I'm at a space that I'm just constantly looking at the game design decision at this point wondering "Why?"
So many classes feel totally unfinished from almost a conceptual standpoint, sure they have the vestiges of "Uniqueness" but that "Uniqueness" just was copy and pasted from other games and ultimately they feel hollow OR, they are neutering the "Uniqueness" for the sake of this "lofty" goal of "TTK".
Elementalist feels like a back burner college project, has some good ideas but nothing finished or ironed out. Copy paste spells from wizard a tier late, blast system thats 1/4th finished, pets that eventually get out-scaled by mobs in a hard way where you are killing light blues and dumping 1/4th your mana pool just to keep your pet alive and not even drop a nuke. The ultimate joke is that our most efficient nuke for a LONG time is our heal (Cant wait for nick to nerf this after reading):
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Shaman feels like they wanted the EQ shaman but then were like "Woah no, this is OP as fuck!" and nerfed the foundations of what made the class interesting in EQ so now you are stuck with a class that shares spells with like 2-8 other classes and heals with hots that are shit tier efficiency compared to...fucking clerics?
Bard feels like it's going to be relegated to being a buff box as you afk them in a corner singing 4 songs via AHK / Keyboard macros. Their damage BLOWS, so soloing is done after this charm nerf, taking 8 minutes+ to dot down a mob at 48 feels like absolute dog shit. The class feels like it's going to be an aura class that sits in camp and plays aura songs for max uptime.
It feels like a ton of the classes that felt interesting and engaging are slowly having their interesting and engaging aspects removed via ball-peen hammer.
Finally, the gameplay loop feels at odds with their mantra of "Sandwich" game, sure your APMs are super low, you basically do a couple actions at most per fight but then your basically mandatory in those actions. An encounter is so boring that I legit start falling asleep in camps. On the opposite side of the spectrum, my group the other day was running around orc island with 2 enchanters, a bard, a cleric and a SK and it was the most fun I ever had in the game. The action was paced nicely, the kills were flowing, I wasn't even concerned about XP. That group is a 1 in 1000 group, most groups you are stuck in a corner in a hallway staring at 3-8 spawns as you break in and fall asleep.
I dunno, I feel like I need to step back from the game and wait til they iron out things a bit more because as is, this is a sleep simulator. Or maybe this just isn't for me anymore, which is wild to say because I dropped a FUCKING YEAR of /played on aradune.
