How do you create visual effects?

How do you create visual effects in unity? I mean combination of animations (not characters, just empty gameobjects so we can animate the other effects) + trails + particles + sound effects played at the correct time + etc?

I just stumbled unto this yesterday and I'm struggling trying to find a way to create vfxs for the attacks of a game I'm making... We don't have a separated window (not really necessary but...) where we can combine these stuff and preview all of them at once without hitting play in the editor and that makes things too clumsy and too difficult for a lot of reasons:
- Previewing them in the editor makes it difficult to edit current effects because when you exit play mode the changes will revert back, unless you only edit one component at a time and use the "copy/paste component trick".
- Another thing is that you can't add new effects while in play mode because, well, they will disappear when you exit play mode.
- Sometimes you have a big scene which take some time to enter in play mode so every change you make in edit mode will take some time to preview, of course we could create an empty scene to preview the effect but for reasons sometimes you need to see the effect in a specific part of THAT level.

We need an all-in-one audio/visual effects editor where we can tackle lots of different effects and preview them in the editor!!

Do you guys have any tips to speed up the workflow for this kind of task?

 

Just what I needed:

at 9:14

Now I wait!