The main issue I find with the combat is it feels non-"complete". As in the interaction of someone attacking and someone defending does not feel like its planned out to go in a certain way other than attack, block/parry, counter, block and repeat until someone makes a mistake or gets tired. In the games current form, someone turtling could just block you until someones weapon breaks, once durability actually goes down to real levels.
Melee vs melee is very defensive lopsided, 360 block is actually good if there was a counter to blocking, since it circumvents high ping people(or difference between two people is more accurate I guess) from getting on your back even though on your end they are clearly in front of you. If you were infact behind them, don't swing the same way they last saw you swing and you would be getting a perfectly good hit. 90% of the time, you are clearly not behind them on anything but your end, the enemy is staring at you like you are a special kid and hence why they keep matching the block direction.
People with high ping, be it on purpose or just because of distance to the servers is a reality we are all even in MO2 are going to have to live with and as long as its always considered throughout balancing and adding features there are ways to make it less of an issue, like 360 blocking to prevent high ping difference from just being a straight up easy win as long as you play aggressive.
Which brings me to the main gripe I have with how it works right now.
Blocking(is how I will reference to it, even though its parrying you want to achieve) has no cooldown, there is no way of getting past a block other than some "clever" looking straight up and changing your swings around with weapons that have similar overhead and side swings and hoping they don't catch on before you swing at them. blocking/parrying needs to be handled more like how its handled in Mordhau and in turn the way swings work will have to change, too. My proposed change to speed up (or alter it anyway) the flow of combat would then be:
If you block in a direction, there should be a cooldown before you can block again. This cooldown needs to be (generally) longer than the time it takes to get a sort of swing out. Then one of the tricks to get past blocks will be to start a swing from a direction and try to get the defender to block/parry prematurely, which lets you switch direction and get a hit in. In turn I think the charge timer should be reduced, but the swing speed should be made slower. This will make blocking more reactionary than it is now as right now its very anticipatory and the defender gets way too much time to block in the right direction with how little risk hitting an early block carries. I've also noticed there is nothing preventing you from blocking when you have a swing charged at any point during the attack other than a brief moment when the swing is being delivered. The only thing making blocking even remotely harder is when you get parried and the counter coming at you will be faster, making it just slightly harder. But if you are not giving him any attacks to parry it is incredibly easy to block.
Counter playing when you missed a block would be entirely possible too, you'd find yourself missing your block, either by matching the right direction but pulling it off before he released the swing or getting the direction wrong, if you could "morph" the block into a charge and squeeze of at least a partly charged attack or a non charged attack you could end up trying to get a trade in if you can risk taking the hit in return. Another option is to run or in other ways get enough distance between you and your opponent or miss so he can not capitalize on the mistake and either get the correct block in or go on the offensive.
Things that would override the cooldown would be things like, successfully blocking or parrying an attack. This way if you are outnumbered you'd not get entirely screwed by the mechanic if they are swinging from different directions, but you are still committing with your blocks and if they are clever they can still wreck you by making it harder for you to keep a check on where both their attacks are coming from(like getting on each side) and feinting attacks or outright baiting swings that don't hit. The meta here is very long.
No its not perfect, im sure it might have actually been mentioned before in this thread or somewhere else. But this is one way to go about it that would add more depth to combat. the additions to shield and other additions and changes to other systems is clearly going to have an impact on a system like this and will have to see a lot of reiteration.
Other people got any ideas?