Random combat ideas: Active blocking, handedness toggle, combo slot

This is drawing on an idea I had before, but I think there are several issues in combat that make the idea still relevant,

1. Its hard to use all 10 number keys when your hands are both on WASD and the mouse trying to control movement. If you put some rescue glyphs like Healing Touch or Light on 0, that much is easy. But if you put glyphs that you want to re-actively use during battle its hard, and 7-9 are actually harder than 0. It becomes even harder to manage if you're using a rotating deck or want to combine rotating and locked cards, because you have to visually track the glyphs, something which is easier with a smaller set of slots.

2. Blocking in the game feels kind of abstract and it would be fun to have some type of active blocking now that we have active (free) attacks.

For me, the keys 1-4 are the easiest to reach from WASD, and 5 and 6 are close but a little more difficult. So the idea is to link a handedness or attack/defense toggle with a side of your bar, so you can switch what keys the numbers 1-5 apply to, or possibly a larger range.



So, the simplest key to use would probably be TAB. As you can see in the illustration above, the 1-5 numbers switch to the second side of the bar.

Now, obviously, because of this type of design, you don't need to limit the player to 10 slots anymore, and it could theoretically be extended to 12 slots, with 1-6 on either side. You would have to set up both sides of your bar of course separately, although, possibly, rotating cards could pop up on both sides if set up as free slots. Though setting the sides up separately for rotating cards would be useful.

As for active blocking, if you had a shield in your hand, it would hold your shield up, giving you some defenses. If you had an offhand sword, or no other item besides your first sword, it might switch you to a guard stance with your sword (like with parrying in in Witcher 3).

The main downside of this would be that you would have less choices to use to create combos. One might mitigate that just by increasing the number of slots so you have 1-6. Another solution to that problem is simply let your combos retain through pressing TAB. For example, you press R then 2 on the first set, then TAB, then 2 on the second set.

Yet another solution, take it or leave it -- but its worth bringing up -- would be to create an extra slot in which combos are created.



You would press R and 2 and the first card would go to the combo slot. Then press TAB and R and 2 again and the second card would combine with it. This would be a solution to making combos that would make people who don't like rotating cards happy, I suppose. You'd of course need a way to clear the combo slot, which could be R and 0. Pressing 0 would use the combo.

Another idea would be to give players some control over how your hotbar is split. So in the examples above its 5-5, but you could theoretically move the split to 6-4 or 7-3, or the other way and make it 4-6 and 3-7. The keys for 6-4, for example, would then be on one side 1-6 and 1-4 on the other side.