Animation Lock: Why don't you like it?

[KaiTBF]

You don't need to *slide* around. In another game they animated upper/lower body separately. so you could run around, and upper body would rotate, and attack; lower body would run. If you stand still and attack it's the normal animation.

This would be far worse in my opinion, footwork is one of the most important parts of the martial arts and I would cringe every time I saw someone use a skill while running if they did that. Then you have to consider how they would make a skill like dragon kick work where you're in the air for a good portion of the skill. You'd either have to lock them down, make them do the slidey floaty thing, or not make animations where your feet leave the ground. I'd much rather have the animation lock, or even the slide if it meant I got to have badass skills like dragon kick.

Not to mention, considering the future of PvP content, anilock in every skill is simply beyond comprehension. Considering a cat-and-mice-situation between two players, simply either one using a SINGLE skill - heck, ANY SKILL - would have most likely resulted to either getting mauled, or retreating succesfully.

I think too many people here just have bad memories of animation lock in Ifrit, as a gameplay mechanic (and it is a gameplay mechanic, don't even try to argue that crap) animation lock can work very well. Especially in pvp. The issue with it in pvp for ffxiv woud be that it's not an action/fighting game so we couldn't rely on a hitstun effect to keep them in place while we used a skill. Even still though, animation lock could be added and worked around in pvp if they gave classes the right skills, in pvp the focus would be on locking down the enemy with a short hard cc effect at the right time then bursting and retreating before they could make any significant counter attack. Pvp would be about timing cc and winning trades. It's not that animation lock can't work in pvp or games where mobility is important (It's worked in countless games before, and in games where mobility was far more important and mistimed skills were punished much harder) they just chose to go a different route.

I don't hate the lack of animation lock, but skills made from this point onwards are likely to look rather lackluster.