Vanguard was the only MMO I really enjoyed other than EQ and early WOW. Shame it was forced to release a solid 8-12 months too early. Many of the level 40-50 zones were completely barren and unitemized.
That said the class design, world design, and quest design was top-notch. CLEARLY it was the "true successor" to EverQuest. You even had dungeons you could crawl starting as early as level 15 or so; similar to something like Upper Guk, Befallen etc.
The level progression was more WoW-inspired, in that it was focused mainly around questing. However, unlike WoW, the mobs you killed while questing actually gave significant amounts of experience. So much so that you could also play the game EQ-style and just setup camp in a dungeon and grind mobs for a few hours to level up at a similar pace.
Hopefully Pantheon follows these leads. It always bothered me that some MMOs shoehorn you into grinding mobs for xp, while others force you into grinding QUESTS for xp. There's no reason not to allow players to choose their own means of progression.
If Pantheon is given the dev. time to actually be a COMPLETE GAME on release (including "end game content" / raids) I think it has a solid chance
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