I long while into ESO’s development, they made a MAJOR change to how stats work. In ESO at launch, magicka was for spells and stamina for melee skills exclusively. You could NOT use “stamina based skills” as a magicka character, because the damage(or healing) did not scale with magicka. This ruled out any kind of spell blade gameplay, and everyone hated. I mean really hated it. It was a big part of why the game struggled early on. They changed the game, to overwhelming support by the way, so that the skill/spell damage scaled off of the players highest stat, regardless of which one it was, and that way you could have a melee fighter, with say, a fireball spell, or a healing spell on your bar, this opened the doors for many many new builds, meta got healthier and everyone was making their dream sandbox, classless mmo character. The video I am linking below will likely explain what I am saying much much better. I highly recommend watching the “combat changes” portion of the video for context. Your Build WILL CHANGE In ESO Update 33! Here's WHY!! - YouTube
New world is supposed to be that classless, sandbox mmo with build customization and the ability to play how you want, mix and match and be creative with your weapon choices. As things currently stand, this is not possible. I recently had my partner try to get in to the game, and they were immediately put waaaaay off because new world could so clearly have a system where a weapon scales with the highest stat no matter what, allowing us to mix say, sns and ls or vg and bow, the list goes on. This is what I want to discuss here.
To preface, I want you to try and not think about the current meta and stick with me here on this topic, because this is not about balance or meta or whatever else, because it is my confident and honestly almost fervent belief at this point that all things CAN BE BALANCED, and fear of something being “unbalanced” often leads game devs in to balance hell. Balancing your game via player freedom and build theory crafting is always better than balancing with drastic dmg % changes.
Now, opening new world, via some similar “stat scaling,” would create a space where there are no longer 3 builds top that dominate the entire game. Player freedom and theory crafting would create a meta with archetypes, without the need for classes. We would see many different melee weapons be mixed with magical ranged weapons and many ranged weapons be mixed with melee weapons. All things that can’t be done as we speak for the majority of the combinations. I genuinely believe this leads to the player having a much better experience. It is more fun to create your character because everyone can be so unique, and it is more fun to fight others because each individual being so different keeps the meta from getting stale. New world on the surface looks like it is BUILT to allow this kind of theory crafting and mix and match style gameplay, but it has a fatal flaw in how stats scale.
A simple step that could be made to equalize this, is to make weapons scale to the highest and second highest stat a character has as if it was that weapons secondary. So if you had 200 str, 131 int, and 122 con(from gear, using some of my 600gs gear to test this) for example, and greatsword and fire staff, the greatsword could use that int and the fire staff could use that str. Yes, this would mean you could do something silly like all int and focus and equip a spear and you would have a pure secondary stat spear, but pure secondary stat is not as effective so you would never do this, and you cannot equip more than 2 weapons to abuse this anyway. It may seem silly that it would work this way, but eso did exactly this and you can make some wonky ineffective stuff there too. In reality, all this is, is a win win, because you are now able to make hybrid builds. Hybrid builds sustain classless games, which even though eso isn’t, when you examine eso in comparison to class based games, it really is a classless game that has you make one irreversible skill line choice at the start, unlocking that skill for use on that character, which is represented as your “class.” You can play a templar in eso and never use the templar skills at all and make an entirely classes build out of that character by simply not touching the templar skills. This is new worlds great flaw. The number one problem I see amongst new players, is the disappointment that they cannot be creative with their build. People want to have freedom with their class fantasy in a game that advertises itself as being classless. It is the entire appeal. But what new world has become, is a class based game. Your class is your stats. Str/dex class, Int/focus class, Pure Str class, etc.
I am curious on your thoughts regarding this. ESO made this change and the community rejoiced. Yes, it flipped the entire meta on it’s head. The game was nearly redesigned in terms of builds, but it also made a play space that every ESO player prefers to this day. I truly believe the same could be said for new world. This is a pretty complicated topic, even though implementation is simple and can be worded simply on the skill page(weapons scale to the highest and second highest stat a character has as if it was that weapons secondary), but if I have made any errors I would love to hear them and talk about this further.