*edit /u/Reav3 has posted
Hey all, lots of great points brought up in this thread. With legendaries the amount of unique anims and how drastically they change can vary from Champion to Champion. With newer Champions they can sometimes have massive animation suites, so rather then give them 100% unique anims we just tweak the base ones. This was a approach we took for both Nightbringer Yasuo and and Dark Star Thresh since they were much newer Champions. New Kayle has a enormous animation suite, between 4 forms, enraged/non-enraged AAs, Melee/ranged AAs, High Attack Speed/Low Attack speed AA, so we had to chose carefully where to put the unique animations for Kayle.
We ultimately chose to put the unique anims into her mechanical wings, which do have a new animation suite compared to base Kayle as we felt her mechanical wings are the most unique aspect of the skin. The Death anim is a good call out though and we will be adding a unique death anim to her soon, targeting next patch. We will also be adjusting AWs Auto attack SFX to match closer to old AW SFX.
I'd be honest, if I knew nothing about kayle I might have been hard pressed to tell the difference between this papercraft anivia skin and aether wing kayle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF0FN4gHND4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uvQTPO5z34
If you think I'm exaggerating, I'm not. Watch and compare them. With no context Aetherwing looks exactly like a 1350 skin.
Touching upon some of the design choices that did make it... (those wings past level 11...why did they not keep the wings pre 11?) or the personality shift, (now she can join the edgy club with aatrox and akali) or her robot voice and robo cop attitude.
You know, I could accept that maybe they wanted to do edgy space cop and go "well shit happens in a rework". But making the skin LESS unique then it was before makes no fucking sense to me. If they had, had unique animations, movement, etc. Then I would accept it's simply a reworked skin that I didn't like but they actually made it closer to a 1350 rp skin then a legendary skin.
This is literally NOT what I paid for. Like I said, if it was a rework I simply didn't like that'd be fine. But they actively removed shit in addition to everything else =/
What the fuck.
*edit, it goes without saying that I have no dev experience. I don't know if it was being lazy, or greedy, or whatever. All I know is that this looks exactly like a 1350 rp skin.