Examples:
Combat similar to dying light, parry by attacking a weapon, throw weapons ( smoothly) and the OPTION of allowing the game to be more punishing and cause damage to be locational, more realistic and what not. So an arrow to the chest makes you pull a boromir and you get slowed down and bleed out and eventually die a dramatic death. Or lol an arrow to the knee makes your knee unusable and damaged until it's fixed by a .. Magic healer because you can really just walk that off
A strength and weight as well as hight system.
Strength causes the avatar to become more muscular and capable of greater force and carrying ability and can cause a character to be able to interact with the environment according to their strength ( forcing open doors, picking up rocks boulders and other characters or even horses and monsters) and lets players wield a 2h sword with one hand. Weight of character determines the force needed to stagger or topple the character. Strength and weight determine the size of weapon the character can wield ( ridiculously big swords like clouds buster sword or swing an opponent around) . Hight could determine the point at which a character could both weigh and be strong enough but yet not be a tank. Taller characters can put on more muscle and not be overly bulky and yet still weigh more.
Heavy armour could have a certain force threshold needed to puncture it. So unless you have the required strength you can't run your sword through a fully armoured target. Heavy armour has a chance to deflect arrows and swords as they just glance off. The material of heavy armour would also effect this as well as weather or not the armour is enchanted to deflect all attacks or raise the armours threshold for direct force.
Armours should have weak points and some should have straps which could be cut in order to remove pieces of armour so a rouge style character could sneak of up a heavy armour character and cut off his shoulder straps causing the briastplate to fall to the ground damaged and rendered unusable while leaving the core of the character open to damage.
Magic could be expanded to influence the strength of a character and their weight without influencing their physical appearance. A Mage might look slender and fast but they can toss a boulder at you ( would look funny but would work like the armour rating buff spells from skyrim)
Hand to hand combat should also be employed with grapples and the ability to break limbs or even hit pressure points. If a character has the hand to hand skill and strength they could grab a heavy armoured enemy and crush their helmet to their head knocking them out or killing them.
Perhaps there could be a new school of magic that draws from the style of Kung fu that focuses around directing your chi to points of the body to make its stronger. So this combined with hand to hand could allow a player to finger jab a heavily armoured target and rip out their heart.