Playing Drk heavily in XI was actually a lot of fun, everyone said they were just auto attack bots and up until the 60s that was pretty true, but that was because interesting ailities didn't beome available till later. Drain II, Dreadspikes, Seighan, Hasso, third eye, Stun, Souleater,Aspir, Weapon Bash, Bio and the various absorbes that could be done were actually time conuming. Unfortunantly there were not enough mobs that could be easily aspird and keeping your drk skill capped to use them was rough and convincing RDMs for refresh was intollerabe. As such a lot of Drks did not get to fully enjoy their class while leveling becuase they were always hampered by others not palying with them and lack of mana. If you got these abilities much much much earlier in the game , like say most of them by level 40 and better mana conversions it would not have felt as much of an auto attack bot.

Granted the blaance of the class would of been off, but it was not designed to be played using all your abilites all the time. In FFXIV I was hoping for a similar mechanic but where you got your abilities sooner, smaller CDs different resources such as CDs opposed to hard mana caps, (still have mana but let me last longer than 10 spells before I run out.) IN such a system, auto attacks still work and still add something to the game play, my auto attacks are more important than a whms auto attack, makes sence, therefore I can gear appropiatly and make decissions on it.

No idea if I am making my point here or not but basically what I am trying to say is that faster combat is possible with auto attacks, while not just making autoattacks a DoT but you have to design around it and SE isnt'. Should they? mabey, but I don't think you can say that auto attack will kill the flow of combat, and reult in you just watching your character, like you did in the first 40 ish levels of FFXI.