Auto-attack ranged attack

[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.