You don't engage mobs when selecting target.
You only engage mobs after selecting and confirming selection.
Either you are unaware that you have actively engaged a mob, or you are exaggerating.
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ok went in there and tested it because i remember these issues before. The problem is that "confirming" is the act of bringing up your battle menu, which would be fine, except the favt that you bring up your skill ui, not only for battle but also for buffs, cures, etc. so if you are switching between monsters while looking for your cure skill, or raging strike, or trying to chakra yourself after you die, you will hit whatever you have targeted, people who play with a lot of macros are probably less likely to have any issues since it doesnt bring up the action bar.
Its a bad design that merely looking at your skill bar list, or even bringing it up to scroll to a different ability, automatically puts you in AA mode. Especially when you look at the old system where having something targeted did nothing at all, you would often target things just to pull up your menu and do a buff fast, when nothing is close it starts on you, but when something else is close it locks on that.
Looking at it carefully, this looks to be one of the things where a lot of play was tweaked around a different mechanic, and doesnt gel as well because some rules changed.
They either need to make it so pulling up your action bar doesnt initiate AA on a selected target, or make it so that AA uses a different mechanism to officially trigger. They should probably put something into place that signals to the user that the guy is going to actively AA now. Its more clear when you have a button that says attack, or AA, but if your not doing that some sort of different stances when in AA mode or something could also work. Its still needs a lot of tweaking imo
as a side note this also means you are even more likely to AA a monster that you are trying to do something special too, if you are close enough, like sleep, paralyze, bind etc. because it requires you to go open your action bar, and have the monster targeted. You can probably get around this by using macros with subtarget commands, once/if thats enabled, but its still pretty counter intuitive and awkward design wise.
LNC auto attack is pretty absurdly slow, but i think it's to maintain an emphasis on the Manual non weapon skill attacks which makes for more involved and entertaining combat.
that also reminds me, this AA issue is effecting mages, and they know it, but it seems to me they are going the wrong angle. They want to allow mages to use abilities without being in active mode, but it will take a lot of work. The only reason mages really need to not be in active mode is AA. So if they fix aa so it is its own skill, and a toggle, they wont have to worry spend what they say is a long time to fix it so mages can do things without having to draw their weapons.
As long as auto attack doesn't become the primary means of damage, etc... I think, it's alright.
I never run out of actions to do on my 50 lancer and 35 glad so far O_o it probably is kind of slow at low ranks but you get more abilities to kill time later on...
hmm. double attack class trait or a job trait. even a double, triple, and a quadruple attack materia would be sexy.