[EQBallzz]

You pretty much nailed it OP.

Archeage - tried it. Hated it. Just seemed like garbage.

BDO - looks amazing. Has some interesting elements but ultimately the combat is button mashing boredom. No holy trinity or class interdependence. Mostly single player game until 45 when the focus changes to toxic PvP that is forced on you at end game. Cash shop insanity and everything I hate about F2P/B2P games. Not wasting my time or contributing to that shite.

GW2 - tried it. Liked the leveling and game world but again..no holy trinity or class interdependence. Every class feels almost identical but with different weapons and spell effects/animations. Everyone gets self heal, utility, DPS. So fucking boring. Quit after trying to do the first major dungeon several times and it was nothing more than ppl zerging the bosses and dying and running back over and over. Worst group experience in an MMO ever. It's like everyone is playing single player games along side each other. Ironically, people try to load out their characters to form "tanks" and "healers" even though they were expressly trying to remove that requirement. Should be an indicator of how that failed miserably.

MO - never tried it for the exact reasons you mentioned. Not a big fan of PvP-centric games anyway.

ESO - played a lot of this. Game had great potential but it was changed and morphed into a pile of shit..including the conversion to B2P with more fucking cash shop bullshit. The game was actually quite hard in beta and at release so the challenge was high. It was eventually nerfed to shit and became mostly trivialized. ZOS are a bunch of manipulative, lying dbags. Don't waste your money.

Pantheon *might* suck but it's one of the few MMOs on the horizon to look forward to. Only others you might want to look into would be Saga of Lucimia (explicitly being created in the model of EQ like Pantheon and on a similar release schedule) and maybe Chronicles of Elyria (different enough that it could be interesting but also ambitious enough to fail miserably or just not meet expectations).