Continuing the discussion from Midnight Beta Test Development Notes:
This is extremely hard to track with specs that don’t have to glued to the character. On Ret or Unholy for example you will be able to hit your targets just fine, so you won’t notice you’re not auto-attacking.
This change seems weird to me because there’s not going to be a way to have addons track it anymore, so why buff this hidden damage? You can’t really see the animations because it happens during spell abilities.
If it was up to me the swing timer would only work when the GCD is not active, and basically remove auto-attacks unless your character truly wasn’t doing anything.
I never understood the mechanic of auto-attacks in WoW. It’s basically just passive invisible damage for sticking to your target like glue, maybe it’s a good moment to rework the mechanic to move damage to abilities rather than just a participation trophy for standing at roughly the right position, without the game telling you this.
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they tried doing no autos with monk and it was apparantly weird. ever since then autos just exist usually as resource gen. i agree no ones going to see dmg buff cause no addons though.
If auto-attacks are a resource generator it’s even worse, because you can’t see whether or not you’re generating. Abilities are hiding the animations. I’d argue that such hidden mechanic should not be used for resource generation as it’s the opposite of what they want to achieve. You can’t see it happen without an interface element.
Swing timer only working without GCD means it’s balanced for all melee (and MM/Wand users), and it means that once you get in range it’ll still instantly cast if no GCD is present.
So they’re buffing my most hated part of the entire combat system.
It’s particualarly awful on melee and, specifically, hunters, where some random arrow will piff out of nowhere during animations.
Ideally, there should be no auto attacks, and instead a skill acts as one (e.g. Slam for Warrior, Gloom Blade for Sub Rogue, Fireball for Fire Mage and, Steady Shot for Hunters, and perhaps the best argument for this: Consume for Demon Hunter, as examples). Like Guild Wars 2 did very successfully.
Of course they’d simultaneously need to make these auto-skills useable whilst moving, and divorce them from the GCD.