The aim of this idea is to make creepkilling fun, not something that you do on autopilot, only occasionally repairing gear, emptying backpack etc.
The principle
1) New creeps would survive several rounds of combat and yield a lot of experience. Keep the amount of stamina used similar to today, but reduce the amount of kills by an order of magnitude (so, where we kill 300 creeps today to make a level, killing 30 would suffice). Of course, item drop rate and gold gain would have to be adjusted as well.
2) Apply ideas of PvP arena to PvC. Players could use various combat move setups to be performed in the combat, creeps would do the same. Some of the combat moves could be purchased in shops, some would be available only when a certain buff is activated on the player. (These buffs could replace the sucking defensive buffs that multiply base points and therefore nobody uses them).
How to integrate this idea with the current gear system without causing a revolution?
From creeps level 600 above (to give developers time for this), the combat system would change to work like this:
* Each player would have his $level hitpoints (+whatever boni from guild and gear).
* Monster's damage vs. player's armor would be determined to calculate hit severity rather than exact number of HPs, according to a table like this:
| Arm/Dmg | Hit type | HP reduction | | > 95% | Glancing | 5% of $level | | > 70% | Light | 10% of $level | | > 40% | Full | 20% of $level | | > 5% | Piercing | 30% of $level | | < 5% | Critical | 60% of $level |
So, a well-armored player could afford to get hit many times, while a defense-based setup would, like today, rely on avoiding the hits because otherwise the player would be only able to withstand 1 or 2 hits (as any HP from gear and guild would increase his HP capacity over 100% ($level).)
Of course, monster enhancements would be able to shift the actual percentages...
On the monster side, one big adjustment would be necessary - compared to "normal" monsters, the new ones would have approximately 50% of their hitpoints added to armor. (That means that the new creeps would be still compatible with the damage-heavy setups that the current combat system bred.) (And their hitpoints would work similar to player hitpoints, being something that is to be cut down in relative chunks, not by absolute dmg/armor difference).
Also, ratio between attack and defense of both participants could have some effect on the percentages....
To make the combat interesting, the new creeps would ALSO use combat moves. There could be various possibilities in here:
a) each monster would have a choice of whole combat setups to randomly choose from (some monsters would have all setups similar, some monsters would have extremely different setups)
b) each monster would have a choice of combat moves to randomly use in each combat
c) each monster would have on-the-fly-composed setup, where it would be able with various probability of success to use it's own combat moves to counter the combat moves used by the player. (This would open room for a few new buffs as well, that could negate this ability or negate effects of particular buffs).
Anyway, the desired outcome of this change would be that combats against monsters would:
a) be interesting to watch
b) be non-trivial to do well
c) not affect any new players who would have 599 levels of the old system
d) would make much more room for differentiation between players, because the combat length could vary according to quality of the setup from as short as 5-7 turns to 20 turns.
e) would offer room for new weapon enhancements (i.e. +1 Dodge move when equipped) or (+5% damage on pierce/critical) etc...
f) would remain compatible with majority of current buffs.
g) would be a nice Halloween or Christmas present (depending on whether they'd manage to do it from level 600 or 700).
It's a very rough idea, of course, I mostly wrote from the hip :).

