What purpose does it serve?
I remember my firsts interactions with the game, and auto-attack was something odd to me. At first I thought I should time my skills to match the auto attack animation. It didn’t occur me that clicking on a skill would cancel the auto attack animation and just release my skill instantly.
When I realized that it felt cheep. I come from a table top RPG world where things take turns to happen, and shooting 2 arrows almost instantly was like cheating, and ugly looking. Even on old electronic real time RPGs like Baldur’s Gate (1), if you spent your turn attacking (right clicking in the enemy), and then cast a spell, your character would wait for his next “turn”, and cast the spell instead of attacking.
Then I met SW: The old Republic, a rip off wow for sure, but at least they didn’t carry this odd mechanic of auto attack, every animation (and attack) should be cast by you trough a skill.
By now the only pouse I see from Auto Attack is proccing some of your skills, in that case, can’t we just move those procs to other skills?
Weapon damage could be reworked as “Attack power” which increases the effectiveness of your skills. Done, gone with this ugly mechanic.
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If you left click on the target you won’t get auto-attack. It just selects the target. If you right click you get auto-attack.
I rarely use auto-attack, it just gets in my way. lol
Monks were supposed to have no auto-attack, their damage suffered greatly with high overpowered abilities when used but had big gaps of low damage when on cooldown.
I miss Jab.
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Weapon damage could still be Weapon damage (since a lot of attacks could scale on weapon damage)
I would actually love to go to a classic like system (aka slower combat) and have some form of “basic attack” to use when your other attacks are on cooldown.
Though I guess really thats just auto attacks, so pretty much it serves as the attack while our other attacks are on cooldown, we’re out of energy or such.
Plus Auto attack damage is a large portion of melee characters DPS so it would take a large restructuring to remove auto attacks.
And again as I write this, auto attacks are really in the end of the day or standard strike, your bonk with a club, your stab with a sword, or flick with a wand, so they make sense to be in the game.
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There’s some specs that rely heavily on auto-attack. Off the top of my head, HDH, prot warr, FDK, ret pally etc, all rely on it for their core rotational abilities. Although that being said, there are options to remove auto-attack reliance in the spec tree. Personally, I hate auto-attack reliant play-styles. Its why I do not spec into them on the HDH or prot warr, much to the chargrin of the degenerates over at iceyveins.
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Auto attack is fine, removing it would be silly. No thanks.
WoW is not a TTRPG.
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Mostly a hold over from the early days of WoW when the majority of melee classes didn’t have enough abilities. Enh shamans had a single one on 20 seconds cooldown. Ret Paladins had zero melee abilities. If not for auto attack, they flat out wouldn’t not have been able to swing their weapon.
Blizzard have experimented with getting rid of auto attack. Notably with Monks, who initially didn’t have it. But it didn’t work out for many reason. Part of which being that their ability damage had to be tuned far higher than other melee specs to make up for not having auto attack and that caused a lot of problems.
These days it is too ingrained in too many melee specs to get rid of. You’d have to redesign the majority of them from the ground up to account for no auto attacks.
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If you run out of Rage, Focus or Energy, you’ll keep on attacking instead of just being a target dummy.
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Slice and Dice of course!
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Rogue, especially assassin, kinda requires it for pacing out poison application. Auto-attacks are also a reliable thing to tie to procs because you know roughly how many times per minute a certain class is going to swing.
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I’m just not quite sure I see the point in removing it? Really not worth getting any sort of worked up over.
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It’s there to be passive damage. It’s not the most engaging thing in the world but I also don’t really see why it needs to change either.
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The simple and not very sexy answer is that “WoW combat is designed around auto-attack existing”.
You could remove it and replace it with simple abilities that functionally do the same thing, but ultimately people don’t like pushing buttons that do functionally nothing.
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This is why a ton of people make a macro that includes /startattack and /petattack in their builder to start auto attacking and having the pet focus the target
That’s an ancient holdover trick that isn’t needed anymore. All damaging attacks turn on auto attack and have for many years.
Hasn’t this always been the case?
I’m probably just not remembering but I’m pretty sure that every melee class and hunters have always started auto-attacking with any damaging ability.
The difference now is that when I’m close enough my disc priest finds himself swinging his staff for literally no reason between casts.
Like I’m pretty sure they mostly changed this for classes that don’t benefit from auto attack at all.
It is really good in some older expansions to tag a mobs but not kill it too fast.
I’m still grateful when my shadow priest went oom, I could still shoom, shoom with my wand. Better than zero dps.
Of course, that was during vanilla WoW.
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Clearly a take from someone with like 6 hours played. Never played rogue, feral, warrior, survival, pally, dk, monk, or probably really wow? Dear Lord.
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