<STRING>ANIMATIONDW allows you to set a unique animation for the skill if the player is dual-wielding. In addition, it also causes any weapon damage delivered by the skill to be delivered from each weapon. Let me explain more thoroughly.
If you set a skill to deal 50% Weapon DPS, normally you deal 50% of your DPS once. If you use <STRING>ANIMATIONDW, when the player is dual-wielding they will deal 50% DPS, twice. The calculation works through damage for each weapon, so 50% of right hand DPS and 50% of left hand DPS, plus any on-hit effects that might be triggered by the skill count both weapons.
I had been holding off on publishing this little tidbit until I had time to do a thorough presentation of how to clean up the balance problem. But now that this particular horse has left the barn, I suppose it's better to make this info available to those who might puzzle through it rather than wait till I have time to give a thorough explanation.
This animationdw trick is a great thing, and it's a big part of my ongoing rebalancing efforts. (And also a big delay because it means re-redoing all the weapon based skills in the vanilla game.) However, it introduces a big balance problem of its own: Triggering on-hit effects at a doubled rate is just stupidly, amazingly, game-breakingly overpowered. I've got a fix working, but it's quite involved.
To make weapon-based skills hit with both weapons, but not double-trigger on-hit effects, do the following:
On the weapon-based skills: For damage-shape-based skills, simply add the same animation that already exists as the animationdw.
Missile-based skills do not work with this out of the box. The animationdw has no effect. You need to refactor the skill by using a [EXECUTE_SKILL] inside an [EVENT_MISSILEHIT] to invoke a secondary skill that actually deals the damage and has its own animationdw. Here' s a sample: As best I can tell, you can use any animation at all for the secondary skill because it will never actually play. But just to be safe I created a super-short animation that should be unnoticeable if the game does decide to play it in situations I don't know about yet:
On the player unit: Add the following two affixes to every class. (You can put this in base, but outlander needs its own copy because it overrides the base affix block).
Create these custom stats:
Create this ridiculously complex skill: Don't muck with it. I've tested this very thoroughly and it works right 100% of the time. There's lots of changes that look like they should accomplish the same thing with less overhead and/or complexity, but they either don't work at all, or manifest subtle bugs (often due to utterly irrational quirks in the game engine). Trust me, I tried lots of variants. (More detail: I think there's some kind of use-before-initialize bug infecting the whole stat system that leads to crazy statwatcher results for no apparent reason in some situations.)
Inside EVERY triggerable skill: Add this statwatcher to the root [SKILL] block.
I know I've given basically zero explanation for why this works. Hopefully you can figure it out. If not, I'll have time to explain better in a month or so.
Triggering on-hit effects at a doubled rate is just stupidly, amazingly, game-breakingly overpowered. I've got a fix working, but it's quite involved.
Does it fire skill affixes twice? Or is it that you get on-hit effects from both weapons instead of just one?
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As best I can tell, you can use any animation at all for the secondary skill because it will never actually play. But just to be safe I created a super-short animation that should be unnoticeable if the game does decide to play it in situations I don't know about yet:
Quite right. Animations will never play from procced or executed skills.
To make weapon-based skills hit with both weapons, but not double-trigger on-hit effects, do the following:
Making this work as intended seems involved. Let me suggest an alternative that might interest you. Of course, it's sort of a fake solution as it doesn't actually read damage from both equipped weapons.
Here's what I've done with other skills (like the Vanquisher's Rapid Fire):
-Use an alternate animation. These are set on the Player Unit editor and can override an animation based on a player's equipped weapons, e.g. dual-wielding.
-In the alternate animation, use a non-overlapping event trigger. That is, if single one-handed or two-handed weapons use HIT, the dual-wielding animation should use HITTWO.
-The animation can just be a copy/paste of the original animation as long as its info is properly set up in the .animation file for the player unit's model folder.
-In the skill, use two separate EVENTS, one for dual-wielding, one for non. Copy and paste the original EVENT into the dual-wield alternate and muck about with the stat balance as you like. EVENT_TRIGGER will never fire without HIT, and EVENT_TRIGGER_TWO will never fire without HITTWO.
This way you have total control of how much damage is delivered for each variation and you can keep the affixes from being doubly applied (if that happens?). I find that the ANIMATIONDW option deals too much damage. 2-handed weapon damage is only about 20-25% greater than 1-handed damage, meaning that if you want dual-wielding and 2-handed options to give roughly equal damage outputs, which I typically do, you'd want the dual-wield version to deal about 120% of the alternative. ANIMATIONDW of course deals 200%.
The only problem with this setup is that I suspect certain on-hit effects might never trigger from the off-hand weapon, such as damage-over-time effects. The off-hand weapon's dps doesn't affect the skill's DPS either as the system isn't actually reading the off-hand weapon's damage at all.
Of course, I guess you could consider my method pretty time-consuming, too. Since you have yours set up already, it's not much more work to just add the toggle function/execute skill.
The affixes only fire once. It's just the on-hit effects.
I'm reworking the entire weapon balance so that 2-handers will be ~2x as good as 1-handers. DW doing 2x damage is exactly perfect for that. I could see how it wouldn't be if you didn't also fix 2-handers.
If I understand your setup correctly, then it would still have double on-hit effects.
Another thing to remember for skills that use ANIMATIONDW is that for the off-hand hit to actually trigger, the REQUIREMENT_LEFT unit-type (if specified) must match the unit-type of what you're wielding in the off-hand.
I was thinking that this may be a possible point of confusion, since TL2 allows you to specify something like 2HMelee left-req and Melee right-req (many engineer skills do this) - you can dual wield and cast the skill just fine, but you won't be able to get the off-hand hit to happen, even with ANIMATIONDW.
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