Hey,
So i’m pretty new to the whole unreal engine thing. I had some questions about getting started with animations and what not. I’ve messed around a little with blender and have a small background in programming. Like I can get the mindset behind the programming, and some general ideas on ue’s style of programming.
Q1: I want to make a skill for my character that does damage to enemies around him, and then moves said character. Think of like a shock wave with a dodge at the end. What’s the best way to go about doing that
Q2: What are some good/cheapish animation programs for making cel-shaded characters and abilities. Is cel-shading better for polygon counts, or not?
Q3: What’s the best advice you can give me for skeleton rigging, scaling, and reducing polygon count on my models? I’ve made a model already, but he came out EXTREMELY small and lagged the game due to the poly count. (going from blender to ue4)
Anything else you guys can add would be wonderful.
Q1 are a few problems/tasks that are only slightly connected.
while you could trigger the ‘shock-wave’ with animation notifications, i think it would be way simpler to trigger it through a simple delay in the character blueprint.
as for the movement of the character, you could either do it with root motionor with a box/line trace and a lerp of the character position (here you would just animate the character in place and the lerp handles the change of location). option b) lets you have a more control but is a little more complex.
Q2: Blender already is a free program that lets you do whatever you want. cel-shading has nothing to do with animation or poly count, it is just how the shadows are calculated in the engine (or a post processing effect applied to the character using the shadow data).
cel-shading can make low poly characters look better though. where it helps the most though is low res textures, flat 1-color textures look best when they are cel-shaded in my opinion. cel-shading is more of an artistic choice and can even cost you performance, depending on your solution.
Q3:
the best advice i can give for a low poly count is: make models with a low poly count ^^. from what it sounds like you sculpt your models in blender and import those into unreal? in that case i would learn how to “retopologize”. for animation in blender i can recommend this playlist, it is what taught me how to animate.
as for the size issue: there are a few things to consider when importing from blender you should find most of it in these links (link1 link2). among others make sure you get orientation and units right, you should also investigate how to set up your root bone in the right way 
(i only make stuff in unreal as a hobby and everything i know is self taught, so take it with a grain of salt)