I think that the 1.2 advanced combat premises are pretty good to be completely discarded. We could make the new basic like the old advanced, with some alterations.
I guess that the main problem with the old advanced system it's that it was bad paced, and actually was very easy to master. A good thing in order to give the impression of an " accelerated " combat would be making an animation of a fast paced combat while the combo commands aren't done by the player (just some animation of the characters involved, trading punchs and kicks very fast, something like the pre-combo animation of 1.2). Once entering the melee mode, the player would do a small initial damage (only a symbolic amount), and then the combo time gauge would start automatically, inciting the player to input his combo moves before the gauge expires (it should be a very short time). Finally, once the combo move was inputed, it would turn into a slow motion attack, and the defender would have to guess, by looking at the animation, which arrow (or mouse button combinations) he should press. The " slow motion move " should be slow enough to give the player time to react, and fast enough to give some challenge to his reflexes (yeah, fast enough to newbies have trouble with the pace). Instead of relying totally on a " random direction " animation, you could make some moves pull faster than others in order to confuse the defender reflexes (randomly, or by using some kind of special command for each, according to the player will, like holding Shift Left for a faster punch, spending ki, stamina, both, or none, in order to do it).
One more. In DBZ (and many other anime series) we see the characters fighting while doing some small " teleports " around the field. Would it be possible to implement something like this on ESF? You know, in the middle of advanced combat one could decide to teleport out of the range of the enemy, and the enemy could try to follow him up, or if the defender decided not to follow, he would be vulnerable to a " teleport back " and a surprise melee attack (or maybe a suprise beam, like Goku did on Cell), all without leaving the " melee mode ". If this is easy to pull, we could actually make the ones involved in melee combat vulnerable to beams without turning then into potentially easy targets. Eventually, these " melee teleports " would become mandatory in most fights, and additionally they would give the chance for the defender to break the attacker combo and perhaps revert the situation completely.
And the last suggestion. I guess it has been mentioned before, but, let me try anyway. Wouldn't be a good thing giving an advantage for melee combat on the ground (I mean, without flying)? It would have some interesting effects on the behaviour of players. If staying on ground turned out to be a really good advantage in some cases, melee combat could be pulled of more easily by noobs (since people would tend to be a little less scattered through all the map flying space), and at the same time people would be careful to not do it all the time, since it would be easier to hit then with ki attacks (also, it would give some more usefulness to beams, without giving then more explosion radius). Of course, this requires a good way to differentiate flying players from not flying ones (I mean, in the engine point of view), as is very easy to enter flying mode by mistake.
Hope I helped with something :yes: