Hey Guys, sorry for my late answer
First of all, remaining theme with the thread, i wish the best for 2018 in very Gandalf style, happy new year!
Firstly: thank you Walküre for sharing your ideas, your advices are always precious. I like the idea of "Emissary of Hope" especially the lore meaning behind it. I admit that i'm not particularly fond on mount when it comes to heroes, because unless the heroes is just on the horse before arriving to the battle, usually it is difficult to use it as an escape tool, given that the switching unmount/mount is quite slow. I understand the reason of removing "Servant of secret Fire", since it plays a similar role of your marvellous Narya concept. That's why i wrote it on brackets the to discuss the matter
. I hope that your concept will find a way, because it should compensate some weaknesses of our beloved wizard, given also that is a 3000 resources hero.
Only i want to ask you: why not keeping "Blinding Light" as ability on foot an "Emissary of Hope" as ability on mount? I think the last ability is more related to fire rather than light. I feel that Gandalf must always be the one who keep the darkest monsters away, and a light-based spell is the most suitable option in my opinion
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In this way we would have an "explorer" gandalf on horse, and a fighting Gandalf on foot. It is quite in line with the lore in my opinion. Tell me what do you think
Secondly i'm interested too in exploring a new version of Gandalf who bears staff only. The animation of Saruman is quite good, but i don't know if it fits with Gandalf. Some of Saruman's way of move, attack, walk, reminds me an "evil" wizard. It seems the creators wanted to transmit this when they studied the character. Maybe it is habit only, but that is also the reason why whenever i use Radagast (who has the Saruman's animation) i feel like the animation is a little bit out of character, like if it was too "aggressive" and so to say "imperative" to fit with the Brown one. These are my sensations at least
I would like to propose instead, and we return again on Chronicles submod, the animation of CaH wizards class. It is more generic, without the "evil" direction described above. I will try to figure out a way to extract and present here the various moves of Gandalf, Saruman and CaH wizards, such we can easily compare them.
As for a possible attack animation on horse using staff, i sincerely don't know what we could use for the purpose
Yeah, another important thing i forgot: with the staff-only configuration, should the attack turn into area-of-effect type like the other istari? Or, should it remain single one?
EDIT: I figured out out to use w3d editor as well as editing final gifs for the forum (at least not too heavy ones in terms of MB), for example, this is one of Gandalf's oringinal attack animation, they are three in total (by game experience,it seems are played randomly), this one involved staff only, the other two Glamdring or both staff+glamdring (that is the coolest one, but could look strange if you remove the sword):