I created this mod as a way of solving what I see as the biggest flaw of minecraft's combat system - trading hits with enemies.

Inspired by soulslike games such as Elden Ring, I was working on a modpack that focused on bossfights by adding a variety of bossfight mods of varying quality. With most bossfight mods, I noticed that the combat felt lame because the tendency to simply trade hits with bosses made the fight 100% reliant on your gear. When fighting players or smaller mobs in vanilla this might not be an issue because of knockback, but when fighting giant bosses it doesn't make sense to be able to smack them up into the air for the traditional reach advantage. So, my solution was a stagger system - immediately after you hit an enemy, they shouldn't be able to hit you back. No mod I could find did this in a way that applied to every new modded enemy.

As this was my first attempt creating my own minecraft mod, rather than figuring out how to disable enemy attacks I settled for simpy applying the resistance effect to the player after dealing damage to an enemy. When you hit an enemy, you are given resistance 255 for 1 second. This should give you enough time to back up out of the enemy's hit range. There is a 2 second cooldown on this to pevent you from being permanently invulnerable as long as you're hitting them. In order to get the "stagger" (or resistance effect) multiple times in a row, you'll have to back up and wait a second, creating a much more interesting rhythm for fights.

Using the resistance effect rather than actually disabling attacks may have been lazy and somewhat abusable, but it plays well as far as I've tested it. Also, you could explain it as instead of the enemy being completely unable to attack after being hit, its attacks are simply weaker. It really doesn't matter how you look at it, since there is no way to add attack animations for every modded enemy in the modpack. It really has more to do with the rhythm of the fight than realism or combat logic.

I find that this mod is best paired with the epic fight mod, which adds awesome animations and also seems to make your reach depend on the visual reach of the sword. This simultaneously looks awesome and increases the difficulty a little bit (since that generally means you have less reach than the bosses). This difficulty increase may be necessary if you're an experienced gamer, as by itself this mod will probably make the minecraft combat too easy. I would also recommend adding the combat roll mod and the "Block, Parry, Dodge" mod for even more souls mechanics.

If anyone ever uses this other than me, enjoy!