You should take a look at "Die by the Sword". Although the game has some really nasty jump&run-scenes later, it has a really cool idea in it.If you play the game the hard way, you control your sword arm with the mouse. If I remember correctly, just swinging hits usual, clicking left uses strong swings, which are faster and stronger, but have a small cooldown after reaching their final point and left means blocking.
With that system you had to learn to fight properly, otherwise you were royally doomed.

I think, this way of playing stuff should be followed as well. I even thought of going totally mad ways in RPG. The general idea was to throw away all "abilities" and rather define a maximum number of combos the player can do with a weapon or with magic and thus creating bigger damage or bigger spells.
Using the mouse-system from above, you could define 8 areas in front of the player and the player could be a Warrior X, where the player can cross something like 3 areas for all 3 stages gained (equal to: he can strike once more for each 3 levels.). Stronger swipes take more levels of course.
Magic whould be similar by defining several effects as swipes, like "swiping from upper left to lower right makes a biiig ball" and "swiping from the middle to upper left, from there to upper middle and from there to center again turns something into fire" and creating a similar limitation like the swings above whould create some pretty cool magic system. You actually have to _learn_ how to cast spells.

Even a warmup and a cooldown is implemented immediatly and without a counter to watch. Your warrior is panting a bit and gathering strength to get the next swipe, which could be animated very well. Same for the magician, the warmup is the time used to "draw" the magic shape and the cooldown is the actual casting animation followed by a little resting phase of the magician. :)
So, who needs static abilities? And who needs cooldown-counters? :)

If you take this a step further, you could even create a realistic health-system. (runaway!). You could define hitpoints for parts of the body of the character and if (for example) your right arm was chopped to often, it is chopped of. If enough cummulated damage is done on all parts of the body, the user dies. You could show this using several wounds on the certain part, which could identify the health of the character rather nice. (something like: 3 bleeding wounds on the chest and losing a left arm means run! RUN!). Ok, the healing of this might be a bit irreal, but hey. We are using magic :o)

Overall, I can say I second your ideas, although I whould take some of them even further than you did. :)

Nice. :)

I really liked your ideas of "active defense" and "active offense". I'll be looking forward to reading the rest of the chapters.

Because i come from the fps player crowd, i really like mmos with fps style combat. This is when you don't select a target and hit attack, but aim and shoot. In a game like this the combat is not between two objects (player and mob), but it's a free for all. To make scoring possible, one can give out xp based on each bullet hit and some common xp to everyone who hit a mob during a fight. To make it less twitch based, the player and weapon stats could limit the precision and the speed of aiming and the power of a hit and the max distance. Mob ai has to be similar to an fps bot but that imho makes the game better. However adding twitch as a requirement will mean that a good fps player will be able to take on bigger enemies than itself and a standard mmo player will be fried fast if he just stands in one spot no matter how good are hes stats. This can be good or bad depending on the style of the game.

Spells can be used the same way as weapons, by selecting them from a quickslot, aiming and firing. Each weapon has a rate of fire and a limited set of ammo per clip. Each spell can have a limited rate of fire and a limited set of power per player.

Imho, most mmos play like a card game, where you select enemies and play various cards collected while virtually standing still on the battlefield. An mmo, where both the players and the mobs have the ability to dodge, hide and generally run around while fighting gives a better, although twitch based challange to the game, while the stat based aiming, hit power and other rules enforce the requirement for progression. This system also results in the ability to play against multiple enemies without area of effect weapon by just constantly moving the crosshair between them. Higher mobility, like the ability to jump over objects or ememies or climb walls results in more intense combat situations, compared to the height map based curved world surface that is used in most mmos.

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If you take this a step further, you could even create a realistic health-system. (runaway!). You could define hitpoints for parts of the body of the character and if (for example) your right arm was chopped to often, it is chopped of. If enough cummulated damage is done on all parts of the body, the user dies. You could show this using several wounds on the certain part, which could identify the health of the character rather nice. (something like: 3 bleeding wounds on the chest and losing a left arm means run! RUN!). Ok, the healing of this might be a bit irreal, but hey. We are using magic :o)

The game i mentioned before actually implements this. Some players and mobs prefer to shot to the legs first, so the player can't run away fast enough if he decides to retreat. Aiming for headshots decreases the health of the targets faster and decreases their aiming precision, not to mention it's easier to find unarmoured spots on the head. The game had a target area for the legs, the chest, the arms and the head. Using the environment as cover was possible. (until you found out that unlike concrete walls, the wooden barrels could be shot through or completly destroyed by bullets) This requires an fps style bullet tracing system, but results in a more realistic game. A wounded leg results in slower movements, a wounded arm results in the player starting to hold the gun visibly less steadily. A direct headshot can even make the player temorarly blind from the shock. Checking the biomonitor on the hud usually explained what's wrong. For example a pulse of 150 usually meant the player will soon collapse on the floor from overload.