Why is it the attack animation of enemies (in both PvE and PvP) play AFTER the damage dealing animation? I don't have a good video demo, but you can see it in a lot of the Spiral Knight videos on Youtube. Basically your knight loses health and flinches a fraction of a second before the attack hits. The effect most visible with fast traveling projectiles and gets more pronounced at higher depth. I'm not sure if this is bug or an intentional "feature" the devs are exploiting to make the game harder. If the latter, I hope you realize it's only making it harder for people with high latency.
It would make more sense and make gameplay much more enjoyable if the damage animation and flinching happens AFTER the attack animation.
I know PvP is not prioritized in this game, but changing this would also be beneficial for Lockdown and Blast Network. Right now the Lockdown metagame is centered around people spamming weapons with high DPS to "stunlock" opponents with inferior latency. Typically that means the result of every match is effectively predetermined when there are only a few individuals with far superior ping in the lobby. In no universe is that considered a fun PvP. Don't even get me started on how this ruins Blast Network. Dying before the explosion of a bomb gets to you is simply not fair.
In a real time game, reaction time is everything. By taking away causality, you are creating an environment which encourages cheap tactics (ie. spam) over experimentation and mastery of diverse equipment. This is bad for both PvE and PvP. Please change this.
This sounds more like a server issue than a game issue. On the server side, these attacks have connected, whereas on ours we're still moving. This isn't to say it's not frustrating, but it's part of the issue of using servers rather than peer to peer.
Slowing down attack animations may be good for PvE, but I don't think it's necessary for PvP. I think alternative methods could be taken for PvP, such as speeding up blast network explosive's speeds the further into the game it gets (early game make it slower), and increasing the amount of time players have invinciframes after taking damage for lockdown (preferably based on ping but not required).