Couldn't you just use the All Water tool on the Un'Goro ADTs to lower the water level?

Shield would be facing your character, it would be flipped. There's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Mostly correct.  You could use the SpellVisualKitModelAttack and rotate the model to achieve basically the same effect.

Phantomx is correct.  I can verify it's not a theory, but that's how it's actually done.

Thats why I smell something hardcoded around.

It's not.  Or at least I haven't hit a hardcoded limit yet.

What tools/software do I need?

010 Editor.  010 Editor M2 template.  MPQeditor.

Can this get me in trouble or compromise my account at Battle.net?

Technically, yes.  You're altering the game files.  Probability of being caught?  Basically nill.

If so, how do I circumvent that and still do it? Possible?

Such a low chance that I wouldn't even worry about it.

As for the how-to, it's been a while since I played with animations.  I think this is probably too advanced for you without background M2 modding experience.  If I were doing it, then I'd to copy the swimming animation sequence twice, point them towards the correction animation IDs for walking and running, remove the default walking and running animation ID pointers, and probably have to mess around with some other values in the M2 to make it work correctly.

It's definitely doable though.

[Edit] After taking a quick peek at it, it may be easier than I thought.  Editing some pointers may be enough.
[Edit2] Looks like more than just pointers hah.
[Edit3] PhillipTNG's post from this thread: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7798&hilit=animation+swap&start=15 indicates it's more complex, which matches what my testing from this morning tells me too.  It doesn't appear to be just swapping stuff around like Alastor's post in that thread suggests.

Quote from: "kojak488"

Just edit the skybox and make that mesh larger.  It's no different than modifying any other .m2 with animations.

The moon is _not_ part of any M2 for the normal sky.

I'm not sure what you're getting at.  You can edit the meshes in a skybox and make a moon bigger that way.  When I edited a skybox's day/night cycle (as a hackfix, obviously), I played around with the size of the moon in that skybox because it's merely a mesh in the m2 file.  I posted a video of the skybox somewhere in my post history if it's worth's time to look in to.

Just edit the skybox and make that mesh larger.  It's no different than modifying any other .m2 with animations.

That flag determines whether sheathed or unsheathed animation is used for casting a spell. I also doubt it would work for some spam passive while running, standing and so on. It seems to me that core is the only option you have and I am not even sure if that can work without any more or less random glitches.

I just told you that it can be done via spell visuals rather than sheathe flags/weapon positions.  Certainly there is no need for core changes.  Then again I also know the spell.dbc and its associations better than 99% of you.  So maybe YOU could only do it via core edits, but it's easily accomplished with relatively simple dbc additions.

Quote from: "kojak488"

Though I'd use spell visuals rather than the position of weapons during a spell.

But then you'd have to create a different spell for every fist weapon, wouldnt you?

Different models, yes.  Not necessarily every different fist weapon.  But fuck, could script it and have EVERY weapon model done in 10 minutes (basically the time to write the script).  So that makes no difference.