My personal take on combat scenes and what to write:

Combat should flow differently than other situations. Combat is an action scene. Action scenes demand short sentences; semicolons, maybe; they demand the pauses be plentiful but brief and they demand that you understand how a paragraph needs to flow. They demand that you match scenery with pacing, that you focus on what's important, that you get to the point because action happens [i]fast.[/i] It's not leisurely. There's no time to know all the details of the dude that's clubbing you. You just know where he is, what he's got, and most of your attention is on that walloping stick in his hands. Unnecessary detail kills an action scene.

Okay. So, with all that said: description can be an incredible boon in other scenes. You CAN be over descriptive - I know I saw a really bad case of it in someone's short story recently - and you can definitely focus on too many details at once. However, done right, a little fluff goes a long way, and a lot of fluff doesn't take so much to chow down on.

But I hate action scenes that don't have that speed to 'em. If it doesn't feel like an action scene, if it doesn't flow like an action scene, then chances are I'm not into it. There can be lulls in the action, especially for dramatic reasons, but they'd better damned well make sense.