Machinist leg animations... cemented to the ground?

So, I finally unlocked machinist today I was super excited. I normally play gun toting classes if they are available (Like Guild Wars 2's engineer) and so I felt I would be right at home with the machinist.

One thing I noticed, however, that is really bugging me for some reason are the animations. His upper body is VERY animated, with lots of waggling of arms and general excited motion, but his lower body is almost like it belongs to someone else; utterly and completely stiff. No matter how excited his upper body gets, or what sort of recoil he seems to show, his legs are in the same idle state they are in if he is reading a book in town.

Having come from Guild Wars 2, where my engineer uses his legs to brace against the recoil of his gun in a very natural looking and fluid movement, this is seriously messing with me lol. Is it some kind of bug with the animations, or is this just how animations work for the machinist?

Thanks!

Machinists have legs made of steel. Seriously though? It's just poor animation work. The animations look fine, but anyone who knows how guns work, especially the high-powered rifles we have in Eorzea, knows the legs help absorb the recoil.

It's not a bug at all, it's just REALLY dumb, lazy animations! I think some jobs have a split between upper and lower body animations for most attacks. (Specifically i know bard does) This is so that when moving and attacking, which bard and mch do most often, it can look as natural as possible in most cases.

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Originally Posted by MiniPrinny

Machinists have legs made of steel. Seriously though? It's just poor animation work. The animations look fine, but anyone who knows how guns work, especially the high-powered rifles we have in Eorzea, knows the legs help absorb the recoil.

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You are also firing that high powered rifle with only 1 hand. There are whole videos of people getting hurt from not holding a gun correctly, but our characters pull it off.

Roukiz has has it right though, it's all about movement.

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Originally Posted by Gokuhan

You are also firing that high powered rifle with only 1 hand.

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We should try and make it more impressive by using a shotgun like Blackthorne's protagonist does.

This is the result of people complaining when ARR was in beta. Archer/Bard had some great animations for its abilities, but when you moved around your character just slid while doing the animations. Despite every melee job also having this scenario, people complained explicitly about the Archer ones and the changes that resulted are what we have now, where the upper body does one animation while the lower body moves around normally.

Thus when they made animations for MCH they followed the same pattern.

I heard people saying the 1.0 animations had more "weight" to them. Like archers actually recoiling on their bows for skills like heavy shot and such.

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Originally Posted by Larkspur

I heard people saying the 1.0 animations had more "weight" to them. Like archers actually recoiling on their bows for skills like heavy shot and such.

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This also affected your movement as well, so you had to be careful in how you attacked or you'd be eating that AOE.

After reading the title of the thread I had a mental image of lalafell MCH getting knocked on their butts every time they shoot. I would very much like that to be a thing...

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Originally Posted by Larkspur

I heard people saying the 1.0 animations had more "weight" to them. Like archers actually recoiling on their bows for skills like heavy shot and such.

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That was because it stopped your movement during the skill animation. To move away you had to wait until the animation of the last skill ended.

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Originally Posted by Felis

That was because it stopped your movement during the skill animation. To move away you had to wait until the animation of the last skill ended.

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Honestly I wouldn't mind this. Sure things would be clunky but I'd get used to it.

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Originally Posted by Felis

That was because it stopped your movement during the skill animation. To move away you had to wait until the animation of the last skill ended.

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There was no reason they couldn't have kept the weight without restricting movement. We already ice-skate during most our attack animations. They removed the weight to allow for quicker actions rather than the animation lock.

Battle was also much more slow paced and strategic rather than the frantic button mashing fest we have. That's just my opinion of course.

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Originally Posted by Larkspur

Honestly I wouldn't mind this. Sure things would be clunky but I'd get used to it.

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so long you don't activate a skill 1-2 seconds before an AoE appear under your feet.

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Originally Posted by Larkspur

Honestly I wouldn't mind this. Sure things would be clunky but I'd get used to it.

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You'd die. This animation position lock of Jump is one of the reason DRGs still have a lolgoon rep. Imagine now if every move ogcd and gcd had that position lock.

Heck, we still have big animation locks for LV 3 limit breaks. Nothing beats eating several AOEs you didn't know was coming for you after you revived everyone.

Thanks for the responses, all! Now that I know it's intended, the best I can do is try to work with it.

That being the case, I could use some help from the community! What's the smallest gun a machinist can use? Physically small; less rifle more pistol kind of thing? Even if a pistol isn't possible, the closest I can get the better.

