FFXIV moved away from auto-attack while WOW went without... how odd.

[Coglin]

I personally, was never a fan of the TP portion of the battle system. I prefere something like a mana pool, or attac pool or what ever you want to call it, in which you have X amount in the pool, and it is used for all abilities, WS, buffs, debuffs and what not.

That may or may not be the way to go here, but I definently dislike having to attack a mob just to build up the ability to hit it with my real attacks.

Granted I was pretty general in my ideas, but I just dislike the TP portion and would like to see something workable without it......but thats just me.

[Alhanelem]

Frankly I spend so much time using actions that I barely notice auto attack anyway. They might have added auto attack to the game, but that doesn't mean it's central to combat.

[Dragon]

From a Blizzard Developer on the issue of auto attack:

"The monk not having auto attack was controversial around the office too, we are not even 100% sure the monk will keep it. And removing auto attack for other classes will just feel like a huge change. We do crazy things on new stuff, not on old stuff. There are some downsides too - if a monkey has 5hp left they have to wait to push a button again were as a Rogue would just kill it with its auto attack."

Sounds to me like Blizzard is full of crybabies.

I hope they get rid of it. Combat seems less strategic for certain classes because of this and auto attack for some classes seem stupid, imo (archers and conjurers for example). I'd rather they work on servers to increase the response time, THEN get rid of it...and allow us to stack actions and have them executed when there is enough stamina for them >_>

Agreed. I wouldn't mind auto-attack so much if I knew they'd look into implementing a non-AA system.

[Dawiichan]

Honestly, I believe that what needs to be tweaked is the TP system. It's a universal combat system that was incorporated to different classes. It just slows down battles a lot, hopefully this is one of the priorities they have planned for 1.20(skill overhaul) or 2.0

[Buddhsie]

The TP system is fine the way it is, the way that it's so dynamic is how abilities cost different amounts to use, and on different timers. It allows a strategic, ever-changing mechanism for battle that forces you to constantly think of the best way to make use of your TP.
The auto attack feature, for now, may look very bland, but it allows for things such as haste, tp gain based on delay, coming from ffxi store tp, and dps of weapons based on dmg/delay. In the future I'm sure that they will add things that have a greater influence on auto attack. We still have normal attacks that are on timers, I know I use all 3 on my lancer, in case people forgot about heavy thrust, pierce and full thrust, as well as the other classes' counterparts.