I feel like pretty much every class has gotten really neat animations over the years, but hunter animations remain the same. I look at rapid fire, for instance, and I’m just like… man WHAT. I’m just holding my bow in the auto attack pose while my arm spasms for a few seconds. Or aimed shot? It’s just… the auto attack animation again. Even BM’s kill command I’m pretty sure is just the DK “Lich King-style” weapon point, isn’t it? I could be wrong about that; I’m not a DK player. But it looks the same to me.
The point is: please!! I’m begging for just a crumb of love to be put into our animations… Even our auto attack animations could use better reloads. Like why on earth do crossbows just use the gun reload animation?? 
That’s not how a crossbow works!
While we’re at it, can we make the ranged ready animations visible to other players? They added it years ago and it was the only time I really felt like whoa they’re giving us a neat animation for our class fantasy—and then I discovered it’s only visible client-side. :l I’m 100% certain this was an unintentional error, but they never bothered to fix it, so…
Side-by-side comparison of what I see versus what everyone else sees when I’m in my “ready” pose (can we get better arrow options too holy moly ):
Anyway yeah end rant. I am a loser IRL so can I please at least pretend to be cool in my favorite bidya game thank you 
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Agreed I made a post a while back they could do so much more with ranged animations.
Some examples:
- Aimed shot builds up a bright white glow across its cast time and then streak across the room (Could even make Aimed an empowered shot so it fires but weaker if you interrupt the cast)
- Volley fires an arrow/munition into the air that explodes like a cluster bomb and rains down in the circle.
- Explosive shot has either a flaming arrow or tracer round that leaves a smoke trail behind it
- Arcane shot has a small glowing projectile that leaves an arcane explosion coloured trail behind it and does a little mini Arcane Explosion on landing
- Ricochet should cause a small crosshair to appear on every mob its going to hit as it bounces between them
- Black Arrow could streak across the map kind of like flayed shots animation but shadow
- Multishot should have the projectiles weave, twist and wind through the air before landing
- Binding shot could have the projectile sprout a small tree and fling out vines to anyone affected
Love the idea of better spell effects!! I also would like to see this. I just also wish we could get updated character movement animations and perhaps a set of glyphs to let us change our arrow colors or something… but that would require a level of dedication to the hunter class fantasy that i unfortunately doubt we will get when there are so many other pressing issues for devs to worry about 
The low-level animations actually is one of the things that first drew me to the Hunter class. I’m the sort who don’t like flashy animations. The flashier a class/spec is, the less I play this class.
(The sole exception to this is my Fire Mage. It’s the only “flashy” toon I tolerate with no problem.)
It’s one of the reasons why I hated Sidewinders in Legion, actually.
Rapid Fire is basically the ceiling of what I don’t mind. Flashier than that… blergh.
But! Adding flashy animations in the form of glyphs? Now that’s a good idea — allows everybody to go with “flashiness” if they want, or stick with the “simple and unassuming” style. 
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Tbh I really don’t want super “flashy” animations either—just better quality/more unique ones. Different ways of angling your body when you hold your weapon, more fluid updates to the existing animations so they look a bit more “natural,” etc. For rapid fire, for instance, I think it’d be cooler if the bow animation was like… lining 3 arrows in your bowstring and firing, doing that multiple times until the ability is over. Rather than the glitch-y weird mess it is right now (it doesn’t look too bad for guns, I guess, since it’s sort of a “machine-gun” effect, but for bows it’s just so goofy). That same logic could also be applied for multi-shot I think, just with the bow positioned sideways so that it makes sense for the multiple arrows to spread out horizontally.
But yeah I agree that I don’t want suuuper over-the-top spell effects. I just also don’t want to be standing here doing the exact same animation over and over again no matter what ability I press
Wrathlon’s suggestions are, to me, over the top. THAT’s how much I dislike ‘excessive’ and ‘flashy’ animations.
But, I’ll always be the first person to admit that I’m the sort who, when I find something I like, I’ll stick with it for a very long time.
See my main here? I rolled her in 2005, picked MM, tamed a tan wolf named Howler, and I haven’t changed a single thing since. Not even Watermist’s customization! I tweaked exactly 2 things — the horns when we got more options in WotLK, and the war paint when we got it in WoD. Other than that, Watermist is identical to the day I rolled her in 2005.
I’m used to her animations. I like her animations. I’ll be bummed if Blizzard changes it without the option to choose the original animations. This includes shooting bows and guns.
Which is why I advocate glyphs for spells/attacks! But character animations? Hmmmmmm. I’m not sold on that yet… unless Blizzard makes something similar to the Dance Studio they promised us back in WotLK. 
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Heh. I wish empowered shots for Evoker went off at whatever level they were at if the cast is interrupted or you move before releasing the cast, but they don’t. They just fail.
Ya know, the animations in original Rogue were good enough:
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For several releases, the number of multi-shot streaks equaled the number of targets, even down to only one target. It was a nice visual cue of how many targets were left in a pack you were AOEing. I’d like it if that were back. Currently it appears to add streaks for large numbers of targets, but has a minimum of three streaks.
That’s fair! I do always prefer when they give us options. I kinda doubt it, since they’ve set a precedent for changing many spell animations without offering the option of going back to the originals… but I do hope they lean more into that level of customization in the future. More options are always better!!
Yeah it’s fair some people don’t like the bigger flashier stuff though personally I do.
Glyphs would be a perfect solution to this and is a way underutilised system.
Also some bows have custom arrows - the mythic nyalotja now for example has fully rendered and animated arrows:
imgur. com/gallery/MW1CPQO
Just wanted to make a link for you.
(To people reading this: click on the picture and it’ll take you to the album, which has a GIF in it.)
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Thanks I stopped posting for a little bit and lost my link privileges. So hard to maintain.
This is so cool. I’ve seen a few bows in-game with unique arrows, and it’s always awesome to see. In my opinion, once they introduced Thas’dorah in Legion, they should have just stuck with that and made it so every bow model comes with a matching quiver & arrows. Hopefully at some point they start doing that! With quiver straps as well, preferably.
All bows should have matching quivers, all guns should have matching ammo pouches, all crossbows should have matching cases.
Just make it a toggle in the dressing room if we want to show it or not.
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