Auto-attack ranged attack

[Babekeke]

With up to 6 ranged attacks on 1 macro now, is this really still necessary? The only thing that I can think of is that without auto-ranged attack, rapid shot appears to be completely useless due to your macro going off at a set timer regardless of whether RS kicked in or not.

[Mirage]

And that is one of the issues I sought out to solve. Additionally, while macros simplify things, official macros only work with whole seconds (at least I think so!) for wait commands, while actual delay might be anywhere between .0 to .9, so you lose potential dps there as well.

[Helel]

They really need to fix the cost of ammo before they do anything with auto-attack. I absolutely love the delay reduction that they've implemented, but I don't love how much more ammo I use now.

[Rambus]

Increase damage so it is worth using ammo? *see sig :P*
Anyways it used to be like that, got a few nerfs while now SE is fine with GS being overpowered soooo... ya confused

[Rambus]

You know i been thinking...
How come WoW can do this and ffxi can't ? XD

[SpankWustler]

Thanks for the information!

I'm disappointed that automation of Ranged Attacks is extremely unlikely to happen, but this isn't entirely bad news.

I'm glad to hear the Development Bros understand that people want to engage with ranged attacks as they might melee and that the two systems are drastically different, even if a change is extraordinarily unlikely. That understanding bodes well for any possible changes that might be made to Ranged Attack rate or Rapid Shot or such.

However, we do understand there is a desire for an automatic ranged attack, and if it should change, we'll be sure to let you know.

I'm not sure what this line means exactly, though. I can get two drastically different readings out of it.

"If it is discovered that Ranged Attacks can be automated somehow without making rivers suck up the sea and voices of the dead wail their ghostly laments from below the earth, we know you guys would be into that. So, if that does happen somehow, we'll let you know how implementation is going."

OR

"If Ranged Attacks are adjusted again, presumably in some way other than automation since that is impossible, we'll let you know."

[kingfury]

Greetings,

We definitely understand the desire to have automatic ranged attacks and/or a toggle to switch it on and off. As the system is now, if we were to implement auto-ranged attacks, characters would be unable to use weapon skills or abilities during the ranged attack animation and the auto-ranged attack would interfere with the priority of the other abilities/WS. To address that issue would take a huge overhaul to the core system, so unfortunately it's not as simple as you might hope. However, we do understand there is a desire for an automatic ranged attack, and if it should change, we'll be sure to let you know.

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Always good to know the Dev team understands the players have a want for new functionality, so koodos for that. However, I'm not very clear as to how adding an "auto-ranged attack" functionality would effect players any differently than the current ranged attack and spell casting systems do currently. We can't execute any actions/weapon skills during a ranged attack currently. We have to stay completely still until the attack has been fired. We already have very simple ways of managing the fact that we cannot execute any other abilities/weapon skills during ranged attack and spell cast built into the current battle system.

As it stands currently, if a player wants to cancel either a ranged attack or a spell cast in progress, they simply can physically move or rest(/heal) and the action will be interrupted allowing them the opportunity to use another ability or weapon skill shortly thereafter. I fail to see how an auto-ranged attack would effect us any differently especially if we could quickly toggle the functionality on/off similar to auto-melee attacks.
Should an auto-range attack be in the middle of a firing cycle and the player wants to interrupt the shot, they could either move around a bit to interrupt the shot, or theoretically use the Ranged menu to toggle the functionality off, or could quickly use a possible "/range off" macro command to cancel the firing cycle. This wouldn't be game breaking since we're pretty much functioning this way as is, except we just have to move to interrupt our shots and be patient for the following 1-2 seconds to use another command.

[Mirage]

You know i been thinking...
How come WoW can do this and ffxi can't ? XD

Because they coded their game with this in mind from the beginning of.

[Babekeke]

I wonder if a queueing system is possible?

While doing a ranged attack, hit your ranged attack macro, and it will queue it and use it as soon as possible. This means you're not missing out when rapid shot kicks in, and guaranteed not to damage your DPS. It also means there's no lock-out when you've done enough ranged attacks and want to use JA/WS.

Many other FF games have had this queueing system (where they had the bar going across, and when it reached the end your next action went off), so it's certainly something that SE knows how to do, it's just whether it's possible to implement it into this spaghetti coding or not.

[Mirage]

That sounds almost exactly like what I suggested earlier.