if you want to pause your game, while playing, consider playing the game in offline mode. while you are connected to a server instance, i am pretty sure pausing the game is a technical solution / decision on their end. keep in mind that offline and online characters cannot be shared.

the conversations are exactly that - like a bridge between cinematics / chapters. feel free to stop walking, while a conversation is coming up. if there are monsters around you, you can still just moving with your mouse or pressing the space bar for active dodges. else you could manipulate your audio settings so the conversations are more in focus, while the sound fx are less.

i agree that this feels a bit weird. all these kind of "choose one from five" events are pretty bad, while in combat. they should adress that.

each waypoint is less then have an hour away from the next one. so yeah. try to make sure, to think of these waypoints like checkpoints.

not sure what you are meaning, but you can press tabulator (like the button on the left side of your Q button), that will open up a map on whatever floor you are, showing the space in a radius.

Thanks for the response.
I didn't know about playing offline. I looked at it and the character I've been playing won't transfer so I would have to restart from scratch.
Unfortunately the map you speak of only shows the immediate area you're in. Other similar games have a map of the entire area you've covered and adds sections only once you've travelled them. It's easier to keep track of where you've been that way and keeps some suspence in what's up ahead.
As for the waypoints I do find they are a lot more than a 1/2 hour apart in some cases. If you look at the world map there are brown dots labelled for certain places. In my opinion there should be a teleport pad at these locations. I just beat a large Boss, which took a long time to get to. I tried playing to the next teleport station but I ran out of time. It would have made sense to have the teleport pad right after the Boss but there was nothing. Only the brown dot indicating I'd started a new level.