How about you freely move as people do now in Warband. But once you begin a swing or block, you are rooted into place. W A S D during these attacks and blocks then become individual footsteps, or you hold them down to shift your weight to brace a block or lean into an attack. Agility focused players will get buffs to use rapid or longer stride footsteps, and attacking effectively in succession will require readjusting your feet with WASD between swings, creating combos that allow you to press ground, fall back, pivot around, etc, but requiring coordination between the WASD controls of how you plant or move your feet with your mouse controlling your arms. Strength focused players may prefer to hold a direction to brace themselves and have bonuses to charging swings by holding LMB like in Warband but more tuned into the engine to give feedback through animations not meters or random guessing. So you hold LMB and position your feet with a couple taps then holding down your dominant foot's direction and release slow but much more powerful swings.
This works the same on defense, where your WASD taps or holds, which change your stance subtly but on the fly, influence how strong your blocks are from certain directions or types of attack. Lots of tapping RMB and WASD on defense is more about deflecting your opponents swings while closing the distance and getting a deadly first strike in. High STR people get buffs to holding RMB and a WASD direction to absorb the impact of attacks with ease and keep space between their opponent.
If you mess up your footwork and move in some sloppy imbalanced way, your attacks are much weaker and your blocks are more likely to cause you stun, stagger, or completely fail and get broken through. So just spamming LMB for hiltslashes or RMB downblocks to be invincible to an army of pikemen doesn't work, matching or countering footwork is just as important as direction.
Calculate something like "Force" of attacks instead of speed bonus, where you can be stationary but just adjust your dominant foot and shift your weight by mashing or releasing W or WA to be pivoting while releasing LMB to extend your stab are perfect hits, maybe even S your wieght back then tap W twice for a 1-2 step then release LMB for a real good pike thrust or something that impacts in a unique way. So you can just hold LMB and brace by holding S or something to be a cav deterrent, but require some coordination to deliver the most powerful attacks.
Would also work with my concept of "balance" which would be like an invisible stamina bar. If someone unleashes a combo of sword slashes on you that you can't block right, with them stepping up inside you and doing real solid hit after hit, your balance depletes real fast and your attacks and blocks are less effective, maybe even knock down chance, but if they stop pressing the assault, your balance shoots right back up as you catch your breath. Super charged swings can drop your balance criticlaly low for a second or two, depending on stance and crap, so people are extra vulnerable for a second after swinging a massive support weapon charged up for full damage.
Blunt weapons can drain balance the fastest to simulate concussive force disorienting your foe. Pierce attacks like spears can reliably hit with the most force, making them simple to use for new players and ideal group fighting weapons, with little reliance on fancy WASD stance adjustment to use effectively. Swords should be generally weak, but fast and very well suited for combo attacking, which is all dependent on your WASD taps and holds tocreate a real sense of pressure on your foe, so even a technically perfect warband blocker might struggle to adjust their WASD/mouse foot pivoting and crap and their blocks get less and less effective until they are overwhelmed. Two good swordsmen should have really exciting, fast, and deadly duels, adjusting their W A S D tap after every swing or block to make their next swing hit sooner or at a more unpredictable angle. Once someone starts winning the duel their opponents balance will quickly deplete without a new tactic and get owned.
Basically make the current WASD directional system more limited but meaningful during actual combat. Combine fast taps, long holds, and timing of release of W A S D , LMB, and RMB to make combat more violent and unpredictable, open to experimentation and full of depth. Maybe add space bar or some shit as a hop and something as a duck for real advanced play, where you don't move much different but are designed mostly to avoid attacks by dodging up or down in a smooth way.
