors such as mob armor/spell res getting buffed, gear getting nerfed, stam costs increasing but it is a potentially serious issue and there should be no expectation from ZOS that your customers will accept getting nerfed and forced to level up yet another character to get back to the same level of power that we used to have.It is also affecting us in Trials, for me I am noticing my Stamina regen doesn’t cut it anymore (with the exact same sets, buffs, you name it) as on Live. On the exact copy of my character I can no longer sustain my offense even after putting a few points in both regen and cost reduction. This is a major issue, because we literally all got nerfed. Simply put, we all feel far less effective. This together with the raid gear nerf is just a slap in the face.We’ve only tried AA so far, very unsuccessfully due to both issues of our own and the buffs/nerfs. I can however say that if your intention was to stop us from “stack and burn” this still works very well on the first boss.However it does not seem to work at all on the 2nd boss due to the Negate nerf that dropped yesterday. (any null pain spawning after a Negate is dropped stays up, i.e. it's possible to continue casting into a Negate field).This boss will now require a strategy, something we obviously didn't have.PS. You can also see some of the stamina management issues here. DW used to be self-sustainable but is not, can be sustained through pots and Evil Hunter (only appropriate targets) but Bow and execute (Killers Blade) is not even remotely sustainable.I’m not exactly sure what the intentions behind the nerf was, but it has completely stopped this tactic at least. Sadly that’s how far we got on the first attempt. I’ll say that it was very much mixed feelings on the “buffing” of AA and how things work now, on one hand it’s nice to have a bigger challenge .. on the other hand, when you couple this with how bad resource management currently is, and the fact that our gear and characters have become weaker.. it doesn’t feel very nice at all.The intentions are all good, and maybe we’ll appreciate it at some point, but buffing a Trial that has no gear we want (we have it all 100x over + it’s useless now anyway) is sort of killing the motivation to even do it at the moment. We could spend some time and get the strategies down etc. but it’s just not fun when you struggle with Stamina, your character feels like a useless loaf of bread and there’s absolutely nothing worthwhile loot-wise.XP gain seems to be completely broken on the PTS currently, I am gaining next to no XP from doing things like Veteran Dungeons and Trials. Killing a boss gives ~1K XP, which means 400 of them to level up. I received about 30K for finishing a VR dungeon or 30K for finishing AA (not my numbers). This is completely off the mark as you can gain that at least 5x faster through questing at the moment. XP for doing hard content needs to increase by a large margin, or endgame players will find ourselves with 80CP when someone just questing casually has 300. I’m not saying we need to earn them faster, but equal. 30K XP for a half hour dungeon run, puts champion points at 13 hours per point. This is WITH enlightment.Bow was nerfed to *oblivion* in 1.6 on the PTS. Using the same gear setup my Focused Aim damage has went from 1058 -> 5574. That's a ratio of 1:5.2 which is lower than any modifier I have seen on any skill.Bows are the only range option for Stamina users, and at it's current state you can barely break 7-8K dps with it while ranged Magicka builds (such as this ) can hit 12K.That is an enormous disparity and unfortunately means that Bow is not even a possible choice in 1.6.Edit: Excellent thread on this subject by Alcast here Radiant Oppression - is doing some insane damage (for reasons unknown) resulting in a magicka cost channel equivalent of the soul assault ultimate.Wrecking Blow - is currently hitting people for >17K in PvP, this might be due to some bug or stacking weapon damage, but it’s not acceptable for a skill that can no longer (1.6.1) even be interrupted by Bash.This is one that hits Sorcs really hard especially, but has also become prevalent in more skills (Expert Hunter) providing necessary passive buffs. Basically, for every toggle skill you have on your bar, you eliminate a slot from both of your bars. A sorc skill bar in 1.6 might only have 2 useable slots per weapon if you have Inner Light, Winged Twilight and Bound Aegis. A solution could be to allow toggled skills to be toggled on one bar, and still stay on while switching bars. This would still make it a trade-off, but without removing 6 possible active skills.In 1.5 Werewolves get a Stamina regen buff in human form, without suffering any weaknesses. This makes it so that gaining Werewolf with no intention to ever tranform, and/or spend any skill points, is still a buff. There should either be a larger gain together with the poison damage debuff apply in human form as well, or the Stamina regen should only extend to Werewolf form. As it is now, there is no reason to be a human in 1.5.Making the guards unkillable seems a bit too cheap, make them bosses with a million HP, for sure. Make them call for reinforcement and spawn even more guards, but if we want to assemble 12 people and wreck a guard we should be able to.. it would make the Justice system much more fun as an activity to take part in when you’ve got nothing better to do.Can’t fill a trial and don’t want to go to PVP?See how long you can last against the guards. Kill one, get attacked by 3 more, kill them and get 6.. etc. It would make the system go from “oh well, I’ll steal some recipes” good, to “oh my god” awesome. More bystanders could join the fight, and it would simply be an almost guaranteed good time.If they remain invincible, why didn’t we just send one guard to kill The Serpent? Or Molag Bal?Looks like a great change, on this one I can’t do much more than congratulate you. When we first heard about the changes to a point based system this was pretty much exactly what we envisioned. Stops the incentive to break things through bypassing mobs, provides an incentive for hard modes while still keeping a focus on doing it fast and clean. I have yet to see the individual point bonuses in action but on paper it looks perfect.So, there's a "passive" in the Champion System that gives you 12% spell/weapon crit when you have invested 30 points. Now, the Champion System was supposed to prevent large gaps between players and provide a slow long-term progression system.. this is not the way to do it.What's bound to happen is you're going to have PUGs ask for people only with 90 CP, because you need it to get that passive. Every DPS in the gamehave that passive. If you're sitting at 89 CP, you're going to be doing 6% less damage than if you had 90? Those are the kind of gaps that shouldn't be in a system like this.My suggestion (which I think is the most important one that can be raised in regards to update 6):Put the crit back on gear, remove this passive and if needed give a little more to the respective "active" stars instead.This would prevent an enormous gap between different point levels, and provide that long-term progression system that doesn't separate players too much. I'm also sure this needs to be done with other passives, or the passive system needs to be scrapped altogether, because having it this way will do nothing but force a massive grind and make your effectiveness directly related to your CP.I don't see any way that this can make it to live without causing very serious issues with game balance.We all share the interest of this games continued success, and this feedback is provided 100% to enhance the game experience for everyone albeit with a large focus on endgame PvE, as that is our focus as a guild.1.6 is a great opportunity to once and for all correct all the issues that have kept the game good rather than the best. Most of these things should be fairly straightforward but I (as well as many more of our members) will be happy to provide any further feedback and/or clarification here, in PM or on TS. If you need anything further from us, give me a shout and I’ll arrange it.Officer of Sigma Draconis