Here's the thing -- the boredom factor is twofold:
1. It takes quite a bit of grinding just to get to a reasonable level of competence at
anything under the current PS system -- it's a far cry better than it was, but it's still enough tedium to dissuade at least some RPers from making their chars mechanically match their RP'ed abilities.
2. The PS combat & progression systems are quite
vertical -- and this has a strong negative influence on PvP balance, because then you either have a grind so tedious that newbies/low-time players have no chance to catch up to full-time grinders, or so trivial that everyone is able to max everything with ease, rendering character stats/skills rather useless from a RP standpoint.
Fixing the first item is a matter of building a more engaging overall progression system -- crafting training has made some progress in this regard, but still doesn't quite have the degree of back-and-forth dialog that I'd want to see out of a RP game. Combat, though, takes advantage of none of this -- instead, the philosophy is "here's a sword, go have fun" with the associated dismal results. Why can't you have quests involved with learning how to use a weapon? It'd be a good opportunity to help RPers learn how to play their character more accurately when it comes to combat, for one.
The second item, though, is where the real problems with balance lie. New players are forced into a severely uphill grind so that their characters can do what they want them to do, while veterans get split into the "haves" and the "have-nots" by the amount of time they can invest into grinding their characters further, rendering the combat mechanics almost unusable for RP. Fixing this isn't a matter of specialization, either -- trying to bind a character's specialty to some innate facet of a character leads to players spawning numerous alts in order to cover all the roles they wish to fill, which creates an opportunity cost as now they find themselves "caught out" playing the wrong character for the situation, or unable to participate in a RP as they don't have the ability to manage things like disposable characters due to their slots already being occupied by specialist alts.
The solution I see, though, is to take something of an opposite tack to redhound -- instead of focusing on the red herring of specialization-via-stats-and-skills in a vertical system, make it so that veterans don't progress vertically alone, but
laterally as well -- instead of forcing everyone to perfect their swordsmanship
and become demonic, flashing brutes in order to use the mechanics in combat in a reasonable way, make it so that veteran characters are more versatile, not necessarily better at one thing. That way, new players or low-timers can take a specialization-driven approach in order to achieve a set goal quickly, while veterans who need a training sink can have their characters diversify their capabilities.
"But wait", you may say, "isn't that a recipe for 'perfect at everything' Mary-Sues everywhere?" It may sound as such at first, but there's a solution to that --
equipment. Make it so that you can't carry every glyph under the Azure Crystal on you at the same time. Make it so that we have to make intelligent tradeoffs about what weapons our characters carry into battle. Make it so that there's more than one way to skin an Ulber, so to speak -- giving room for different characters to favor different solutions to the same mechanical problem.
Last but not least -- the entire stats system is based on a rather faulty distributional premise, atop having far too much influence on character performance. Just because you're stronger than everyone else doesn't automatically make you a super-warrior, nor does stubbornness alone turn you into a mighty mage. Letting statistics primarily (and subtly
influence how quickly a character can learn things is a much more sensible approach, as it allows the skill system to "even out" the balance differences between races and character creation backgrounds, instead of accentuating it.
