The design philosophy behind stamina and magicka was clear. In theory it worked like this:
Magicka had higher costs, but had more utility, and could do safer ranged damage, with shields and self heals. This was at the expense of not having stamina to run faster, break free, and dodge roll with. They also had less weapon abilities [only 1 dps weapon] but more class abilities [i think this is the only thing that shouldn't have been there from the start]
Stamina cost less because it was also the resource that made stamina so mobile. It lacked range, and was dangerous to play up close. They didn't have shields or good self heals, but had some stronger sets to make up for it, and did more damage. They have a lot of weapon abilities to choose from, but few class skills [mag and stam should be on the same level imo- class morphs for each, and weapon choices for each]
This theory has been totally warped and made not only redundant but just plain bad for both sides involved.
Now, magicka costs wayyy more, shields are garbage, have mediocre to crap self heals that require melee range, offer no pve utility anymore, can't run fast, break free, block more, dodge roll a bunch like stam can, and in terms of the game's history are YEARS behind in sets.
Stamina costs way less, does more ranged damage, does more melee damage, is safer, has more weapon skills and executes, does more AOE, more single target, can dodge, break free, block infinitely, more mobile, hell, ZOS outright full on said they designed the newest raid specifically to cater to stamdps, they continue to get buffed, get BETTER heals than magicka dps could ever dream about, and have all the most amazing sets in the game spoon fed to them, like Major Slayer for 15 seconds for pressing X on an orb or ritual. Let's not forget the new stamina necromancer class, where every magicka morph of a DPS skill is a crappy useless "utility" morph [you now do like 10 more aoe damage, your skull bounces, you restore 20 magicka per second] where stamina gets crazy damage boosts on all their morphs [skill now does 190412948% more damage, and also buffs you, and also debuffs the enemy]
I know Magicka was BiS and considered god tier dps a year ago, but going full reversal is NOT how to fix this. Stamina doesn't need to be the literal only viable option in order to make the game more interesting, and deliberately designing content to be "stamina-friendly" (AKA 3 parse bosses in a row) is just lazy and annoying for people who enjoy content where you get to do stuff besides dummy parse with add waves every 20%.
I'm fine with stamina doing the most damage, but the fact that they literally have all the advantages of magicka, with none of the disadvantages of magicka, is ridiculous, and I hope they look at this in the upcoming class audit and passive changes. Give more classes stam abilities, and STOP nerfing the everlasting crap out of magicka for being remotely competitive.
I hope I don't come across as hateful towards stam dps. I'm fine with stam dps being meta, heck, they deserve it after being shunned for most of the game's history, but going complete 180 in game direction is not what ZOS should have done after having years of criticism leveled at them for making magicka the only viable option.
the best part is, magicka is still king in pvp, and probably will be as long as they have the utility skills that are useless in pve but super powerful in pvp.
from the perspective of a magicka main who is constantly asked to switch to stamdps.
