New animations for existing sets- would this be possible

I was reading JayBoh's thread abot orbs and already had a concept come to mind about a magician or wizard- and then thought about it and wondered if the image in my brain could be ported to other stuff.

basically, i had imagined a classic wizard with his ornate, gnarled wood staff with a glowing gem on top, shooting JayBoh's new orbs at things from the staff...... and then I thought, why not other blast sets too?

What if we had things like energy blast, electric blast, fireblast, animated as such that your character fired the projectiles from a wizard staff/techno spear or even some other item, like a set of guns(think energy blast coming out of something like the "heavy barrel" praetorian resistance guys have) or even things like wands, like the blackwand.

I mean, how cool would it be to fire electric blasts out of the end of some pointy techno spear thing, or see short circuit come out from a staff held up over your wizard's head? or bust out that big ol dust cannon and fire off some REAL beam rifle blasts(like power burst)

How much work would this take on animations? would it be basically all ground up work, or could the projectile start point of current animations just be altered to work with some of the existing things? I am not really familiar with how the animation work in this game is done. In my mind it would be as easy as taking a few of the "gun" animations for example, and then moving the projectile start point part of the animation to "fit" on the end of the gun barrel, and voila. I could be horribly mistaken though on this.

I think it would add tons of new concepts to old sets, really spice up some of the classics.

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Doable...probably. But nearly everything involving new animations is a TON of work for likely little financial return, as I don't think they can break apart the new animations to sell them as a micro-transaction at this point.

Not to mention there comes the issue of everyone having a different idea on what a wand will look like. Could be solved by options a-la the current custom weapon selection, however stuff like fire blast and electric blast currently don't have a weapon selection, so that would have to be figured out, or settle on 'this is how it looks, deal with it'.

They've added alternate animations already for several of the blast and melee sets before, so we know alternates are possible. Adding more would just be more of the same work most likely, but any power customization typically is very expensive for them to develop...look how long its taking us to get custom power pool customization. If it were low-hanging fruit and easy, I really doubt they would be taking several years to get some of the most asked for power customization done. Adding a new way to add and customize a weapon like that also would be new tech added to the power-sets/animations code, which could have several unintended effects and bugs come with it too, as well as possible having to suddenly balance those powers for newly added redraw some of the time when you do have a weapon, which is probably where the biggest problem will come in.

Keep in mind we also have a new 'sorcery' power pool on its way too (leak on beta) sometime in the future, and we don't know what all that will bring yet. This may bring similar things to what you're asking as far as being able to use a wand.

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