ttobey wrote:
Yeah most of the original animations were mocapped, that's why they look so weird and bad mimey. Can you sense my love for mocap? Evan Sampson, another animator on the team gets to deal with the mocap more than I do.
For dances, combat, exotic creature stuff etc, hand animation is great.. assuming the animator is really good and can manage all the subtleties and secondary movements you would get from mocap 
.. but for walk cycles and run cycles on player characters etc its damned hard to beat good mocap. The walk and run cycles in EQ2 are the best in any game Ive played by a huge margin, compare the idiot bouncing in LOTRO (did someone there REALLY think people bounce on their toes for hours on end) or the outright wierdness of wow to the believable run cycles in EQ2.. I find hand animation of those kind of endless repeat 'see it a million times' animations is problematic, because one tends to put in too much 'life' and it looks annoying in ways that are hard to identify or even notice if you are working on it. Its hard to beat something that just looks like someone running.