2 New Dawn quandaries: Ophanim Activation and Hyena Whiteout

Having just completed the story and got to South Africa, I’m puzzled by two things:

  1. I’ve picked up Ophanim of the Awakened, the winged AoE off the Z key that does massive damage. It shows at the top of my main bar and there’s a new gauge there that apparently measures “animus,” which from the description on the window has to be full to activate the ability, but aside from having set it off once by accident, I can’t seem to do anything that fills up that gauge, and can’t get the ability to activate. What loads that bar?

  2. Fighting hyenas, is anyone else annoyed by the whole screen flaring white at various points in the combat? Or is this some setting glitch of mine I need to fix?

Thanks!

The bar is filled when you hit with attacks (possibly with heals as well?). The middle box should have a yellow outline when it is “charged”. The meter fills from the outside to the middle (rather than just left to right). It shouldn’t take that long to charge though. If you think the bar is filled, are you pressing the right key, and have your cursor pointed towards the ground in front of you? It is a ground targeted attack, and if you don’t use ground targeted attacks often the controls may not be obvious yet.

There are a few bright moments with the hyenas, but the biggest one occurs during a mission when the hyena mother is defeated. However the flare for that happens for everyone in the same map, even if they aren’t on the mission.