Do auto-attacks serve any meaningful purpose?

[wildvenonat]

I hoped for a moment this would be complaining about how healers and casters have to manually turn on auto attacks. It was not. Tragic.

Maximizing auto attack damage is the most fun available healing Praetorium, and it's still better than SMN Physick.

[HikariKurosawa]

Oh man, I'm actually PRAYING you'll become better at this game than me, because 1) it means that your posts will have merit now that you have actual experience to draw from 2) you'll get to find out how shallow endgame is and realise that maybe the people you've spent this past month shouting down had a point. Then you too can know the joy of being shot down by casuals for daring to ask the game to be more engaging.

No guarantees about 2), but 1) alone is enough to make me genuinely hope for your success. Do not disappoint me.
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I've nothing more to add to the main topic, so I'll take my leave before I derail this thread any further. Apologies, LilimoLimomo.

I just killed titan in UWU last night and I can't say I'd ever call endgame shallow knowing what it's like to scratch the surface of the ultimate system. I am 100% certain my opinions will stay the same and my position will inevitably increase. You haven't cleared a single ultimate yet, and I am inevitably going to clear UWU now that I've begun the grind.

crit direct hits say hello.

I play with damage numbers turned off so I couldn't care less about stuff like that. You're getting into semantics heavily here too, as we're still the ones activating the ability with an input regardless of whether it crits and direct hits. Where auto attacks are just automated entirely.

[Gunz_Zbestest]

This thread is a great display of the forums being very, very bad at game design.

Good to have these reminders now and then to keep everyone grounded.

How are we going to have any dps in the down time if we run out of TP halfway through the fight? Not every team has a ninja to goad them.

[Emitans]

PLD generates Oath Gauge from them but otherwise they don't really add anything. But it's not like they hurt anything by being there. PvP doesn't have autos and it doesn't make any difference in how it feels to play.

[Syln]

Well you would be wrong, they didn't have AA's in 1.0, they added them in ARR, because turns out having your character just stand there like a plumb in front of the enemy for nearly 3s in-between weaponskills is really really jarring.

I can see Auto attack being relevant 11 years ago to provide dynamism to a very slow gameplay.
The fact is that it's not anymore.

[VictorSpoils]

Removing auto attack would enable them to make our active potency higher, and it would feel like we are in control of our entire output. I agree that they are meaningless and I would describe them as archaic.

Well you would be wrong, they didn't have AA's in 1.0, they added them in ARR, because turns out having your character just stand there like a plumb in front of the enemy for nearly 3s in-between weaponskills is really really jarring.

Both good points, though they don't apply to DoM. BLM whacking things with a staff for 1 damage is like WAR having an MP gauge. These are supposedly just things that are expected to be ignored instead of updated or removed. I'd rather it be a ranged magic blast that deals a few hundred chip damage if it has to exist.

[Oizen]

Yeah so you have a way to do damage in deep dungeons when you get silenced

[Lyth]

Auto-attacks on melee measure your time spent within melee range. Historically they also used to measure your time spent facing a mob as well, but that changed in patch 3.4. They also measure your uptime of certain buffs that reduce auto-attack delay, such as Fuka and Swiftscaled.

Auto-attacks on physical ranged exist to one-shot you on Ice Spikes/Smoldering Scales.