The game's design and pacing isn't meant for having animation locks on everything. It's slower paced than something like WoW, but fast paced enough that having animation locks on skills can be detrimental to both your dps and survivability, either requiring fights/telegraphed to be slowed down (which essentially defeats the concept of a telegraph to begin with), dps checks to be lowered overall, or have mobility skills that act as animation cancels.

It's a crappy video with me playing like garbage, old, and recording software that was lagging the crap out of me, ultimately crashing, but here lol

It does show off some of the animation stuff though.


https://youtu.be/Fe0uYRqlBuY

Animations are in general, very poor in this game. If you move while attack, legs stay as if you don't move. One of the things I want for this game is a rework on animations, they are too simple.

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Originally Posted by Imoen

It's a crappy video with me playing like garbage, old, and recording software that was lagging the crap out of me, ultimately crashing, but here lol

It does show off some of the animation stuff though.


https://youtu.be/Fe0uYRqlBuY

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Wow! Those animations look really good in comparison to how they are now. That's pretty awesome to watch.

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Originally Posted by Imoen

It's a crappy video with me playing like garbage, old, and recording software that was lagging the crap out of me, ultimately crashing, but here lol

It does show off some of the animation stuff though.


https://youtu.be/Fe0uYRqlBuY

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Gosh, I miss the old Bloodletter..

And Doomspike...

And Chaos Thrust...

And just about everything except the magic.

Machinist has some of the few animations that look fluid and normal while in motion.
More classes need this.

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Originally Posted by Tolmos

Thanks for the responses, all! Now that I know it's intended, the best I can do is try to work with it.

That being the case, I could use some help from the community! What's the smallest gun a machinist can use? Physically small; less rifle more pistol kind of thing? Even if a pistol isn't possible, the closest I can get the better.

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Well, off the top of my head I know there is a revolver you can get for PVP medals (though since it is a pvp weapon definitely glamour only in PVE generally.) and the Esoteric weapon is closer to a sawed off double barrel than a rifle

The alternative is sliding around like you're in Final Fantasy : On Ice™, like what happens with all melee jobs. NIN is the only one that looks less obnoxious since most of their weaponskills involve spinning around like a spinning top.

And not to mention all those ugly animation clipping, which is even more apparent in Job like Machinist.

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Originally Posted by Roukiz

It's not a bug at all, it's just REALLY dumb, lazy animations! I think some jobs have a split between upper and lower body animations for most attacks. (Specifically i know bard does) This is so that when moving and attacking, which bard and mch do most often, it can look as natural as possible in most cases.

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And come heavensward bards and machinists are bow/gun mages with cast times on most of their skills....

So they lose the movement, and are now left with the same animations..?
:(

can't remember the name fully but "Mithrite carbine" (I think a lv52 craftable gun) is the smallest 1 I have seen so far, just u hold it no were near the trigger hence why I don't use it (Assetics & some form of believe-ablity in even a fantasy game is a must) so I just use the Eso gun as it reminds me of a sawed-off shotgun (or relic 170-180 if I bothered with more then 1 relis)... to bad MCH's "casting" involves so much handwaving just to shot something usless its a oGCD move, what are we sidshow magicians its a gun not a wand u'r gona get Carpoltunnel doing that (or break u'r wrist)

Please, we are warriors of light. We can use a gun with one hand and no recoil at all...

>:3

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Originally Posted by l---------------l

Please, we are warriors of light. We can use a gun with one hand and no recoil at all...

>:3

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So all the NPCs we fight that use guns one handed must be warriors of light as well.

They're magitek guns, maybe there is no recoil.

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Originally Posted by Cakekizyy

They're magitek guns, maybe there is no recoil.

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You can't hand wave basic physics though that the realm of Eorzea tends to follow for the most part. Magic while a mystical abillity using a fuel known to residents as Aether still creates a reaction. They are using a gun that functions the same way regardless of it's power source.

If the gun wasn't shooting bullets there is a different argument but considering that for all intents and purposes we are to assume machinist weapons actually fire a physical projectile from it's barrel (Even if magically charged) would have to follow the basic law of.

"Every actions has a equal and opposite reaction"

such skills as lead shot being a physical item and blank shot (Having pushback) support this theory and debunk that machinist are using pew pew laser guns.

