Alright so I'm having a very big problem and I hope these forums arent dead enough that no one can help me. When I made a new ability, most of them work fine. However a couple I've made have a very frustrating and at the moment very frustrating 'bug', wherein for no particular reason, when they are upgraded, they trigger some part of their particle effects. I have no idea whats causing this: the ability, the animation, the event types, the particles themselves, the layout timeline, I can't even find any significant difference between a pre-existing ability and the one I made to pinpoint a problem. I don't know where else to go for help.

Update 1: I finally found what property controlled this: Start on load, however a different problem arises in the fact that the particle is not playing normally in the animation i've chosen, which I suppose hopefully will be fixed by switching or editing, perhaps the ability has no event_trigger tag. Hopefully any other beginning modder finds this and solves their issue too

What kind of skills is concerned with your issue ?
If it is a skill that involves movement it can be a particle attachement issue.

Essentially, when the particle's option for "start on load" was set to true, the particle would play whenever I added a point to the skill. Turning this off solved the issue perfectly. For reference, I made a wave ability not unlike tremor, and when I plussed the ability, the wave particle would play. I thought there was another issue when the ability itself never played the particle, but soon realized the animation I used simply didn't use any "hit" key frames. I was freaking out a bit when I made this post, but now it's all but resolved thankfully. It's tough when trying to search for an issue you're haviing yields no results until you stumble across the fix. I'm trying my hand at missle creation next so that ought to be a challenge

hey @Shawn sorry if it felt like no one was around to help! it's a bit of a hassle but you can try cross-posting in the torchmodder's discord (link is right underneath our right-panel shoutbox window) since there's almost always ppl there too.

but im glad to hear you got the issues solved speaking of animations, you may already know this but i'll go ahead and mention you can also attach particle layouts directly to an animation via
[KEY]
<STRING>LAYOUT:
[/KEY]
lines of code