Quote Originally Posted by Rentahamster View Post
This is an issue that many players find annoying.

The animation lock that players experience does a lot to inhibit smooth and dynamic gameplay. It hurts the design objectives of making active positioning an important part of battle.

Having your player get stuck in place does nothing to positively promote the areas of strategy, adaptive positioning, and fluidity.
it did help strategy, and adaptive positioning,

strategy is about ascessing the cost and benefit of actions, and coming up with a plan that will make the best use of them,

youre supposed to decide when you cast a spell, i get X damage or effect, but i have to position myself so that i wont get hit for X seconds.

With attacks, you are commiting to the attack, and losing some of your manueverability. Its the same thing in real life, the strength of attacks is coming mostly from momentum from your body, it is difficult to get a powerful attack while you are retreating. you also are more likely to take heavy damage while in the middle of an attack, because it leaves you open. It was an interesting mechanic, somewhat muddled by the ability to cue skills, (which most people did by accident) and slow server response times.

But in an auto attack world it would go from strategic choices to just you will be rooted, which is a bad idea. I wonder if Weaponskills will root you, probably only auto attack will be completely free, similar to ffxi. Casting i think people want too much, many games root you completely for casting, this one only stops you on initial cast, and on execution, without having to use any skills, i think that a big step up.