Being having the same discussion elsewhere. The two games aren't really comparable in this way. Tera was designed from the ground up to use animations of skills as part of the overall balance of risk reward of that skill. Skills in FFXIV are flashy and lengthy for the sake of looking cool at higher levels. See Chaos Thrust, which was even made longer to add a flourish.
It also goes to the balance of melee vs ranged and their capabilities. Melee has instant hitting attacks and should be able to move because they don't have the same leeway that range does. Range can start their cast on a running mob and it doesn't mater. If melee does the same, and has to come to a full stop, there is a much smaller chance of hitting. Add lag into the mix, and it just puts more burden on one side that already has the distance limitation.
So yeah. I would much rather have an odd looking slide on the occasions that I need to run and use a skill then to be skill locked in a game that wasn't really designed or balanced with it in mind.
Mm, yes, I agree the games are too different fundamentally to compare, but I'm not really comparing them. I'm just saying there can be a happy medium, one with the best of both worlds, which I also think could be applied to a non-"action combat" MMO.
Basically to me it boils down to this: why animate skills if the animations don't really mean anything? If they're going with non-locking skill usage then the animations should match. That is, they shouldn't exist, or shouldn't be unique. Which is boring, to match a boring button-mash WS spam system. Because otherwise there is this constant feeling of "what I'm seeing is not what is happening" or "I'm not seeing what is really happening" (however you want to look at it) that never goes away.
I'm not completely opposed to non-locking (I played WoW for way longer than I played XIV), but at least WoW had the courtesy to not waste time making a bunch of fancy unique animations for things which meant I didn't care as much that the animations looked goofy (I played rogue a lot, that was probably the prime example of animation pointlessness). The thing is, this is an FF title where the graphics and animations have always been a BFD (tm) and precedents have been set--precedents like lifelike and grounded character animations (or, on the other extreme, things like Advent Children where grounded is not an applicable adjective, but lifelike-within-the-setting's-physics still applies). This puts them in an unhappy position--they can't really just do away with character animations (well, they could, but it's unlikely they would), but at the same time the 1.x style lengthy animation locks will turn away a lot of potential players, so we end up with devs wasting time on animations that won't please the people who really care about them. :\
