back in the days i enjoyed Lineage II (private servers). it had something going that made it enjoyable and a change of pace from the whole WoW boom.
nowadays i only play EVE and WoW (private server sadly, PC cannot handle the latest versions so im stuck in Cataclysm/Mists of Pandaria, perhaps Warlords of Draenor but there's no good server for it that i know about).
from personal experience i would recommend any of those 3. i played Aion once, didnt like it, there were others like Perfect World or ARGO but most of the time these asian MMOs were really just never grew on me. for some reason Lineage did, either for the lore or the gameplay mechanics (even when player movement and models were quite limited, but it surely wasnt the voluptuous Dark Elven females).
Mortal Online was a cool endeavor too. but i cant play it atm and never really got the grasp on how to be adept on it.
as for the current discusion in the comments. im more of a fan of action bars compared to active combat, it feels good in games like The Elder Scrolls where you're a single player and the NPCs dont do weired maneuvers to fuck you up. but in a multiplayer game, with people shooting and doing crazy combos it really feels complicated to land weapons or spells on targets.
yes pressing buttons feels unrewarding if you're not a fan or hability rotations and shit like that but this is more of an adaptation from the old turn based RPG combat mechanics (with dodges and accuracy being based on calculations rather than being a result of movements).
i wouldnt mind the Skyrim system of putting your spells/powers into a selectable menu when pressing a key so you can swap to different habilities during action combat as complement to regular hack and slash or shield blocking. but this only works in singleplayer format because the system actually pauses the game before that.
in a multilplayer scenario that means players have to quickly move around and relocate. even Mortal still uses action bars instead of a full action system like the described above.
i think that perhaps, in the future. we could handle this with a system similar to Minecraft/Terraria. with a special scrolling bar where you can swap weapons and spells in real time just by using the mousewheel (wouldnt surprise me if one of the current MMO titles already took on that concept tbh).
this frees the system to handle more action based stuff like using the left and right clicks for blocking and hitting. perhaps even dual wielding or dual casting (like in Skyrim).
one thing to take in account tho is that this would mean taking a look on how many habilities are churned into classes/professions (honestly i dont get why we still look at those things as separate instead of a single careers tree). to ensure players have enough habilities to tinker on different strats but not so much as to clutter the limited amount of slots of the single action bar.
for example. lets say that im trying to make a class similar to the Druid from WoW but less button intensive:
1. forms would be habilities in this case instead of special UI inclusions. this means i need at least 4 slots avaliable for the druid to change forms, in this case the forms are divided into "Defender" (armored herbivores, works similar to the bear form), "Ambusher"(predatory creatures that prowl or faceoff to deal damage directly like the cat form), "Photosynthetic" (nature based, plantlike, healer oriented forms like the old tree form) and "Faeric" (like the boomkin but you become something like a fae creature or stuff like that to deal nature damaging spells) forms. one thing to take in account is that this may mean a druid can change forms with just rolling the mousewheel so certain limitations may have to be put for pvp.
2. each form has at least 5 specific active habilities, the druid class on its own may also have 5 active habilities for theiru se in the scrollbar. this means a total of 14 slots in the scrollbar.
3. one upside of the druid in WoW is that changing form puts a different actionbar than the one you use in humanoid form so this could be extrapolated to the scrollbar system, with the habilities being replaced when you shapeshift. another additional could be that forms can be keybinded so you dont have to scroll them in the bar and free more slots for extra spells
4. the scrollbar would then be used for special hability selections while regular blocking, spell casting and attacks would be managed by the left and right clicks.
what do you think?