This post was born as a response to animoanbu’s post, however it is so long that I prefer to make it a separate post as it has enough content.
I have to clarify that these controls will be used in the offensive posture of the character, which is the one we currently have. In the future we can activate this attack pose with some key, so this is my idea of the controls that we will have in this pose.
In order to properly understand my idea, we have to assume an offensive stay in which we focus on the enemy. Some examples would be The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or For Honor.
My vision of the controls for melee combat.
First of all, some abbreviations for the buttons we will use.
- Left Click: LC
- Right Click: RC
- Middle Click: MC
- W A S D Buttons: W, A, S or D
Once we have these abbreviations we can move on to the controls in the player’s offensive stance.
Attacking controls ( IN OFFENSIVE POSITION = ARMS UP! )
- Fast Attack ( Less range, faster ) = LC
This attack will tilt the left shoulder in a fast way and you will be able to hit faster at short range. - Heavy Attack ( Longer range, slower ) = RC
This attack would tilt the right shoulder with the fist to increase its range and make sense of the range acquired. - Push ( Will push the enemy back ) = MC
- Block ( Decrease the physical damage by a set percentage ) = Hold LC + RC
The shoulders would stick to the body and the forearms would be brought together protecting the face. - Dodge ( Will move the character’s body to one side ) = W, A, S or D
Depending on which button you press, you will dodge to that direction. This will allow you to move forward, backward or sideways with a quick dash that will use up your stamina.
With these controls we have a great repertoire of combos that we could execute in combat, and with a great animation, it could be a very good combat for fist melee.
Some details
Here I will detail how some attacks would react against others.
- If a fast or heavy hit collide at the same time, both will take 25% of the damage and knock them back.
- If one hits before the other, it will cancel their movement.
- When blocking a heavy or light hit, their damage will be reduced by a certain percentage and both enemies will be knocked back. (This is to avoid spamming light hits).
- Every move you execute in the offensive stance will take away stamina, unless you level up your fighting level and lose a little less.
- Between each move there would be a different delay to avoid the spam of hits, dodges, pushes and blocks. However, this delay would be higher for heavy fighters, and lower for light fighters.
Combat with bladed weapons
With the previous controls, we can have a very similar gameplay.
They will vary depending on the weapon:
- LC: Diagonal Strike
- RC: Horizontal strike
- MC: Push
- Hold LC+RC: Block
- (Dodge will work the same)
Details
- Logically, blocking would no longer use the arms, but would use the weapon itself to block damage, which would cause damage to the durability of the weapon. This will ultimately cause a weapon in poor condition to do less damage and its blocks to retain less damage.
That’s all, I hope everyone likes it, if you have any criticism, suggestion or opinion, I’d love to hear it 
! This idea was born from Animoanbu’s post.