I normally play either a CW or a GWF, and CW had a similar problem with chill stikes: The animation of chill strike was a lock-out for dodging. The dev's fixed it.
So why not change wicked strike so that the damage comes after the animation and allow animation canceling.
This would resolve the original issue of not letting the GWF use animation canceling to boost the DPS of wicked strikes, but would allow the use of sprint to effectively dodge red zones (which currently will just rubber band you back) by animation canceling and allow you to sprint out of red zones as necessary.
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