Allowing claws to be used barehanded (without a physical weapon model)!

I have been thinking lately, and I doubt this is the first time this suggestion has popped up, but what if claws did not require you to have a weapon? If you could choose 'no weapon' for the claw weapon in the costume customization?

There are a lot of character types that would use natural claws, or even claw animations as a fighting style. Why not make it official and let people be creative with this?

I myself would be tempted to make a claw character if I could use natural claws, as opposed to weapons.

Do you mean, like, open handed fingernail-esque beast-type claws? They'd have to come up with alternate animations for each power that have you not flailing your knuckles wildly at enemies to pull that off. It's possible, especially with the larger staff nowadays, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

I very much doubt they'd need new animations, per se. They'd need to use the same animations with a slightly different character model. Instead of a closed fist, they'd just leave the hands open. This would be most noticeable on the "Monster" style gloves, obviously, since the fingers are elongated and sharp.

Right now for most attack styles they close the fist, either around the weapon or simply to make a fist. Some, however, do use an open hand. Those are mostly for projection style attacks, but the models for open hands are already there and the skeletons are already articulated. Therefore, the difference would not be in animation but instead in which hand model was used.

I think that if they did say no to this, the reason would more likely be the can of worms it would open for requests of things extending from said open palm model: jazz hands (splayed fingers), claws directly from the fingers and such like. That would require some extremely fine art to make it so anything that came out wouldn't look really bad. From there people would be asking for lasers shooting out of the fingertips, and all sorts of wacky stuff.

All that aside, however, I'd like to see this as well.

/signed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha ...I have the patience of a coffee-fueled flea...

Back when BaBs was here he commented that this would be EXTREMLY difficult to do. It changes the "stance" that the power uses (from Dual Wield to Unarmed) which is apparently a pain in the *** to setup with the animation system.

Still with all the changes to the animation system since then maybe we will see it one day.