The long story short, is that you should use animations only in cosmetic manner. You should not use them to actually trigger parts of abilities, it’s opposite to what what ability system is trying to do.
I can see point on why you would want to trigger something from montage, like shooting fireball from hand ( if you want it to be perfectly synced), but in that way you limit yourself to perfectly timed animation (which will determine cast time of ability), which isn’t good approach in something like RPG (IMO).
Setting it up to use animation only as presentation layer is probably more complex and I honestly haven’t found good workflow for it yet, but it still going to be more beneficial (at least for me) in long term.
It would nice to actually know how it is handled for casters in Paragon (like Gideon).