Managing Simultaneous Damage Animations and Character Animations

Hello all, first actual thread here.

1. I want to have say a martial artist character step forward as normal, but when he is doing his combo, each hit of his animation is in sync with the animation shown on top of the enemy being hit. 

2. Currently, I'm only seeing the ability to have the character step forward, do his attack animation, and then the "attack" animation plays, followed by the weapon type animation. I'm trying to reduce the number of animations to the bare essentials in order to speed up the flow of combat. 

3. Lastly, my combat testing is crashing when the animation for the weapon is supposed to play, preventing me from turning off that first attack animation. 

Any ideas, suggestions, or input?

Update Edit - I'm currently trying to see if it's a plugin causing the issue. While testing, I randomly got an error saying that a folder had been created for custom mouse cursors by the TDDP_MouseSystemEx plugin and to use it. Also, it seems it's not only animations for the weapon, but will crash after executing "Guard" as well. The error message reads: TypeError Cannot read property 'result' of undefined. 

2nd Update - It turns out it was the "WeaponSkill" plugin by Sasuke KANNAZUKI causing this. I'm presuming that skill ids NEED to be assigned for this to work, but the good news is that this plugin seems to perform mostly what I want in 2. and 3., but I will leave this unresolved until I figure out 1.