Thank you for the informatic and well written post. These are surely the things I am also afraid of in ToS. We have very similar mmo gaming background and even tho it pains me to read your opinion, I am still hopeful that IMC games will look into these matters.
I also have to agree that CD is a very lazy way to balance things and basicly limits the way you play a character in the first place. Why can’t we just adjust the mana usage / regen and so forth of all skills?
Also what you said about a linear story in a game, yeah it feels limiting. However, I can’t really say much about this issue concerning ToS, since I was not a betatester. Still, the “open” world style of games such as Runescape vintage or pre-renewal RO was in my opinion a lot better than the current way mmos are being controlled.
I was watching streams for a few days and what really bothered me was that the fighting seemed fairly “trivial” without any real skill involved. Most players seemed to be farming mobs of weaker monsters that die instantly and even on the stronger monsters I saw no real variety on the way they fought. Even in RO we had variety in monsters, everyone can remember the ultimate newbie killer Thief Bug that called all his friends to attack you and kept looting your drops 