If you don’t have any constraints or other fancy rig features, you definitely don’t need to bake! It sounds like you might with the grip though? I’m not entirely clear on what that setup looks like, but it should be easy to test.
As for the separate strips, I actually had to go back and insert keyframes for the IK in each of the strips later on in the course. Ideally it wouldn’t be necessary, but I ran into issues with how Blender updates during animation and sometimes it would get confused and freak out if it was evaluated separately.
If you do have two separate actions that you want to combine together while exporting, try turning off NLA Strips and All Actions in the export settings under animation. That will leave you with one long animation, and you can then chop it up in your game editor based on frame numbers.
Hope that helps!
