About Guildwars, I got tired pretty soon, and only got to level 7 or 8 (after the entire academy (or whatever the first place was called)) you were level 5 IIRC. The thing is, a walk that would take half a minute without monsters took five minutes because of monsters. Fighting one monster took half a minute. And at this stage of the game you had pretty much eight skills, and those where the ones you used. You couldn't do much in the ways of combos with those limited skills...
Zephyrus idea acually sounds kind of interesting, since it sounds fun and not too difficult to pull of pretty well. It allso sounds realistic, which is something most RPG's fail on when it comes to fighting...
My feeling about battles in most RPG's is that there's way too many of them, and they're boring/simplistic ie fights in most RPG's are a real pain. The best fighting system I've seen in a game (I like) so far is Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, which felt pretty FPS to me, but at least you felt active during those fights, even if it was only rightclick to activate celerity/potence/whatever and then go nuts on leftclicking.
My feeling about an active combatsystem isn't that it's the combatsystem that is the problem, it's the ammount of fights. Because fights still shouldn't be the focus of the game, and therefore not exaggregated (think KotOR).
Übereil
