Combat design here means the engineering side of it: what a hit actually is, when a character can be hit, and how an attack ends up landing where the player expected it to land.
Most of these posts come out of shipped action games. Melee hitboxes are socket-to-socket capsules with rank and group IDs, so a sweetspot becomes data instead of a script. Dodge invulnerability is an anim notify window on the montage, not a flag inside the ability. Attack tracking is Motion Warping bending the root motion of the animation toward the target the ability picked.
There are also two breakdowns of other people's work, the takedown pipeline in Shadow of War and the prototyping loop behind Horizon Zero Dawn, because reading how a shipped team solved something is usually faster than inventing it twice.
If you want these systems as one connected thing instead of separate posts, the Quod Combat Framework page collects them as a framework built on top of GAS, and the Gameplay Ability System hub covers the layer underneath.
