Stormpooper

This is not a bug nor something in general that would need fixing. Animation lock is a feature (no sarcasm) and here it's working as intended. The game is already extremely lax on this.

Items in general are similar for every class and you can check other BMs' profiles in F2 to see what you go for, but somebody did go on a rant about it in another topic iirc. No updated guides but not much has changed for that, you can just see dungeon guides and whatnot run by BMs to see the rotation, but once you get the hang of the game, you'll do just fine adjusting on your own: I PvP'd quite a bit back in 45 cap and since then haven't checked any guides for any of my 8 classes yet from what I hear I'm running mainstream builds on pretty much all of them. It just feels right and there's always F12 boss imitation to check your dps. Moyun (Spear general) works best because he just stands still the whole time.

To add to what has been said by KuroAme, in the latter stages you will be expected to keep the boss facing the same way so your teammates don't have to walk around the attack cones. For build choice, Fire build is friendlier for: Players with high ping and/or low fps. (you should have <40 real ping for ani-cancelling lightning). Now i've already mentioned ani-cancelling, which is very important for lightning build, you can just look at guide videos for things like Yunsang F20, KR people do it really well (most likely because of macros and their internet infrastructure, but that's besides the point). Basically ani-cancel is using lmb (draw) before your rmb (draw) finishes its animation to speed it up. Low-geared players. With lightning you will run into focus problems before and sometimes even after you acquire decent gear, which doesn't really happen in fire. Can't say whether it depends a lot on skill or not, but my attention in fire build is almost always on the boss since you can do your normal rotation while blinded. In lightning build i tend to focus a lot on myself rather than the boss, meaning it's much harder to tank. However, there's one thing fire loses at while I haven't noticed it in lightning - animation lock. Sometimes you see an attack coming but you think you can get another attack in? Well, once you start casting RMB (fire), you're stuck casting it and cannot block or resist so you end up taking the hit, making it harder to keep hitting the enemy and do quick reflex blocks (might not be as much of a problem to others but since i really liked Royal Guard in DMC 3, here it feels like i'm in slow motion with the blocks). Apart from that and as far as I know, it has already been mentioned that lightning is superior in pvp (though really if you have ridiculous rng like some BMs i've met, fire wins). As for PvE, i think they're about the same damage. Both here and in KR.