Noone ever really gives an explicit description of what it was, how it worked - can you fill us in?
It worked like this at its core:
1. Every weapon had a swing speed just like normal MMOS, if you just walked up to a mob and hit attack with a 2 hander, you would hit it, wait 1.5 or so seconds to hit it again with an autoattack. Most of your "abilities" were the WoW "on next hit" type ability, so that for example, your "mace stun" ability would convert your next autoattack into a stun. There were exceptions to this of course, with attacks that reset your swing timer or went off independently of your swing timer, but in general your attacks were centered around your swing timer. Your swing time was visible as basically a reverse casting bar each attack.
2. When you pressed an ability that was "on next hit" it was queued up and displayed to anyone that targeted you. In PvP, you could, therefore, see the opposing players swing timer and see what attack they had queued up. You could queue an attack up at any time prior to your swing timer, so you could, for example, wait until the last minute and queue the stun, or queue the stun earlier to try to bait some response, then swap it out with another action before your swing timer went off. It was not in the game before they removed the system, but I was told by folks making it that some classes, like a rogue would be able to disguish their next attack or feign another attack.
3. The last part of the component was that mobs showed their next attack in advance too. So, instead of "block" being a %chance, you would be fighting something, and it would hit you with like auto, auto, then it would Q up a giant strike. If you used a block skill on the small attack, the big attack would wreck you, so you would have to eat the little attacks and hit the little attack, and then queue up your block so that it ate the hard hitting one. I was the tank for our little group and I remember fighting in the first dungeon....I think it was called Khegor's End....and there was a bugged Mob that'ss big attack would perma root you until you logged out. We called it the fail mob, because if I failed to block correctly, it was basically a restart of the dungeon.
Anyway, you can probably extrapolate how it went from that basic system. You would see what "cards" the other mob was playing and by knowing the type of mob, you would know his "deck" generally. This might not sound too innovative with all of the action combat stuff and mob "tells" etc, but it was very novel for its time and could still work if they don't want to go the action combat route. Anyway, it was a good system and I am a pretty harsh critic of combat systems generally.
