Let's formulate the problems that currently exist in the combat system:
1) Fighting is uncomfortable. In all senses. Haven in my opinion has the WORST targeted combat.
2)The current balance is heavily tied to MOVEMENT SPEED. Any means of transportation (ships, sleds, skis) spoil the balance and cause unnecessary frustration.
3) For a game with 15 years of development history, the game has very little variety of weapons and moves. The meta cuts the list down to everyone wearing the same thing and pressing the same buttons.
Now that we have problems in front of our eyes, let's try to come up with solutions. Let's start with the quality of life changes:
Feel thirsty skill. The vanilla client must have customizable auto-drinking.
Rampage skill. Auto aggression of everyone on the screen. When learning a rage, a toggle skill is added to the character. While the skill is on, the character automatically initiates combat with all players appearing on the screen (who are not members of the same group/village (should be customizable)).
Next target skill. Selects the nearest target. Subsequent presses scroll targets within a radius of half the screen.
Next target (range) skill. Analogue of Next target, but works on targets that are from half the screen away to the loading radius. Will be used by archers.
Switch target skill. Switches target to closest to your mouse cursor.
FOF highlight. Game should have option to draw circles around players (according to colour in kins) AND PARTY MEMBERS.
Well, we have several new skills, there will be more. So game requires some UI changes:
Skill bar made by people, not aliens from the tau ceti constellation. 10 skillbars, 1-4(5,6) skill bars (switchable) on screen. Drag and drop to put skills on bar, shift drag/or lock button to prevent the consequences of missclicks, fully bindible. Your combat and non combat bar should be the same bar, current system is responsible for hundreds of murdered newcomers.
New party HUD. Right now we have very limited information (their hats, thanks jorb) about party members. Something minimalistic like WoW's Grid will be great to have, because we don't need that much information. Health (toggle percentage/numbers), status (alive, ko, dead), direction, distance and special effects (MR, starving idk).
Feel free to add something else.
Let's move to point number two. In this shitpost, I will not invent a bicycle, a new (stolen from other games) mechanics. The current system has the right to live, it is enough to remove from it the very reasons for unnecessary frustration. This suggests some solutions:
http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=72523
It is also worth coming up about something with what is said in the second paragraph here:
http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=71916&p=901875#p901875
In the current (based on the same speed of movement of characters) system, there is no place for third-party means of acceleration in battle.
Is there a solution? I'm not entirely sure, but you can only find out by starting to solve the problem (instead of ignoring it). I propose to start by adding inertia and turning speed to all vehicles. And also remove speed difference on ships, as Trollex suggested. After these changes are put on a test live server, we can see if this was enough to reduce the desire of testers players to use ships and sleds to cheese in battle. Skis should be removed completely, or made so that at the initiation of combat, the character is forcibly jumped out of them.
And finally the last part. Warning! If before that I described serious problems, and offered a solution, then here will be my fantasies. Developers are free to do what they want, but nothing stops me from fantasizing about new content, right? If you don't give a shit about what I saw in my dream, don't read any further, don't open this spoiler I double dare you.