Quote Originally Posted by Malthir View Post
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.
Only at 1.0's launch - autoattack was added to 1.0 in a later patch, after Yoshi took over as producer and director from Tanaka, and the battle system was redesigned from the ground up, as a test bed for ARR. 1.0 autoattack actually did contribute to building the TP gauge in order to use weaponskills and the like, as 1.0 the TP gauge started at zero, like FFXI, as you said. ARR swapped the TP gauge to being full at start however, so autoattack thus lost that particular use.

ARR autoattack was useful for tanks to help keep hate on ourselves when DPS=enmity as every hit you did built up more hate. Naturally that's no longer the case.