How to handle an ability animation's impact timing?

Hey again Gaeta27!

The biggest difference here is you’re looking at it as if it were the character doing the animation for the spell effect, not the cast, and I was looking at it as the spell being a spawned actor all by itself.

Looking at it this way, what unity calls a timeline here is an animation montage. Notice that the video says nothing about when the damage goes out or how to damage the enemies, purely looks only, because it’s a bit more complicated.

So on your character BP you’ll use the PlayMontage node, and select your spell.
You’ll also need to send whatever targeting data you need to your Anim BP and set it as a vector variable on the Character BP and the Anim BP right before the PlayMontage.

On the montage itself you’ll pass in your vector, and then on that location put your Niagara effects, and use an animnotify for the functionality of the target damage.

Then use TryGetOwner on the ABP event graph to send that notification to play an Event on the character which would be your Sphere cast by Object> Do damage event on your vector you saved before your montage :).

None of this would use my above-mentioned timeline.