I love beautiful animations.. but I think they're too slow for this game

[Tibian]

Animations in battle.

I'd like to see these animations sped up like 1 light year. I suggest making them so fast they seem unnatural, then scaling it back one notch. It's really lame how your character gets animation locked in tough battles, and it doesn't make any sense.

I do think melee animations in general need to be sped up slightly, I don't know if I'd want them as fast as you say though. I'll discuss casters in a bit, because they need a ton of help in several areas regarding animations.

Buffing yourself

The unique spell effects accompanying each buff are truly incredible. If I could just sit outside the town activating these buff effects just for the eye candy it'd be great. The problem is, in the middle of a fight there's no time to enjoy them. Especially because if you use another buff right away, it clips off the animation of the active buff, so you don't get to see it anyway. How about we speed these up as well?

I actually think the buffing animations are some of the most lack luster. Protect, shell (when it was still in the game), were awfully dull and boring. I would much rather have protect be like the opening cinematic "ultima bubble" where you activate it and it spreads radially from your character and then buffs those in range. As it stands now though, buffing animations are very very anti-climactic and quite dull. So I do disagree with you here.

I suggest the dev team open up WoW and click some buffs. When you press a button, your buff instantly activates, but it leaves a lingering animation somewhere on the screen (usually over the characters' heads). This is a much better thing to have happen. You get to see the whole animation.

I would love this. WoW's buffing mechanics are fantastic, so is being able to cancel them very quickly and efficiently. Furthermore, the only thing SE really needs to do in regards to animations is to allow more than one animation to overlap another. If you notice, you can only be doing one exclusive animation; when another starts, the previous one is cut off.

How about we have buffs that instant-cast with no animation lock, but with a spell effect that persists and doesn't get overwritten by another spell effect? I'm asking for the spell effects to mix in version 2.0. Like the black smoke of Dark Seal mixed with a flaming axe of Bloodbath, for example. Instead of one cutting the other one off. And no animation lock, leaving you free to move or act. So you can cast 5 buffs subject to some kind of global cooldown, then use your move.

Animation locking is one of the major fixes of 2.0. If it isn't fixed, the game won't succeed. It is a very very serious and game breaking issue that SE cannot ignore. They have publicly stated they are removing it. Until 2.0 you just have to make do unfortunately.

Some of these buffs take so long to play out, that it's really hard to use 3 or 4 before you use a spell because the 20 second timers wear off by the time you chain your buffs. Like if you're a BLM, and you want to use Sanguine Rite, Dark Seal, Excruciate, Necrogenesis, and Parsimony on a spell, guess what? You don't have time to play through that many buff animations before your combo timer expires. I really don't like that.

Part of that is also with global cooldown and the response times of the server/client interactions. The animations do clip currently, so while you can chain them, this is more of an issue with global cooldown rather than the animations. Lots of improvement still here for animations though.

Crafting

The crafting animations are all incredible, but again, watching so many really slows down the process. The first few levels it's pretty awesome, but before you get to 50 most people have turned on Netflix or the TV. It's just way too long. How about letting us instantly issue commands without having to wait on the animation? Maybe the animations can be sped up like 5x or something and it would still look good? Try it out. I really don't like waiting that long.

I am in the camp that thinks the crafting mechanics and "mini-game" needs to be completely thrown out and redone. The problem is that crafting classes are considered actual "classes" and not just supporting professions like many other MMOs. The animations and the pause time during animations is atrocious and insufferable. A better solution to the current pause time is to simply play a random selection of animations while keeping the color wheel independent of the animations. A one second global cooldown could be implemented so when you select "Standard" it will only take one second until you press "standard" again. Not only does this speed up the synth process, but it makes crafting much more active and intuitive, rather than having that god awful pause time while the animations occur.

Gathering, etc. I could go on but I think you get the idea. Going to a museum is a great experience but playing an action game is totally different. These animations were poorly thought through when they were implemented in the game. It really needs to change for version 2.0 or this game really doesn't stand a chance at great success.

I have a similar mindset when discussing gathering as with crafting. The "mini-games" (hot and cold) are atrocious and need to be thrown out. Delink the animations with the actual gathering process, implement a one second GDC on selecting options... and thus you have a temporary fix until 2.0. I find HARVESTING animations are acceptable since you don't have to play a terrible mini-game, but the actual process of cutting a tree is one of the worst things I have seen in any MMO.

Returning to casters and their animations now.

Freeze, Flare, and Benediction are easily the best graphics casters have. They have impact, they feel important when used, and most importantly -- people can easily see what spell has been used and can react to it appropriately.

The biggest issue plaguing caster animations is very simple: all spells are arbitrary waves and blobs of color. The reason why flare/freeze/benediction look impressive is because they have a unique shape and impact to the spell. Regular spells like fire, blizzard, thunder don't really have appropriate animations. Not every spell needs to be "SUPER IMPACTFUL" on the scale of flare/blizzard/benediction, but they need a significant buff in appearance.

The second biggest issue is that all spells appear on the designated target. There are no spell trails and certainly no indication of who cast what spell. These spell trails really do matter and give important positioning information to the party and allow party members to see what spell is being cast and by whom, and for what reason.

Finally, the last significant hurdle SE needs to tackle in regards to caster animations is the actual casting animation itself. Currently every race brings their own wand/hand up to their face and then throws it out (mind you there is no actual "throwing" of a spell because there are no spell trails, lololololol.) Regardless, only having this weird hand extend animation for every race and every single type of spell is really dull and boring. Black mages could use a casting animation that involves their current weapon (like slamming it down into the ground, or thrusting the weapon out and having the spell coming out of the weapon with a trail). White mages could be more self involved and not rely on their weapon -- putting their hands together and then casting them out to heal.