How's Blade and Soul

What's it's upsides and downsides currently? There are some advice:

1. The biggest selling points for me personally is the extremely satisfying combat, fun endgame and item progression

The thing I love with combat in this game, especially at high level, is that your contribution in dungeons feels a lot more dependent on skill rather than gear. If you're an amazing player it doesn't matter if all other party members dies. You have all the tools to survive yourself since there's no healer class, however to balance this there's enrage timers so you can't solo everything regardless of gear.

PvP is also really fun and balanced (at low ms) imo.

Even though this game is probably my favorite game ever there's plenty of downsides. The world feels quite small, you don't get the open world feel that other mmorpgs offer. The crafting and player trading is also pretty lackluster, the few items you can craft quickly becomes worthless after bots squeeze every last copper of profit out of them. The underlying UE3 engine can't really utilize the power of newer hardware, so you'll have a hard time avoiding low fps when there's more than 15+ players on your screen. Also at high ping the game starts to fall apart, you can't "animation cancel" so a lot of skill combinations will just not work.

With that said I would still recommend everyone to try out this game, Team Bloodlust tried to do something new in this dying genre (3 years ago but still!), and it really meshed perfectly with my preferences.

2. It's a nice and fun game (played the Korean version for 2 years) but once again, just like the Korean version, the ping to the NA server makes PvP unplayable for me since I live in Europe.

If they want Europeans to be active in PvP they need to add a European server.

3. To anybody that has played it: where would you put BnS on the scale between "Arena queue simulator" (as someone here described it) and the MMO (especially having in mind that the first M is for "Massive")?

4. there's a dodge skill at a relatively early level, and the combat absolutely is an action combat. not sure about forcemaster, but the assassin class is a more tactical one, so this might've been your issue, but if you'd try a blade master or blade dancer, you'd probably swallow your words in shame.

the game is extremely action-based, however the russian server is also extremely outdated

personally, i find the combat far more dynamic than in tera, can't say for wildstar because i've had a lot of lag there and haven't really experienced a proper combat.

5. I played the Russian version and didn't like it. I guess its just my opinion but things I hated were. The combat isn't really action combat. It is more of a hybrid type similar to Skyforge.

I did not play it too much but till the point I played I found no dedicated dodge skill or anything related to it. I usually prefer sandbox over theme park but Blade and Soul would be at the pinnacle of theme park (I don't know if that's a thing). It is more like playing witcher and choosing how geralt looks. I didn't get to the endgame. Not even close to it. But till the point I played I didn't like it and I don't recommend it.

I am sure there may be a dodge skill and stuff in higher levels (I don't know). But i am not interested enough to go and check it out. Feel free to point out things that I have missed out as I indeed have only touched the surface of the game which has failed to catch me in unfortunately.

Tell us more. Thank you.