Hi Durzo

I felt pretty much like you at the start, and I was "scared" of "it's just happening again".

I'm 50 for a while now, and enjoying the game a lot, I'm actually very pumped and every day more at what is coming at the end game.

I'm a hardcore EQ1 player, and played everything else (not FFXI, and not a ridiculously big fan of FF).

Let me tell you a few things I experienced:
  • It is true that it's mostly spamming 1-2 skills on EVERY class, I saw this pre-30s and I was dead worried of this game being so dull and with a great lack of combat options. This totally changed at 35-40+ for me (monk), and now in the end have a plethora of skills and rotations to do
  • The GCD is something that worried me, and I hate it, for non-casters it's ridiculously slow. Since I'm a monk and have high skill speed I don't have this issue anymore, don't know about your future
  • Dungeons are dull and stupid, totally agree and also felt like this. From level 34 on, this will change, and they will be more dynamic and require more brains, at 50 many dungeons (and hard modes) are starting to be really hard and fun
  • The endgame seems really built up and polished, there's sets of armor, upgrades, you know what to farm, different options to gear up, and you can see your progression path ahead, dungeons at early 50 (hard modes) are obvious gear checks over and over
  • Questing is annoying, FATEs to, I hate the lack of promoting grouping, elite areas, and better dungeon run rewards (in EXP terms), but well... that's a commnon trend lately

Summarizing, the game is increadibly repetitive, easy and dull up to level 35, from there on it starts getting more challenging (dungeons), but the real fun will start from 44-50 on.

I agree with you it took too long for the game to become challenging or dynamic