Making stances actual combat styles

[Xenoraptor]

A lot of people have, since their introduction, mentioned that stance combos are at best inconvenient and unnecessary, and at worst unwieldy and counterproductive.

Part of this is because they generally involve some sort of button hold that seems rather counterintutive (holding backwards, anyone?) or a pause that becomes near-impossible to judge correctly once weapon speed has increased sufficiently.

So my thought would be to make the 'combos' consistent in style and appropriate to the weapon type.

As an example single swords or sword & shields would all get a 'defensive' combo (hold block button) that grants them partial benefits of blocking and parrying capacity even while attacking, but restrict the weapon to more short-range attacks, with lower attack speed.

By comparison, dual swords or scythes would get a more offensively oriented combo (hold forward) that would grant increased mobility, with a number of long, sweeping attacks that constantly move the wielder forwards.

Other ideas would be: a stationary combo (hold crouch) that provides sweeping arcs or coverage for when you need to hold a point; a heavy target/charge combo (start with a charge attack) that provides added damage multipliers with the trade-off of slow, heavy attacks that mainly focus immediately in front of you; a standard combo without any requisite button; possibly and aerial or upwards combo involving the jump button somehow. More unique and complex stances could be added for specific weapon types, but these ones should be pretty standard across all weapons though some are better suited to others.

Ideally, you could smoothly move from type to type as the combat situation changes and every stance card would be made up of a selection of different 'types' of combo that are all pretty much the same to pull off between weapon types and make contextual sense, and it allows differentiation between stances beyond 'this one is just better', and also allows differentiation of similar weapon categories.