I'd sure hope that fighting games, which actually do use use direction blocking (low, mid, high, grab), would take skill, given that they're widely acclaimed as the genre with the highest skill requirement and ceiling. But fighting games are also doing the directional blocking in an environment where you have 7 frames to react or you potentially lose half your health, and there's over twenty characters all with over potentially sixty different moves in their moveset you need to know how to prep for.

Freeform directional blocking and swinging have fairly weak skill requirements and limited room for growth. They're both easily mastered within a couple of days of game release as long as you don't have a horrid reaction time. Mordhau made that pretty obvious, given how quickly the complaints in the game centered around chamber/feint spamming being the only method of hurting someone, and even they were blocked on reaction at higher levels. The 'skill' in freeform combat is entirely based around how cheesy the feint mechanic is, or, in Chiv's case, how much you can cripple your own character to hit the enemy from a weird angle. Even in the rare instance that the freeform game allows you to make your attacks hit earlier or later depending on whether the opponent's on the edge of the screen or in the middle, it makes no difference once people are blocking on reaction.

Skill comes from understanding of footsies, frame data, knowing and linking combos, abusing recovery frames, timing, matchups, understanding of your moveset versus your opponent's moveset, and knowing what move's going to pop up when you input it. In CoE's case, basically all of these will be covered, albeit the last is more about knowing at what point in your combo is the overhead attack, heavy attack, or whatever special attack (no idea if super armour exists, for example), as well as knowing how to get to that and when it's safe to do it. Conversely, freeform combat involves almost none of them. Almost every freeform game comes down to reactionary blocking until one side gets bored and does something dumb, and even using movement ends up being placebo.

I wasn't very clear in my previous post. My post was mostly in relation to how attacks are initiated / blocked.

By skill based I really meant 'player input'

What I ment to write was.

My opinion is that player input should be the bigger factor in if an attack hits or not as opposed to what stats a character has.

directional blocking is one way of increasing player input, although it dosn't have to be the way.

if you increase the importance of stats you usually decrease the value of player input.

A heavy influence? Absolutely. Always the biggest influence? I'm not totally sold on that idea. If you're a low strength kypiq and you try and punch a brudvir wearing plate all that should happen is you break your hand and damage yourself. It's an extreme example, but stats and gear do need to matter or there is no point pursuing them. Personally I would like somewhere near a 50/50 split.

Player input works just fine in the form of what leads up to the attack being thrown. Your distancing, timing, abuse of enemy's recovery frames, and knowing what attack you're throwing/what stance you're in and what result it'll have are all forms of player input and a skill requirement. Of all possible input factors, directional input in third person fighters is the least indicative of skill or decision making once you get past the absolute entry skill level; it becomes purely about blocking on reaction via muscle memory, and the direction you choose to attack is largely irrelevant as you're generally attacking during the period when an opponent can't block anyway (recovery frames, stuns, guaranteed damage combos, or cheesy attacks). Just about the only game with directional attacking that makes a difference is For Honor, and that's because the directions make you perform entirely different techniques, something this game is going to be doing as well in a similar way via the Absolver-esque stance system. You can attack directionally, but it's based more on the stance you're in and the predefined attack that will come out, rather than mouse input.

For character skill vs player skill, they've talked about how your attacks are faster, slower, or less consistent the lower your character is in skill. Higher skilled characters are more likely to have more flexible styles or more options in combat (still pending). Your stats obviously have an impact as well. But at the end of the day, the most important factor in combat in this game is confirmed to be player skill; there's just no way around that. You just can't remove player skill from a competitive game, or even aim for 50/50, because the people who understand the game best will still end up on top. Character skill augments what you can do as a player and how you can get to the result you want, but player skill is almost always the deciding factor. Obviously, extreme examples like a Kypiq punching a Brudvir (or even worse, Yoru) are heavily one-sided regardless.

As for things like the impact of gear, SbS has talked about this in the Discord. Although obvious subject to change, the main purpose of armour in this game isn't to add defense, although it does add a bit - but not enough to break the 3 - 5 hits per fight expected average. The main purpose of armor is to reduce wounds in a fight at the expense of a bit more stamina reduction per action. Armour is an investment into multiple fights in this game, as an injury in this game can be incredibly debilitating and, in some cases, almost singlehandedly be what decides your next fight. More armour = less injuries, slightly higher defense, higher stamina drain, potentially detrimental based on climate, environment, or your character's condition. Certain helmets can impair your vision, but given the whole headshots = generally oneshots, who knows how much helmets matter.

I'm specifically talking about if an attack hits or not. not anything else.

So im not sure why you use an example relating to damage

If you swing in 3d space and there is a collision, then that should count as a 'hit'

Im not saying 'the consquences of being hit should not be mitagated by stats'. I agree with you there. They should. to an extent.

And i'm not saying stats shouldn't be important. They should. I just disagree with systems that use them as the defining aspect of combat.

There should be different consquesces for being hit depending the situation. For instance depending on the protective gear a character wears they should take more or less damage. Or if a character is weaker etc.

Combat doesnt matter more than other systems. At least, there is combat, while many other systems dont even exist at all (or we never heard of anything about them). There is nothing wrong with making combat interesting... but CoE needs a huge variety of abilities, which all need to be interesting. Therefore, I clearly prefer having everything good/okay over combat being great and everything else being bad. And usually... it takes much more effort to get from good/okay to great than to create several good systems.

It is my hope in general that combat itself remains entirely physical in terms of impact on the locomotion system, injuries, ability to move, swing a sword, etc. It has also been mentioned that you wont be able to pass through people and I really hope that also applies to weapons in combat.

Where if you swing at the same time as your opponent the weapons will actually connect with each other and depending on the incoming directions it will deflect, parry, or block the strikes. If they can manage to do that combat will be much more interesting.

But also that all attacks have a charge compenent to them to have the ability to cause crits or crippling blows to someone along with knocking people off guard to help change the flow and dynamics of speed vs power when fighting. But not just something that you can charge and hold but if you dont use it when it is charged it just comes out as a normal attack.

If they can keep those things well balanced with slashing, crushing, and piercing damage inherant to the weapons and weapon types it will have a good feel based on the weights in asthetics and performance combined with player skills and the combat skills, disciplines, styles, stances, etc.

I don't mind directional combat, but I hope it won't be like Kingdom Come Deliverance. In KCD you 'decide the direction' with your mouse movement, but I was never able to get the hang of it. Half the time it felt like the direction it went for wasn't in sync with the movement of my mouse. It felt extremely unnatural and I never really felt like I was in control.

If they go for directional combat, I hope they'll allow me to select a swing-direction by hitting certain keys. Num-pad would be ideal, though people would need to be able to configure it because not everybody has a num-pad on they keyboard.

Out of all the suggestions, the one they'd be most likely to add is a charging mechanic, where you can make your animation take longer to deal more damage on an attack, but even that is circumvented by the stance system, where if you want to have a heavier fighting style you should pick a heavier fighting style, and there's a good chance your alternate attacks and combo finishers will be your heavies.

They aren't going to completely change and redefine their combat system and the skills related to the combat system just because some people like the realistic weapon control approach. It's completely antithetical to almost everything they've said about combat until now. As it is, we're getting Absolver-esque (something people might actually want to look up to see how directional attacks are likely to work, based on the actual attack you're throwing from your moveset) stances with a mix of third-person fighting game gameplay.