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/...ew-pew-pew.jpg

/end serious explanation to unserious response.

Recoilless guns do exist.

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Originally Posted by Cakekizyy

Recoilless guns do exist.

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you are aware of what those actually are right? and how they "Prevent" recoil.

To save the sake of arguing semantics there are guns with very little recoil but that's obviously not the case with the machinist firearms.

All the MCH animations look terrible. Even the way the gun is sheathed and the way the character runs with it unsheathed look awful

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Originally Posted by Cakekizyy

They're magitek guns, maybe there is no recoil.

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Originally I had thought the same thing: "Ok, they are magic guns so maybe it's just shooting aether and there is no recoil".

The problem I have is not with the idea of a gun with no recoil, it is actually with a particular skill that you cannot remove from your rotation: Slug Shot. Ever seen the animation for that one? The character's upper body gets launched backwards in a display of explosive recoil from the gun, arms flailing to keep balance, while the lower body from the waist down remains 100% unaffected and continues to bobble up and down in the idle dance that it does. It creates a pretty extreme "uncanny valley" situation where they move in an very inhuman fashion.

The rest of the skills look pretty OK, especially skills where the character uses both hands to brace the gun. That 1 skill, however, is the most immersion breaking thing I've seen in this game to date.

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Originally Posted by Xlantaa

Animations are in general, very poor in this game. If you move while attack, legs stay as if you don't move. One of the things I want for this game is a rework on animations, they are too simple.

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The complain of the OP is that the legs move normally while moving around during a skill animation (bards and machinists), regardless what the over part of the body do.

The only solution I see to make the character doing the skill animation correctly without sliding is to force the character not to move while in animation (like in 1.x), and that will also create complains (like in 1.x).

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Originally Posted by Felis

The complain of the OP is that the legs move normally while moving around during a skill animation (bards and machinists), regardless what the over part of the body do.

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Actually, I'm not really concerned with the way the body looks moving; it's standing STILL that is the problem.

I got spoiled a bit by Guild Wars 2. The Engineer class is a gun user, and the character uses their legs to brace against the recoil when standing still. But if you start running, it cancels that leg animation and you run like normal without ice skating around. It creates this amazing fluid and natural/realistic animation for the class that looks great whether you stand still, run, or go from standing to running.

More than anything, if the developers cannot find a way to solve the leg problem, I just wish the animation team would revisit skills like Slug Shot so that there is not this hugely obvious recoil for the upper body that does not affect the lower body.

Machinists and Bards having almost immobile leg movements for 90% of their skills has always bugged me. Bard at least will spin around and do some stuff for some skills (Windbiter, Empryeal Arrow), but ngl I'd rather have FFXIV: On Ice for them like all melees have than the awkward immobile lower half we have now. The melee iceskating hasn't ever really bothered me much anyway.

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Originally Posted by madolyn

All the MCH animations look terrible. Even the way the gun is sheathed and the way the character runs with it unsheathed look awful

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I can't disagree with this. The worst offender to me for mch is the left arm placement during the second shot, so awkward.

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Originally Posted by Kaoru_Nagisa

Machinists and Bards having almost immobile leg movements for 90% of their skills has always bugged me. Bard at least will spin around and do some stuff for some skills (Windbiter, Empryeal Arrow), but ngl I'd rather have FFXIV: On Ice for them like all melees have than the awkward immobile lower half we have now. The melee iceskating hasn't ever really bothered me much anyway.

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Idk, I would find "FFXIV On Ice" much more noticable than the current lower half separate animations myself when I play.
I guess partially because im not staring at the animations the whole time.
On Ice would bug me more than this, which doesnt bug me much at all

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Originally Posted by Tolmos

But if you start running, it cancels that leg animation and you run like normal without ice skating around.

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At which point the upper body and lower body animations no longer always sync up, and you (at least the last time I played) end up getting mismatches in animations, or (for melee) "powerful" swings that don't look at all effective because those kinds of swings use the torque of the shoulder, hips, and feet turning properly to generate their power, and you're just seeing the upper body part of the movement instead (it's like watching someone just kind of swing a bat back and forth versus a proper swing at the plate).

To my eyes, that looks as silly as sliding around, so I can't agree that it's amazing. It is fluid looking, but it had to compromise to make it work...which is exactly what the sliding is - a compromise for full bodied (except for Bard and Machinist, sadly) animations plus mobility.