The batty lacks a wand use animation, and as a result when I use the "Transylvation" vampire ability and use a wand while in batty form the regular wand casting animation for the character jarringly displays instead.
No it's not. The Transylvation ability is from the official vampire skill tree (skill="13" level="4"). It's not even from an expansion; it's part of the core game. (Technically the spell it casts is named "Batty Form", which may have caused the confusion, but the skill level is named Transylvation and it shows up as such on the skill belt)
This must be one of those cases where a mod got merged into the actual game? Vampirism was part of core, but player polymorphing wasn't added until ROTDG. Huh.
Batty Form was added around CotW I think? And it wasn't a mod, part of the general effort to extend all of the 3-skill lines to hit the 5 skill minimum. (At this point I'd really just use the Batty attack animation for the wand & cast until-and-if, BIG IF, we ever had Mr. Triolo do sprite animations for this.)
Ever used a wand while in diggle form? Same result, your default character is briefly shown using a wand and then it reverts back to diggle form.
diggle_wand_l.xml and the sprites after that proves you right, Essence. Those are in main dod\sprites\monster\diggle folder. Spoiler: from the other side of the mirror Obviously there is also a diggle_wand_r.xml.
The diggle issue has been brought to attention on multiple occasions, and yet keeps falling out of focus to address other issues. Still, whatever it takes to make sure the anthropomorphic ability to point magic sticks remains graphically captured!
