I like how my character moves his whole body into his attacks. I don't know how i feel about sacrificing that. In Wow the characters arms move independent from their legs, that's why the game looks like a bunch of gorillas swinging swords around.

I think issues like this continue to highlight why games that copy wow can't succeed without poor graphics to hide all the visual sacrifices they make for frantic game play.

I think they just need to speed up the animations a little, maybe let the character exit the animations a bit earlier, and cut down on all the linking and make individual monsters stronger cause clearly the current system benefits AOE characters more than anything. I think characters inputting actions should suffer a bit of a movement delay, attacks should have more depth and planning to them then just spamming them whenever tp is available, not to mention stronger attacks with longer animations now have a bit more to them, or planning to spam low cost TP attacks like skull sunder no longer become viable.

FFXI was a lot more refined then WoW I think thats why it maintained its consistent niche fan base, I think players so quick to ignore and sacrifice animations encourage games to look nerdy and close out their hardcore fan base. Wow players didn't leave wow and go to other MMO's they're moving away from the frantic unorganized gameplay onto the streamlined content rich console games that have been coming out during the past 3 years where developers have really gained a strong mastery of the platforms they're developing on.