Auto attack: A complete battle system

[Linnear]

Sentinel lasts for more than 10 seconds... if you are a Gladiator or have Swordsmanship. Provoke is not a trait, and does not do damage.

Automated battle systems will only serve to aid botters and put people to sleep.

This is my favorite post on this thread as it is the only one that tries to explain why SE does not have an auto attack. I have tried to think of a solid reason for not having it and the anti bot/afk progression appears to be the only reason for it. You lose a lot of interesting game mechanics for not having one and gain very little for excluding it as far as I can see, other than making it harder to bot/afk. On this thread so far, I have seen people trying to figure out neat ways to implemlent an auto attack system and them being shot down without providing a reason for not having it other than the game is not that spammy without it. Personally I don't think that is a viable arguement as all it does is say that you can work withen the current system other then explain why the system is good. When you making a decision such as auto attack / not auto attack, you need to figure out what each one provides to the game experience and I don't see many +s for the current system.

All allusions to FFXI and comments about how an auto attack should be left to FFXI is a wast of forum space and time to read becuase it does not aruge the reason for it in FFXIV on any merit or metric. So if you want to reply to this post, please try to provide some detailed reason othar that my rotation is super cool and I don't spam go back to XI.

Ok, now that is said, my personal problem with the lack of auto attack is the reduction in weapon choices and advantages you get from different weapon types. I might be missing something but I really dislike the fact that as a Glad, my dagger action takes as much stamina as my sword...... this hurts my brain when I think about it and it takes something away form the game that I love in other games. I like the concept of weapon speeds and the stats attributed to them and such. I also like running around with 5 weapons in my inventory for various mobs and situations and scenarios. I do not want my decisison between a dagger and a sword to be which ever one is higher level..... I want sword A and sword B to have more differences than stats, I want weapon speeds! it may seem like a small change but personally I see it as a big loss.

Noone has mentioned this yet but gear alotments and the way that stats are assigned to gear is also uninteresting to me. In many games you can set your gear depending on what aspect of your character you want to focus. I don't see much of that in FFXIV, I will admit that SE needs to fix a LOT in the game before getting around to it, but at the moment I find the armoury system lacking. I want a decision in gear to be lose 10% auto attack for 5% in two abilities, but that does not seem to happen right now, once again I may be missing something, but without weapon speed this nuance appears to be lost.

In short, why is having no auto attack good?
Why is having an auto attack bad? other than to stop bots and afking.

I can see a couple of advantages in having one, please provide a counter arguement for not.