It really doesn’t belong in the game any more. It deals almost no damage, it serves only two functional purposes:
1 is solved by making slam (and whatever ‘rage dump’ button Fury has) into rage-generators instead. And increasing the rage-per-damage-taken formula for Prot and Guardian.
2 is solved by moving the proc to a different ability (e.g. change Art of War to trigger from Crusader Strike instead of auto attack).
Youre trying to find a solution to a problem that doesnt exist.
Even if auto attack is 100% passive and irrelevant, still, why even remove it?
But youre wrong. Theres many auto attack interactions youre not factoring.
Leave this. When are we getting a real auto loot? My back hurts from all the squatting.
Now do enhance shaman.
Really? List 20. You said “many”. Did you mean “a handful”?
EDIT:
Fun fact: we actually had a kind of auto-loot for a while. Everything left on a body would be sent to the mailbox. But people who hate free money whined and cried 'til it was removed.
Torghast had a true auto-loot, but as anyone who’s played OCE ↔ US knows, applying that to the entire game would make it completely unplayable when cross-region is involved.
auto attacks are useful on some classes/spec
I rarely play melee but in a way, isn’t autoattack useful as a way to keep some “passive” damage going out without needing to fill a GCD at every single possible moment? I remember Demon’s Bite from the Demon Hunter class driving me bonkers because of the repetitive nature of having an active filler ability to keep you pressing a button every single second.
I am on my hunter and my auto attack damage is 2% and I am just doing short world content mob kills -goes up to 4% on longer mobs.
What about maelstrom stacks? 
Auto-attacks are weird. I never understood how 100% uptime on abilities would still trigger auto-attacks. You don’t see them, it’s just a passive damage being done on a timer that may or may not have a swing animation based on whether or not it lines up with your abilities being used.
I’m okay with keeping them as right click interaction with enemies, I just don’t think it should be more than that. Abilities and auto-attacks should be mutually exclusive.
The biggest mechanical issue I have with auto-attacks is that you can’t really tell if they are happening. Especially with the reduced melee range I could be missing 20% of my auto-attacks (and thus passive generators using auto-attacks) without even realizing it.
(Thinks back to MoP remix when a single swing would be accompanied by six yellow numbers and ten white ones).
I don’t really understand what autoattack has to do with ‘buff Warrior/Guardian Rage generation’.
It’s passive damage when you’re doing things like moving or aren’t nailing 100% parses. It’s fine.
Remember when Monk was going to be the no-auto-attack melee class? That didn’t get far. I have a feeling auto attack is doing more than you think.
Do you know of a protection warrior not taking devastator? Auto attack for melee isn’t an insignificant amount of damage…
They could remove resource generation through auto-attacks and simply make it a passive recovery as long as you are in melee range (+3yards?) of an enemy.
(Cries over the loss of Annihilator.)
I’m sure Blizzard will take your criticism to heart and get right on this pressing matter.
It’s another nob to tune for blizzard to use for class balance.
Increasing auto attack damage is a good way to increase the damage of players with slower fingers. Honestly they should buff auto attack damage imo.
Right, so some extremely critical gameplay functions?
What is solved? You still haven’t explained any kind of problem with it.