I would like to talk about Heavy Attack Animations for Staves.

Let’s start at the beginning and light attacks. These are all substantially the same, single click and a pulse from the relevant staff is produced. Fine, we are told a Heavy Attack is done by holding down the same key, but we soon find out that there is a marked difference between the effects and the various 4 staves. I know and fully understand the damage differences so that is a non issue here, this is purely about the animation only

An Inferno/Flame staff and Frost/Ice staff both take time to charge up and unleash their elemental attack animation.

A Lightning/Shock staff and a Restoration staff both produce a connection to the target for the duration, and further, if we look behind the scenes we see that they are made up of two parts, a small channelled attack that hits at around .8/.9 of the first second and the final non channelled burst at around 1.8 seconds. Note: The first part is buffed by the Deadly Strike set which demonstrates it is counted as channelled whereas the final hit is not.

I would like to suggest that for all 4 staves this choice of a different attack animation style is given to all players (introduced say during the tutorial) so that they may choose either to charge up and unleash a heavy attack or the connected channelled version which would apply to each staff type. So a Flame staff would produce either the current two fireballs or a connected flame thrower with little embers or sparks effect to the target that hits as a channelled attack. Same for an Ice staff, except the connected channel would be frosty in nature with small ice shards/snowflake effect.

Similarly the Restoration staff could charge up and unleash a single golden bolt at a target and cause say a red flash on impact. A Lightning staff would charge up a ball of lightning on the end of the staff which is then unleashed as a single ball at the target exploding in a shock discharge effect.

The timing and damage overall would remain exactly the same but be calculated as the current versions are now. I.e. A single un-channelled hit as a single burst damage at the end of the attack or if channelled in two parts the first small channelled amount at .8/.9 seconds and the final amount at the end.

Technically this means the introduction of 4 new attacks and associated animations which may produce some issues for ZoS to get around and the management of that in group content perhaps, but, if it is set at account level that should alleviate pressures rather than at character level or even by staff type although this might be preferable to players!

So if this choice were implemented would you choose to use a flame thrower or ball lightning effect for example?