Firebrand specialization, and the old tome animation

Dedicating this thread to the new, overhauled forum (good job with it, by the way.)

There's been some posts here and there, supported a lot by how lacking the Firebrand tome animation looks like when you are standing idle. You stand with your usual weapons-drawn animations, but you hold nothing, not even your own weapons. You stand there with some (again, very lacking looking) pages floating around you, and that's it. I think it changes very slightly depending on what tome you entered, but it's barely visible.

This is what the current "tome" animation looks like. ^

The old elite abilities that we had removed—Tome of Courage and Tome of Wrath, while still only having a weapons-drawn animation, had at least a very high quality tome in front of the guardian.

That is what the Firebrand should have, and I feel it's quite unfair that this is not what the Firebrand already has. That is what they should have. ^

In a PvP scenario, it won't be easily spotted at first which tome the Firebrand is in, since the pages doesn't give enough clue. With the tome models, they could at least recolour the back of the tome, giving people an easier, visual que of what is about to come up.

I wanted to voice my opinion on this yet again. There's been some highly upvoted posts about this on reddit, and I thought it was worth to bring up.

I do personally love the old tome animations, and think they're better than the new ones. The only reason I can guess as to why they were changed, is perhaps because of performance concerns or something along those lines. Or perhaps because some of the new casting animations they wanted to incorporate wouldn't quite work with the old tomes.

That being said, I do think the old elite tomes had a very nice flavor to them, especially with the way the pages turned as you cast spells. It was really awesome.

I'd love to see the old tome animations return as well. Just isn't the same when the 'tome' merely explodes into a spread of orbiting pages.

You guys gotta move on from the old and get with the new.

@phokus.8934 said:You guys gotta move on from the old and get with the new.

I have to argue that this comment doesn't make much sense since we're not saying to go back and not forward.

The Firebrand specialization is all new with very beautiful animations overall, but it's lacking quite a lot with the whole tome theme. A specialization about tomes, and there are barely any visible tomes at all? I will say that is a huge step back from what we previously had with two elite skills.

The tome model we had in the past would add a lot to the Firebrand.

@phokus.8934 said:You guys gotta move on from the old and get with the new.

So if they replaced the tome pages with generic looking rocks, would you still hold to that statement? Just because something is new, it doesn't automatically make it better or justify its existence. That kind of statement simply doesn't hold up on its own.

The old tome animations, being subjective, were boring and just had a big tome in your face. I'm not saying the current FB tomes are better but the old tomes weren't appealing at all.

Personally I'd rather they not add superfluous graphics/animations just to be flashy.

I would like to see a better tome animation..but rather than the old ones I'd just like to see a less underwhelming version of what we have. The floating pages theme of the current tomes fits with the whole page based tome setup we have. It would just be nice if the pages looked more impressive. The actual abilities animations are great overall too. When it comes down to it though I think this is all incredibly minor.

Hey, I'm gonna link this relic of gone-by times because my guild did a thing back then, where we sync cast a bunch of tomes and spells!

@Kerivek.5740 said:I would like to see a better tome animation..but rather than the old ones I'd just like to see a less underwhelming version of what we have. The floating pages theme of the current tomes fits with the whole page based tome setup we have. It would just be nice if the pages looked more impressive. The actual abilities animations are great overall too. When it comes down to it though I think this is all incredibly minor.

It certainly isn't the most significant issue, and yes, a lot of the new animations do look very cool. But I do agree with Farzo's concerns about how your character adopts a stance where it looks like they're holding weapons even though they are not. The old tome was nice in the sense that it gave your character something to focus on and the animations were built around that. But the pages floating around you don't give you much of a focal point, and so the character just adopts a generic melee weapon stance.

Even if they don't go back to old tomes and keep the pages, it would be nice if our default stance wasn't so generic and our characters at least interacted more with the pages around us in some manner.

I've said it many times before, but I much prefer the open handed caster aesthetic over having a giant book obstructing my character's view.

I prefer the old tome version, if you are going to do a tome themed spec you might aswell go all the way.