What Visual Effects Would You Change?

[butchersblock]

To be fair, that visual element is not likely to change without dynamic animations. Anything that hits anything else directly is going to make a lack of aim or ragdoll effect that much more noticeable. That's why greatsword animations can get away with a ton that barehanded animations cannot.

The auditory feedback could be relatively easily improved upon, though.

You can somewhat make the argument that NIN is close to barehanded, but it still delivers with visual and auditory feedback. You feel like you're actually hitting something and not flailing your arms in the air with the exact same terrible animation for half of your GCDs. I've always wanted to like Monk but its lack of visuals and audio made it very difficult for me to get into, despite really liking the idea of fast GCDs and overall theme of Monk across games.

[Shurrikhan]

You can somewhat make the argument that NIN is close to barehanded, but it still delivers with visual and auditory feedback.

NIN uses slicing attacks, though. The whole idea of slicing THROUGH an enemy is that they do not present much resistance (else you couldn't slash THROUGH them). The animation for hitting someone with slashing attacks, fundamentally, has to be very similar to having not struck anything (or, only air). That's not the case for barehanded strikes, which require far more feedback to feel realistic.