Quote (Goomshill @ 30 Aug 2021 16:52)
When Diablo II was first created in classic 1.00, animations for characters were tied to their weapon classes. Each animation carries a Wclass for the equipped weapon class, which has different animations in different poses, many with different frame lengths
When LoD was added in 1.08, the developers had a problem adding weapon switches: Animations couldn't be swapped between directly. If you switch from a barbarian's A2-1HS with 16 frames / 256 speed / 8 action frame, to a barbarian's A2-2HT with 19 frames / 256 speed / 9 action frame, how does that work? If you swapped on frame #8, would you hit twice in one attack? Even if they rescaled animation timers proportionally each switch, you'd still have different action frames.
Well, the developers just came up with the easiest solution: Any time you switch weapons, it interrupts and resets your animation state. And to prevent this from being abused to speed up attacks / casting by resetting animations during your backswing, they made it so you couldn't weapon switch during attacks/casts, but allowed it only during idle states or disabled states.
When the classic games team tweaked how animations were handled serverside in some kind of attempt to mess with TMC mods or whatever in 1.13 in 2018, they briefly disabled WSG. But then you know what they did? They recreated WSG on top of the new system, adding back both its animation interrupting and desync. Most people agreed that the 'new WSG' was actually more reliable and powerful than the old one.
WSG is a misnomer. WSG isn't a glitch. Its actually WSF: Weapon Switch Feature.
They added it to fix pvp frh, gotcha. Now we all know close thread please