I'm merely thinking how will all this stances and directions work in a 50v05 fuckfest, so many random things and fails the game won't be fun for me. Warbands simplicity worked perfecty in these scenatios.
I think the wording just seems a bit more confusing. There appears to be less complexity here than warband, complexity being how many things you can do at once. At any given point you can only attack in 3 directions while in a stance, further if you aren't even doing anything and are in the same stance you will passively block it by doing nothing as long as you mirror their stance. So really at most all you have to do is pick from 4 directions and be in that stance, just like warband, except you should have more time to recognize the stance hopefully.
When you want to try to do the 'good' block you still only have 3 directions to pick from asa the swing is coming in. So objectively speaking it should be easier to block in melee than warband. It probably depends on how quickly you can go from stance to stance though.
I was just thinking, I wonder if you can do something like keep an upper-left attack chambered constantly so you can't tell if i'm in left or upper stance, so can't effectively block it. Not really sure how the diagonals map out in the block system though.
I just think when they talk about the system it sounds scarier than it appears since 'stance' is usually something in a game that implies wildly different attacks, where here it actually is limiting what you can do more than enabling more options.