While I'm enjoying the atmosphere of the game solving mysteries, I'm really not enjoying the actual gameplay - especially the combat.  I was wondering what combat options people are enjoying so maybe I'll invest more time in checking those out next time.

More or less agree.

I do like the game world, the story, and the dialogue, but the combat system is not doing it for me. I tried a melee character, a ranged firearm character and a magic wielding character. Most I liked would be the blade wielder, with whom I went blade all the way (both survival and damage). He got pretty effective, chopping down groups of mobs without breaking much sweat. I still wouldn't call it "fun combat", a bit on the boring side, but in effect you have some PBAOE so you can run into a group and let loose without bothering to target anything (and keep aggro of the group, btw). 

I'l just say this: I've found myself actually wishing we could create non-combat characters and play this more like a cooperative open world adventure game. :) 

Still, intriguing game, with some very nice touches I haven't seen in other MMOs - and some surprisingly solid execution here and there as well.

I felt swords were the most effective. Did not try all, though.

Swords and blood magic - a winning combo.

Nice damage and some casting goodness too  I had the first tier of both fully unlocked and by the time I logged out I had it worked out so anything hitting me also inadvertently healed me. Kept one heal/shield on active and used the heck out of my sword's pbaoe, backed it up with Military Precision (I think that's what it's called) and some nice Blood Magic damage spells (Cardiac Arrest FTW!).

I did start out playing pistols, hated it. Switched to shotgun + chaos, liked it better, and then just rereolled for blood'n'blades which is much more fun and fluid... and has slightly better animations. 

I wanted to like pistols, but that one attack where you swung from the pistol from the right to the front was lame.  Reminded me of the movie Wanted... like we were trying to curve bullets or something.  I don't know, I just didn't like it.

Shotguns were cool.  But I was disappointed not having the ability that you were able to use in the Tokyo scene.  The assault rifle just didn't feel assault rifle-ish enough for me.  The aoe attack, while effective wasn't doing it for me either.

I loved the hammer!  Blood Magic was good as well.  It was fun using Infected on a group of zombies.  The only downside was the cast times.  I couldn't see Blood Magic being my primary, which was fists.  I also would have liked more healing power as well.  Although I'm sure you could raise that between sp / ap investments and the right talismans.

I went Chaos Magic heavy just about all the way except for the two 7 AP skills. I decided to go with Elementalist as my second choice (was okay) after playing with pistols a bit. I found Choas Magic (Fist) sort of satisfying. Doing some decent damage once you learned how to get your powers to proc- the right way.

I found the pistols lacking the "Umph" I needed to enjoy them. In fact many of the skills / abilities left me with that feeling. I don't really want to but the one thing I can draw and compare for how combat feels would be something like DDO. The animations themsevles weren't the best and with the lack of feeling any real weight to combat was a slight turn off.

When I compare the basic attack from GW2 to the basic Pistol attack in TSW it shows more so for me. That emptiness behind actually attacking something. I know there's no force feedback or anything like that; something consoles have a benifit from, but you can still relate a bit more to the player when he/she's actually making contact with mobs and such.

Maybe I didn't have enough CC' skills but I didnt see how my range attacks really mattered when just about everything tried to /faceroll you up close. I did die here and there, but mainly from combat feeling so lose and clunky. I never felt truly in control of my character or felt that keeping distance matter outside of watching for some monster abilities.

This is only combat discussion as far as the abilities so I'll stop here.

On the side note though; I found the atmosphere and setting appealing. Monster design was fairly nice outside of the derp-zombies. They need to work on the A.I though. Zombies are dumb as shit but they aren't going to watch me surf jump right into the crowd of them only to sprint up to the location I jumped from just so they can pursue me back down to their original location. I found this quite humerous in a smdh kinda way..

I really liked the combat worked just as well as any other themepark/tab target MMORPG out there but with their own little twist on things. Sure nothing knew but just like GW2 it worked fine.

I went for pistols as it suited the knid of character I wanted to make :)