DFO: New Player with Some Question
DFO: Just got of our first night of the trial. We will give it a few more tries, but the first day is a very fustrating day in this game, no matter how much mmorpg or fps experience you have. There are many little things that DF makes needlessly fustrating. Even after you get the controls and combat down. If your looking for pvp, your going to have to do a hell of a lot of grinding, macroing, a nd afk skilling to get your character there.
Try it out yourself, but you need to really want to like this game make it past the first day controls and community. Tomorrow ill roll another race and forget about magic. Apparently theres two paths to take in this skill sandbox, leveling everything and going defender. which cant use magic but gets other bonuses. This is usually the case for games that dont define a class and lets players choose, everyone levels everything, which isnt fun if your not interested in anything but a mage.
We have our beef in DarkFall, but a new player who played DarkFall for the first time would not even know about the grind wall, hell unless you removed New Player Protection, you can't even PvP. Controls, some players had difficulties with it, we personally didn't and the UI actually felt a bit familiar so we was not affected that much. But we have heard more players having issues with UI than none, so we will agree with you here.
As for your last paragraph, Hyrbrid and Indestructible are indeed the main 2 play-style that players favors. But this is not usually the case for sandbox that have no classes, most games have either Hardcaps or meaningfull Specialization. DarkFall has none, and that's the issue here. A Mage-Only build is somewhat viable, you have many knockback spells and all, it's possible to play Mage-Only, but most players still prefer to use Melee for close-combat just in case. Mana is limited and all.