Slow-Paced Combat And Depth (MMORPGs, JRPGs, etc.)

[droqen]

u/ahnarip's "Looking For Game With Slow-Paced Combat And Depth" on r/MMORPG

Recently I've been looking through a number of games I never tried and I remembered like a decade ago I played some Asian MMO where it literally took 1-5 minutes of pretty idle combat to kill one normal mob, you lost exp on death and just a single level of like 150 levels could easily take a full day. I loved that.

Pretty sure that particular game is dead by now, but it would be nice if I could find some new game that meets some of the following points:

Combat

• you don't need to pay a lot of attention, the less inputs per minute the better (full auto-combat or no combat at all is fine too, if there's more depth to the game in other parts)
• preferably no keyboard input needed during normal grinds
• it can be more demanding during special boss or pvp fights, just not the majority of time

General Gameplay

• grind-heavy
• either a very, very long way to max level (at the very least like 300+ hrs) or some good endgame content with a lot of character progression
• depth to the game (I like to theory craft strategies while playing, always thinking what the most optimal next steps are, looking through menus and stats, looking at a wiki - I don't want to feel rushed or like I am not playing efficient while doing so)
• rare loot even from non-raid like content
• rare items and collectibles
• no real money only advantages or at least purchasable with in-game currency as well
• don't care too much about dungeon / raid content right now, but I wouldn't mind of course
• no resource management system / base upgrade as the main focus

Story, Setting and Other Things

• story not important to me (skippable cut scenes and quest texts are nice)
• any graphics are fine, it could be 3d with newest graphics, 2d or fully text-based
• it's available for PC (and not just some bad mobile port)
• free demo up to a certain level or f2p
• if you know a fitting single player RPG or Adventure that takes more than a week to complete I might be interested too (obviously doesn't need to be f2p)

Some games that I recently played are WoW, OSRS and a number of rather short incremental games. While OSRS is quite close to something I would like to play right now, it just requires too many clicks when you're trying to be efficient.

The last few days I did enjoy playing Megami Quest 2 a lot, but at some point there's just very little content left after you started to fully min-max it. I also tried some idle games, but all of them are missing a lot of depth to them.

I'm looking forward to any suggestions, keep in mind not all of those points need to be met as long as the game offers a lot of content and depth (grinding for weeks as content is fine for me, if it's rewarding) and has a rather passive combat system.

edit: Thanks for all the suggestions so far, I am currently looking into classic FFXI a bit more. My biggest complaint from my first impression are the weird console-style menus, but it gives me a lot of nostalgia. Trying my Xbox1 controller instead of mouse/keyboard next, first minutes felt a lot better already. Not sure yet if I'll stick to it FFXI though. Still open to more recommendations.

Quick summary of suggested games in no particular order:

OSRS
Dofus
Wakfu
Ragnarok Online
FFXI
FFXIV
Tibia
Pantheon
Kenshi
Eve
GW1
Maplestoy
TwelveSky 2
WoW Classic