Most spells make one or both (usually left hand - weapon, shield or focus) hand items disappear while casting.
Is there any way to change this/make it stop?
Preferably I’d like the spells to look like they are shooting out of the weapon/shield/focus. Like a weapon swing or shot (for ranged weapons.).
if your plan is to make a (for example) a gun shoot out a magic bullet (hehe) that is a different spell and not a gunshot that scales with attack speed, you could change the specialanimation in the dbr of your spell skill to one of those inquisitor wps animation entries (or any gunshot) since those don’t make your weapon dissapear.
you can also add new entries on the special animation in the anm_malepc and anm_femalepc (if i remember the names right) dbr so you can for example reference a basic weapon swing animation as a special casting animation.
If you want to use the default casting animation but with the weapons not dissapearing one anim play, you have to edit the .aif inside the animation file using notepad++ or other text editors (just open the anim file with a text editor, scroll down to the part where it is legible, and find the section that says to disable weapon thingy, then save as a different file name). afterwards you’ll have to inject the file into your modded .arc file using ArchiveTool before you can use them (add them to special animation again), which is kinda complicated but there are resources in the forum that can help with that
sry to butt in
and not sure if i’m understanding it correct, but it kinda made it sound simple/“easy”, so like the “only” reason ex DEE caster offhand disappears or MH on doombolt/PB is a simple switch flip/line entry from on to off? (aside from repacking etc)
*by simple i mean for people already adept at navigating the files and tools ofc, not for us regular folks
Because if it’s largely just a switch, that doesn’t have extra complications added, i’m kinda puzzled why we sometimes have those jarring cast animations on some spells with weapon just disappearing and flicking in 'n out of existence 
(like stuff like FoI makes obv more sense continuously channeling a beam out of our hands)
It’s a switch in the animation file itself iirc that controls if the weapon would dissappear when the specific animation is played. Editing it may be a simple task (just open in a text editor and edit the specific line) but the repacking is usually a hassle because archivetool being archivetool (and i haven’t tried basemods method)
As for why they did it, i think it is because that the animations were designed with having no weapons on hand for their artistic flavor (for example the dual hand casting anim has like a push motion, which would look weird when the weapons were visible).
I really appreciate the help. AIF, Anim, injecting - that stuff is beyond me. No idea how to do that.
I do know how to use basic editor and how to edit DBRs. Changing the special anim for abilities does not appear to affect weapons/shields/off hand at all.
The D2 Paladin spell Holy Bolt in the Dawn of Masteries mod does exactly what I want - nothing disappears when you cast it. I did extract all the mods DBRs and looked at the DBRs for holy bolt but I just can’t figure out if there is anything in DBRs to change this.
There’s not. Either use a different animation that doesn’t hide the weapon, or edit the animation file as suggested. There’s no other option.
It appears that changing special animation in the skill DBR to FieldCommand does the fix for some spells. However, this does not affect the beams (Aether Ray, Obliteration, Conflagaration). Any ideas? I’m thinking there has to be some way to edit the DBRs for the beams to do the trick. Thank you!