Quote Originally Posted by BlaiseLallaise View Post
And thus we come around to my point. Who really wants to stop using abilities? Is anything more boring than standing around waiting for stamina to get high enough to use another ability? Even with auto-attack, which I am in favor of, I could still burn up my stamina, just with more weapon skills and less basic attacks. Auto-attack does not reduce my stamina usage, it just diverts it to something else. For example, as PUG, Heavy Strike is my #1 ability. If that gets removed and translated over to an auto-attack, I still have Light Strike and Pummel to use as TP building abilities.

But I'll concede this much. Perhaps the stamina gauge would be fine if only abilities cost less stamina to use. Having a barrier in place that causes me to physically stop doing anything for seconds at a time is a bad idea. Whatever happens, we need the freedom to continue to use our abilities.

Ok, I just thought of another scenario that might work. If auto-attack restored some stamina relative to the frequency of strikes, then that might also help reduce the number of times I have to sit around waiting for stamina to refill. Another idea would be to have stamina act like MP, where it doesn't cost much to use an ability, and it doesn't refresh while in active mode without some item/ability designed for that purpose.
Let's use World of Warcraft as an example since it's a pretty popular reference. If they give us auto-attack, stamina would act as energy to a rogue or feral druid. They would play very similar, stamina regen is decent.
I've never played an rpg where I was button-mashing until the target monster was dead. Long endurance encounters might become tiresome quick in this scenario.
Anyway, I'm just suggesting that they add auto-attack, keep stam gauge for ability limitation, and tp abilities (finishers in WoW).
Stam regen abilities is a great idea (on a cd of course).