Combat was def fun in BDO but that, IMO, is where the fun ended for me. Its cool to take a character through the leveling once though. But the pay shit really starts to show its face later. They start to nickle and dime you to death with shit like storage and such. And like I said, the gearing system is retarded when you get to end game.
I'd say the P2W isn't that bad, but it's a set amount that you more or less are going to end up paying. The caravan campsite shit is almost a must have with all the functionalities it offers versus the ingame one which is absolute ass, and that's 49bucks, 35 on sale or so iirc? A cooking costume is also almost a must have since cooking is such a big way to make money, it's still 15bucks or something like that, could argue that one's optional though if you don't mind taking longer doing your cooking stuff. But past that, not nearly as much stuff you'd have to buy. Maids and pets are nice but they do give them away frequently via events(plus the free ones from questing the first time), weight and inventory slots are also nice but not vital if you have the campsite to sell your shit and stack your horse(might want to buy a weight pack on sale at some point on your main char eventually), city storage lets you use your CP more easily but you can kinda just farm more CP/cut down on some of the stupid shit and that's more or less it.
Ultimately if you're going with the mindset of spending say 60bucks, you can cover most of your needs. If you're going with the mindset of spending nothing at first, then 60 a month in, then 50 a month or two later, then you're pretty much golden. It does end up costing more than a standard box for what I'd consider the baseline, but you can play a fair bit of time before you have to spend that money and spread it over time. The campsite is the big offender.
The gearing system is fairly ok imo, but it's similar to PoE, it's RNG fiesta shit. So basically you have 3types of people making gear, newbies throwing random shit at it and getting lucky(but most just throwing away their shit for nothing), gambling addicts who might also swipe their credit card to get more rolls and 20hours a day streamers who throw so much gold at it they brute force it. But as a standard user, you can just ignore the whole shit, farm currency, sell all the upgrade shit that can be sold or use it on easy upgrades for small currency gains, and then buy the gear you want. It's a slow process, but that's just how the game gearing works, it's a slow process regardless, but buying means not having to deal with the fucking gambling shit. You can easily set yourself objectives(next I upgrade my ring, I need x millions, I farm y millions a day so it'll take 18days to get there give or take) and gear up, although in some cases availability of gear can force you to look into other paths for a time.
They're still very different games though. And imo the PvP in BDO is absolute ass, and that's if you have equal gear(which a lot of the time isn't going to be the case which means you have 0 chance of winning a fight, none at all, other than the gear equalized guild wars).
