I always thought FFXII would make an awesome MMO. It's like they took FFXI, fixed a lot of the major issues with it, and made it (IMO) more interesting visually and storywise. On the other hand, it's one of those games that was well liked when it came out, but later it became popular to hate it. See...well, every FF game after VI basically. FFI-VI are grandfathered in because they were around before the mainstream came and ruined etc etc I don't even feel like finishing the sentence. I'm so sick of hearing it.

Ahem! As far as auto-attack goes, FFXIV needed it first and foremost because the engine and servers were slow and unresponsive. I'd often have to wait 2-3 seconds before one of the basic attacks actually went off. Compare this to WoW, Rift, Guild Wars and many other games where you get about instant feedback on abilities--it's part of the reason why they're able to have much faster combat systems than FFXIV. I'm hoping the new engine and server architecture fix these lag issues once and for all, as even now this game is even laggier than FFXI, which at the best of times you still needed to give at least a 1 second lead time on every ability.

Maybe then they can consider going back to the no auto-attack system, but even with the lag considerations the game can work perfectly fine without it. Going back to the "most MMOs outside the FF series" example, I'm usually using an ability on every global cooldown as it is, but they still have auto-attack. To that end, I don't think WoW's Monk class will feel all that different overall from any other class, you'll still be using an ability on every cooldown, but they'll probably just be a bit stronger to make up for the lack of background damage auto-attack gives you. Auto-attack isn't exclusive of a fast paced active battle system, but a laggy server and client architecture is.

Either way, from dev comments before, they're not going back to that system because they spent a lot of time planning and balancing the auto-attack system. It'd be a waste to go back to a system the player base showed a clear dislike for before just to try something new. That may have been how the game was managed in the past, but thankfully things are different now.