How to disallow player inputs during anim montage until specified point?

Ok this is very basic as I am completely new to all things game-design related.

So basically I have a set chain of animations that fire off when the player presses a button. The button press triggers attack animation 1, then 2, and so on until the end of the combo.

The problem, though, (and this was an issue even with a single animation from the montage) is that every time the button is pressed, it will start the designated animation, regardless of whether or not the animation completed. With 1 attack, it would just restart the animation as rapidly as one could press the button. With the combo chain, it will transition through each step as fast as the button could be pressed, resulting in a sort of flurry.

How do I stop this from happening to prevent button mashing from exploiting it?

OK. I’ve finally found out the problem after an absurd amount of tinkering and needless workaround attempts.

The solution was actually really simple but not at all obvious to me, being a beginner.

TLDR answer - Get rid of the “released” portion of the InputAction (button press) event entirely.

Expanded Answer - When setting up the command inputs, all tutorials tell you to make wires from the pins to SET results for “pressed” and “released”. It makes sense. Press the desired button to set ‘Attack’ to True, release it to set ‘Attack’ to False. What none of them ever say, however, is that the “released” pin is actually setting an action (as opposed to doing nothing), so in dragging out the wire from “released” and having it set ‘Attack’ to False, you are actually setting two actions for one button. This is fine for, say, weapons with automatic fire (hold down the button to keep Attack engaged, release to turn the Attack off), but problematic for a single attack or, in my case, a string of single attacks in sequence. In this case, you only want ONE thing be happening, so don’t set anything to that “Released” condition.

I think you are looking for a DoOnce node. After that, you may wish to save your attacks, saying that you are in a combo like so:

The events will have to be fired off in your AnimBP (since it updates every tick) and you can add notifies in your animation montages to tell the animBP when to fire off the event.