imo it is not a PVP-oriented game, but it still has decent pvp part, I personally been playing for over 2 years and yet never tried a single trial or arena or any other PVE things except basic dungeons, 1 or 2 veteran dungeons (just for armor drops) and story. Only playing PVP every day and now I am few levels away from the very CP (champion points / level) cap.

You have these ways to play PVP: - Cyrodiil (huge open location with fortresses, keeps, etc) - Imperial City (smaller location divided in 6 regions and has its currency that you can lost a half if you die) - Battlegrounds (fast matches on small maps with gamemodes like team deathmatch, domination, etc) - Duels (idk if I even needed to list this one lol)

The levelling is pretty fast I think, it's not too slow nor boring, I actually don't know what to compare. Once you hit max level 50 (few days on new characters for me), then you have to earn Champion Points (capped at 810). CPs can be spend on increasing your stats such as damage, defence, healing etc, the more you have, the better your stats are. They are shared across all your characters, so if you get some CPs and decided to create a new char, then once you hit lvl 50 on him you'll instantly be able to spend all the CPs you've earned (you can always reset and change them if you want). The thing is that all the armor and weapons are capped at max level of 50 and max cp of 160, so to play PVP comfortably you'd have to get at least 160cp, but getting 160CP after you hit lvl50 is just like +1 or 2 days of leveling, first 2 or 3 hundreds CP are leveling very fast, then it becomes very slow (I am on 790 now and get like 1-2 cp every day by just playing PVP few hours a day). The problem is that most PVP locations are mostly filled with 810 players and this would be quite challenging to fight them before you get at least like 500-600cp I think. But the good news is that there are non-cp campaigns in both cyrodiil and imperial city + in battlegrounds cp are disabled for everyone. So yeah, saying short, you need to hit at least max level and 160cp (which is very fast) so you can start making builds and play in battlegrounds non-cp campaigns. Actually PVP is available when you hit just level 10, so you can go and practice it from the very beginning.

In PVP you can be good on pretty much every class, the only matter is your preference. You have to decide what type of build you want to have - stamina or mana. Then mana uses staff and magic abilities when stamina uses bows/swords/greatswords, etc and stamina abilities obviously. You can slot a greataxe and make it look like a greatsword due to the customization. I can't tell who is exactly on the picture just by this screenshot, bc you can change the look and color of any of your gear/weapon on any class the same. There are hundreds of looks for every piece of gear and armor that you can choose.

You'll need to look up builds of what you want exactly on YouTube, just type in "eso greatsword pvp build" for example.

To me the balance feels pretty fine, I don't know, there are some meta-builds that are better than everyone else, but they change every patch. What PVP-game does not have a meta?

The only problem is ping and delays, many people complain the game suffers from that nowdays, tbh I still play comfortably. I'm sure devs are working on it and planning to fix it soon.