Combat being shitty is an opinion, and one which i dont share.
As for the animations, they were solid for me, some things missing animations is the only issue and they'll have that fixed before or soon after release. Even still its not that many…
Going with Secret World, sure i dont have all the buttons to make the game retardedly hard, but the open class concept means in pvp i have no idea what im getting into and everything else about the game i played in beta was fantastic.
I played that game for a bit, but never tried the pvp. It seemed like it would be very imbalanced, but if not I'll consider it.
Are there lots of skills? I like 30+ abilities per char by endgame