Hi jcl, thanks for answering.
The problem would be that you'd have to do the animations of the character's legs seperately as well - which can be quite a difficult task. With the method I suggested, you could simply create a run animation, and a firing animation and then simply blend them so the legs run and the torso fires. Another great advantage is that the firing animation could even display the character standing - because the legs would be animated by the running animation while moving, otherwise by the firing animation. Result: Two animation sequences for four possibilities of combination. Now have your character equipped with maybe 100 sequences and the advantage will become huge! I hope you can get the message out of my confused scribbling