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

[Jinko]

Well why did they "correct" the doomspike "bug" (i-e being able to move freely while in animation)?

Well we were all scratching out heads on that.

As you say though about separating body animations, the only purpose fort hat IMO would be to allow players to run whilst performing specific moves.

Animation lock is present in action based combat. Ever play a fighting game or the like? The concept is as northernsky points out:

A fighting games mechanics are heavily reliant on animation locks though, MMO's aren't, as I said show me an example of a modern MMO that has game breaking animation locks.

WoW is 8 years old and doesn't have such a thing.