[Draenin]

My two cents:

Personally, I don't think it's such a bright idea. No offense. Personally, I think it could slow down the leveling process and make things even slower, which might discourage some from continuing to play. What you have to remember is that all of this takes time; even more time than it all does now. And using a party to kill something off would be nearly impossible for lower level people. Instead of working with a completely new battle system, you should focus on making the enemies more responsive and a bit quicker as far as speed goes. Any enemy is easy to kill because all of them move at crawling speeds, and half of them aren't even worth the experience after a while, which is why people like Atheal don't have an extremely high mental level. Phys is the one of the hardest things to level up right now, and it just needs a little boost to make it better.

I personally don't like the idea of re-using old enemy graphics, because it tends to really take away from the variety of enemies out there. You should try to make the ones that were originally going into the game rather than just settling for less and just recoloring or modifying pre-existing enemies. That is what you have a gfx team for, after all.

The newer enemies should replace the old ones that you're able to fight in maps, and those enemies should be tweaked to have higher exp than standard non-map enemies, but lower exp than the new ones in the maps. Flying enemies have been wanted for a long time, and I think that would really spice things up a bit. Instead of being able to be hit physically, they'd have to be hit with magic, (Which also needs a tremendous amount of work. Perhaps I'll touch on that subject later.) which would give more of a use to the magic system. GK's leveling process is slow, but it would be made even slower if there was a turn-based system added. It's not that the real-time combat is boring, (because it isn't) it's just that it becomes mind-numbing when you have slow-witted enemies that are worth next to nothing and that are pitifully predictable.

I hope you pay attention to my suggestion. It'd be better to go one step forward than two steps back.